A.J. Banner

I can’t explain why I write. I won’t try to be eloquent or clever about my compulsion to do what I do. I’ve simply always had the indefinable impulse to put my thoughts, feelings, and impressions on paper, from the time I could pick up a crayon. Maybe I inherited writing genes from my maternal grandmother, who was an English author living in India. Or maybe creativity comes from some other mysterious place. I’ll never know. In elementary school, I wrote short stories influenced by the authors I read: Tolkien, Agatha Christie, C.S. Lewis, Enid Blyton, and more. When I got my first typewriter, I felt immeasurable satisfaction when I filled the blank space with words. I loved the clacking sounds of the keys hitting the page. I loved the scratching of pen on paper. When I was eight, on a family trip back to India – I was born in Bengal and we had emigrated to Canada – I wrote a vignette about a lost dog on a beach in Puri, in the state of Odisha. At eleven, I started keeping a journal after reading The Diary of Anne Frank. Every day my entry began with Dear Wilma… and the rest is history.

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