I was not alive during the most important events of his life. He was shaped by war and famine and loss, things I have read about but never experienced firsthand. By the time I was born, he’d already escaped death, crossed the ocean, changed his name, begun to speak in a new language. I never met the people who influenced him. I never knew his family, my own family, neither the ones who were dead nor those still alive.
Without any formal instruction he became a skilled photographer. Every day in the chill of dawn he set out with a camera in his hand. He removed the case and got lost in the work, forgot where he was, forgot time, forgot us …
Bio:
Pamela Hensley is a Montreal-based writer whose fiction has been published in Canada and the UK. She is the creator and host of the new podcast How I Wrote This and the managing editor of yolk literary journal. Previously, she worked as an automotive engineer and management consultant in Germany, Japan, the US, and Canada.
Bio:
Bruce Stewart was born in Vancouver in 1946. At the age of 12, he began photographing equipment and buildings with an Asahiflex 35 mm camera in order to assist his father in the waste wood recovery industry. His early interest in medicine and art led to an after-school job at the Medical Illustration Department of the University of British Columbia. Today, at the age of 77, he continues to chronicle the subjects of the street in Victoria and elsewhere and is working on several anthologies gleaned from his work over the years.