A B C’s of Saskatoon

I’ve written many different things in my life, from school exercises, to stories, poetry, book reviews, nonfiction articles, government reports, novels, and so on. But human beings didn’t develop a system of writing until the ancient Mesopotamians began to record agricultural accounts. The first inscriptions of writing consisted of simplified drawings to represent stylized objects – pictograms of a sort. It took quite a while before the symbols people wrote began to represent the sounds of a language, and eventually develop into alphabets.

Each year of doing a blog I try to do something different. I don’t want to bore myself or other people, though perhaps I do anyway. Words go out into the world or not, and they are ignored or read. I write because it’s second nature to me, and I like doing it.

So this year, 2014 I’m going to write about the city where I live, have lived for the largest chunk of my life. Throughout the year I’ll go through the alphabet, two or three letters per month, and I’ll write about events, organizations, landscapes, architecture, and so on that start with the next letter of the alphabet. Hopefully people will find their own favourites here, or perhaps they’ll respond with their own odes to Saskatoon.

“Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood.” – Melville