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www.oakvillebeaver.com The Oakville Beaver, Friday November 21, 2008 - 31 Sheridan College professor releases first book By Ryan Bolton SPECIAL TO THE BEAVER Mike Walsh is what many would call an old-fashioned storyteller. He's a man that everyone can relate to, mainly because he can speak at length about knowing Marshall McLuhan and Irving Layton to living as a schoolboy in wartorn Britain during the Second World War. He, on the other hand, calls himself as a generalist, rather than specialist, on any given topic. It's an asset, coupled with his collage of travelling, which is strikingly clear in his recently published collection of poetry, Singing in the Mist. It's also a skill that he has honed, and continues to hone, as a professor at Sheridan College for the past 35 years. Teaching everything from animation to business, photography to fashion design. Walsh, 65, is a jack-of-alltrades when it comes to academia. But teaching is just one ingredient to the stir-fry of Walsh. Although he is publishing his first book, Singing in the Mist, Walsh has helped produced myriad book titles from around the world for more than 40 years. Starting Oakville's-own Mosaic Press in 1975 with Howard Aster, Walsh has worked as a publisher, editor, sales and marketing director and international rights negotiator. As a well-known individual in the Canadian publishing industry, Walsh has worked alongside Canadian literary icons like Irving Layton and Joy Kogawa and personally helped Governor General award-winning poet Gwendolyn MacEwen publish The T. E. Lawrence Poems. "It was a perfect piece of writing and I didn't have to do anything to it," he recalled of working on the collection of poetry with MacEwen. Teaching writing at Sheridan and publishing authors from around the world have always been two great passions of Walsh, but he was never publishing his own work. The reason why Walsh is just releasing his first book of poetry now, albeit he has been penning poems since the early '60s, was mainly due to constraints of selfdoubt. "I don't know whether it was embarrassment or uncertainty about whether my work was good enough, but when you have worked with some of the people I worked with over the years, I have seen their work and have actually corrected it," said Walsh with a dry chortle. "So, I say, `Maybe I am as good as they are,' but I'm not going to wave the flag of ego." The bundle of 50 poems and 50 vignettes present a natural blend of literary devices and techniques wrapped tightly with pastoral images of days long past. Poems like Memories, Nostalgia and the opening verse, "I live in the memories," rehash childhood memories, while poems like I am NOT America bleed with analogies to the days of war and the troubled past of America. Born and raised in England, Walsh lived through the later years of Second World War before coming to Canada at age 13. This divide fuels a great amount of Walsh's stories and poetry. "I think a part of me laments my past," he said. "There are two parts to my life: there's the English schoolboy and then there's the adult living in Canada. I don't know if I have ever closed the book on that. Singing in the Mist is remembering the past, but not a false state of nostalgia." His past, however, is not his chief muse or hub of thought. Music, cinema and, of course, poetry have also deeply influenced Singing in the Mist. Verses like "Mulligan and Desmond Swing" and "Music Tapes: Chet Baker" ring clear of musical influence, but bucolic prose reminiscent of Walt Whitman and William Wordsworth are also unmistakably present. Walsh's hope is that readers of Singing in the Mist will take away "some sort of appreciation of the written language... to close their eyes and visualize," he said, before continuing with his own aphorism, "We see words and we read pictures." As a voracious storyteller, Walsh is already compiling a collection of memoirs and photographs for a second book, Roughin' it in the Bush. The book's title is a play on words from Walsh's own past growing up in England's Shepherds Bush and 19th century Canadian novelist Suzanna Moody's acclaimed diary, Roughing it in the Bush. Singing in the Mist is available at Bookers Bookstore, 172 Lakeshore Rd. in Oakville or online at www.mosaicpress.com. Mike Walsh Profile FEATURING... PET SADIE Sadie is a two year old female Schnoodle. The first time Sadie saw the big yellow chick plush toy and it made a noise akin to a duck, she started to tremble and was visibly upset for 15 or so minutes. 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