My Lefthanded, Backwards, Upsidedown Life & Assorted Short Stories

My Lefthanded, Backwards, Upsidedown Life & Assorted Short Stories contains both my growing up and coming of age memoir, set in a small Canadian town during the 1950's and 1960's, in a time of great social change for young people the world over plus a number of fictional short stories which I call emotional thoughtscapes because of the vivid emotional images they create in the reader's mind. The memoir starts the day I am born and follows me through many adventures until I get married and life gets a whole lot more serious. It's about playing in the town band and later rock bands...taking cadets and suffering through initiation day at high school...trying to be a hippie and getting involved in the hippie drug subculture and going hitchhiking and so much more. Short stories include the tale of a young boy who gets his first bike....a story about a couple of kids who find some nudist magazines...the zany story about some young guys trying to get to the bar in a car with no brakes and lots more.

My Lefthanded, Backwards, Upsidedown Life & Assorted Short Stories contains a memoir describing author John Gardiner's growing up and coming of age years in the small Ontario town of Hanover during the 1950's, 1960's and early 1970's - a time of significant social change in North American society - especially among young people. The book is written as a series of mostly humorous vignettes delivered in a stream-of-consciousness style that follows Gardiner from the day he is born on a stormy winter day in the early 1950's, through to when he marries in the mid-1970's. From the time he joins the Hanover Musical Society at age 4 on clarinet, to the point in his life where he marries in the mid 1970's, his life is sort of ordinary, but also sort of not ordinary. Playing in rock bands, starting a school newspaper, dabbling in the hippie drug subculture, shooting pool, roller skating and falling in love...all part of his young life - and events that most people of that era can identify with. Gardiner calls his short stories "emotional thoughtscapes" because of the vivid emotional images they are intended to create in the reader's mind. A young boy gets his first bike...a homeless man gets cursed by an old crone....a young guy gets involved with drugs to expand his mind but with tragic results...a conversation with a rabbit ends a teen's hunting career...stories about ordinary people struggling with the stuff of life - Gardiner's stories will make you both laugh and cry, sometimes within the same story.

Canadian short story writer John Gardiner's writing has been compared to another Canadian short story writer, the iconic Alice Munro, his work has been featured alongside Margaret Atwood, D.H. Lawrence and Amy Tan and has been published around the world, including India, New Zealand and England. He calls his writing "emotional thoughtscapes" because they create vivid emotional images in the mind of the reader. Gardiner draws on his life experiences, spent mainly in small towns in Southern Ontario, to write mainly about ordinary people living fairly ordinary lives – because he believes that is where you find the high drama in life.