It was over ten years in the making.
Retired educator Colin Brezicki’s latest book, Nothing to Die For, is a compilation of 19 stories, many of which are multiple award winners.
“They have been published in Canada, the US, and the UK,” said Brezicki. “Short stories are a break from the serious business of writing novels.”
Based in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Brezicki has already earned praise for two novels, A Case for Dr. Palindrome, and All That Remains.
Born in Aberfeldy, Scotland — the setting for the latter novel — Brezicki immigrated to Canada in 1952, landing in Toronto with his parents. His love of literature was spawned by the novel The Catcher in the Rye, which evolved to an appreciation of works by Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, Dickens, Yeats, Tolstoy, and Lewis Carroll. He attended St. Mike’s, a Catholic boys' school in Toronto, on a partial scholarship, where he came to love hockey, and the Montreal Canadiens. Western University in London was his next step.
“I flunked my first year at Western, then had an existential experience after ‘waking up,’ Brezicki said with a laugh. “I didn't play varsity hockey at Western. In a team tryout I took a slapshot in the face, that rearranged my teeth and dampened my spirits.”
He went on to win a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, where he captained the ice hockey team to a win over Cambridge in the Major Patten Cup, the oldest rivalry in ice hockey, dating back to the 1880s. One of Brezicki’s teammates at Oxford was Danny Williams, who later became the ninth premier of Newfoundland and Labrador.
During the summer months, Brezicki worked for Frontier College, Canada’s oldest literacy organization, which places university students in remote mining, railroad, and lumber camps to work as labourer-teachers. Ten-hour days on the job were followed by evening classes, sports, and films for the blue-colour working men. He worked for Frontier in the Prairies, the Yukon, the NWT, and Haida Gwaii (aka the Queen Charlotte Islands). The experience was transformational for Brezicki, and he decided to dedicate his life to sharing his love of literature.
After Oxford, Brezicki commenced a teaching career at English private schools, and after 13 years returned to Canada to head the English and Drama Department at Ridley College, where he also coached sports and served as a housemaster in a boys’ residence.
“Upon retiring in 2012, I quit playing golf and began to write. It was the happiest period in my life,” said Brezicki. “After 37 years of teaching great books, I had an itch to get into writing for myself.”
He found motivation for story lines all around him.
“Articles and essays I read, conversations with people…sometimes it's very nebulous. I usually start with some kind of a trigger. It might even be a photograph.”
His favorite writers include William Boyd, Julian Barnes, and Kate Atkinson, all English contemporary fiction writers. “Philip Larkin, the English poet and novelist, is my favorite poet,” said Brezicki. “And Alan Bennett, an English playwright and author, is also terrific. His memoirs are wonderful, you can just inhale them. I enjoy English humour. I like its subtlety. The writers that I like, whether they're English or not, seem to write without any effort at all, which only comes with years and years of hard work. Their novels look like they write themselves. And that's what I've always tried to emulate in my own writing. I never really know where a story is going until I start it, and very often, I don't really know where it's going to finish.”
Brezicki issued a clear disclaimer about his literary work.
“My writing is my own. It owes nothing to AI [artificial intelligence] and never will. ChatGPT has neither an original thought nor a heart, which is where fiction lies—and AI wouldn’t get the joke. As a writer, I know where my ideas come from. They are sourced in me, in my emotional life, in my experiences, in my reading. It’s curious, almost mysterious, the way it all comes together. But AI, with its billions of data bits and permutation combinations, it writes to a formula. It’s not human. Something I spent five years producing, ChatGPT can create in ten minutes, and the problem is that there are readers out there that can’t tell the difference. And that, for me, is a very big concern.”
ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot, an automated chat partner, which tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has called “scary good.” It is based on a constantly learning algorithm that not only scrapes information from the internet, but also gathers corrections based on user interaction. Educators and academics worry about the chatbot’s ability to generate competent essays based on simple key words, enabling academic dishonesty. On a broader scale, chatbots are capable of creating public misinformation campaigns which can be used for nefarious purposes.
“I’ve done a fair bit of academic writing for education magazines in the States, mainly on teaching English without a technology focus,” said Brezicki. “There were early warning signs. Many teachers are now wishing [technology] was never introduced to the classroom. Especially the cellphones, which are a huge distraction.”
Brezicki credits his daughter Catherine, who manages a book store in Toronto, as a valuable resource in his journey as a writer.
“She doesn’t tell me how to write, but what to read,” he said. One leads to the other. I feel blessed.”
Some of Brezicki’s stories have been written in a woman's voice, for which he has received both praise and criticism.
“It's a tricky subject these days, with the minefield of cultural appropriation and the thorny issue of identity politics,” he said. “Who has the right to depict ‘the other’? My answer is any serious and respectful writer. Otherwise, empathy is a platitude, and authoring a straitjacket.”
Several literary judges (two of whom were women) told Brezicki that his stories written in a woman’s voice could not have been written by a man.
“I guess that means I succeeded,” he said with a shrug. “But I don't write about women in areas that I know nothing about. Men and women have their unique aspects, but there is also a lot of overlap, like a Venn diagram. They share primary emotions like remorse, compassion, fear, regret, longing. These are universal, despite the post-impressionists or post-modernists, who would say that these are all verbal constructs. Whatever the hell that means. I don't know. Stuff like that annoys me. And I think it suppresses the creative spirit. A lot of writers won’t go there because they fear a backlash. I won't write from a Black perspective because I don't know Black, and I don’t dare presume to be a Black person. There are Black people in my stories, but I don't write as one. I'm not gay, but I do include LGBTQ characters in my stories, because they're part of the social fabric.”
Brezicki admits to becoming solitary in his pursuits with the passage of time, with a focus on seeking out new ideas for his writing. Another book is nearing completion.
“Game On is finished essentially,” he said. “I just need to tweak the ending a bit. it's about an aging sports writer, stressed and at the end of his tether, finding it hard to keep up with current trends, who is involved in a court case as the jury foreman. Courtroom drama can be intense. Game On is, I hope, funny and fast-paced. It's unlike any other book I've written, a very different kind of narrative style. I hope it will be out in 2024.”
Brezicki is optimistic about future of books.
“I’m hardly an expert on these things, but I think books will survive. Tactile, print version books are in fact making a comeback. Bookstores are doing well. They can hardly keep up with demand. So I do think that books are here to stay.”
