My parents divorced when I was five, and as an only child, my childhood was almost always entire days with just my mom and me. These days included movies followed by lunch or ice-cream at Rompelmeyer; birthday dinners at Benihanas or Il Boschetto; trips to Disney World, Bermuda, Trinidad, Europe, Canada; Broadway plays; ballet at Lincoln Center or City Center; rainy days, snow days or Saturdays of Monopoly, 221B Baker Street, chess, 500 rummy; Sunday church then Sunday afternoon tv movies... It was a very full childhood for which I am forever grateful. Despite being the only child of a single parent in a neighborhood where that was distinctly frowned upon, I was beyond fortunate.

I have a single memory of one whole day spent with my dad. I was fourteen. I spent the night at his apartment and we were up at 4 am to catch a boat. We had a cooler full of Colt 45 for him. I had a ham sandwich and a ginger ale in my backpack. Near the dock we bought some minnows for bait then boarded a fishing boat. We were on the water for hours. My dad made friends immediately and introduced me around with more than a little pride. This is my baby girl, Danny. Watch out for her. He fished a little, drank a lot, and spent some time playing cards below deck. I learned to put the hook through the eye of the minnow and almost won the pot by catching the biggest fish. It ended up being the second biggest. I remember how happy he was, bragging about the fish his baby girl caught. Or maybe he was just happy I was there doing something he loved with him. It was a good day. I wish we'd managed more of them before memories and pictures were all I had left of him.

When I met her, I had no opinion of Eira. She seemed polite, kind, but not the type to stand out in a crowd. She had friends, but not too many. She was in two of my classes, Art II and Sociology. I barely noted her existence until I found her outside of class one day.

I was at the park because I didn't want to be at home. It was a cold December day so I didn't expect anyone else to be there, and was shocked to see Eira sat on a swing. When she saw me in the dark she smiled and invited me to the swing next to her.

Ignoring my hesitance, I cleared snow off the swing and smoothed out my dress and sat next to her. She complimented my dress, saying the way dark blue blended well with the colors of the next. I expressed a similar sediment in the rings she was wearing, the way the silver reflected off the snow made it appear to be glowing.

She smiled and asked what I was doing there. It was the first time she ever said my name, and it was lovely how the vowels in 'Ada' sounded.

I explained my woes of being at home. Although my parents were given a daughter, I was more inclined to the romantic pursuits of a son.

Eira laughed at my phrasing, saying she always found my dramatic nature to be charming. I blamed my flush on the cold. She explained she preferred to be in cold, and how she wasn't fond of the summertime.

We talked about dull things for hours, although being next to her made them seem like the most interesting things in the world. It wasn't too long before the cold got to me and I began to shiver.

She noticed and told me I should head home. It wasn't until then I noticed she had no winter clothes, just a long sweater and leggings. I forced her to take my scarf, fearing her getting frostbite. She said she would only take it if I took her ring.

After I allowed her to slide it onto my finger, she kissed my cheek and told me she would be there the next night too.

Evening after evening, we would meet up. She would be wearing normal clothes besides my scarf I refused to take back, while the only stable thing about my outfit was the silver ring. Eira would observe it on my finger with a look of happiness I rarely saw in her any other time.

It changed on the first day of spring officially, when it was obvious there would be no snow. I went to the muddy park, dressed in a light coat along with the ring, and she was not there. I waited for her, and she did not show.

I went to the park and waited for a week, before something bright red caught my eye in the darkness, right underneath Eira's swing. It was the red scarf I gave her all that time ago.

That was what filled me with dread as I realized I would not see my love again. I slipped the silver ring off of my hand and wrapped the scarf around it, before sticking it back in the mud.

The only thing I can I do is wait for winter.

I cannot even begin to describe the many reasons why you should not follow me. But I will do so anyway. You see, I am full of ideas, and I'm always coming up with new ways to convey them! Do you really want to follow someone who has ideas? Didn't think so. Secondly, I'm constantly learning! I know what you're thinking. Learning? What is this, school? What kind of total loser wants to learn? Exactly. This is why you definitely shouldn't (wink wink) follow me! You'd totally hate it.

My name is Alex, and I love to write.

But lately, it's all been boring.

Should I switch the scene from day to night?

Change the windows or the flooring?

Perhaps I need some sudden deaths,

Yes, that will do the trick!

When characters take their last breaths,

The reader is shocked real quick.

Katie and Sarah should be in a car crash.

Matthew will drown in a swim.

Pierre's set on fire and burned straight to ash,

No firefighter could save him.

Melissa should fall off a three-story roof,

With Simon caught below it.

This recipe is completely foolproof,

I'll get awards before I know it!

Autobiographies aren't very frequent,

But I'll get some money for the time I've spent.

In my second year at grammar school, I decided to become a school librarian. There were several perks to being a librarian. For instance, we had a small kitchenette annexed to the library - about the size of a boot cupboard, really - in which we could make tea and toast at break-time. Another perk: we could easily ‘check out’ as many books as we liked. But the greatest benefit of being a member of this select band was that we had unfettered access to the ‘black books’ contained within the ‘forbidden section’ - a glass-fronted locked cabinet that contained various volumes to which access was carefully controlled. Unless you were a librarian, that is.

What books lay within this inner sanctum, this Unholy of Unholies? There were various graphic illustrated sex education manuals (well, graphic to the mind of a twelve-year-old lad enrolled at an all-boys grammar school in 1970s Britain: hardly sensational stuff by today’s standards). More interesting was the slang dictionary of the English language, which I eagerly scrutinised for the plethora of intriguing words that, curiously, were omitted from our standard school dictionaries. Restricted access or not, certain pages were blatantly more well-thumbed than others. Which was also the case with the most notorious tome that had been deposited amongst the other ‘black books’: DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley's Lover. By the time I came to read it, almost twenty years had passed since the famous prosecution of Penguin Books for publishing this infamous work: perhaps the greatest cause célèbre in the battle against censorship in the 20th century.

The chief prosecutor in that famous trial, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, had become a laughing stock by suggesting that this was not the kind of book ‘you would wish your wife or servants to read.’ Britain was on the cusp of a social and sexual revolution that would shortly consign Griffith-Jones’ world-view to the dustbin of history. He wasn’t alone, of course, in being unprepared for this; as the great Philip Larkin mournfully expressed a few years later in his poem Annus Mirabilis:

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me)

Between the end of the Chatterley ban

And the Beatles’ first LP.

Once I had read the book for myself, I must confess to a certain disappointment. It wasn’t a patch on other works by Lawrence, like Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow or Women in Love. Yes: here in the text of a novel, for the first time, I was able to read some of those ‘forbidden words’ I’d previously been looking up in the aforementioned slang dictionary. But, on reflection, I didn’t really understand what all the fuss had been about.

In the same year that I read Lady C, I also read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, followed soon after by his masterpiece, 1984. What had been a vague unease with the idea of censorship now hardened into an unyielding opposition to it. More than forty years on, my feelings on the matter are stronger than ever. As Winston Smith, Orwell’s protagonist in the dystopian nightmare world of 1984 writes, in his diary:

‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.’

Revisionist views of literature, art and music are no less dangerous than revisionist views of history. And, in my view, the rewriting of Roald Dahl (yes, I got to the subject of this Challenge in the end…) is nothing short of monstrous. Or - to use a very Dahlish word - beastly.

Less than a week has passed since I first read, in an article published in The Guardian on February 18th, that new editions of Dahl’s work had been published (in which, amongst other things, Augustus Gloop is now ‘enormous’ rather than ‘fat’; Miss Trunchbull is now a ‘most formidable woman’ rather than ‘most formidable female’; and Mrs Twit is no longer ‘ugly’). And I’m still fuming.

It seems ironic to me that these changes have been made by Dahl’s publisher Puffin, itself an imprint of Penguin - the very publishing house that was once willing to champion DH Lawrence in the battle against censorship. How the mighty have fallen!

Now, it’s important to distinguish between changes of language that might be required for the purposes of understanding and clarity, as opposed to alterations motivated by a desire to bring the thinking of the past into line with whatever happens to be the prevalent attitudes of the current day. Clearly, these are the principles that should be applied when translating from one language to another. Even then, there remains the clear understanding that reading the original text in the original language of composition is always to be desired, if possible.

My understanding of the New Testament, for example, has been greatly enhanced by my reading the text in the original Greek, as I and a few friends have regularly been doing together on a weekly basis for over four years now. CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien and various friends once did exactly the same, almost a century ago, when they gathered week by week to read the Icelandic Sagas in their original tongue, as part of the Koalbiters’ Club (a precursor of sorts to the later Inklings). Much as I love Tolkien’s masterful translations of some of the foundational texts of Middle and Old English (not least that superlative epic poem, Beowulf), I know it cannot compare with the original. If I really want to appreciate Beowulf fully, then I should learn Anglo-Saxon (I have tried, actually!); and then I should read the original text - a text that has not changed for a thousand years. But I shudder to think what text of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory will be available for future readers in a thousand years time; and how similar (or not) it will be to what Dahl originally wrote.

Translating is not, therefore, the same as rewriting. Nor is adapting. I mentioned, in the previous paragraph, JRR Tolkien - surely one of the greatest philologists and wordsmiths of the 20th century. Tolkien’s greatest work, The Lord of the Rings, has been adapted for radio, television and film on numerous occasions. Sometimes, these have been faithful adaptations (such as the wonderful BBC radio version, made in 1981). Two decades later, the Oscar-winning Peter Jackson film adaptation worked under different constraints from those of a radio studio, albeit with a far greater budget; yet that too was also a loving and thoughtful production. Both productions were faced with hard decisions about what to omit, what to retain and what to re-purpose from the source material. The large-scale action scenes were, of course, realised with far greater effect in the film adaptation that would ever have been possible within the confines of a radio studio. By contrast, the radio drama retained much more of Tolkien’s poetry from the epic; a much-loved element of the novel that many of the film’s aficionados, like myself, nevertheless missed from Jackson’s version of the tale. Interestingly, both adaptations completely removed the Tom Bombadil sub-plot (wisely so, in my opinion - some of course will disagree). But I have a great deal of respect for both adaptations, making the very best use as they did of their contrasting dramatic forms.

However, the less said about Amazon’s recent television series The Lord of the Rings: the Rings of Power, the better…

So, adapting is not the same as rewriting either.

What, then, about rewriting? What are the ground rules for this?

One word: Don’t.

Or - to expand slightly - in my view, there is generally only one person who has the authority, should they choose to do so, of rewriting (as opposed to translating or adapting) a work of literature. And that is the original author. Which in the case of the deceased Roald Dahl is now impossible.

It’s interesting to note that very few authors ever do succumb to the temptation - or the pressure - to rewrite their work, once finally published. One of the few recent exceptions I can think of to this is the fantasy author Neil Gaiman, who has published several slightly-revised ‘preferred texts’ after-the-fact of his original published works. There’s also the interesting example of science fiction writer Douglas Adams, who in his own lifetime (let’s forget posthumous travesties like the film adaptation) was creatively involved in several different versions of his most famous work, The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, in radio, TV, LP and novel formats. Sometimes these versions diverged from one another in quite significant ways. So, which one is ‘canon’? The short answer: All of them!

Generally, unlike Gaiman and Adams, most authors have resisted the temptation to revisit their published works; and that isn’t at all surprising, really, when you think about it. When one considers the amount of time and energy that is lovingly poured into crafting their works, you can see why authors, once finally reaching that cathartic point - It is finished - would generally rather move onto the next work, or otherwise take a well-earned rest. And this is still the case, perhaps even more so, if they are aware of the limitations and deficiencies of their work. Returning to Tolkien, the preface to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings contains these remarkably honest words:

The most critical reader of all, myself, now finds many defects, minor and major, but being fortunately under no obligation either to review the book or to write it again, he will pass over these in silence, except one that has been noted by others: the book is too short.

Amen to his last statement.

Sometimes - before publication - authors, dramatists and composers expend considerable energy on rewrites. They cannot bring their work to completion. They set the work aside - hoping to return to it, perhaps. Or sometimes admitting to themselves forlornly that it will never reach that final form. Afraid, even, to finish it. To say: ‘There! It’s done.’ For examples, think of The Silmarillion (Tolkien again). Or Schubert’s famously unfinished 8th symphony. And sometimes Death himself intervenes: none more poignantly so than in the case of Mozart, in the midst of writing his Requiem. Lacrimosa dies illa / Qua resurget ex favilla /Judicandus homo reus (‘Full of tears will be that day / When from the ashes shall arise / The guilty man to be judged’): possibly the final words of the Requiem score that he worked on.

(Let’s not get into whether unfinished works should be completed by other hands - even hands as respectful as Mozart’s pupil Süssmayr, or Tolkien’s son Christopher. That’s another controversy for another time.)

But Roald Dahl indisputedly completed many works. Many of them have become beloved classics of children’s literature. He did not feel the need to rewrite them. With what audacity should lesser writers (and publishers looking for a ‘fast buck’ from ‘new’ editions) feel the need to do so? It’s not ‘artistic reinterpretation’. It’s not reviewing the language ‘to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today’ (as the publisher's blurb maintains). It’s cultural vandalism - pure and simple.

Yes, there are plenty of controversial works in the vast canon of literature. Are we going to raise the age of Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, or Nabokov’s Lolita, because they make us feel uncomfortable these days? Are we going to rewrite Huckleberry Finn, removing from Twain's work every use of the ‘N-word’? That’s the logical next step - it would seem - from trying to tell us that Augustus Gloop might be ‘enormous’, but he certainly isn’t ‘fat’.

Some commentators have suggested that Roald Dahl is being retrospectively ‘punished’ for his well-documented anti-Semitic views. Well, again, I don’t want to go too far down another rabbit hole, that of so-called ‘cancel culture’; but altering or invalidating another person’s work because of some supposed moral shortcoming in the artist - real or otherwise - is unbelievably facile. Caravaggio was, possibly, a murderer. He also happens to be one of my favourite artists. The late Eric Gill’s sculptures have become enormously controversial recently, in view of discoveries about his personal life. But what, then, about film directors like Roman Polanski? Or the possible proclivities of Lewis Caroll and JM Barrie? Or poets like Jean Genet, once a petty thief; or the perpetually inebriated Swansea poet, Dylan Thomas? What about drug-using novelists like William Burroughs? Or even - in the current moment, most controversially - JK Rowling? Can I divorce the art from the artist? Should I? To what extent does the artist inform the art? Should one appreciate the music, or the novel, in and for itself? Complex questions, to be sure: but the unyielding orthodoxies of ‘cancel culture’ seem to be a most illiberal response to me.

‘Ah, but Roald Dahl is a children’s author’ - comes back the rejoinder. ‘Corrupting the young - we can’t have that!’ Well, I’m certainly not dignifying that criticism with a response. The artificial division of literature into ‘children’s’ and ‘young adult’ and ‘adult’ categories is something I began to reject long before I took an interest in Lady C and the other ‘black books’ in our school library.

If you think a work lacks literary merit - don’t read it. If as a publisher you think it’s had its day - don’t reprint it. Altering the text to suit current-day identity politics, without the author’s express permission, is tantamount to pissing on their grave.

Good art should entertain us, challenge us, inspire us, and even, sometimes, disturb us. Think of one of Picasso’s most famous works - Guernica. It contains some shocking imagery - such as a gored horse, screaming women, a dead baby, a dismembered soldier, and flames. It was meant to shock. It was the artist’s response to the Spanish Civil War and the Fascist destruction of the Basque town of Guernica in 1937. Are we to judge Picasso’s work as too troubling for consideration today? Of course not.

But, then again, are we step by step remorselessly heading for the kind of world that EM Forster warned about in his extraordinary short story, The Machine Stops? In this remarkable work, first published in 1928 (!), the author predicts the rise of the internet (yes, really), human dependency upon machines, and the death of scientific inquiry and artistic imagination. In the story, we are introduced to a Lecturer, an ‘expert’ in French history, who to ‘tremendous applause’ declaims the following to his enraptured audience:

‘There will come a generation that has gone beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation “seraphically free from taint of personality”, which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened had it taken place in the days of the Machine.’

Sorry Huxley - sorry Orwell. Forster got there a few years before you.

I’m going to give the final word to Salman Rushdie: a man who appreciates the cost of creative integrity, and the dangers of censorship, far, far more than most of us ever will. He posted his reaction to the brouhaha about Dahl on Twitter a few days ago. He wrote:

‘Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed.’

Spot on. Now I really need to get around to reading The Satanic Verses.

Analytics, analytics, all they fucking care about are analytics. This is what journalism has become. It no longer has anything to do with your interviewing or writing skills. Just analytics

My last article was my pièce de résistance. A multi-interview deep-dive into the life of an Afghan refugee who came to Canada with nothing more than the torn clothes on his back.

A nineteen-year-old who spent the last five years of his life in a refugee camp determined to make it out alive and start a new life. The kid got his hands on every book he could and learned five different languages, so wherever he found himself, he would have a better chance to integrate.

He made it out, and he made it to my small town, and I sat down with him and conducted multiple detailed interviews. Did anyone read it? Not many. Not enough to get me ranked in the top ten most read articles in our analytics system. So, at the last weekly pitch meeting with the editor, ole Jamie Wells says

“Hey, I, uh, noticed that your articles haven’t been picking up any steam lately. I can’t guarantee job security if you’re not ranking in the system, okay?. So, let’s get out there and get some good stories this week. Check out Caroline’s last few articles.”

“I’m covering everything that’s going on in Mill Haven,” I answered, knowing that an argument was futile, but also knowing that I was going to defend my side, anyway. “I just wrote the Afghan refugee article, interviewed veterans for Remembrance Day. I even spent an afternoon digging through archives at the museum for stories of local World War 2 heroes. I did the Lakeview festival, several on the hospital crisis, and an 800 word article on the sale of the sawmill. Christ, Jamie, what else do you want me to do?”

“Just check Caroline’s last few articles, okay?”

“Yeah, sure. Whatever.” I answered, feeling veins pulsating from both sides of my head.

It was no dig at Caroline. She was a fine reporter, but her last few “articles” were only rewrites of police reports. Headlines like, Two Dead After Sunday Crash on Route 11. 21-Year-Old Overdoses on Fentanyl. One Dead, One in Critical Condition After Accident Near St Pauls. Headlines that wrote themselves. I felt like screaming at the prick, Do you want me to go out and hit someone with my car, so I can get a top ranked article and keep my fucking job, Jamie?

Yes, I understood that those press release rewrites were the top three ranked articles in the province. But not one of them had anything to do with reporting, at least not in my humble opinion. The RCMP shared the releases; the reporters reworded them, and the public jumped on them like the vultures they were. It didn’t take Woodward or Bernstein to do that.

I stared at the blank screen of my WordPress page, feeling disillusioned about a career that I once considered a dream, but now realized was just another pointless job. The more time you spent doing anything in this life, the more you realized dreams were only the wanting of things that seemed out of reach. Once you grabbed them, reality set in and those dreams ceased to be. It was a bad time to be a reporter in a safe city. The vultures were no fans of the happy ending.

Then, for the hell of it, I started typing in the headline section. 73-Year-Old-Man Dies in Bank Robbery After Heroic Effort. Would you like that, Jamie?. I continued writing.

A 73-year-old-man has died after a heroic effort on Monday morning at TD bank on Main Street. Two masked assailants carrying automatic weapons entered the bank demanding all cash on hand, says Wendy Andrews, a 52-year-old resident of Mill Haven,

“I don’t trust online banking. I still come on Mondays to deposit cheques and socialize, you know? Like people are supposed to do. Then these men came in, waving guns around. It was terrifying. I thought I was going to die until an older gentleman ran at them and tackled them both from behind. He was like a linebacker. We called the cops. The masked men panicked and shot the old man before hightailing it out of the bank.”

This shit just writes itself. Even Wendy Andrews, a name I just made up on the spot, seemed to fit the article. Good ole Wendy, no way she’ll ever make the transition to digital banking, not my Wendy. I even gave myself a metaphorical pat on the back for coming up with her quotes for the press. They seemed authentic enough, and if that were a legitimate article, the province would gobble it up. And maybe next time, when things slowed down on Caroline’s end, Jamie would tell her to check out my articles. That would be the day, wouldn’t it?

But the facade revealed itself to be just that, and Jamie’s high-pitched nasally voice echoed in my ears, “I can’t guarantee job security, if you’re not ranking in the system, okay?” So I closed the WordPress page and refreshed all the tabs of my different news sources to see if any breaking stories had developed since I started writing my little piece of fiction.

A story had been published seconds ago with the headline, 73-Year-Old-Man Dies in Bank Robbery After Heroic Effort. This was the breaking story of each of my news sources. I was stunned. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. It had to be a coincidence. Even if it was the grandest coincidence I’d ever experienced, it still had to be one. Just had to be.

I clicked on the story from the RCMP website and scrolled down to see that it was word for word what I had written. Even the quote from Wendy Andrews, the woman I was sure I had just made up. But there she was telling the “press,” though I was the only press in town, that she went to the bank every Monday to socialize, ya know? Like people are supposed to do.

For a moment, I didn’t know what to do or what to think. I actually pinched the skin on my arm. As ridiculous as it sounds, I did it. Pinched and twisted, but there was only pain. There was no gasping moment where I awoke in the middle of the night lying next to my wife. No, she was at work, and I was at work, and this press release was somehow filled with the words that I had written only moments ago.

I went back to the article, and decided that I would continue writing, just to test this insanity. I added at the bottom. “The man’s dying words were, Gosh, I love this town, and I love this country,” says bank manager Margaret Macmillan. Another fictionalized name. I gave a half-hearted laugh at this. An all Canadian man giving his life, and not regretting a single second of it. It was a pleasant touch, I thought, but it wasn’t reality. No, sir.

Lather, rinse, repeat. I hit refresh on the news pages, and once more started with the RCMP release. There it was at the bottom. “Gosh, I love this town, and I love this country.”

Jesus Christ. This is crazy. But…. I paused. This is job security. If I sent this to Jamie now, he would have to praise my punctuality, and Caroline would certainly be knocked from the top spot by the end of the day. A man who died yesterday is old news compared to a man who has died today.

I edited the story a little, added some more fictionalized information that I was sure would prove to be reality once I hit refresh on the RCMP page, then sent it to Jamie. For a brief moment a voice inside my head whispered, “you killed this man. You killed this man.” But I shook it off with relative ease. And it was soon replaced by an even louder voice that said, “Think about the analytics.”

Top ranked stories every day for this small town reporter. I thought of next week’s editorial meeting, and Jamie telling the rest of the reporters to check out my articles for ideas on how to rank high in the system, and have some of that sweet old job security.

All that mattered in reporting these days was analytics. Goddamn analytics.

As little kids, we had no idea what to get Mom for Christmas. While shopping at the five and dime, we saw what appeared to be a really nice plastic yellow butter dish. My brother and I immediately combined our coins, and home we went to wrap it up.

On Christmas Eve, Mom looked so excited when she opened our gift that we decided to get her the same gift the next year and the next. While we rarely had butter in our house, we always had a good supply of yellow butter dishes.

And guess what Mom will be getting on her 97th Christmas this year?

I see a tiny boy digging into his tiny pocket. He pulls out a coin which he places in the paper cup of a homeless man. This same tiny boy marches on down the street where he hears a steel drum, made out of tin cans, sending beautiful music to his tiny ears. Once again, he reaches into his tiny pocket and drops a shiny nickel on the ground next to the street musician.

The tiny boy knows he has only one copper penny left in his pocket. He saves it for tomorrow. His compassion is not tiny.