Thank you, Neill McKee, for honoring our Choices blog with your presence today. Also for writing us a guest post about how important writing about our careers and life stories is. Neill is currently on his Women on Writing book tour. Here'a Neill: The benefits of writing about your career and life story by Neill McKee As is documented in my travel memoir, early in my career, I became a filmmaker and later a multimedia producer. After 45 years of such work, I decided to switch to creative nonfiction. Many people become consultants in their specialized fields in their senior years, but I had little interest in that. I had all these stories in my head about my varied life: growing up in a small industrially-polluted town in Ontario, Canada, and learning how “to escape” its confinements and stinks; my searching years at university, not knowing what I wanted to do with my life; and then a dramatic transition when I became a volunteer teacher in Sabah, Malaysia on Borneo Island. … [Read more...]
60s Rock & Roll. Wow!
Please welcome our guest today, Neill McKee while on his WOW! Women on Writing virtual tour of his book, Kid on the Go! Memoir of My Childhood and Youth. We are lucky to have his thoughts about living through the 1960s rock and roll culture. But here's Neill in his own words. Surviving the 1960s Rock n’ Roll Culture by Neill McKee Chapter 12 of Kid on the Go! begins with the words: “As my hormones went from 2nd into a smoother 3rd gear, I began to follow my brother’s and our friend Blake’s lead. We often wore our shirt collars up and used lots of Brylcreem to curve our hair forward at the front and slicked down on the sides, forming a ducktail at the back, exactly like Elvis Presley. We had entered the Rock & Roll world of the early 1960s.” I also wrote, “This period of my life is embedded in my memory like a series of movie vignettes that appear to have little purpose until you reach the end.” I titled the chapter Canadian Graffiti, after the popular movie, … [Read more...]
Neill McKee is in the spotlight!
I'm so pleased to tell you about Neill McKee and his historical travel memoir, Guns and Gods in My Genes. This is the second day of his WOW! Women on Writing tour. About the book: Neill McKee, author of the award-winning travel memoir Finding Myself in Borneo, takes the reader through 400 years and 15,000 miles of an on-the-road adventure, discovering stories of his Scots-Irish ancestors in Canada, while uncovering their attitudes towards religion and guns. His adventure turns south and west as he follows the trail of his maternal grandfather, a Canadian preacher who married an American woman in Wisconsin, and braved the American Wild West from 1904 to 1907, finding a two-story brothel across from one of his churches and a sheriff who owned a saloon and dance hall, while carrying a gun with 20 notches, one for each man he had killed. Much to his surprise, McKee finds his American ancestors were involved in every major conflict on North American soil: the Civil War, the … [Read more...]
Living among different cultures is great material for a memoir
Our Choices guest today, Neill McKee, writes about living in and learning about a very different culture, in his new memoir, Finding Myself in Borneo: Sojourns in Sabah. His description of how he chose to find work in a world of more sunshine reminds me of my family's adventures living in the South Pacific in the mid 1970s. We lived on a tiny Marshall Island, called Kwajalein, for nineteen months, and it was definitely a life-changing experience - exactly the way Neill feels about his sojourns. Thank you, Neill, for stopping by Choices on your WOW!Women on Writing book tour. We are very interested in knowing about your successful and long career that all started in Borneo. About Finding Myself in Borneo: Sojourns in Sabah by Neill McKee I grew up in Ontario, Canada. As a kid, I dreamed of escaping my industrially polluted hometown for a cleaner, greener world full of sunshine—possibly in Asia or Africa. In college I studied psychology, philosophy and playwriting, but I … [Read more...]