Richard Scrimger (edit name/settings)

From the age of eight, Richard Scrimger enjoyed spending time in libraries while his parents were still out at work. He also has happy memories of laughing as his father reading Winnie the Pooh to him and his brother. He was born in Montreal in 1957, grew up in Scarborough and then downtown Toronto, where he lived until the mid-nineties. He now lives in the small town of Cobourg, Ontario, with his wife, who is a moral theologian and professor, and his four children.
He wanted to be a lawyer and started out studying history at the University of Toronto, but switched to English; law meant only reading law books and not having any fun. After university, he went to Europe for a year, waited tables and started to write. “I decided to be a writer in my mid-twenties. It was a decision that I took haphazardly, and ten years later I was an overnight success.” He eventually shelved his first novel, but his second, Crosstown, was published in 1996 and he was hailed by Matt Cohen as a “significant new voice in the new wave of Canadian fiction”.
A year before, he had attended an intensive one-week program at the Humber College for Writers. It was there that he found he had a talent for writing humour, when a story about going shopping with his kids was enthusiastically received. The piece went on to be published in the Globe and Mail, developed into a series of similar pieces, and grew into a book, Still Life with Children. He went back to Humber College to work on The Nose from Jupiter, his first novel for children (about a tiny alien who takes up residence in a kid’s nose, giving him a whole new way to solve his problems). He has since taught twice on the faculty of the Humber College Correspondence Program.
"I didn't develop work habits as a writer until my children were born. I'd have four hours in front of me for writing, but somehow the coffee wouldn't be hot enough or the pencil wouldn't be sharp enough. I'd sit down, write a sentence and then stroke it out and write another sentence and maybe change the punctuation… When the twins, the first of our four children, were born, suddenly my life had serious focus. The idea of having 40 uninterrupted minutes for writing when the two of them were napping was tremendous.” Having children made him focus whenever he had a spare moment to write, in between taking the kids to soccer practice and doing the laundry; it also brought the responsibility of having to bring in money. He continued to work in restaurants until recently; he would write from 10 p.m. until 2 a.m., then get up at 6 a.m. Now he divides his time between writing and housework. “Bridget always knows if the writing is going badly by seeing how clean the house is.”
Scrimger has written several novels for younger readers, and is planning some picture books. He says “I love going around to schools and asking the kids what characters they would like to see come back and how they would rewrite the story.” He is perhaps best known for his children’s books, and for his humour, which comes naturally. But his novels have a deeply serious side to them. As in his first novel, Mystical Rose focuses on a single flawed individual in search of redemption. In Crosstown, it is an old drunken homeless guy making a pilgrimage of sorts; here, Rose is compared to Virgin Mary, and the book borrows from the Rosary for its structural underpinning. Scrimger calls himself a “lapsed atheist”. His family was not religious, but he was always searching for something more, and in secret he studied the New Testament he received from school at the end of Grade Six; later he joined a local church choir.
“I talk to God… I derive comfort from the communion of saints. Now I am not, as so many are, particularly drawn to the Virgin Mary…But I do take refuge, in times of sadness or trial, in the litany of the Rosary.” The Rosary is a prayer to God by means of a series of meditations on the lives of Jesus and Mary; according to the church, when someone says a Hail Mary they are giving the Virgin Mary a rose; each complete Rosary makes a crown of roses. “There are no words wise or good or deep enough to reach God on their own merit; perhaps the near-numbing repetition of formal entreaty is a legitimate recognition of our own unworthiness and need… I make no claims to consistent or purposeful allegory… But I am interested in the extraordinary possibilities in ordinary life.”