Rodeo Announcer: Immigration

David A Poulsen Dept: Poulsen started writing when he was a child himself. He remembers tugging an orange scrapbook around the family home that he filled with stories and songs, but he had to wait until 1984, after he graduated with a French degree from the University of Saskatchewan, to become a "real writer." Poulsen put to paper a version of a story his mother used to tell about welcoming home soldiers from the Second World War. She was a little girl at the time and recalled seeing the young men, broken by Dieppe, step off the train at the station in Swift Current. Poulsen fictionalized the story, changed the point of view from a young girl to a young boy, and added some hockey. The story won a provincial short-story prize and Poulsen, suddenly, was getting calls from publishers. In 1987, his own photo graced the back cover The Cowboy Kid, his first book, according to Calgary Herald. Poulsen obsesses about finding authentic voices for his characters, and sees the late Edmonton author Martyn When he was a young boy, David A. Poulsen noticed that all the books he loved to read had a photograph of a person on the back cover. It was then he realized that there was such a thing as a writer. "Those people created those stories. When I discovered that I said, 'That's great. I wonder if I can do that.' " Turns out he could, and here in southern Alberta, he was not alone. There is no shortage of local authors penning books for young readers. Calgary's kid-lit scene boasts a disproportionate number of award-winners and bestsellers for a city our size. The authors who make up this vibrant community come to the genre with their own motivations and via a unique path. Poulsen, for example, is a cowboy, a rodeo announcer and an ex-rodeo clown. Clem Martini is a university professor and playwright who teaches drama to troubled youth. Shenaaz Nanji is a mom from Mombasa, India. Both Renata Liwska and Carolyn Fisher graduated from the Alberta College of Art and Design, but while Liwska was drawing in her sketchbook on her mother's kitchen table in Poland, Fisher slopped pigs on her parents' Alberta farm. Perhaps the only thing these writers have in common is the relative shoe size of their readership. Poulsen has since written 11 more young-adult novels, along with an adult novel, a book of short stories, two sports biographies and a cowboy cookbook. However, he reserves his greatest zeal for his first audience. "I've never deviated from the idea that I would write for kids," he says. "I still read a tremendous number of children's books now. I really like them. And I really like kids. I like the way they look at life." As reported in the news.
@t alberta college of art and design, rodeo clown