Budd presents Buddy

Writer Ken Budd is an ambitious, if wonderfully nostalgic, author. The British Columbian scribe of more than 30 titles is currently on a whirlwind tour of the western provinces and is set to make his blink-and-you’ll-miss-it afternoon stop in this fair burg Wednesday afternoon.

He won’t just be introducing one book to St. Albert audiences. Or two.

Or three.

Budd, a former creative writing teacher, has brought his entire four-piece seasonal set called The Adventures of Buddy Williams with him. There’s SummerWild, FallGently, WinterFree and SpringRush.

If you ask the warm and gracious man about the auspicious origins of the titular character, he’ll give you a bit of autobiographical etymology, which, at the end, makes a whole lot of sense.

“If you look at my name, you’ll see my name is Kenneth William Budd,” he began. “I added an ‘S’ to William and I added a ‘Y’ to Budd and I flipped them around and I got Buddy Williams.”

As a preventative measure, he offered an anecdote about some recent advice that he received in regards to his writing. Jack Hodgins, another B.C.-based writer, critiqued his first manuscript and had an important suggestion.

“He said, ‘You’re going to get a lot of questions about whether this is an autobiography or if this is fiction.’ It’s a fictional memoir. I remember teaching my creative writing kids and saying, ‘write what you know.’ So I started at that point, wrote down a whole bunch of memories I had as a kid, added a dollop of imagination and another spoonful of creativity, mixed it all up and I hope that I ended up with a soup that makes sense.”

He agreed that the stories are liberally embellished rather than being more faithful to the truth of his own upbringing.

The character in the novels is an 11-year-old boy in the 1950s, also not unlike the author himself. Budd – not Buddy – had a rather fulfilling childhood and he used those experiences as starting points for his written adventures of Buddy, not Budd.

“It was not a wealthy [childhood]. We weren’t a rich family. You were kicked out the door in the early morning … ‘Go play but be back in time for dinner, or at least when it gets dark’. The freedom that I had as a child, I want to emulate in this book in the way in which the main theme is the importance of nature to kids.”

Buddy, as it turns out, had a very interesting year, the author describes.

“It’s one complete year in this young lad’s life. It follows him from the summer at the lake of his youth back to school in the fall where he has this rampant anger at his new teacher that he calls the Red Witch, which brings the principal into play. He does get to go hunting with his granddad. At the end of the fall, there’s a tragedy like he’s never experienced before which sends him into a tailspin of bad decision-making in WinterFree. He attempts to redeem himself when it comes to SpringRush.”

Budd stops in at the St. Albert Chapters on Sept. 24 from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. before he moves on to other appearances in Sherwood Park and Edmonton. Please visit www.summerwild.ca for details on his books and his promotional tour.