Michael Crawley-- soldier, wordsmith, and my father, on the tenth anniversary of his death
This is the third and final part, from meeting my mother to his death.
Part two can be read here:
Michael Crawley-- soldier, wordsmith, and my father, on the tenth anniversary of his death
This is part two, from the 1960s to when he met my mother in the early 1980s.
Here’s part three, the final part.
Content warning. There’s some edgy stuff in my dad’s life story, related to women’s reproductive rights, the British Army, and some dark family shit. If that could be traumatizing to you, please don’t read this.
My parents had a whirlwind romance. They left their boyfriend and girlfriend to be together. They fled to British Columbia to get away from the social mess they were in, in Ontario. They were married on March 22nd, 1983, just as the Sun entered firey Aries. I was born on Friday, January 13th 1984, near Vancouver. But by the time I was six months old, my parents were frustrated by the lack of economic opportunity in the Vancouver area, and we all moved back to the Golden Horseshoe in Ontario. To this day, I have absolutely no memories of being in BC. Good riddance.
My dad was reluctant to become a father again, and my mother really had to talk him into it. It’s so ironic, because my dad was generally an okay father to me, whereas my mother was so very emotionally neglectful and abusive that I totally cut contact with her about a decade ago. Now dad is dead, but mom is dead to me.
From about when I was six months to two years old, we lived in Brampton, Ontario. Then from age 2 to 16, I grew up in Mississauga. If you’re unfamiliar with the area, Mississauga shares a border with Toronto. Mississauga is odd in the sense that it would be considered to be an important city in its own right if it didn’t share a border with Toronto. Mississauga has a greater population than any US state capital. More people live in Mississauga than live in Boston. Through my 90s childhood, Mississauga had a population of around half a million, and by the time I became an adult it had reached about 700,000. Today it has around 720,000 people.
By the late 1980s, Nanny was desperate to join dad in Canada. She immigrated to Canada with dad’s help. They both had dual British-Canadian citizenship by the early 1990s.
Nanny was a very loving grandmother to me. She told me all kinds of stories about London. She read books to me. She babysat me when I was in kindergarten and the early grades. I had a vaguely British accent despite being born and raised in Canada. But by the time I was six or seven, my British accent completely transformed into a Canadian one from my public school experiences in the Toronto area. To this day, I speak in a yuppie version of a Toronto accent. But if I watched an Eastenders marathon nonstop for a few days, a bit of the old London accent would probably temporarily slip back in. As for my father, he converted his Cockney accent into a Received Pronunciation dialect a good decade or more before he emigrated from the UK.
By the late 1980s while I was a very young child, my dad had started his career as a novelist. His first book was a horror novel titled The Room. He used the pen name Michael Grey, and it was published by Corgi in 1990. You can now read The Room in its entirety via the Internet Archive! How cool is that?
Here is the biography of Michael Grey (real name Michael Crawley) as written at the beginning of the book:
“Michael Grey was born within the sound of Bow Bells in 1937, and uneducated at a variety of schools. He has worked as a barrow boy, tailor's cutter, soldier, clerk, auditor, factory hand, salesman, demolisher, interior designer, construction-site foreman, bartender, maitre d' - and is currently a computer slave.
Michael Grey now lives in Canada. He says that 'just as all comedians are known to be sad and serious folk, so all horror writers are known to be harmless pussy-cats. There are exceptions to all rules.”
That is unmistakably his distinctive voice.
My dad wrote many novels after that, most notably a series of erotic fiction novels under the pen name Felix Baron. Rather awkwardly, the apex of dad’s erotic fiction career was during my puberty.
Now let’s get even more awkward, but in a way that I find truly satisfying. Dad didn’t even start his writing career until he was in his mid-40s. I turn 40 very soon, next month in January. By the time I was in my late 30s, I was already a more commercially successful writer than my dad had ever been. Here are my four books from three different publishers on Amazon. I have also written many whitepapers and blogs for various tech companies. Not only have my nonfiction computer technology books outsold my dad’s novels, but in the past few years I’ve attained pretty good full time income writing for tech companies as my day job. Dad died before my career took off. Would he be proud of me or would he deeply envy me? Probably a bit of both.
Throughout my dad’s writing career, he also taught people how to become successfully published authors themselves. He had very strong ideas about wordcraft. He drilled those ideas into me, even though he hadn’t really intended to turn me into a professional writer. He probably subconsciously wanted me to follow his footsteps though.
Here is an article about my dad that appeared in the Oakville Beaver. Dad very deeply believed that the value of book writing came from how much a publisher wanted to publish it, and how much it sold. Words are worthy mainly if they make money, that was my dad’s point of view.
Here’s a transcription:
... to a scream: Michael Crawley
By TERESA PITMAN
Mississauga writer Michael Crawley- who will be sharing his System 2000 writing method with the Halton Peel Branch of the Canadian Author's Association Tuesday night- has made an unusual promise to those who attend:
"Anyone who is reasonably intelligent, literate and sufficiently dedicated, anyone who is willing to spend 2000 hours and $2000, can be published."
This System 2000 is the method Crawley himself used to write his horror novel The Room, scheduled for publication in July with Transworld Publishers (Doubleday- Bantam-Corgi.) The publishers have already asked to see the sequel, and Crawley says he has a list of his next twenty planned books up on the wall.
"My biggest problem is that I will never live to write everything that's fermenting in my brain," says Crawley, who writes under the pen name Michael Grey.
He certainly has more time for his writing than he used to, however. For five years he worked a full-time job (the four to midnight shift) and still managed to squeeze in another eight hours of writing each day. Now he feels he has the financial reserves to survive for at least a year, and taking a professional approach to "writing like mad all year." "Writing really is a full-time job," explains Crawley. "If you already have a full-time job that's just too bad. But you can't just play at writing, writing a couple of sentences a week and calling yourself a writer."
Crawley's earliest novels collected him stacks of rejection slips, but he points out that they weren't wasted: "I'm currently rewriting a book I wrote four years ago."
It wasn't until he tried his first horror novel that he found his niche, and he feels that most of his future books will be in this genre.
"I think we all have a cesspool in the back of our minds. I guess mine overflowed," said Crawley, who gives his talk at the Central Library starting at 7:30 p.m. Crawley wants his horror to be original and frightening.
"I want to make most other horror readers read like Dr. Seuss. Most writers try to make you suspect that something is under the bed, I want you to hear the sound of its teeth grating on your cheekbone."
He adds that the publisher considered giving out "barf bags" with each copy of the book sold. Crawley feels that his experience gives him a lot to share with beginning and aspiring writers. He stresses writing, setting a work schedule, and using professional materials.
That's where the $2000 of his System comes in: it's to buy a word processor, postage, and good-quality paper. "You can't write your story in exercise books with a pencil and ex- pect to be published," he says. "Editors just won't put up with that kind of thing."
But the professional approach is only part of the mix Crawley says is essential for successful writing. You also need to love writing, to be almost compulsive about it.
"I started writing when I was working for a mail order company, and there were a lot of times when the phone didn't ring and I had no- thing to do. I decided to try writing while I was waiting," he remembers. "I got lots of rejection slips at first, but I found I couldn't stop writing. I was hooked." Now he hopes that addiction will begin to pay for itself. Crawley points out that even when a novel is sold to a major publisher, as The Room has been, there are no financial guarantees. He realizes that in deciding to leave his other job he has "taken a bit of a flyer," but is deter- mined to give it his best shot.
Admission to Crawley's talk is free for CAA members or $2 for others.
Photo caption:
"Horror writer Michael Crawley - who is about to publish his first novel The Room will be on hand at the Central Library to discuss his 'System 2000' (Photo by Riziera Vertolli) successful macabre fiction."
There is though one book that my dad wrote that I might not have outsold yet, Tina Louise’s memoir Sunday. That was obviously something daddy had ghostwritten. Tina Louise was one of the stars of 1960s TV show Gilligan’s Island. And during my teenage years, dad many long phone sessions with her that he recorded onto audio tape. Apparently they collaborated very well together and my dad got Tina Louise’s heart and soul into words.
I moved away from home for good when I was 19 on June 3rd, 2003. On the very same day, dad packed his own suitcases. We were both determined to leave my mother. My mother made a lot of money from her Bay Street career, but that wasn’t enough to keep us in her house in Burlington. We both eventually decided to leave mom at the risk of our poverty. Dad and I didn’t discuss our plans with each other, so we both surprised each other. Interestingly enough, Uranus just crossed onto my IC at about 0 degrees Pisces, the cusp of my 4th house. It was absolutely no coincidence.
A few years prior, my dad started a clandestine affair with one of his correspondence writing students named Laurie Clayton. Dad was in his mid 60s and Laurie was just about to enter her 50s. They had a lot more in common with each other than my dad had with my mother. He was really, really miserable in his marriage with my mother from about the early 1990s onward. Laurie secretly visited Burlington and Brampton a few times, where I think they probably slept with each other in cheap motel rooms. Knowing what I know about my parents’ marriage, I don’t resent my father for cheating on my mother, even though adultery in other contexts bothers me quite a bit. You can’t overestimate how much I hate my mother.
Dad was still secretive about his relationship with Laurie, even when he moved out in 2003 to move in with her in an apartment building in Georgetown, Ontario, about a ten minute walk from the Georgetown GO train station. He initially said to me that Laurie was his landlord. Ha.
I was deeply poor in Hamilton from 2003 to 2007, barely surviving. My mother eventually married a richer man and moved into a mansion. I was still going to soup kitchens and food banks, all while my mom was living in luxury. Seriously, fuck her. (I eventually found some success in life. I live comfortably in Toronto now. But I will never live as comfortably as my mother.)
My parents legally separated by 2004 and divorced by 2005.
Anyway, dad and Laurie gave me a bit of a family to spend Christmas with and whatnot.
By 2007, I got into criminal trouble related to an abusive relationship I was in. Laurie didn’t see me as a beaten woman fighting back, but as a juvenile delinquent who needed “Tough Love.” (I was 23 by then!)
I briefly had to live in her and dad’s custody in Georgetown. From that point on, Laurie was determined to completely alienate my father from me. My father obliged.
We did though have brief moments of getting back in contact and making peace. In 2009, my dad was 72 and he was infected by what was probably H1N1. He was hospitalized in Georgetown Hospital for about a week. I went out of my way to visit him. Before I was permitted to enter his room, the nurses made me put on a hazmat suit, goggles, and a proper respirator. Imagine that, hospitals took infection control seriously back then. Now nearly five years into the Covid pandemic, there is zero actual public health and zero actual infection control. It’s so deeply disturbing. I’m one of maybe 0.5% of the population that has never been infected with Covid. I would jump off my skyscraper home balcony before I’d let myself get infected with Covid. I’m completely serious.
Anyway, my dad seemed to recover and he resumed his life of being a writer, writing tutor, and unofficial husband to Laurie Clayton.
Nanny died in a nursing home called Allendale in Milton, Ontario in November 2011. She was 93 years old. It was painful for me to watch her deteriorate, both physically and mentally. She was a very loving grandmother and I miss her still. I’m angry at my dad for putting her in a nursing home. Nursing homes are prisons for the elderly and disabled. And we’ve seen them become centres of mass death during our current airborne pandemic.
Dad didn’t live much longer, but thank goodness he never lived in a nursing home. Dad and I were mending our relationship in 2013. I was 29 and he was 76. We were going to spend Christmas 2013 together, Laurie stopped resisting. But in early December, I was warned that dad was getting too sick to spend Christmas with me and we’d have to spend Christmas together next year. That never happened. Dad died on December 22nd, 2013. Laurie informed me with a phone call.
When Laurie phoned me, I was in bed where I lived at the time on King Street West, close to downtown Toronto. I felt as if a whirlpool entered my bed and I was being sucked into it. I cried for literally about a minute. Then I dried my tears, as tears would no longer flow. From that point, I had a very brave face, just as daddy would have wanted. Dad’s official cause of death was a pancreatic ulcer, and he bled to death internally. In hindsight, he probably died from the after effects of H1N1. See? I understand the permanent harm that viruses can cause and I’m ever more determined to avoid Covid!
There was no funeral for my dad, Laurie said he wouldn’t have wanted one (even though funerals are supposed to be for the living). Dad was cremated and my half sister Victoria in Florida got half of his ashes.
During the time of my dad’s death, I was experiencing my very first Saturn return around 14 degrees Scorpio. My Ascendant is in 15 degrees Scorpio, and my sun is in Capricorn. My first Saturn return was probably more intense than other people’s Saturn returns. I said to my partner at the time, Sean Rooney, “I have no more parental guidance anymore.” (Remember, my mom isn’t in my life, she’s dead to me.)
I turned 30 on January 13th, 2014, just a few weeks after my father’s death. My legal adulthood before was a dress rehearsal, this was the beginning of my real adulthood. And in the few years that followed, with no daddy to show my writing to for his approval, my writing career took off. I’m certain that my successful writing career couldn’t chronologically co-exist with his. It’s all fate, it’s all in the stars. Daddy had to die for my writing career to live, and my life as a successful, self supporting adult to begin.
And now by the time I hit publish, it’s December 22nd, 2023, a decade with a dead daddy. And I turn 40 really soon.
And now I’ve shared as much of my dad’s story as I could. I got it out of me and into public consumption. What do you think? Do you like it? Do you understand me better?
FIN
Kim Crawley, buttondown.email/Crowgirl, @crowgirl.bsky.social, @crowgirl@hachyderm.io, linktr.ee/kimcrawley