Stan White, author. Stan’s latest book
Toronto. Our past president, programme secretary, etc., Les Jones. sent me a note recently that another past president (Toronto branch), Stan White. Stan recently published another book, this one a book of ‘tall’ short stories.
Those (like me) who know Stan recall his wit, and whimsy at our meetings, especially in the odd poem he wrote for the society and his occasional 3D images shown at our monthly meeting in full colour and 3D. Note: Stan’s recent books will get the eBook treatment as well as hard copy.
A blurb on this book of short stories gives a brief overview of Stan’s life after explaining his general inspiration for the stories.
Stan says, “These stories have been written over the last 40 years. As each idea came to me, I built a short story around it.
“When I was a boy, I was intrigued by stories of various kinds: adventure tales, humorous stories, love stories, science fiction and tales of the absurd. Especially memorable were: Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth; the horror of The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe, and that of The Monkey’s Paw by W.W. Jacobs; and the humour of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat.
“The short story, with its brevity, seems to me to be an ideal package for our urgent world. I wrote these stories in memory of the boy who read the great authors. They are tales of adventure, humour, love, science fiction, and the absurd.
A biography gives some background, “Stan White began life in Birmingham, England. He was an industrial photographer before coming to Canada in 1957 where he married and settled in Toronto working as a commercial and advertising photographer [at one point with our past editor, the late Everett Roseborough]. In 1970, he joined Sheridan College as a teaching master and ran the studio for them for 20 years, teaching lighting and product illustration.
“After he retired in the early 1990s, he continued with a life-long interest in stereo photography, photographing avidly in and around Brantford. These photographs are now in the local archives. In cooperation with the Photographic Historical Society of Canada, he set up a library of information on stereo photography [later] housed in the Art Gallery of Ontario.
“Throughout his life, he has written non-fiction on various aspects of photography. In his 50s he began to write poetry and short stories. He has been published in local anthologies and has published several books of poetry, some in collaboration with other poets. As well he wrote a slim book on tabletop stereo imaging in 1970, Beyond the Third Dimension, published in the Netherlands and illustrated with View Master reels.
“These days, for relaxation, and in the hopes of slowing down the inevitable aging, he plays the musical saw and the theremin, but keeps the windows closed.”
