I attended Stanley Park Junior High School in Kitchener, Ontario for grades 7 & 8, from September 1981 to June 1983. Junior High was quite a different experience for me, going from junior school where we all spent all of our time in the same classroom, with the same teacher, to a much bigger school where as a class we would troop down the corridors to visit other teachers in order to have lessons from them. This was all new territory – as the eldest child I had no older siblings to prep me for new experiences, and I was still finding Canada a strange new world.

The photo is my official school picture from Grade 8 – taken at the beginning of the school year, this would have been taken in September 1982, when I was about a month away from turning 13.

Many eventful things happened to me during 1982, not the least of which was puberty hitting. Puberty brings with it many horrible things – acne; overactive hormones; moodiness; the need to shower everyday. Then there were these new and interesting creature in my life. They had always been there, as it happened, but up to that point I had spent my time trying to avoid them. These creatures were collectively known as ‘Boys’. For the first time, I became interested in their existence. But most of them seemed not to notice mine, which was a source of great anxiety.

In Grade 8 I had an English teacher – a marvellously eccentric Welsh lady called Mrs Riepert. She was the first teacher to spot my potential as a writer, and her encouragement of my writing, in those early days, should not be underestimated. Apparently she was singing my praises as an exceptional writer to her students for many years to come.

It was in her class we were given an assignment to write a horror story. I wrote a very long story called ‘Terror in Tanner’s Field’, which I later rewrote into a novel. Between that and my happening to discover Stephen King in the school library – checking out first DIFFERENT SEASONS and then CARRIE – that year I became a bona fide fan of, and writer of, horror fiction.

The other major thing to happen to me in 1982 was my first viewing of ‘Star Wars’ – a film I had turned down the opportunity to see in the cinema upon its release in 1977 because I dismissed it as ‘a boy’s film’.

In 1982 VCRs were still a new and novel discovery, and not everyone had one. A lady in Kitchener had a little business going where she would rent out a VCR, plus ten movies, for a short period of time. Thinking back I am now sure this must have been a pirate operation – all the videotapes were in plain covers, with the titles of them typed on labels. And she had two separate lists of films – one list of ‘adult’ films, the other more family-orientated.

One weekend in the summer of 1982, towards the end of August, our family rented a VCR and ten films (from the family list of course – we were a family of five with three kids). One of the films was ‘Star Wars’.

Perhaps the timing of the first time I saw ‘Star Wars’ was crucial to its impact on me. Coming as it did at a time when my adolescent hormones were raging, I fell madly in love with Luke Skywalker, and a lifelong obsession with all things Star Wars was born at that moment.

At the same time music became a lot more important. I think music speaks loudest to you when you are a teenager, and what you listen to then informs your life going forward. It was at this time I started to become interested in spending my pocket money on records – buying 45s, or ‘singles’ as they were known then. In those days they had a round hole in the middle, which meant you had to have a circular attachment on your record player in order to be able to play them.

And the song I’m going to leave you with was a big hit this year, and it’s one I did actually buy. I remember dancing around to it, playing it on the little record player I mentioned in the last music blog post.

Here’s “Gloria” by Laura Branigan. It’s still a song that makes me happy when I listen to it.