Gordon W. Dale Autobiography

Tonight's post is an autobiography of Gordon W. Dale. The post concludes four posts this week involving Gordon and his book, Fool's Republic:

I was born in Winnipeg, more or less by accident. My parents lived in a small town nearby and, as a result of complications, my mother was transferred to a maternity ward in Winnipeg for my birth. My father was a school teacher, then principal, then superintendent. My mother had been a teacher also, but was forced to retire when she married my father. In rural Manitoba in those days, it wasn’t considered appropriate for a married woman to continue teaching, and thereby occupy a job that could be held by a man.

I had a magical childhood, spent running wild in small towns, mostly in rural Manitoba. We spent two years in Malawi, in Central East Africa, after which I attended high school in a small town at the edge of the Whiteshell Provincial Park in Manitoba. We had boats and snowmobiles and I spent most of my time either in the woods or on the water. I’ll always be grateful to my father, who had a kind of wanderlust, for exposing us to so many different locations and cultures, and to my mother who was mad about all things literary.

At seventeen, I moved to Winnipeg, where I took a Commerce degree from the University of Manitoba. I worked in Aerospace for several years after that, eventually becoming an independent consultant with clients in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and across Canada. I moved to California in 2005, where I completed an M.A. from San Francisco State University. As a day job, I currently design corporate online and instructor-led training programs. In 2007, I was a finalist for the British Crimewriters Association Debut Dagger Award, and my novel, Fool’s Republic, was awarded honorable mention (general fiction category) by the 2011 San Francisco Book Festival.