You don't even have to ask him. Mel McConaghy will tell you.
He doesn't care what anyone thinks about the words he uses or how he writes his stories.
At 82 he's well past the age of political correctness, he said.
McConaghy has written several books and when he took a look at how an editor changed the first chapter of his second book, My Life Through a Broken Windshield, which was about his years as a truck driver, he decided to self publish instead.
"I got sick and tired of people reading between the lines and trying to change my stories," McConaghy said.
His latest books will be launched Friday at Books & Co. from 3 to 7 p.m. and they are unapologetically unedited.
Each book is a work of historical fiction. River Spirit Woman is about a woman who makes her way to Fort George in the early 1900s through a set of adventurous circumstances while Gallant Ships is about Canadian ships and how they were instrumental in winning the Battle of the Atlantic during the Second World War.
McConaghy started writing when he was 68.
"I am a Grade 8 drop out," McConaghy said, who for years has written for magazines and offers his opinion pieces for radio.
"I'm not a writer," McConaghy explained. "I'm a story teller. I've had quite a life and I love writing about it. I write because I enjoy writing and people enjoy reading my writing. I don't write for English language puritans. I write for the workin' man. I write in my own voice."
He said after a while his children and grandchildren stopped listening to his stories so he figured he'd better put them on paper.
McConaghy often goes down to the seniors' centre on Tenth Avenue.
"I profess to everybody over the age of well, whatever - that they should write their stories," McConaghy said. "I tell them they should write. If I can write everybody can write. Just sit down and write the story the way you would tell a grandchild or a great-grandchild sitting by your knee because one day they won't be there and all there'll be is a one dimensional picture. If there's a story there that they wrote it adds another dimension to that person and that's important."
