Writer & Poet

This was the fertile ground of an early 80s little boy, stuck in LD classes, with a mind that soaked up the names of dinosaurs, species of shark, and our used encyclopedias. I drifted untethered through worlds of imagination. I spent days setting up sprawling urban battle fields in my room with every action figure available. Those were epic cross overs. Transformers teaming up with G.I. Joe, Skywalker, and He-man heroes fighting Godzilla, Darth Vader, Skeletor and Cobra Commander with surprise interventions from Ultraman and Gundam.

I was steeped in the pop culture of the 80s and 90s. My parents let me watch the greatest films of the era way too young. Flash Gordon. Star Wars. Excalibur. Aliens. An American Werewolf in London. Time Bandits and Terminator, to name a few. Saturday morning cartoons. After school television. Weekly Featurettes. Stories without consequences or repeating formulas bothered me immensely. Yet moments where unexpected consequences cost the lives of dear characters rocked me to my core. (Transformers the Movie I’m looking at you.)

I made up epic stories, wrote a fraction of them down. Finished even less. Drew. Inked. Painted and excelled at graphic and fine arts despite my inattentiveness coupled to an obsessiveness that flitted from subject to subject like a laser cutting through blast shielding on its indomitable route to who knows where. I learned to critique and analyze work in Art School. Probably the single most important skill I learned in fine arts was how to take criticism and analyze creative works.

I read comics voraciously. Batman, X-Men, Grendel. And eventually their maturing kin the graphic novel left an indelible mark on me. I distinctly recall the earth shattering revelation of the Dark Knight Returns, the Killing Joke, The Dark Phoenix Saga. I realized a genre could get serious, thought provoking, violently provocative. In my teens, I read books. The Scarlet Letter, Lord of Flies, The Left Hand of Darkness. I was influenced by Moorcock, Adams, Tolkien.

I came of age in St. Petersburg, Florida, where Punk Rock and Alternative music drove us onto the streets late at night. We found lots of trouble waiting for us. But we could run fast and possessed an uncanny ability to disappear into the 3 am back streets of the suburban maze where we ruled the early 90s Gulf War America.

At 17, I had my first flow state experience writing on my Brothers brand typewriter. Kerouac’s stream of consciousness found me. It put me on a path filled with new poetry, and prose that led me through the works of poets like Borroughs, Thoreau, Ginsberg, and others. While films like Akira, Seven Samurai, Wings of Desire, and Hamlet seeped into me.

I spent a decade writing poetry, novellas, and journalling, while traveling far beyond the flat swamp lands of my formative Floridian juvenile delinquency. I witnessed some of the best and worst of 90s America. I flirted with outlaws, experienced violence, social decay, natural disasters, rejected the lies of the state. I radicalized. My journey brought me to San Francisco, Taos, Flagstaff, and Maui. I fell in love with Beowulf, the Odyssey, Myths and Legends of Polynesia. Poets like Kabir, Jimenez, Cummings, and Kinnell honed my tastes through long discussions with my writing mentor, a Vietnam veteran and free spirited poet named Walking Boots Taylor.

I matured, got serious about a few things and found myself in Canada, led by my intuition and the need for a fresh start, where I challenged my selfish adolescent behavior with a new family. I de-radicalized. Purged the superstition of old beliefs from my spirit and picked through the remains for the relevant bits of salient myth and truth in story telling. The whole time, one story kept coming back from my youth. The film Excalibur. Merlin. Arthur. Guinevere. Morgan. I started scribbling notes while changing diapers.

I raised my sons in a constant deluge of imaginative play and world building. We spent hours building lego ships, documenting each scene with photographs composed like comic panels. We invented societies, governments, created whole eco-systems, epic heroes and devious villains with complex back stories. Our family was a writer’s room for brainstorming narratives. Plot lines. Beats. Epic twists within dozens of storylines and shared myths. We took in film and shows like Avatar, the Last Airbender, Lord of The Rings Trilogy, Kiriku, Studio Ghibli and anything early Pixar. Our family questioned, analyzed, developed theories, and critiqued. We honed our creativity together.

As the Arthurian storylines grew dimly in the background of my mind, I fell into the trap of most modern men. I stopped reading fiction (Except for the occasional comic.). I focused on learning about the world. History. Science. Religion. Philosophy. Self improvement. Politics. For 15 years, I obsessed over mechanical excellence and understanding the world while I grew a web development business. I struggled to change myself and my process as a human being, parent, partner, and friend.

In the last decade, I came to realize that in engineering myself; I longed for the organic and timeless nature of stories. The archetypal experience distilled in fiction. Myth itself! I was pulled back to my notebooks and files on King Arthur. Haunted by the Arthurian legend, first sparked by Excalibur in my youth, it became an ever-growing catalog of storylines, concepts, and scenes. My sons got involved while I threatened to take it seriously and invest myself in telling the story that became the heart of Future King—a novel that blends myth, futurism, and the timeless struggle for truth that has defined my life.

Novels drew me in again. I needed to understand craft and narration, but through the act of engaging directly in the writing process rather than the cerebral voyeurism of reading ‘how to books’ as an outsider. I poured myself into fiction. I retraced my path through my earliest influences: Heinlein, LeGuin, Azimov, and Card. And I dove into authors I missed out on like Kingsolver, Atwood, Tchaikovsky, Cixin. I sought to absorb the eternal messages and narrative arcs of novels like Andy Dufresne grasping at the life affirming rains after escaping Shawshank.

That’s when I began writing the story, still dogging my steps. I read Arthurian. White, Stewart, Pyle, Malory. I studied the canon. And I wrote! I broke ground on Future King armed with a few hundred pages of outline and beats. Hyper focus became my super power once more. That laser burned and burned, this time in a single spot. Cutting deep and totally toward that goal as I discovered once more the transcendent experience of writing. Losing myself in the magic of dissolving onto the page.

Over the last 5 years, I have poured myself into Future King, reimagining the Arthurian legend. It combines the mysticism of The Sword in the Stone with the intrigue and character drama of Andor with a dash of romantasy. It’s the first in a six-book series and a topical exploration of oligarchy, divergent ideals and diminishing human values seen through a mythic lens. I hope you find it worthy of your time.

With a few stories to share,

J.J. Arsenault

Nelson BC