About Larry
Larry Verstraete (B.Sc, M.Ed.) is a
I was born in Winnipeg and live there still. After high school I went to university and worked towards a degree in science. Eventually, I became a teacher, and over the years have taught the gamut from elementary school to university courses. Somewhere, in the middle of my teaching career, I dabbled in writing for others. The two interests, teaching and writing merged. It's hard to tell sometimes where one begins and the other ends.
As a youngster I loved books and read
anything that I could get my hands on. I grew up in a pretty full household, and between my brother, four sisters and myself
there weren’t many books to go around. The books that we did have tended to be adult biographies, collections of short articles
about famous people or essays. I read them all, some two or three times. I think my love for true stories came from this
early experience. Even today, stories about real people, their adventures and discoveries, are my favourites.
Beginning
to write …
I think I've been a writer all my life, though not in the way most people might think. One winter, when I was
about nine, I asked for a printing press for Christmas. I had seen a toy one in an Eaton's catalogue and I dreamed of the
day when I might own it. Imagine the stories I could tell then, I thought. Why, I could churn them out in no time if only I
had a printing press. Perhaps I could even earn money selling copies to friends and family. Such were my goals for writing at
the time.
On Christmas morning I awoke early and searched below the tree for a box that would be just the right size to
hold the printing press. There wasn’t one. I was terribly disappointed. But I didn’t give up. Next Christmas
I asked for the same thing. This time I was taken seriously. The printing press was there on Christmas morning, just as
I had hoped.
The next summer, a friend and I became reporters. We scoured the neighbourhood for stories, gathering
as much gossip as we could. We had it in our heads that if we could write juicy stuff, then publish it with the printing press,
our neighbours would scramble to buy copies.
The whole project lasted about a week. Spying on the neighbours was
fun. Writing up the stories was okay, though not nearly as much fun as racing up and down the street spying on people. Setting up the printing press was dreary, time-consuming work that took forever. Each letter in every word had to be set in
type separately, and we soon realized that there were other, more fun ways to spend the summer. We gave up our dream of becoming
world-famous reporters.
Writing professionally…
I stumbled into professional writing almost by accident after I had been
teaching for a few years. One day while waiting for a haircut I picked up a magazine and spotted an ad for a correspondence writing
course. On a whim, I clipped out the ad and enrolled in the course. One of my first assignments was to write a non-fiction article
for children. It wasn’t the kind of writing I really wanted to do. I envisioned myself as a fiction writer and I thought the assignment
would be too simple and boring. I was wrong. Once I started doing research for the article I was hooked. I chose lightning as my subject,
a topic that fascinated the scientist in me. I enjoyed uncovering new facts and found that expressing them in an interesting and easy-to-understand
way for others was quite a challenge.
The first book…
As I researched lightning, I uncovered an unusual story about Benjamin
Franklin. Franklin was an American statesman, inventor, and scientist who lived in the 1700s. He's known as the guy who
flew a kite in a thunderstorm in order to prove that there was a connection between electricity and lightning. In my research, I discovered
that Franklin had tried a few other strange things in his time. One Christmas, he rigged up a series of Leyden jars (a type
of primitive battery) to electrocute the turkey he was planning on cooking for dinner. By accident, he bumped into the device,
discharging it, and sending a massive electrical charge through his own body. The accident almost killed Franklin, but it also
taught him a few new things about electricity.
The Franklin story was so odd and interesting that I started to look for other
science stories where accidents, mistakes and minor disasters played a part in discoveries or inventions. There were lots of them,
I found. I started writing them up, and by the end of the course I had a collection of more than 20 stories, almost enough for a book.
That
collection of stories eventually became my first published book, The Serendipity Effect. Years later it was republished as Accidental
Discoveries: From Laughing Gas to Dynamite.