After a long career as an accountant, this author decided to pursue his passion for writing, bucking the advice his mother gave him many years ago.

by Emil Rem

“Son,” my mum said, “stop dreaming of becoming a writer. Be an accountant. You’ll always have a job and be able to pay your bills.”

At the tender age of sixty, I decided to rebel. Now I’m miserable and broke. Why? Because I allowed writing to possess me.

It’s a woeful addiction. And there’s no Writers Anonymous to turn to.

On its completion, The Vanished Gardens of Cordova brought a whoop of joy from me. It became my third opus. Warm climes, ancient sites, quirky characters all enchant me. I wrote about a summer family holiday spent in England, Gibraltar, and Andalusia, Spain.

Writing is a woeful addiction, and there’s no Writers Anonymous to turn to.

My vignettes always compare and contrast the present to the past, mainly through characters I meet and those I once met. To contrast against the bleak Heart of New York, Vanished Gardens was meant to regale you with humor. Instead, once again, the writing took over and demanded its own direction.

“The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”
—Omar Khayyam

Vanished Gardens took on the role of bittersweet memories—the struggle to survive and escape the world of accounting and our last family trip together. One after another, the stories became a giddy rollercoaster of amusement one moment, pathos the next. I, like my readers, had no clue where the writing would take me. But the takeaway was always a silver lining—no matter how outrageous were the slings and arrows of fortune, sunshine always prevailed.

May sunshine prevail for you, too, and may gratitude overcome you at the end.

Emil Rem is an eccentric accountant who became a writer of eccentric characters in exotic locales. Each of his chapters takes us on a trip into his fascinating, twisted world. Born in the fifties into a close-knit, middle-class Muslim East Indian family in Dar es Salaam, Africa, he then moved to Maidenhead, England, at the age of five.

Emil spent the next twenty years shuttling between England and East Africa, wearing a St. Christopher’s cross and attending church one minute, then wearing a green armband and attending Muslim religious classes in Africa the next. He then moved to Canada, where he married a woman from the Philippines and had two boys, which only added further texture to his stories.

Visit Emil at his website and connect with him on Facebook.