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This is Hamish MacDonald...

by Isaac Meyer Odell

To his friends and family on Prince Edward Island he is known as Alistair. However, when Alistair left 'the Island' for theatre school and joined the privileged ranks of the PEI diaspora he became Hamish MacDonald. Not to worry, Hamish is not avoiding any loan sharks or biker gangs - he is simply living an extraordinary tri-located, indie-artist life.

When I first met Hamish (way back in the 1990's) you would usually find him in a café somewhere in the NFZ, doodling, cartooning, or working on his novel on his Apple Newton. Then a few years ago, Hamish took himself off the mainland and en-isled himself once again - this time on the British Isles . Though Hamish now lives and practices his art in Edinburgh , he still works here in Toronto ! Hamish works as a graphic designer for Strategic Coach, a consulting firm whose offices are in Liberty Village . As his work can all be accomplished online, he is in the unique position of being able to live where he pleases without having to give up his job. To manage the time difference, he begins work at 2pm and works till 10pm. This allows Hamish to spend the morning pursuing his passions - writing, cartooning, blogging and bookbinding.

Hamish has been writing seriously for over ten years and in that time he has accumulated a healthy cannon of work which includes 2 novels, a novella, numerous short stories and a play that he co-wrote with his friend, Mark Cosgrove. The unique thing about Hamish's works is that they are all self-published and his most recent novels are also hand made, hand bound, and printed on demand. Now, don't get the wrong idea here - Hamish is not one of those guys who stand on the corner and sell you their somewhat less than literate self-published works that reveal the secrets of some so-called Zionist plot. If you take a look at his blog, www.hamishmacdonald.com, you will witness that Hamish's writing is witty, sensitive and rife with insight.

He started off intending to publish via the traditional route, but discovered that when he approached publishers about his 1999 novella doublezero , (which is about Y2K) no one would be able to publish his extremely time-sensitive novel before Jan 1, 2000. So he purchased a print run of a thousand copies and managed to get them on the shelves at Chapters and several reputable independent bookstores. His following novels, The Willies and Idea in Stone , were emailed chapter by chapter to friends and family to provide feedback, a quasi open-source form of novel writing. As Hamish was completing work on his most recent novel, he became interested in bookbinding and discovered that for the same cost as the print run for his first novel, he could buy all the equipment to hand bind his own books and publish them on demand from his website.

He did garner some interest from publishers for his recent novels, but the unique appeal of creating a book that is "printed and hand-bound by the author" and the independent spirit of being free from the timelines and demands of a publishing house was too much for Hamish to give up. Hence when you receive a "Hamish MacDonald" novel, you can sense his presence not only in the words but in the texture of the paper, the font and the cover image. You can imagine him staying up late on the weekend to carefully prepare a print run of ten books as your finger passes over the fan shaped faint impression that his guillotine has made along the edge opposite the spine. (I wonder if there are some bloodstained copies hiding in his Edinburgh flat somewhere.)

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