I don't know that it is so much that I want to be a writer as it is "this is what I do!'

I make stuff up.

As long as I can remember I have been wandering through life entertaining people and playing with ideas and scenes in my head.

At the same time, on a TV show that I saw as a kid, there was a character called Maynard G. Krebs.

And he made quite an impression on me.

Maynard G. was laid back and innocent and funny. He wasn't overly interested in material things; He wore scruffy clothes and, in an otherwise "clean-shaven" era, he sported a goatee.

He was okay about being different.

He was the exact opposite of pretty well everyone in my small factory and farming Canadian hometown, including me.

Maynard G. was a "Beatnik".

He embodied the Beatnik subculture of the time - Poets and Storytellers and Folksingers who gathered together to share their work in coffee houses or basements or even around kitchen tables. They'd hang out and talk Social Philosophy, about ideas for creating a better world.

And here I am decades later, channeling my own inner-beatnik, as a Social Philosopher/Poet.

The Beat Poets and Writers believed that creativity ought to reflect and address the real-life situation of our times. In poetry, short (flash) fiction, satire, prose, comics, graphic illustrations and lyrics, I explore our relationships and our world through the insights of The Humanities and Social Sciences - Sociology, Social Psychology, Psychology, Philosophy, Anthropology.

Hopefully my work touches your inner beatnik, gets some Social Philosophy dialogue going between you and yours, in person or online.

Oh, and a bit of trivia - the guy who played Maynard G? He was Bob Denver who later went on to be Gilligan of Gilligan's Island.

The idea has been there for decades and I am only now really getting serious about it.

I don't know if I was ready, if I was mature enough to write what I needed to write when I was younger. I think that I needed to live a full life first,

And I definitely needed to have a good financial base. I wouldn't have made a very good starving artist.

Now I am pensioned off and can write what I want, muse on ideas about which I am passionate and have some knowledge to back up that passion.

The idea of just being able to put your stuff out there without all these other people messing with it is just so attractive to someone who has spent his life fighting with bureaucracies.

Keeping focused on any one project for a long time is difficult for me. That's why I don't think I could ever write a novel. Poems, satirical pieces, short stories, op-eds, the Park Bench Philosophy comic strip, - short "in and gone" attacks work well for me. If I had only known about Flash Fiction decades ago (sighs)! ...

Also I am not a very good salesperson. I am kind of shy and private and, yes, sensitive to criticism and rejection. Asking people to buy my books is something at which I am really going to have to work.

Beyond that I don't do melodrama in my real life so I have difficulty including it in my writing, even though that's the most popular genre.

I'm kind of like a sculptor. I let the idea take its shape. That's the idea behind my web-site "the-possible-ks.com". The Possible Ks lets people know that I, Kevin McGill, produce work in a variety of possible genres, ... short genres.

The whole creative process gives me a buzz. It's like solving a puzzle and you go "Wow, did I just do that?"

I am a voracious reader. Sometimes I have to read a book a second time, just because I ate it up so fast the first time.

I have loved pretty well anything by the late Terry Pratchett.

Albert Camus' "The Outsider" was the first "artsy" book that I ever read and it just blew me away. As a teenager, it was totally new territory that someone could just experience life differently from others and that this could condemn them more than their actions. Now, that's something to think about.

I have a strange relationship to Catch 22. The first time I read it, I laughed; the second time, I cried. That's because by the second time, I realized how true this story was to real life.

And, I still don't like Catcher in the Rye!

I heard a Gus Vander Haeghe interview once in which he said that growing up in a small town really allowed him to know people. I agree. Growing up in a small town, you simply meet all kinds of people at different levels and in different conditions. I don't think that happens in larger centers.

Walking! I step out the door and the ideas start to flow

I'd like to hope that my writings help people to get their own thoughts together.