Trevor Trower, taken from his memoir, Phyllis the Donkey Girl
A local senior has taken up a hobby in retirement and he appears to be pretty good at it.
94-year-old Trevor Trower of Georgetown says he took up writing about 12-years ago. He’s been retired for 32-years and he says he was looking for something to do.
On the phone with FM 101 Milton, Trower spoke a bit about his life.
He has since become a published author in his late years, writing his memoir ‘Phyllis the Donkey Girl’. The titular story dates back about 70 years ago when Trower worked at a seaside resort. There was a man who worked in the area who had a stable of ten donkeys. Unfortunately, he had some pretty well known medical issues and one day was taken to hospital by ambulance. That was when Trower had the chance to meet the donkey man’s daughter, Phyllis.
Trower says he never saw or heard from Phyllis after that wedding announcement. He moved to Canada shortly after and worked for Air Canada for 35-years before retiring around 1989. Looking back, he says it was likely the hot sun that affected his 21-year-old brain. “At that age, and in that constant heat, everything’s beautiful,” he jokes.
Trower took up writing over a decade ago when he joined a creative writing class through the Milton Seniors Activity Centre. He says the woman who ran the class was a real inspiration for him and it was the first time in his life where he felt like writing and poetry were for him. To his knowledge, the class is no longer available, and he wishes it was still active because it was something that really helped him and the other seniors.
He then continued his hobby by joining other writing groups around the area. He travelled around Mississauga, Oakville, Georgetown, and Milton to improve his writing. Here he is gushing over how much he enjoys hearing the stories of others in the group.
Trower says the pandemic has really affected the groups. He doesn’t like meeting over Zoom because it doesn’t possess the same atmosphere that being around the other writers in person brings out. He misses that feeling.
When asked for advice for young writers, he says “it helps to have a few lessons. I only started because of the lessons given to me. One thing’s for sure: to start writing, you don’t need a lot of equipment – just paper and a pen.”
Phyllis the Donkey Girl has about 40 poems and stories. It’s available online here. The summary for the book reads as such:
“Stories told with imagination and humour, Trevor C. Trower’s tales takes the reader to a bygone area – to a period in the British Isles during the Second World War and later in Canada in the boom and economic growth years after the 1960s. This collection of enchanting stories is best described in his own words: ‘I hope you find the stories narrated herein to be entertaining. It certainly gave me a lot of pleasure writing them.'”
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