The family legend has it that when he was eight years old, Ira Nayman decided to devote his life to writing humour in all of its sub-genres and as wide a variety of media as he could master. Over the years, he had cause to wonder how he had come to this decision: most eight year-old boys want to be astronauts or firemen or real estate agents, not comedians. The best he can come up with was that he grew up in an emotionally abusive home (a painful childhood - could he be any more of a cliche?); he realized that laughing made him feel better, and thought it would be a good thing to share with the world. He may even have thought that if he could make his parents laugh, he could ease the tensions in the household.
Did I mention that Ira was eight years old? He would learn. (Only years of therapy eased the tensions in the household and psychiatrist's offices are not generally known to be sites of yukfests.)
When Ira was 12 years old, his father, Bernard Nayman, got religion and moved the family to Israel. For all but the last two weeks of the six months that they lived there, Ira believed that he would spend the rest of his life in the besieged Middle Eastern country. Accounts differ as to why Bernard changed his mind and moved the family back to Canada. The current wisdom is that Israel has a mandatory draft for all boys at the age of 13, and Bernard wanted to spare his eldest son military duty. While there is undoubtedly some truth to this, Ira's memory of it is that his father left because he had become disillusioned with Israel's politics and economics. The journey ended with a cruise up the Mediterranean, ending with a week in Paris, where most of the Holocaust survivors on his father's side of the family lived.
Years later, Ira would come to appreciate this travel, which gave him perspective on the received truths of Canada by showing him that other places had other received truths. This ability to question accepted ideas has served him well as a satirist. However, at the time, he hated the experience.
Coming home to Toronto created a different dislocation for Ira. At the time, high schools put students into two streams: one for kids smart enough to go to university, the other for kids who would go on to vocations. Which stream you entered in junior high depended upon your marks in grade six. However, because he missed most of the school year abroad, he had no record to be used to determine which stream he should go into. So, he was put in the vocational stream. It took him two years to work himself up to the university stream.
Throughout his high school years, Ira would do his best to inject humour into his assignments. He invariably was rewarded with high grades for these efforts; years later, he would reflect that teachers who had to mark the same dreary assignments from disinterested students must appreciate somebody who put effort and - dare we hope? - creativity into their work. In 1985, when Ira was in tenth grade, he wrote his first major work (in collaboration with a friend of his): The Tragedy of Richard Nixon. The pair took The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, swapped out Shakespeare's characters for the players in the Watergate scandal and changed the dialogue accordingly. He received a 98 in English that year.
Ira had many influences during his formative years: the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, Lewis Carroll, W. C. Fields. However, the humorist who most affected his work, the one whom he most wanted to be like, was Art Buchwald. If Buchwald is known today at all, it is because he sued Eddy Murphy, claiming that his film Coming to America had ripped off a Buchwald script. And won. That is actually where the story became interesting: to determine damages, Buchwald was entitled to see the financial records of the studio that produced the film, revealing the common practice in Hollywood of charging losses on films to the budgets of films that were successful. This was how films that had grossed hundreds of millions of dollars could still appear to be losing money. If nothing else, the lawsuit introduced the term "monkey points" into common parlance.
Ira knew Buchwald as the preeminent newspaper satire columnist of the day. He wanted to be a newspaper satirist, himself; to this end, he created Les Pages aux Folles. Over a period of three years (1984-1987), he wrote 300 articles for the project. Then, he realized that you aren't generally given a humour column at a daily newspaper because you're, you know, funny or anything (although many columnists are, or grow into the role); it's usually because you've distinguished yourself by writing for a different section of the newspaper. So, he abandoned this goal. Temporarily. Between the years 1992 and 1997, he wrote over 100 additional articles, enough to fill a fourth book. (And make his first professional sale. "Win A Dream Date With Dan," "The 1992 Police Brutality Summer Olympics" and "The Bush Administration's Policy on the Complicated Issues of AIDS, Abortion and Teenage Pregnancy" were published in Comic Relief magazine.)
But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
In 1980, Ira flunked out of his first year at university. This triggered a depression that kept him in his room for two years, with effects that remained for approximately a decade and some scars that will never heal. He never experienced that level of darkness again, thank the Gord, but he does experience periodic bouts of lesser depression, anxiety and self-doubt. So much self-doubt.
Realizing that Les Pages aux Folles had hit a wall, Ira switched to writing screenplays. Over a period of a decade, he would write 100: 15 feature film scripts and over 85 scripts for television series, mostly works he originated. They included: The Love Box (a sitcom about a family that lives over and runs the biggest porn store in the world; 13 episodes); Forever Live and Die (an anthology series about vampires; 24 episodes); and, Metropolitan Life and A Guide for the Easily Confused (a pair of feature-length romantic comedies).
In 1989, Bernard told Ira that he believed strongly in education, and would fund another go at university if Ira thought he could handle it. Being in a much better place emotionally, Ira agreed. The one condition Bernard put on the offer was that Ira had to study to become an accountant so that he would one day take over the family business. Ira agreed; his strategy for success was to take only courses that interested him outside of the courses required for his eventual MBA.
At the end of the first term, Bernard gave Ira perhaps the best gift of his life. He told his son that it was clear that he wasn't happy studying to be an accountant, and that he would fund Ira's education no matter what he studied. Well. Ira took this and ran with it. In his first year, he had applied to and been accepted into Introductory Screenwriting (even though it was a second year course, the professor approved his entry on the basis of his portfolio); he would go on to take all three levels of screenwriting courses. Ira also had an unofficial minor in comedy, taking full-year courses on Satire, Humour in Theatre and The Social and Political Impacts of Humour, and a half year course on Samuel Beckett. Ira graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies with a Concentration in Creative Writing.
During this period, Ira wrote for magazines such as Creative Screenwriting and Reel Independence. After 9/11, Eric Bauer, the editor of Creative Screenwriting, wrote to all of the contributors to the magazine to ask them to contribute to a special issue on the role of the writer in times of national crisis. In response, Ira wrote "Laughter is Always Appropriate," an article that explores the nature of laughter, particularly in response to emotional trauma, and spiritedly defends the use of humour in difficult times.
Ira was also a member of two radio sketch comedy groups during this time. The first, Earth Two, was invited to record a pilot at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Unfortunately, the CBC executive who was a champion of the project was shuffled to a different position, and his successor had his own comedians that he preferred to work with, so the project never went anywhere. Ira is chuffed, though, that somewhere in the bowels of CBC headquarters in Toronto is a DAT tape with is voice on it.
The second, Dead Air, was a project of students at York University. For two years, Ira was the host of a literary show at CHRY, the community radio station based at the university. He and three other volunteers wrote enough material for six episodes of a radio sketch comedy series, then auditioned actors to perform. While many of the female actors who auditioned were brilliant, only one of the male actors were, forcing Ira and two of the other writers to perform themselves. Ira was initially hesitant, but he eventually took to it and would happily do radio or voice over work again. The troupe released a cassette and CD of the best material from the series called Dead Air; Comedy Is Not Funny, which was positively reviewed in The Toronto Star.
Then, Ira took a course that changed his life. This is not a hyperbole. For most of the five years he studied, Ira's plan was to get a degree and then concentrate on his writing. In his last year at York University, however, he took a course that set him on a very different path. In high school, he took a course on computer programming. It involved writing programmes in pencil on bubble cards, sending them to the mainframe computer at the ministry of education and getting a print-out the next day to see if the programme had worked. Ira was so enamoured of computers by the experience that he didn't go near one for another 15 years.
However, he learned about a course on computers that was taught by a computer scientist and a humanities professor. This would have been 1993, just as the desktop computer revolution was gathering steam. Imagine a computer you could work with on your actual desk! Ira took the course at around the same time that he was discovering cyberpunk, which ignited a lot of possibilities in his imagination. Perhaps more important, both teachers insisted almost from the beginning of the course that Ira shouldn't waste his intellect, that he had to go to graduate school. He probably would have resisted, except they actually suggested a school: Connected Education.
Many people know Paul Levinson as a science fiction writer and social commentator. However, Ira first knew him as a pioneer in online education. For two years, he was Ira's mentor as he studied at a school in New York even though he lived in Toronto. Ira received a Masters degree in Media Studies from the New School for Social Research (the degree granting institution with which Connect Ed was affiliated).
Ira was not aware that a Masters degree was meant to be the initial research phase for an ultimate PhD, so he felt his thesis, which looked at interactive storytelling (an interest he has to this day), was his last word on the subject. When he was accepted into the McGill University Communications Graduate Programme (with a scholarship, no less), he had shifted his focus a little: his dissertation would be a study of fiction writers who post their work online. (Okay, okay, it seems a bit obvious, now, but it was a lot more innovative in 1999.) Ira lived in Montreal for three years to take courses at McGill, then moved back to Toronto and took a year to write his dissertation.
In 2000, Ira became the first member of his family to be awarded a PhD.
After graduation, Ira connected with a couple of McGill alumni who would affect the course of his life. For two years, he worked with Liss Jeffrey on a public interest web site called The Electronic Commons. He edited Jeffrey's PhD dissertation, which was on the work of Canadian media scholar Marshall McLuhan. Ira also assisted Jeffrey in teaching a course on McLuhan at the McLuhan Centre at the University of Toronto, where he gave a lecture.
Jeffrey worked out of a space on the UofT campus called Chelsea Mews, which was occupied by Joel Alleyne. The most consequential aspect of this part of Ira's life is that it was there that he met and befriended Gisela McKay, Joel's niece. Gisela was the person who pointed out to Ira that it was odd that he had written a dissertation on writers who post their work to the World Wide Web, and that he was a writer, but he didn't post his writing on the internet. The observation would have remained an irony of Ira's life if Gisela hadn't offered to host his web site on her server and use her skills as a web designer to design it for him.
It was an offer he couldn't refuse.
Ira decided to revive Les Pages aux Folles as an online publication. There were many advantages to this. For one thing, the 700 word target for article length that he had established for the newspaper column was a reasonable size for an online column. For another thing, he had been in the habit of writing two or three columns a week, so he knew he could create enough material to maintain a regular schedule, at least in the short term. For another another thing, he had already written four books; if he posted them along with his first week of new material, potential readers would have a lot to get through if they liked what they initially saw (which would be different than most sites, which are usually quite sparse in the beginning).
Over the summer of 2002, Ira wrote new articles specifically for the web site. By the first week of September of that year, he had a stockpile of approximately 30 articles (mostly to cover weeks when he wasn't inspired, although there were other circumstances where a store of articles was essential to maintaining the site's publication schedule, like the month in 2005 when he had to recover from triple bypass surgery). That was when he decided to open Les Pages aux Folles to the public.
Five years into the project, Ira decided to expand his readership by publishing collections of articles from Les Pages aux Folles in print and ebook formats. He decided to self-publish the books because he didn't believe he would find a publisher for reprints of weird pieces of writing that had originated online. The first volume, No Public Figure Too Large, No Personal Foible Too Small, was a collection of general articles. It received so little public recognition that you would be forgiven for thinking that it had been sucked beyond the event horizon of a black hole.
When he was deciding what to follow that book up with, Ira realized that part of the problem was that there were no conventions or online review pages specifically for satire. But there were plenty of both for science fiction. One of the features that he had developed for the web site, the Alternate Reality News Service (ARNS), could fit into this category: it sent reporters into other dimensions and had them write articles about what they found there. The first of ARNS collection, Alternate Reality Ain't What It Used To Be, was published in 2008.
Charles de Lint, who reviews science fiction in the magazine Fantasy and Science Fiction wrote that Alternate Reality Ain't What It Used To Be was, "a great volume to leave around the bathroom." While Ira appreciated the positive review and understood the point (because the book was made up of short pieces of writing, it didn't require the sustained attention of a novel), he rankled at the idea of the bathroom. The book could easily be raid on public transit, in a doctor's waiting room or any other situation where the reader didn't have a lot of time. In his positive review of Ira's second ARNS volume, What Were Once Miracles Are Now Children's Toys, de Lint called him, "the author of one of my favourite books of 2008." After reading that, Ira thought if he's going to give me that kind of praise, he can talk about bathrooms all he wants!
A few years later, de Lint was reading in Toronto. Ira, wanting to thank him for the positive reviews early in his publishing career, decided to attend. At a lull in festivities, Ira walked up to the author and said, "Hello, Mister de Lint. You're my biggest fan!" Not having the faintest idea who he was, de Lint looked blankly at him. It's one of Ira's fondest memories as a writer.
To date, Ira has self-published 12 collections of Alternate Reality News Service articles. Five are general collections of news, reviews, interviews and basically anything else you might find in your daily newspaper. Even obituaries, because people in other universes die, too. Two of the collections are of humorous speculative fiction advice columns. Five of the books focus on a universe where the United States of Vesampucceri is the world's leading idiotocracy, which, as you might guess, is rule by the stupidest people. Ira hadn't intended to write so many books on a single topic, but the bullshit flowed so thick and fast during the Trump administration that he couldn't keep up with it all! Seriously, the five Vesampucceri books were written in four and a half years; ordinarily, that amount of articles would have taken Ira seven and a half years to write. The first three Vesampucceri volumes (ARNS and the Man, E Deplorables Unum and Angels of Our Bitter Natures) were collected into a single omnibus volume, Idiotocracy for Dummies. The final two Vesampucceri volumes (You and What Universe?/That's When Everything Went Cow-shaped and Welcome to the Insurrection*** were collected in an omnibus volume called - what else? - Advanced Idiotocracy for Dummies.
The other McGill alumni who helped Ira was Ed Slopek, who was the head of the New Media department at what was then called Ryerson University. Ed offered Ira the chance to teach part-time at the institution. In the five years he worked there, Ira taught such courses as New Media and New Media Production, as well as Experimental Media for the film department.
While teaching, Ira used the resources of Ryerson to move forward two of his creative projects. He used one of Ryerson's studios to record "The Weight of Information: Episode One," the pilot for a radio series based on an Alternate Reality News Service story that appeared in What Were Once Miracles Are Now Children's Toys. The pilot combined a report from an on-air version of ARNS with behind-the-scenes drama. The pilot, in two parts, can be found on YouTube.
Ira also booked a room at Ryerson to do readings of some of his scripts by professional actors. This gave him a sense of how his scripts would play, leading to the confidence that his work didn't actually suck. More important, one of the readers was a stunt man/actor/director named Chris Cordell. After some discussion back and forth, the two decided to shoot a short film based on The Love Box.
The film was shot over two weekends, one at Ira's home and the other at a porn store on Yonge Street. The professional cast was willing to do it as a co-op (waiving their up-front fees in exchange for a percentage of any profits that the film might make). During shooting, Ira asked some of the actors why they were willing to forgo their fees, and they all told him variations of the idea that they didn't receive a lot of truly original scripts, but this was one of them. The cinematographer believed in the project so much that he donated dog ends that he had been collecting over his career so that it could be shot on film rather than video.
While it would be nice to be able to report that the short film sold the series to a television network, life is rarely so straightforward. * SIGH *
In 2010, Ira won the Swift Satire Writing Contest for the poem "Love Amid the Construction," which had originally appeared on Les Pages aux Folles.
Also that year, Ira wrote his first novel, Welcome to the Multiverse*. He had never had a strong desire to write a novel; he was, in fact, quite happy writing short articles for his web site. Blame Terry Pratchett. Ira had read online that Pratchett was sponsoring and judging a contest for best first humorous speculative fiction novel. Ira's first thought was, I could do that. I should enter! Unfortunately, one drawback of entering a novel writing contest is that you have to, you know, write a novel. The first draft of Welcome to the Multiverse* was completed just short of Ira's 50th birthday.
The novel didn't win the contest (in fact, despite attempting to contact organizers on multiple occasions, Ira never received confirmation that it had even been entered into the contest). At this point, Ira had a novel he didn't know what to do with. He sent it to a couple of publishers, who expressed a distinct lack of interest. He tried an agent with the same result. Joy Pearl, a friend of Ira's from his earliest days going to SF conventions, had suggested that he set his sights on England, suggesting that the country of her birth might be more open to his kind of comedy. So, when he heard that a British publisher specializing in speculative fiction was looking for writers, he sent a query letter.
The response from Peter Buck was that he had looked at some online references to Ira, and he "seemed completely bonkers - just the kind of writer we're looking for!" He requested the first three chapters of the novel. From there, he requested the entire novel. Welcome to the Multiverse* was published by Elsewhen Press in 2012, two years after it was written. As Ira often points out, this was a stupidly short turnaround: he had a friend who took seven years to find a publisher for his first novel, and another friend who had published several novels, but not his first.
Now that he was a novel writer, Ira followed this up with You Can't Kill the Multiverse**. In all, Elsewhen Press has published eight novels by Ira in the Transdimensional Authority/Multiverse series, the most recent being The Ugly Truth, the final instalment in the Multiverse Refugees trilogy.
When he first started sending books out for review, Ira's writing was most frequently compared to that of Douglas Adams. While the comparison was flattering (after all, Ira was a fan of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), Ira always downplayed it; his comedic style was substantially different from that of Adams, and he didn't want anybody picking up one of his books expecting Adams and being disappointed by getting, well, him. While they were editing his first novel, he explained this to Peter. His publisher's response was, "I knew Douglas a little before he died - he was working closely on projects with a good friend of mine. I would say that of all the people who write humorous science fiction, you are the one who comes closest to taking on his mantle."
So, hmm...
In order to broaden his reach in the science fiction community, Ira started writing book reviews and the occasional opinion piece for the Amazing Stories web site. He had been doing this for about a year and a half when Steve Davidson, the publisher who owned the Amazing Stories trademark, had to take a leave of absence to care for his wife, who was dying of cancer. Steve asked Ira if he would be willing to run the site while he was away. Ira agreed. He had heard that Steve wanted to revive Amazing Stories as a print fiction magazine; Ira requested that, if that ever happened, he be considered for an editorial position on the magazine. Ira edited the web site for another year and a half, at which point Steve returned.
Eventually, Steven Spielberg revived Amazing Stories as a television series. This seemed to be the perfect time to relaunch the magazine: it could benefit from the interest generated by the relaunched series (not to mention income from licensing the series: a pittance for a TV production, but a large amount for us). Ira, who had expected to assist somebody with more experience, was surprised when Steve asked him to edit the magazine. Not enough to decline the offer, but surprised nonetheless.
Over the next three years, Ira edited seven issues of Amazing Stories magazine and five volumes of Amazing Selects paperbacks (three of Alan Steele's Captain Future revival, Tiny Time Machine by John Stith and David Gerrold's Adrift in the Sea of Souls). In the call for submissions for the magazine, he said that he was looking for stories that would surprise and delight readers (something that he had always tried to do in his own writing); he feels he accomplished this. With Kermit Woodall's impeccable design, the magazine both reads and looks fabulous. Ira was thrilled to be a part of the project.
As if the 2010s weren't a busy enough time, Ira also started writing short stories, 20 of which were published in various anthologies and/or online. The stories come in many buckets, the biggest of which contains stories that take place in a post-singularity world where all matter in the universe at all levels of organization (from the smallest sub-atomic particles to stars, galaxies and the universe itself) has become conscious. The main character in these stories is Antonio Van der Whall, an object psychologist; his job is to learn what motivates newly conscious matter. The first story in the cycle, "Escalation is Academic" appeared in UnCONventional, a terrific anthology which is, sadly, currently out of print. Ten of the 17 stories in the cycle have been published; Ira is waiting for one or two more to see the light of print, at which point he will try to get a collection of them published. (For completeness, it should be pointed out that Van der Whall's story is brought to a conclusion in a chapter of his second novel.)
A second bucket of short stories contains characters and/or situations from Ira's novels. "A Town Called Unity," for instance, which appeared in Trump: Utopia or Dystopia?, features Transdimensional Authority investigators. "Message Found in a Variable Temporality Appliance" (Shapers of Worlds, Volume II) features a Time Agency agent. "He Who Dies With the Most Followers Isn't Immortal" (free download on the Elsewhen Press web site) is one of a series of stories featuring E-pyk Flail, the trickster in the pantheon of digital gods who was first described in an Alternate Reality News Service article and was later featured, along with many of the other digital gods, in It's Just the Chronosphere Unfolding As It Should, Ira's fourth novel.
More recently, Ira was looking for new things to do with the concept of the multiverse. He hit upon triptychs: short stories that contain three parts set in three different universes which reflect upon each other in interesting ways. The first triptych to be published was "When the Call Comes In" (No Police = Know Future). The second was "Goddess Given Advice" (in Dreaming the Goddess). Ira feels he has only scratched the surface of what is possible with triptychs, and hopes to write more as the inspiration comes to him.
Finally, there are the stories that stand on their own. "The Stupefying Snailman, Gastropod of Justice, vs. The Disease That Steals the Soul," for instance, about a superhero in the late stages of Alzheimer's, appeared in The Singularity Magazine. Another anthology which is sadly no longer in print, Doorways to Extra Time, featured Ira's story "Time, And Again," about a man who makes a pact with the devil to go back in time to fix his relationship with his one true love. As these stories often do, the man doesn't exactly get what he bargained for.
Although not currently produced, one other project Ira worked on is worth mentioning: six scripts for a comic book called Heroes Are Not Born. The main premise is that ten years before the comic starts, some people in CityVille were given super powers. They all decided to become villains. Today, a brilliant young scientist, backed by a billionaire, has created a machine that turns ordinary people into superheroes. The catch is that it only lasts for 23 hours, 47 minutes and 12 seconds, and that it cannot be used on the same person more than once. Ira asked an artist to draw the first six pages of the comic, but even with that, he has not found a company interested in producing it. As a fallback, he converted the first issue into a script, which he found remarkably easy given how visual film and comics both are.
This page will be periodically updated as new projects come to fruition.
* Sorry for the Inconvenience