Neil Guernsey is a writer and photographer based in Vancouver, Canada.

I have travelled across the globe and worked in journalism, market consultancy, and government policy-making.

Contact

neil (at) neilguernsey (dot) com

Writing

Having dabbled with the odd story, I committed myself to fiction when, having put off an assignment to journal a day spent at work with an adult, I invented a salacious  "Day in the Life of a Taxicab Driver" the night before it was due. Despite revealing it as a fabrication, I received top marks, teaching me that people prefer a good story over The Truth. That lesson carried me far in the business world. 

My unpublished first novel--written in an obscure suburb of Bangkok--was a dark satire entitled Paradise Lots in which the US military decides to field test a biological weapon inside a gated community. In so doing, they come into conflict with the local police, private security, a long-embedded FBI agent, sex-mad octogenarians, heavily armed Militiamen, and a herd of camels. That novel may yet rise to see the light of day. 

For almost two decades after Paradise Lots I concentrated on earning a living while also writing short pieces of fiction and verbally peripatetic travelogues for friends and family. Over this period I also began my own halting translation of Dante Alighieri's Comedy in order to better understand it. I'm still in Inferno with my obsession.

Over that same time, the ideas for my novel Sad Songs of the Death of Kings gestated: I'd been fascinated by the tales of the Mad Trapper since I was a teen while my interest in Dante brought me to Giulio de' Medici and my passion for the swashbuckling tales of Alexandre Dumas introduced me to the Abbé Faria. Each warranted its own story but I knew that I wanted to weave them together.  The characters spent many years mocking my conceit but I hoped to tell a story (stories) that would allow these characters to interact across time in various ways without violating the historical record. 

I took time off to devote myself fully to my writing and the novel burst forth. Currently, I am seeking a publisher for Sad Songs of the Death of Kings and am sketching out ideas for my next novel. 

In the meantime, I sketched out a children’s book ("There’s a Hippo in my Pool!”) and am tinkering with various ideas circulating around a science fiction screenplay.

Photography

My favourite cameras are my grandfather’s 1950s Zeiss Ikonta and No. 2C Autographic Kodak Jr. I used these to learn the practical elements of photography before joining the digital age. Their continued functioning represents to me the Industrial Age aspiration to defy the erosion of time.

Human initiative eroded by nature is a predominant theme in my work. Urban dwellers have trained their eyes away from the observation of detail in favour of the grand façade. I focus on the microscopic landscapes that are created when natural processes of decay work upon the built environment and how our insistence on repetition and clean lines creates abstract flat geometric images that seduce the eye away from the fractal natural world. We are so seduced by the seeming solidity of our world that something as banal as the stuffing herniating from an abandoned chair is as much a violation of the natural order as the entrails of an animal killed by an automobile.

My images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our post-industrial existence: they seek a balance between conservativism and anarchy. We are drawn to the certainty of our predecessors yet are consciously or unconsciously aware of the impossibility of maintaining the ‘good life’ in a post-colonial environment.

I strive to create images that can stand on their own but also reward the viewer who wants to puzzle out the larger context. I aspire to work on a scale such as Edward Burtynsky uses to portray humankind’s impact on environments world-wide but to explore instead the depths of nature’s encroachment on our unconcious of mind.

I also enjoy taking far too many pictures of lemurs and sloths.

Credits

All writing and photos (except Dante bust, and pictures of Johnson, Faria, and Giulio de' Medici) by Neil Guernsey. Copyright 2007-2017