Meet Mark Morton

We recently connected with Mark Morton and have shared our conversation below.

Mark, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?

I get my resilience from a few places.

First, from my parents, who had a small farm in Saskatchewan (the middle of the Canadian prairies). It was a small farm and they didn’t make much money at it. Luckily, we were able to supplement our grocery budget with the vegetables that my mom grew in a large garden, and with the chickens and pigs that we raised, and with the geese and deer that my father hunted. There were many tough times, economically speaking, but my parents didn’t give up — I guess they couldn’t give up, as there wasn’t any other choice! But seeing their hard and ongoing work in the face of farming challenges was a good lesson.

Second, growing up in Saskatchewan was itself a study in resilience. Saskatchewan (located north or North Dakota) is one of the flattest places on Earth, and has extremes of weather: from minus 40 fahrenheit in the winter to 110 fahrenheit in the summer. Plus the occasional tornado and hailstorm. To live in Saskatchewan was to see on a regular basis how hard and unforgiving nature could be — it was a bleak beauty.

Third, the four kids whom my wife and I adopted as older children. Almost all kids who are adopted as older children have PTSD and, often, other challenges. Watching our kids overcome those challenges, over many years, was inspiring. They have more resilience than anyone else that I know.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

Before my wife and I adopted older kids, I wrote four books of nonfiction on topics such as language, food culture, and history. Then I stopped writing for about 17 years while we raised our children. After they had gotten old enough to be more independent, I started writing again, but this time I decided to write fiction, so I wrote a YA dystopian novel called The Headmasters. And now, the very first nonfiction book that I wrote is being republished by a new publisher: Shadowpaw Press — so things feel like they have come full circle. I’ve spent my working life (I mean the work that has paid the bills!) as an educator, first teaching English literature at several universities, and later teaching professors how to teach better. My core belief is that everything is interesting, and that our job as educators (and authors) is to challenge our students and readers in such a way that they become absorbed in learning. My plan is to fully retire in about six months and then devote myself to writing fiction full-time. My website is www.markmorton.ca

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Three qualities or skills:

1. Curiosity (as I said in a previous response, I think everything is — or can be — interesting).
2. A love of language — both individual languages (I’ve studied French, Latin, Arabic, and am currently working on Spanish) and Language in general (how human language works, how it’s evolved, etc.)
3. Being comfortable in following my own drum. It’s important not to care too much about what other people think!

Advice: try to discern what you are passionate about and then, to the extent that your circumstances make it possible, try to “realize” that passion. You likely won’t be able to devote all of your time and energy to the thing that you’re passionate about — after all, a person has to eat (among other things) and that takes money — but if you can even devote just 5% of your free time to your passion, then I think you’ll feel that you are finding or creating meaning in your life. Of course, it won’t be easy: everything worthwhile takes time, energy, and lots of failure. But the alternative, to my mind, is to just sleepwalk through life, and I don’t think many people reach the end of their lives, after sleepwalking to it, with much sense of contentment or satisfaction.

Okay, so before we go, is there anyone you’d like to shoutout for the role they’ve played in helping you develop the essential skills or overcome challenges along the way?

The answers that come to mind are the obvious ones: my parents, my wife, my kids. But I’d like to focus on something else: our dogs. I’ve almost always had dogs in my life, and my wife and I — and, later, with our four kids — we always had four dogs at the same time in our household. Dogs provide the best example of showing us how to be: they are loyal, loving, and have a remarkable ability to live in the moment. Dogs don’t hold grudges. All of those qualities are ones that we humans should seek to emulate!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.markmorton.ca
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/markstevenmorton/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mark.morton.author/
• Other: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Steven_Morton