Laird Stevens

Laird Stevens is a writer, a composer, and a philosopher. He has four degrees, a BMus in musical performance, a BA and an MA in philosophy, and an interdisciplinary PhD in philosophy, English, and psychology. He has two websites, www.lairdstevens.com and www.motherandchildlearning.com.

He belongs to The Writers’ Union of Canada. His books for children include Millie The Mouth and Harris Goes to Paris, both picture books, and The New Blue Fairy Book and The Fairy Tale Grammar Book, for children ages eight to twelve. He has written two novels, a psychological thriller called The Death Fairy, and a literary novel called Paradise Lost. He has also written a book on gender identity, Big World: What is a Girl? and What is a Boy?, and a nonfiction memoir called The Dashiell Diary: Life Before School. All these books are available on Amazon.

He has written a number of essays as well, Nationality: A Case of Mistaken Identity (free on Smashwords), Everything Happens for a Reason (unpublished), and Homeschooling: The Best Education in Town, also available on Amazon. Finally, he invented a game of imagination and arithmetic called Private I, and an arithmetic puzzle called Plus or Minus. There are three Plus or Minus books for sale on Amazon.

As a composer, he has written more than fifty popular songs, four of which can be heard on lairdstevens.com. He wrote a piano concerto for his second son Dashiell, who was a virtuoso pianist from the moment he put his fingers on the keys. Dashiell won first prize playing the first movement of the concerto in both the Kiwanis Festival in Toronto and the QMEA Competition in Montreal. His father played the orchestral part, and was much more nervous than Dashiell, and not nearly as good, and made all kinds of dumb mistakes. Dashiell won anyway.

As a philosopher, he spent twenty years studying until he finally got the chance to take everything he had ever thought about and cram it all into his doctoral thesis, which was called Knowledge of the Self. His main philosophical belief is that nothing is meaningful until it is expressed in language, and that language therefore stands between people and the reality they experience. Language is like a pair of glasses through which we see the world. We can experience a world without language, but it has no meaning for us, and we can’t say anything about it.

What else? Well, he thinks that if people have a purpose, it is to bring happiness to others, or at least to alleviate their pain. Love is a blessing, but a blessing that sometimes has claws. And he would like to live in Paris. He lived there for a year as a boy and never got over it. The first line of his novel, Paradise Lost, is, “I was born in Paris at the age of twelve.” That about covers it.