Welcome!

My name is Stephen G. Parks. I’ve lived an unusual life, on four continents and in communities both well-off and under-developed. You’ve probably never met me and that’s fine. It’s a big world and you haven’t met most of its inhabitants.

I grew up in a region of Canada known as Southern Ontario. It was a place of many opportunities. In high school, I volunteered at the local community cable TV station, learning camera work, lighting, and how to wire a mic.

Later, in university, I started my own newsletter, making fun of the student politicians and the school’s rather staid newspaper. When a group of students decided to start a second newspaper, they approached me and asked if I wanted to participate. Within 2 years I was Editor-in-Chief.

I also trained as an on-air DJ for the school’s radio station, but I never had a regular slot, only acting as an on-call emergency cover. I did DJ dances and private parties.

After uni, I became the editor of a weekly entertainment paper, helping them transition to desktop publishing. Then I becoming the production manager for a small chain of non-editorial papers. Again, I led the transition from traditional paste-up to desktop publishing. This was where I learned both traditional darkroom development and Photoshop. Once we were successful, we were bought out by a large competitor, and my team was let go en masse.

Fortunately, I had trained myself on HTML. I landed a position with a new company that would become one of Canada’s top new media firms. I started as a coder, but switched over to being an information architect. This was where I was mentored in User Experience Design.

And there I would have stayed, if not for a personal tragedy. Reevaluating my life, I realized that I had two goals to achieve. The first was a nebulous “Go to Africa and make a difference.” The second was to become the author I’d always wanted to be.

Since then, I’ve lived (chronologically) in South Korea, Spain, Namibia, South Africa, and now Malaysia. This has included working for educational charities in southern Africa for almost 5 years.

One common thread throughout my life is that I’ve been a storyteller: I drew my own comic books as a youth; I wrote fiction as a teen; I was a journalist in university and beyond; later, I defined information flows as an information designer; I communicated language as an ESL teacher; and I’ve shone a light on some very deserving people as a communications specialist and fundraiser for educational charities in Africa.

Now it’s time to focus on my stories. And I’ve got a number to tell…