Bio
Biographies, let’s face it, should more properly be called autobiographies. They’re normally a one-paragraph blurb written by the person they describe using a falsely distant third-person voice that’s meant to convey a sense of professional detachment. Performers and writers have to churn these out all the time. Here’s what mine looks like:
Jason Whiting is a military-trained engineer and former freelance journalist who has written for Wired, the Globe and Mail and Hour Magazine. He recently sold his first feature film script to a low-budget Montreal production company and is in the midst of brushing up his first novel. Jason is a proud member of ACTRA and the Writers Guild of Canada.
So that’s the dry toast version. Here’s a longer, truer and more personal autobiography…
I was born to young unmarried parents who were told by various well-meaning but misguided government workers that they couldn’t keep me. I spent some time rattling around Children’s Aid in the Ottawa area before being placed into a family that had previously adopted a girl, my big sis, Liz. I spent a brief amount of time with that family until my adopted father died of cancer. I momentarily went to live with that father’s parents until a custody battle that I still don’t fully understand landed me back with my sister, my re-married mother and my soon-to-arrive younger little sister, Barb.
I spent my growing-up-years skinning my knees on a dusty side road in Nowhere, Ontario (about forty minutes south-west of Ottawa). The hobby farm that I lived on had a small acreage, many pets and some chickens and ducks. We had goats at one point. A dirty river flowed across the backyard. We were surrounded by fields, cows, mostly poor farmers and their children. I was troublesome and bored and got into prolonged scraps with my adopive mother. The situation went from bad-to-worse until my dead father’s parents found out about it. I left home when I was 13 years-old.
For the next two years, I lived with my adoptive granfather and his second wife at their winter home in the Turks and Caicos Islands. I attended the International School of the West Indies for grade 8 and 9 traveling back-and-forth to school every day by boat. I was less troublesome. I fished a lot and read books. Eventually I became bored again (my entire high school had about 30 students and I was the only kid my age on an island of about one-hundred mostly rich, mostly elderly retirees). I returned to Canada to attend a boarding school outside of Brockville, Ontario.
After high-school, fervently proud of my home and native land, I enrolled in the Canadian Armed Forces Officer Training Program. I attended Royal Roads Military College in Victoria, British Columbia and then Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario and obtained a computer engineering degree, with distinction, in 1996.
For the next three years I worked as a technical writer, then applications engineer then product manager with Tundra Semiconductor Corporation back in Ottawa.
1999 was a big year for me. I met my birth parents, quit my job and headed back to school, obtaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Playwriting) from Concordia University in Montreal.
Since then I have been a writer, performer and smalltime landlord.
You can contact me by writing to jasonrwhiting at yahoo with a dot ca at the end. You can find my comedian MySpace page here.
Thanks for stopping by!
J. Whiting
