Saultite authors short story as 'warts and all' tribute to late father

Sault Ste. Marie’s J.P. Naphan is trying his hand at writing and publishing short stories after years of doing stand-up comedy, and he’s using a “pretty crazy” relationship with his late father as a jumping-off point. 

Naphan recently released his short story, Going To Wawa With The Old Man, through Amazon as a way of getting his feet wet in the world of self-publishing. The story is inspired by a storm-plagued trip Naphan and his father, Paul, took up to Wawa back in February 2016. 

“It was a crazy idea of his, but he wanted to go - and he was going to go,” said Naphan, speaking with SooToday Saturday. “The weather was like ice, snow. You know the drive up to Wawa is intense.”

“I had to go, and his driving was getting so atrocious because he was 68 years old - and with the diabetes and everything, he was operating like a man well into his eighties.”

Naphan describes that trip as something straight out of the movie Apocalypse Now, with his dad playing the part of Colonel Kurtz. 

“As much as I wanted to pay tribute to my father, I also wanted to show the warts in our relationship,” he said. “I left some parts out. We had some fights. I say fights, but there’s obviously love there.”

When Naphan first published Going To Wawa With The Old Man, a relative reminded him that his dad wasn’t some sort of famous person. 

But Naphan figured his late father was relatable to rural areas across Canada as a blue-collar construction worker in the Sault who came of age in a time that wasn’t so politically correct. 

“What I was thinking is that he’s such a cross-section of the people in this town, and there’s still guys like him in this town - they drive up and down Second Line around here with their arm out the window of their truck. I figured that there would be enough people out there to relate to this kind of dad, this kind of guy,” he said. “I figured anybody from this area might read that and understand immediately.”

“I think that if you were from Toronto or somewhere else, my dad would just look like a complete lunatic, right?”

Going To Wawa With The Old Man was Naphan’s first attempt at trying out self-publishing. He hopes to have a collection of short stories on his Amazon page within the next five years or so. 

Naphan intends to use the short stories seen in the Remember This? columns that appear on SooToday and the Facebook group ‘You Know You’re From Sault Ste. Marie When’ as reference points when putting together his own works. 

He’s also looking to get another book published that he’s been working on about his first year as a stand-up comedian that’s a blend of reality and fiction.

“Anything that I write with Sault Ste. Marie or Algoma area, I was thinking of just self-publishing on my Amazon page directly,” Naphan said.

Going To Wawa With The Old Man is available in Kindle and paperback editions via Amazon.