Hayden Booth

Biography

Hayden Booth was born in the Coronation Street town of Rochdale, England (a place of which he is not fond), and baptized in Belfast, Northern Ireland (a place where he always has a good time), before being brought to St. Catharines when just wee. As the only Irish Catholic of four children, Hayden was continually perplexed by society and spent most of his time retreating to the solitude of his basement bedroom. He rarely attended Governor Simcoe Secondary School, eventually becoming too scared to leave town (and said bedroom), so he stretched his education for two more years at Niagara College. In his working life, he is rumoured to have been a Globe and Mail paper boy, a Port Mansion busboy, dishwasher and cook, a General Motors auto worker, a CJSF and CFBU college radio DJ, and a daily newspaper reporter for a couple of Niagara publications that need not be mentioned. That last one, however, is a lie; he is mistaken frequently for another fellow, a mullet-headed scribbler who died in 1997. After two lost years in Vancouver at the change of the millennia, during which he became a university dropout for the second time, Hayden returned to St. Catharines for a series of missteps, nosedives and minor triumphs. Freshly named the volunteer of the year for 2006 at the Niagara Artists' Centre, he grabbed the hardware (a detourned bowling trophy) and was sucked into the bright lights and workaday misery of metropolitan Toronto. Though ensconced there as operations manager of Capital Q Records – a label devoted to queer artists in Toronto – and manager of two up-and-coming big city bands, Cougar Party and Scandalnavia, part of his heart remains in St. Catharines. He expects to soon complete work on his first novel, tentatively titled The Other Window, and will dutifully return to St. Catharines each Friday to see his psychiatrist and hang out at NAC, CRAM and anywhere anyone will have him. Come nighttime on those visits, he may well be spotted at St. Catharines Falcons home games, where he catches slapshots with his face, Gump Worsley style.

colour image from original photo taken at Ernest Harris, Jr. CRAM event by Sandy Fairbairn, Official Cram Photo Guy