Ira Nayman is the bit of motion you see out of the corner of your eye, but when you turn your head there’s nothing there. He is the half-heard utterance in the crowd that you’re sorry you missed because, what the heck, it could have been important. He is the smell you can’t quite place – it’s not an unpleasant smell, but it’s annoying you that it’s there on the tip of your nose but you just can’t name it.
In short, he is a writer.
Ira has been writing humour since he devoted his life to it when he was eight years old. He stumbled into speculative fiction a decade or so ago and decided to add it to his mix. His major project is the Alternate Reality News Service (ARNS), which sends reporters to other realities and has them report back on what they find there (it has been referred to by a couple of different readers as “a science fiction version of The Onion“). The seventh book in the series is a general collection called Futures in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear.
One offshoot of the ARNS books is a series of novels that take place in the multiverse and feature either the Transdimensional Authority (“If you’re in a place you don’t belong, doing something you shouldn’t be doing, we find you, stop you and take you back to where you belong.”) or the Time Agency (“If you’re in a place you don’t belong, doing something you shouldn’t be – dammit! They beat us to it! Well, we do the same thing, only across time, not multiple dimensions!”). The fourth book in the series, It’s Just the Chronosphere Unfolding as it Should, was published in 2016 by Elsewhen Press.
If you have an interest in political and social satire, Les Pages aux Folles, Ira’s Web site of the same, has been updating weekly for the past 14+ years.
In other media, in the 1990s Ira was a member of two radio sketch comedy groups which you’ve never heard of (but, he is proud of the fact that somewhere in the bowels of CBC headquarters is a DAT with his voice on it). He has produced the pilot for a radio series based on the Alternate Reality News Service which can be heard on YouTube. He also produced a short film based on The Love Box, a television series he created about a family that lives over and runs the biggest porn store in the world.
Oh, and his Web Goddess insists that he doesn’t mention the fact that he won the 2010 Jonathan Swift Satire Writing Contest often enough. So, consider it mentioned.
In one of his other lives, Ira Nayman has a (big breath now) Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies with a Concentration in Creative Writing (phew!), a Masters degree in Media Studies (done entirely online through Paul Levinson’s Connected Education, which was at the time affiliated with the New School for Social Research), and a PhD in Communications from McGill. For five years, he taught part-time in the New Media programme at Ryerson University.
For somebody you only half-hear out of the corner of your eye, he sure does know some things.