Oui, moi.

I can’t digest the idea of having to write a traditional “About Me”. Purely out of a lack of interest. That, and not knowing what to write. Perhaps we already know each other. You never can tell, with this internet thing.

I am Saba. I was born in Den Haag, Netherlands in the late 70s. A women never tells her age. I grew up in the glorious nation of Canada (Calgary, Halifax, Windsor, Ottawa and Cambridge where I graduated high school). My gyspy upbringing perhaps set the tone for much of my adult life, namely the period commonly referred to as ones “twenties”.

I left Cambridge at the tender age of 18 to start university at Carleton in Ottawa. The plan was to study Journalism and Communications. I had written, produced and pubished – steadily – a ‘zine throughout my high school years. That was my entry into the world of publishing and journalism: Free independent press. So when I went to Carleton with aspiring law students, I hated it. I explored other aspects of my newfound freedom.

After my first year of university at Carleton, I moved to Montreal for a summer – to get the party out of my system. Two months later, my parents dragged me back to Cambridge. There I founded the Haider Theatre Company and produced and directed a play I wrote when I was 17 (it won the English award!), entitled “Adam and Eve”. The play was based on the said and unsaid dialogue between my first love and I. That was a phenomenal experience.

Six months later I started a new degree at the University of Guelph, which was a great decision. I dabbled in many departments before settling up on a degree in Politics, specialising in contemporary British and French fascism. Fascinating stuff, really. All the while I worked at my campus newspapers and publications, eventually becoming features editor of the campus newspaper and then after that working for the Canadian University Press on styleguides and coordinating the 1999 CUP national journalism conference. Good times, those were.

I spent the last year of my degree (1999) in London, studying art, theatre and literature — and reasearching for my thesis at the London School of Economics library. Great experience. It’s one of the best libraries in the world. I returned to Guelph nine months later, wrote my thesis, graduated, moved to downtown Toronto and got my first job after university: printing black and white photos at a photo lab. I did that for three months and then started working for a skateboard magazine in Toronto. I did that for less than a year … then I took off to San Diego, California before Canadian winter arrived and landed a job at a skateboard business magazine. Those were fun years. I stayed there for almost four years and then moved to London in January 2004 to launch another skateboard business magazine which went bust after a year because the publisher’s eyes were bigger than his wallet. But that was a good thing.

Since then I have worked as a journalist for two daily newspapers, a daily website and a weekly paper. I spent four months in Manhattan in a fiction workshop and two months in Dubai as deputy business editor. Wild place that is. Very surreal. I can say I’m not a fan of the place, to live, but it’s worth a visit. Just one.

For the past year I worked for a daily in London while juggling multiple peripheral writing and art projects. In September 2006 I relocated to Amsterdam, Netherlands where I am currently doing my Masters degree in Editorial Design. I love it.

I’m still travelling a lot. I love it. It’s the gyspy in me.

Once a gypsy, always a gypsy.

-Saba