Who?

My name is David Schembri, and this is my website, although I hope you’ll like it enough to feel that it’s partly yours too. But the domain is mine, and I’m clinging to it for dear life.

I’ve produced magazine and newspaper fodder since the age of 19, including full-time stints at the Times of Malta and Sunday Circle magazine. During that time, I also took up photography, which sometimes used to accompany my articles.

Throughout my career, I have been privileged enough to meet people from all walks of life, all of whom have taught me something. Some have taught me about their art, others about passion, others about happiness, faith, determination. Others – thankfully a minority – have taught me how many unpleasant qualities can reside within the same human being. Some of the articles from the former group have been reproduced on this website.

The above, probably, all you need to know about me.

I bought this domain ages ago, but I always put off putting anything on it as I tried to decide whether I wanted to call myself a journalist, a writer, a photographer or a musician.

This problem of definition probably took up more of my time than it should have. While if given a job title in the course of my employment I would have no problem calling myself as such and sticking it onto drawer-bound business cards, I find that calling myself an -ist or an -er to be an impossibly onerous (and onanistic) task.

For starters, when comparing myself to people who have been doing what I do for years and at a higher level than I currently do, I feel that I am unworthy of the suffix. Despite having a Master’s degree in philosophy, I would not dare call myself a philosopher.

Secondly, calling yourself an -er or an -ist excludes other names. As I’m still trying to find the best way to express myself, definition feels like a pigeonhole I would rather not trap myself in.

In the end, I thought I’d put the website up to display some of my better work for posterity, and used some -er and -ist words to make it easy for people to find me online. It is indeed my hope that one day, this humble website shall rise to the top of Google searches the world over. Having a convicted murderer sharing your name and surname, I find, makes for stiff competition on the search engine charts.

As of 2019, I have started writing content exclusively for this website.

I’m also a guitarist and songwriter, but this website’s not about that. And now it is.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.