For half a century I was in the business of selling — first records, then ideas. Somewhere along the way I noticed that people never really buy the thing itself; they buy the story wrapped around it. The day that truly sank in, I stopped calling myself a marketer and started calling myself a storyteller — less a career change than an honest confession.
I grew up in Switzerland and spent most of my life there, and I will always keep a Swiss eye for detail. But Canada is where I finally felt at home. I became a citizen in 2024 — an older hippie who took his time, found his country at sixty, and has been quietly grateful ever since. Today I write from Newmarket, Ontario, with one foot still in the Alps and the rest of me firmly on this side of the ocean.
What I do now has a simple shape: I look for stories and I collect them — about artists, about communities, about ordinary mornings that turn out to mean something. I believe a town understands itself best through the stories its people tell one another, and that a good story, told plainly, can do quiet work an argument never manages. That belief is the thread running through everything on this page.
A home for online artist portraits at canarta.net — emerging artists, written about with care, all year round. Once a year those stories gather into print: the CANARTA Annual 2027, a book of portraits, publishing December 1, 2027.
canarta.net →A newspaper for the specialty lofts of Newmarket — small, local, and genuinely curious about the places people make their home.
A StoryWalk® along the Tom Taylor Trail, where a fairy tale unfolds page by page as families walk it together. It carries the name of my sister Esther — a kindergarten teacher and a teller of fairy tales — and keeps a wish of hers alive: that children, and the childlike, would always have a story to step into.
Two writing voices for a life lived between two countries. As SwissChris, I write for Canada; as CanaChris, I write home to readers in Switzerland. One curiosity, told in both directions across the ocean.