JOE KERTES (BA'75) comes from a long line of wise guys, he says. So perhaps it's only natural that after growing up with all his family's kibitzing he embraces comedy as his "second love."

His first love is writing. And in 1988 he combined the two in a novel, Winter Tulips, which won the Stephen Leacock Award for humour. The real punchline, however, is that Kertes never even set out to write a "comic" novel.

"My writing belongs more to a multicultural tradition than a comic one," he says. His forthcoming book, Yard With Trees, is a serious story about how a young Jewish-Hungarian boy's life unfolds when he escapes the Revolution and looks for acceptance in his adopted country, Canada. "It's about the notion of blending in, and the stigma that you don't belong."

One of his big influences at York was meeting the then-bad boy of Can Lit, Irving Layton. He met Layton when he enrolled in his graduate course on Canadian poetry and the two struck up a friendship that lasted 15 years.

"Layton was very gracious in support of my writing and offered to send Winter Tulips to Jack McClelland [then head of McClelland and Stewart Ltd]." Layton also wanted Kertes to write the definitive critical biography of his work.

"I kept saying to him, `Irving, you've got 50 books of poetry and only one good poem in each!' " Layton replied, `Does W.B.Yeats have 100 great poems?' That's when I realized he was incorrigible."