In his article, Turning the Page, in the Walrus magazine, former Whistler Writers’ Group guest author Noah Richler, pins the publishing industry to the dartboard and begins throwing some very well-aimed projectiles at it.
For example, why are Canada’s automakers holding tight to archaic technology, but Canada’s publishers so willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater and jump into bed with e-publishing before they’ve even had an STD test?
And why do publishers equate their product with toilet paper – you run out, you buy some more. Toilet paper that sells better if the publisher has paid for a big bin full of titles located in prime floorspace…
What Richler says that’s most interesting and insightful is that most books sell, because people want to be talking about what everyone is talking about. One interpretation – we’re all lemmings. Or, alternatively, a book needs to be part of common conversations to be a success. So what are you talking about? And is anybody listening?
Sure, he could have skyped or texted me or emailed a photo from his phone. But when a postcard from my brother peeked out amongst all the uninspiring bills and how-did-you-find-me catalogues in my post box, I was pretty stoked. There’s an old school magic to postcards, and Geist is waving its magic wand and beckoning postcards and postcard stories its way.
It’s the writing contest whose name is almost as long as an entry – the 6th annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest - and 500 words is the max verbiage allowed, fiction or non-fiction, inspired by the image on a postcard, that must be sent as part of the entry.
Deadline has been extended to January 15. Yeehaa. Start scouring your old shoeboxes, postcard stands, art stores, museum gift shops…
Whistler’s 2009 Writer-in-residence took a group of non-fiction writers back in time this fall, with creative writing exercises aimed at excavating memories.
The drill – which spurred a round of frantic scribbling and several incredible pieces of writing – is resurrected here for bootcamp ex 21.
Draw a map of the first neighbourhood you can remember living in.
Sketch and scribble and wander again streets that are buried deep…
Research only in your own head. Leave aside had evidence – atlases and street maps and photographs. You’re excavating your stories…
Savour the immersion.
And then, start to write. A memory from that world.
The worst thing that can happen to you, when you embark on an adventure, is not actually that you get lost, or forget the bottle-opener, or get caught in a sudden downpour… Those things are part of the adventure.
The worst thing is ending up in the hands of the wrong guide. You know the type – he won’t stop telling self-aggrandising stories about himself, or he encourages you to duck the ropes when he doesn’t know the conditions, or she won’t listen to you when you tell her that you’re a bit out of your element… Whether the guide is real or virtual, the person who planted the seed and led the charge for your adventure is critical to its success.
And Jack Christie is a great guide. Dubbed “Mr BC” by the Toronto Sun, and a long-time outdoors columnist with the Georgia Straight, Christie and his wife Louise have been enthusiastically traipsing around the Coast Mountains for decades… (he’s 63 and has no intention of retiring – hell, there are too many adventures to be had.)
Out in time for the Olympics, Christie has updated The Whistler Book: An All-Season Outdoor Guide, providing directions to the gateways of hundreds of adventures to be had in the Sea to Sky corridor. Be you staycationers, vacationers, or 100-mile-adventurers, The Whistler Book should be in every corridor home, alongside the telephone book and the Joy of Cooking. It’s like a user’s manual to your backyard. Factual and funny, the Whistler Book might hold the ultimate test of the true local – once you can check off having done 75% of these adventurers, you’re in.
And the thing Christie is most amped about ride now? The Sea to Sky trail. I guess it’s the easiest way to have it all.
Whistler Blackcomb is getting set to premiere their new film, “On the Shoulders of Giants” online at on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at noon, Pacific Standard Time.
The 22 minute doco gets in ahead of the December 23 screening of the story of the construction of the PEAK2PEAK gondola on the Discovery Channel.
WB’s story focusses less on the technical feats, and more on bigger context, exploring the way the challenge of Whistler Blackcomb’s terrain has inspired generations of visionaries, athletes and innovators to keep raising the bar.
“The original motive for this film was to document the building of the PEAK 2 PEAK Gondola. As filming progressed and interviews were captured it became clear, the way Whistler inspires people to constantly do things bigger and better was really the story we needed to tell,” says Stuart Rempel, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing.
Featuring trailblazing icons like Eric Pehota, Mike Douglas and Jim McConkey, the film’s production also tapped the local talent well, with Jim Budge directing, Lisa Richardson developing the script, Christian Begin joining the cinematography crew and Sean Horne providing editing and animation expertise.
Tune in to Whistlerblackcomb.com on Tuesday, November 10 at noon (PST) for the world premiere. The film will remain available on-line for those interested, following the premiere.
If a new federal bill is passed, magazine freelancers will be able to enrol in EI and collect benefits starting 2011. The challenge is to maintain earnings for at least $6000 a year through self-employment in the year before the claim. The changes will also offer the prospect of maternity benefits of up to 15 weeks for mothers and up to 35 weeks of parental benefits for the self-employed – which is a sizable part of Sea to Sky’s workforce.
Just when the world was despairing for a saviour – someone to make snowboard magazines interesting again, someone willing to poke suitable amounts of fun at the Olympics, someone with an artistic aesthetic and a free distribution model – the Star of Pemberton is shining.
The King is here. King Snow. What may be the greatest snowboard magazine ever produced (in Canada this month.)
Lovingly crafted by a crew of former Future Snowboarding, SBC and Big Brother alumni, King of All Snowboard Magazines hits all your favourite snowboard shops on Monday November 9. It’s free. It can jump tall buildings in a single bound. It will fly. So get your copy fast.
Annabel Lyon has been busy. Not writing. No, the shy and thoughtful writer, “Can-lit’s newest golden girl” according to the Globe and Mail, has been beyond-busy on the circuit and in the spotlight, a place she is not entirely at ease with.
“You could not possibly complain about it,” Lyon told Toronto Star writer Vit Wagner, of the surge in interest in her as her novel The Golden Mean earns nominations for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. But it has hit her like a freight train, which makes it tricky to bask in the moment.
November, when all three prizes will be announced, will be a tense month for Lyon. (The awards are announced Nov 10, 17 and 24.)
The reason writers in Whistler will be rooting for her? Not just because she’s a new mother who’s honest about the struggle of balancing family and the creative life, (and who looks kick-ass in a pair of knee high boots), but for her measured words, shared at the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival this September.
Trust your constitution, as a writer, she said. The pace you write at, the tone of voice, the things that interest you. As much as she may have wanted to write a hip, post-modern, overflowing tome like Lee Henderson’s The Man Game, Lyon’s book is tight and spare and conventionally told. As much as she may have wanted to pound forth at the keyboard great volumes of text, she wrote in tiny chunks of time, stolen between babies’ naps. She trusted her constitution, though it was not always effortless. Her novel is wonderful. And deservedly acclaimed.
Magazine writers, don’t despair! The industry is rallying to remind people that magazines are still being read. (Albeit in funkified 140-character doses.)
Magazines are like a personal branding statement – your coffee table (or toilet mag-stand) is a proclamation to the world of who you are? Urban hipster? Dwell magazine. Red-blooded male just this side of forty? Men’s Health. Canadian intellectual? The Walrus.
And while advertisers are redeploying their marketing budgets online, they might have missed the most critical fact of all – magazine readers are often reading the magazine FOR the ads.
Canadian indie rock princess, Leslie Feist, says, in this interview with Spinner’s “Interface” that “Canada is more about the spaces in between the cities than the cities themselves.” The power in music is often held in the space in between the notes. The drama in a story is often in the space in between two characters in conflict… the distance between what they really want and what they tell each other they want… and the story lies in how they bridge the distance and what goes wrong along the way.
At the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival in September, author (and actor) Chris Humphreys led a session on Characters in Action. Our back to boot-camp drill is inspired by Humphreys’ workshop. Humphreys’ magic formula is COMOCA – characters’ objectives meeting obstacles creates action. The questions for a compelling protaganist are : what do I want? what is stopping me getting to it? what am I going to do about it?
Write a scene in which two siblings are forced to work together, but both have different underlying objectives.
Funny that the only real push-back to Google’s plan to dominate the digital literary landscape, are the Chinese.
As reported in the New York Times today, two Chinese writers’ groups are demanding protection from Google’s unauthorised copying.
Chinese authors know life under Big Brother… so maybe they’re less inclined to take for granted the idea that words and books should move freely… should not be under the control of one entity… even if (especially if) that entity’s motto is ‘don’t be evil.’
As David L Ulin of the LA Times wrote, after Amazon.com remotely deleted digital copies of George Orwell’s novels 1984 and Animal Farm from customers’ control, ”the issue is not that Amazon erased material from people’s Kindles, or de-ranked gay and lesbian writers, but that it can.“
Vigilance. As Thomas Jefferson famously said, the price of democracy is vigilance. And being vigilant means when someone like Google or Amazon.com says “Trust us,” we think hard and watch carefully and speak up…
Doors open at 7pm and Stephen will read and give a slide show presentation at 7:30pm. Books will be for sale and there will be some nibblies and beer.
If you can’t make the November 7th Whistler event, Stephen will also launch the book in Vancouver on Tuesday, November 10 at 7pm at Aphrodite’s Organic Cafe (3598 West 4th Avenue).
Back before the Sea to Sky Highway finished getting its epic facelift, it was such a construction hot-spot that it inspired the fascination of children. Food writer, Andre Lariviere, recalls his toddler daughter dubbing the road “the Land of Diggers.” And Whistler author, Sara Leach, boned up on her heavy machinery vocabulary, turning her son, Ben, into a two year old who knew the difference between a front-end-loader, a grader, and a dump-truck.
As Leach told the Pique’s Holly Fraughton, of her rhyming counting book for children, Mountain Machines: “I wrote it when my son was two and he was completely obsessed (with machines). It was right at the start of all the construction on the highway, so we’d drive down the highway and he’d just start getting cranky as we hit the construction.”
To keep him happy and entertained, Leach would spend the next half-hour of the drive pointing out and naming the machinery they drove past, which turned out to be a learning experience for both the child and the parent.
“All of a sudden I knew all these machines – I used to think they were all just tractors!” she said with a laugh.
The book is full of rhyming text about groomers, pipe dragons, gondolas and other ski hill machinery that is all too familiar in Whistler. The text is accompanied by colourful, cartoony illustrations by California-based artist, Steven Corvelo. “Steven’s illustrations are amazing, I’m so pleased with them and the kids love them. I read it to about four or five classes at school now and honestly, I could be speaking German – they’re not actually listening to what the words are, they’re laughing themselves silly!”
Steven Corvelo and Sara Leach at the Whistler launch of Mountain Machines, a rhyming counting picture book
My friend Molly had a bath and then went running through the house, trailing suds and puddles, yelling, “I’m naked! I’m naked!”, exhilerated to be at that meeting point of the naughty and the natural. She was only 3.
That unique and uncensored voice (in the face of vigilant cops with video cameras) is the reason Harbour Publishing chose him to pen two books about Whistler. After all BC Ferries’ concern about the naughtiness of bare bums strikes at the heart of an age-old tension in Whistler – between the free spirited and the straighter-laced, the boho-ski-bum and the investor, the early squatter and the indignant member of the “Alta Lake Ratepayers Assocation” who kept having their toilet paper nicked by freeloading ferals. (And that was in the days before Costco.)
Juggle wine and cheese and celebrate her publishing debut, with Jake Reynolds: Chicken or Eagle? and Mountain Machines. Though Leach has been influencing young minds for years, in her role as elementary school teahcer, mother and teacher-librarian, she’s taking that to a whole new level, as author of books for young readers.Books will be available for purchase at the event, and are also on sale at Armchair Books.
Stu McNolty and Mount Currie artist Donna Jane Dan have collaborated on a new kid’s book, The Snot Monster.
Written in Pemberton, illustrated in Mount Currie and published in Squamish, it’s the first 100 Mile Literature project to come from the corridor.
McNolty joins several local writers who have turned their talents to kids’ books, including Tracy Higgs (The Alphabet Goes to Ski and Snowboard School), Katherine Fawcett (MushKid) and Sara Leach’s forthcoming Mountain Machines.
The Snot Monster tells the tale of (what else?) a monster who lives in a weeping willow tree and does particularly gooey things to children.
Currently, the book is available locally at Pemberton’s Frontier Street Pharmacy as well as from McNolty himself through grandpastalltales@gmail.com.
A test for your pattern recognition skills: what do The 100 Mile Diet, Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, The Year of Living Biblically, Nickel and Dimed, and the recent No Impact Man have in common? (Apart from the fact they mostly began as blogs, they have mostly been optioned for movies, they threatened to disintegrate marriages, they made various best-seller lists and they fall into the dubious literary category of “ordeal” books or “immersion journalism”…)
They were all year-long experiments, in which their authors took a hypothesis and made themselves guinea pigs. It’s a gonzo tradition – Morgan Spurlock ate only McDonald’s for 30 days, Grant Stoddard didn’t sleep for a month. (He also had sex with himself, but that’s a whole other story.) But a month is an experiment. A year is an ordeal. It takes a different level of commitment. (A level of commitment that lasts long enough for a publishing house to discover what you’re up to.)
The year-long ordeal might be an effective gimmick to cut publishing deals. But it also seems to tie into a bigger longing – the longing for transformation. All the makeover shows we can tune into at night serve up fairy godmothers to bad parents, bad money-managers, bad dressers, bad dieters, bad dancers, and magic-wand them to a better place.
Reading, being the slow food equivalent in the entertainment world, reveals transformations that require at least 365 days to take hold. And if a new habit takes 21 days to establish, then a year is probably needed to undo your reflexive reach for the remote control/frozen pizza dinner/VISA card as life crutch.
And the thing is, we only really get things in life once we’ve lived them. Sure, we can know something, intellectually, but it’s not until we experience it, viscerally, that we really truly bodily KNOW it… and so, life actually is an experiment, and we need to get out of our thought-bubbles and get messy to really know what it’s like to be in this incarnation, this time around, to know what really might be possible. How far could one year take you?
Whistler Reads anchorwoman, Paula Shackleton, did some serious prep work for last week’s book club get-together on Alice Munro and the short story.
Here’s her top ten cribsheet:
1. The short story derived from oral traditions that could be enjoyed at one sitting.
2. Through the centuries the rhymed verse of Homeric-type epics evolved to Canterbury Tales, Aesop fables evolved to Grimms Fairy Tales, and parables evolved to anecdotes, which finally trended to realism and the modern short story.
3. Every short story uses 5 elements: Plot, Character, Conflict, Theme, Setting.
4. Writers have introduced styles within the short story genre: Philip Roth evokes Jewish writing and others continue the trend of cultural identity. Feminism and other socio-political themes explore all corners of the human condition. The 90s saw a period of magic realism. Alice Munro sits firmly in the “Minimalist Camp” along with noted short story writers: John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, and Hemingway (among others).
5. Minimalism is characterized by a single plot line, few characters, one theme, precise writing where the protagonist is not exceptional and their attributes are revealed to the reader through context. Alice to a T.
6. A short story ranges from 1,000 words to 20,000 words but averages 7,500 words.
7. It is considered the most demanding oeuvre because the length is inversely proportional to its impact.
8. I did a quick review of all the noted short story writers and luxuriated in those I’ve read that still resonate:
Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter),
Herman Melville (Bartleby the Scrivener),
Edgar Allan Poe (The Black Cat),
Nikolai Gogol (The Overcoat),
Guy de Maupassant (The Necklace),
Anton Chekhov. (The entire list)
Jorge Luis Borges (The Garden of Forking Paths)
Kurt Vonnegut (Canary in the Cathouse), John Cheever, Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald (who paid all his bills with short stories.)
Canadian specialists like: Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Jane Urquart, and Mordecai Richler. I’m sure you have your own favourites.
9. How do we know these writers? It is because of all the dedicated publications that print a short story per edition, which puts bread on writers’ tables and enables them to compile books of short stories, and also publishers to print short story anthologies. We love: The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Saturday Evening Post, Scribners, and then there is all the esteemed literary journals: The Paris Review, Granta, Quill & Quire, etc.
10. Talking about stories can be as much fun as reading them.
Coming this October – something to warm you from the inside-out, as the mercury drops - Stephen Vogler’s new book, Only in Whistler: Tales of a Mountain Town. “If I found myself laughing at some part of the writing day,” says Vogler, of writing this book, “I figured I was hitting the mark.
The book, which took Vogler a year to write, “following 32 years of intensive research”, offers the kind of insider’s view that not many people can offer in Whistler. In a town where a person’s credibility is contingent on how long they’ve managed to live there, Vogler has seen 34 seasons turn, enough to give him the immersion necessary to scribe authoritatively about the community that lies, layered beneath the outerskins of marketing gloss, transient residents, and institutional amnesia. ”I don’t think my idea of Whistler has changed much since 1994 when the first pieces for Whistler Features were written,” says Vogler. “It’s still a place with a very glossed-over corporate veneer––which is what most people think of when they think of Whistler––while beneath that lies this seething mass of eccentric characters and stories that truly characterizes the place. It’s those characters and their stories that I dug into in this book.”
Anyone who has read Vogler’s debut collection, Whistler Features, knows how funny he can be. And anyone who has Top of the Passon their coffee table knows he also has a great eye for character and a poetic perspective, capturing a place with the help of local photographers Bonny Makarewicz and Toshi Kawano “where gravity drives the economy and the lifestyle.”
The biggest difference between Top of the Passand Vogler’s newest offering, Only in Whistler, is that this one has no pictures.
Says Vogler, “It’s all storytelling. In the last one, because it was a pictorial essay as well, I had to step back a bit with the writing so that the photos could tell part of the story, almost like a script. With this one I just dug into all the stories of growing up here and all the eccentric characters I’ve gotten to know over the last thirty-odd years. It begins in 1976 when I was 12 years old and we moved to Whistler. “
A heartfelt thanks to Stella Harvey, organizers, panelists, participants and fellow voyeurs of the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival. I was very impressed by the enthusiasm everyone enjoyed and shared for the written word. The insightful sessions led by Wayne Grady and the writing aerobics of Michel Beaudry greatly inspired me to press pen to paper. An evening among the literati of the Sea-to-Sky corridor (and Brazil!) was great fun to hear the ageless gender debate, be captivated by the poetic lyricism of Shane Koyczan and participate in the illuminating haiku competition! A wonderful event for inspiration and networking.
The Festival organisers have been busy crunching data into bytes and reports, to discover the following:
Over 8 years, Festival attendance has grown from 20 to 134. In 2008, attendance increased by 25% over the previous year, and in 2009, the numbers grew by another 15%.
31% of participants had attended last year’s festival.
Half of the guest authors were corridor-based, matching the wealth of local creative talent with out of town guests.
Almost 10% of attendees were under the age of 25. Another 100 students had the chance to hear from guest author Chris Humphreys.
The Festival’s promo campaign generated 200,000 hots to our website at www.theviciouscircle.ca, and 950 column inches in editorial coverage, an advertising equivalent of $50,000.
An increased percentage of attendees this year came from beyond Sea to Sky corridor, up to 37%.
The Festival program was downloaded almost 1000 times.
100% of participants said they were likely or very likely to come again.
The Pique covers some more details in their post-mortem today.
#1. For the weekend of September 11-13 2009, in Whistler, book sales are up, crime stats are down.
#2. High school students are overheard, after visit of author CC Humphreys, saying “I am reading the French Executioner and it’s awesome” and “I never would have picked up this book (The Fetch) but because I met him, I did and I really like it. I think it’s because I already understand what’s happening. It’s kinda cool to meet the author in person.”
#3. Sixty people walked into a bar, and before the night was through, 20 of them had written poems.
#4. Attendance grows by 15% over the 2008 Festival, despite the economy, beautiful weather and Stephen Harper’s War on Culture.
#5. 100% of attendees say they are “likely” or “very likely” to attend the Festival in the future.
#6. Aspiring magazine writers pitch story ideas to editors and several hear the magic invitation, “let’s talk more.”
#7. Random people skip through Whistler behind a flautist and write poetry on the dock by Alta Lake. It’s an inspiring setting. Might as well make the most of it.
#8. Author Nancy Lee (Dead Girls) proclaims the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival top-notch, with a higher calibre of professionalism, communication and regard for the visiting writers than any out-of-town festival, including festivals in the UK and Paris.
#9. 240 people have direct and intimate contact with a professional working writer, and come away having charged up their word-power decoder rings. Word POWER!@)!#
#10. The Festival Director gets a good night sleep for the first time in months, and bounces up the next morning with plans for the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival 2010.
And most importantly, the day after the Festival, people are writing.
As rare as the Bigfoot, several sightings of writers in Whistler were captured on camera this past weekend. Spontaneous gatherings took place, both indoors and outdoors. Most creatures were wielding notebooks, often scribbling frantically, sometimes staring into the distance, occasionally reading out loud. Experts in the paranormal say, “There must have been some kind of convergence we weren’t aware of. It certainly seems that an important gathering took place this weekend. What it means, over the long-term, is just something we’ll have to watch for. But I definitely think this is a phenomenon we should pay attention to.”
Stella Harvey is the Whistler Writers Festival’s Little Engine That Could. She receives herewith her eighth nomination for Best Director in a Drama Series, Best Supporting Everything in a Cast of Thousands Production, and Best Friend of the Arts and Literary Community in Whistler.)
But to help move this word-nerd-train, she enlisted the support of a host of folk, and we want to throw out huge virtual applause to them, with thanks, for jumping on board the 8th Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, and enabling over 150 writers to take the journey.
Food and Shelter: Before we can self-actualise, we need to get our basic needs met. Thanks to Legends at Whistler Creek, Evolution at Creekside, Alta Lake Station House (the RMOW), Players Chophouse, Whistler Cooks Catering and Blenz Coffee for essential sustenance and hosting.
Funding support: Grants and funding support from the Whistler Arts Council, the Resort Municipality of Whistler’s Community Enrichment Program, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Writers Union of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts and the 2009 Cultural Capitals program enabled us to bring a host of professional writers to town to anchor this critical mass of word-nerds!
Media partners: For helping us to get the word out, thanks to the BC Association of Magazine Publishers, the Pique, the Georgia Straight and Sub-Terrain magazine, as well as The Tyee, the Question, Vancouver Review and BC Bookworld. Thanks also to Tourism Whistler. And our wonderful local journalists for spilling ink for us – Jennifer Miller and Holly Fraughton, as well as Pique contributors Rebecca Wood Barrett, Mary McDonald and Pam Barnsley.
For going the extra mile: The Pique newsmagazine and the Whistler Museum and Archives stepped up to support two young individual writers, enabling them to attend the Writer in Residence program through September, and to develop a project of their own. Huge thanks to Bob Barnett and Jehanne Burns for answering the call and being our partners in creative crime!
Community partners: Where would we be without Dan and Armchair Books? With nothing to read. Without temptation. Walking into a corporate megalith store’o'books to the sound of our souls sucking away. Thank you Armchair Books for standing behind the Writers Festival for the last eight years, and for part of what makes the Whistler retail experience wonderful and unique.
You, the brave: Annie Dillard wrote, “You can’t test courage cautiously.” It takes courage to get out of your comfort zone, out of your couch’s vortex, or to admit, ‘yes, I am a word-nerd.’ Thank you to all the bold attendees of the 8th annual Whistler Readers and Writers Festival for keeping the word-stoke fired. Welcome to the Vicious Circle.
While Friday and Saturday’s events will take place at Creekside (hit Legends Hotel at the foot of the mountain, and Players Chophouse for Saturday night’s shenanigans), Sunday will take place at Alta Lake Station House.
Best way to get into a writerly frame of mind is to get out of the car. Access to Alta Lake Station House, where the Poetry Walk will commence, and where the manuscript appraisal, readings and writing workshop on Sunday will take place, is on foot or bike, via the Valley Trail.
Hit the trail from the Alta Lake Road side (5.3km from Alpine Way traffic light), or Wayside Park. Parking is available at both ends. From the Alta Lake Road side, start at the yellow boom gates and follow the (not yellow, not brick, not road) path (black, bitumen)… for a relaxed 5 minute-ish jaunt. The house is identified by a couple of small “Shhh! Workshop in progress” signs.
The five month countdown to the Olympics is marked, by coincidence, this Saturday, with the debut of Haiku Idol, a live-poetry writing contest that has its genesis in a national poetry slam held during the Calgary Cultural Olympiad.
The Whistler Readers and Writers Festival takes the Olympic analogies even further this week, with Rebecca Wood Barrett’s feature in the Pique, comparing novel writing to the speed skating long track (endurance, much time spent going round in circles, draft after draft), short story writing with the halfpipe (compact site plus high aptitude for risk forces practitioners to go big), or magazine writing with the bobsled (it’s all about nailing that torpedo-start to grab the advantage and the reader’s attention.)
Profile your prowess… After all, making it as a writer is as audacious an accomplishment as winning a medal. We’ve got more in common than we realise.
They’ve been raiding the bookstore and ReUse It Centre, and putting 20 local writers through their paces, as Whistler’s Writer in Residency program gets underway.
1. Success in writing is about who you know. It’s shitty to admit that merit alone is insufficient, and god bless Obama for actually creating a meritocracy across the border and telling kids to work hard, but the world is about networks and relationships and it takes other human beings to open doors, especially when your arms are full of manuscripts. We bring those door-opening people to you – writers, publishers, editors. The Whistler Readers and Writers Festival is an intimate industry event for people in the fields of words and stories.
2. It could be the last festival. You never know. You might also be dead by this time next year. Bottom line, why put off until tomorrow what you could do today? Carpe diem, remember.
3. Guest authors are making history come alive. We need that rear-view mirror to the past to put everyday life, depressing headlines and minor personal crises into context. Many of the Festival’s guest authors, Lee Henderson,Claire Mulligan, Merilyn Simonds, Annabel Lyon and Chris Humphreys excavate history to create tremendously readable novels.
4. An ideas-fest always gets your brain tingling. As stoked as I am to read the first Buyer’s Guide of the year, with all the ski and snowboard gear reviews, there are only so many conversations I can have about sidecut and camber and binding mounting devices before I feel like standing up and screaming, “Can’t we just talk about our feelings for five fucking minutes?” The moment usually passes. But for one weekend a year, at the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, I can immerse myself in conversations that make life, and the life of the mind, seem incredibly rich.
5. It will kickstart your creative mojo. Motivation is a slippery little sucker. Sometimes a bootcamp is what we need. A few teachers. A few inspiring fellows. A few skills and drills. Maybe even someone yelling at you. (Or shouting down that little voice inside your mind that has been getting too much airplay – “you can’t. You’re not good enough. You don’t dare.”)
Otherwise known as a brain-fart, Mommy-alzheimers or the momentary space walk, that experience of losing one’s words (“um, she’s like a really good friend of mine and her name is…??”), we’ve all been noun-challenged. Thwarted by the disappearing person, place, thing. It’s okay. Learning how to fill in the blanks when your words abandon you just better prepares you for travel in countries where you don’t speak the language.
But when it comes to writing, you want to get that person-place-thing thing dialled. The crux of a good story is at the nexus between those three things.
Enter the three Wise Men.
The place is Whistler. Legends Hotel at Creekside, to be exact.
The people are writers Wayne Grady, Chris Humphreys and Leslie Anthony.
The things? All your ideas and ambitions. Stories. Notebooks. Pens. Whatever talisman you carry in your pocket. Frankincense. Myrrh.
Saturday, 11 September. Grab coffee. Get started with Writing Place, or Characters in Action.
After lunch, Write People like a Profiler.
Wrap it up with the whole package – Writing for the action sports world by nailing person to place to thing.
It’s not a tricky equation, once you have the tools.
Sugar and spice and all things nice? Not necessarily. There’s no need for poetry to be as saccharine as a Hallmark greeting card… especially when it’s written in the adrenaline-boosting, fat-free zone of Whistler, and inspired by a shot of fine Scotch.
To free up your Muse to be spicy and articulate, the poets are talking a long walk on the beach. Join them on Sunday. It’s free.
I dutifully crack open the spine of Annabel Lyon’s new novel, The Golden Mean. She’s coming to Whistler on Friday as part of the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival. Plus, she writes about Aristotle and I really should know something about one of the greatest thinker’s in western civilisation.
Two sentences in, any sense of obligation is out the window. I am reading for pure pleasure, chasing my own curiosity through the annals of 350 BC, not stopping until I’m at page 284 and can close the book and turn off the light. Sure, it was a rainy Sunday. But if I had known that philosophy could be so muscular and bawdy and vigorous, I too would probably turn to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in times of trouble.
Lyon’s novel has been praised for its brilliance and its intellectual depth, and deservedly so. But such words suggested to me a dense tome that might bring on faint headaches from the effort. The Golden Mean had the opposite effect. It was exhilarating to be transported so effortlessly to a long ago place and time, peopled by vaguely familiar characters – Aristotle, Plato, Cleopatra, Alexander the Great – who now skitter about vividly in my mind’s eye.
I spent the day in ancient Macedonia. And I can’t wait to get back.
The CROWD CHEERS wildly. The women exchange pleased looks.
REBECCA WOOD BARRETT
To Citta’s! Our work here is done!
And your work, aspiring screenwriters, is just beginning. Get your ducks in a row for the Whistler Film Festival with a crash course in screenwriting this weekend.
Following up on earlier posts about large-scale sculptures made from books, we stumbled upon a feature in Elemente magazine, showcasing various innovations in the world of interior design. From book-shelves to vases to table-lamps, those remaindered books are getting new life.
UK designer Not Tom pulled some books out of the trash at the end of a jumble sale. Dutch designer Bom makes reading lamps from old books. UK design grad, Laura Cahill, is making lamp stands and reading stools from old books. (Just the perfect place for kicking back with the e-reader…)
Inspired by the Calgary 1988 Olympics, the home of the 2010 Games is about to play host to a contest that organisers worry might get out of control.
After all, the stakes don’t get any higher for a poet than when there’s a chance to get paid.
Haiku Idol debuts in Whistler on Saturday September 12 2009, to mark the 6 month countdown to the 2010 Winter Olympics.
The live, high-speed, poetry-writing contest involves one bag of money, one thesaurus, and 20 writers ranging from the celebrated to the obscure, who will test their mettle, with hopefully, a minimum of spittle, when they’re given one torn-out page from the thesaurus, one pencil, one notebook and one half hour as everyone else heads to the bar, to scribe a poem, of any length and any style.
When the bell rings, its pencils down and mikes up, as they take the spotlight to read, and reveal what the crucible created. The winner takes the money, and runs.
Due to limited seating, potential poetry-slammers and audience members are advised to purchase their tickets in advance at www.theviciouscircle.ca.
The Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, September 11-13 2009 presents He Read, She Read: The Battle of the Book Clubs, followed by Haiku Idol, Saturday September 12, 7:30pm, Players Chophouse, Whistler Creekside, $25
In the novel, eleven year old Jake Reynolds has to deal with his braver and cooler best friend Emily, the wolf that he suspects is stalking Hidalgo Island, and the reality that he might just be too chicken to be the hero of Hidalgo.
The book was born more than seven years ago, when Leach and her husband were walking on the beach and saw a seal pup lying on a boulder that poked out of the water. “As we watched,” Sara says, “an eagle almost managed to scoop it up and eat it for lunch, but the seal pup got away just in time. My husband turned to me and said, ‘You should write a story about two kids on an island like this. Imagine all the adventures they could have’. But the time we had walked home, Jake and Emily had started to take shape in my head.”
On Saturday September 12, at the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, she will offer up the inside scoop to aspiring children’s book writers, with her 2.5 hour interactive workshop on Writing for Children. Covering everything from what makes a good children’s book, to how to navigate the publishing gauntlet, Leach is an inspiring example of Whistler’s creative can-do. (and teach.)
Philosopher/writer Alain de Botton has moved into the airport at Heathrow as part of a marketing initiative that aims to humanise the bad-press-besieged Terminal 5.
The collaboration is turning the airport into a meeting place between the corporate sector and the creative sector – with de Botton being paid an undisclosed sum and granted full creative freedom to write stories that will be compiled into a book and given away to travellers.
Heathrow says it is the first airport to employ a writer-in-residence, but in-house writers have been adopted by institutions from prisons, shopping malls and football teams to London’s ritzy Savoy Hotel.
This fall, the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival hosts its third and fourth writers-in-residence, husband-and-wife authors Wayne Grady and Merilyn Simonds. They’ll hunker down at historic Alta Lake house for several months, first leading workshops for 20 participants in the residency program, and then, working on their own writing.
The Vicious Circle though, inspired by the Heathrow project, is looking at taking the writer-in-residence program to new heights. Anyone want to live on top of Whistler Mountain? Inspiration is pretty much guaranteed.
The Pitchers Mound, at the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, September 12, is your chance to find out.
Bringing together five of Canada’s leading magazine editors, the lunch-hour session, presented by the BC Association of Magazine Publishers, gives audience members a chance to walk away with a full belly (lunch provided), a full brain AND a bag full of magazines for just $35.
Plus, ten aspiring magazine and non-fiction writers will have the chance to step up to the plate and go all-star, selling their best story ideas to James Little from explore magazine, Leslie Anthony from SBC Skier, Sandro Grison from Color magazine, Matt O’Grady from BC Business magazine and Charlene Rooke from Western Living.
The session runs from 11:15 – 1:15pm at Legends Hotel at Creekside.
Willing pitchers should sign on in advance to secure the limited number of opportunities to seal the deal. Contact Stella Harvey at stella25@telus.net to book your spot.
Pitches are welcome from the freelance and professional journalists, veterans, newbies, or PR professionals.
The Panel:
Charlene Rooke is the editor-in-chief of Western Living and the former editor of Air Canada’s enRoute magazine and the Calgary city/lifestyle magazine Avenue. She has done freelance work for publications including the New York Times Magazine, Marie Claire, Fashion, Flare, Report on Business and Vancouver magazine.
Western Living is the leading lifestyle magazine in Western Canada, reaching 200,000 affluent households and 600,000 readers in Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina and Winnipeg. It celebrates the best the West has to offer in homes and design, food and wine, and travel.
Matt O’Grady has been editor of BCBusiness magazine since March 2008. Prior to joining BCBusiness, Matt was a freelance writer, teacher and consultant, as well as the associate editor of Vancouver magazine (2004-07) and assistant editor of Western Living (2003-04); he also interned at Harper’s magazine in the fall of 2000. Matt is a former director and treasurer of the B.C. Association of Magazine Publishers (2004-07).
Smart, savvy and always on the money, BCBusinessis Canada’s best-read and most-respected regional business magazine. Now more than ever, readers are looking for insights into what makes our economy tick – and each month, BCBusiness goes behind the headlines to tackle the issues and profile the leaders driving business in B.C. In addition to award-winning features, BCBusiness also offers a broad array of expert opinion, including columnists such as Tony Wanless on small business, Bob Rennie on real estate and Brent Holliday on technology.
James Little has worked in the Canadian magazine industry for 22 years, and has been the editor of explore since the magazine was purchased by Quarto Communications in July, 2000.
explore is a lifestyle magazine for Canadians who are passionate about the outdoors and adventure. It covers a wide range of activities—travel, hiking, mountain biking, climbing, canoeing, kayaking, winter sports and more. It also covers related issues of interest, such as nature and the environment.
In the past eight years, explore has been named Best Magazine of the Year by the Canadian Society of Magazine Editors three times. It has also been nominated for 118 National Magazine Awards, winning 17 Gold awards and 22 Silver awards. In 2006, to celebrate its 25th anniversary, the magazine published Way Out There, an anthology of some of the best writing to appear in its pages.
Sandro Grison is the editor, creative director and co-founder of Color magazine. A lifestyle and design publication,Colormagazine is a skateboarding and contemporary art culture quarterly that presents stunning photography, in-depth writing and modern and innovative artwork to the Canadian and global skateboarding communities.
Leslie Anthony is the editor of Skier magazine. A former Managing Editor of Powder magazine, and current editor of Peak Performance magazine, Anthony has also contributed widely to action sports, travel, adventure and science publications.
SBC Skier is Canada’s premier and favourite ski magazine. An award-winning glossy published four times a year, SBC Skier is dedicated to showcasing the heart and soul of skiing and the lifestyle that surrounds it.
Take the magical location of Lost Lake, 200 tons of snow and ice, a set carved by Canadian Snow Sculpture team member Carl Schlichting, a hosted ice-bar for pre-show cocktails, plenty of pyro including fire-breathing musical instruments, the death of a snowman, AND a love story set at the end of the world, and you have NiX – the most unique cultural event for winter lovers ever to come to Whistler.
The show just nabbed two Betty Mitchell theatre awards, for outstanding set design and outstanding lighting design. (It was also nominated for outstanding costume design, outstanding new play and outstanding production of a play.)
Tickets for the show will go on sale this week. The limited run kicks off January 22, until the end of the Olympics.
For the past eight years, Stella Harvey has donned a captain’s hat, and steered the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival through all-weather of waters.
Truth be known, she built the boat herself too.
It may have been landing on a strange island of adventurers and adrenaline-junkies, that prompted her Noah-like mission to construct an ark for arts and culture in Whistler.
Without a doubt, her commitment to the literary community has brought about a space for creative creatures of every kind – poets, screenwriters, novelists, short story writers, journalists, documentary-writers, children’s book writers, memoirists… and when the ship docks at Creekside for the weekend of September 11-13 this year, all the word-nerds and word-watchers can come out to play.
Stella Harvey, founder and director of the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival
It’s opening night for the Bard-killing debut of a grassroots theatre festival in Whistler. (Really, there’s no need for any more Shakespeare in the park.)
$20 tickets, or $35 for a 2 night, 2 show pass, can be purchased online, or at the door of the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre.
Choose each night between 2 contemporary plays – a dark comedic musical from one of Canada’s most widely produced playwrights, or a one-woman show fresh from an acclaimed run at the Calgary Fringe Festival.
The Blank Slate Theatre Festival runs from Thursday through Saturday, and is a great chance to be part of the freshest arts initiative to come out of Whistler this year.
That makes you the perfect combination of adventurer, to take up the task of raising history from the dead.
The Whistler Museum has made excavation its mission – the excavation of stories. As Manager of Education Services Jehanne Burns is fond of saying, the future belongs to the storytellers.
The Museum’s new exhibit, to be launched in 2010, will feature a Hall of Characters – key players in Whistler’s story, like Franz Wilhelmsen, Rob Boyd, Al Raine, and Garry Watson. But there were plenty of other characters – just waiting for a storyteller to spin a yarn from their life histories…
The desire to put the power of time-travel – to the past and the future – squarely in the hands of aspiring storytellers, prompted the Museum to partner up with the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival and sponsor the attendance of a writer at the month-long writer in residence program.
The writer will get the chance to develop a feature length article under the mentorship of Wayne Grady. No experience is necessary. Just a pencil, a pair of overalls, and a willingness to step back in time. Any time you like…
The RMOW started the poetry ball rolling, with their Poet’s Pause sculptures, and the Writers Festival is jumping in on the act, with a free poetry walk and writing session on Sunday September 13, which is aimed at helping people shut up their inner critic and fire off some deep thoughts.
The poet Robert Frost said that a poem begins as a lump in your throat. I’ve always experienced that first inkling more as a stone in my boot…(read more)
Pam Barnsley reads the poem that is about to become embedded in the Whistler landscape
Another (beautifully constructed) book sculpture was constructed at Lisbon’s Modern Art Centre. It’s evocative, to create landscapes and buildings from the very material that allows us to do the same thing, in our minds, from the ether…
I can’t help but to see a trend here… and wonder if the sculptors, by appropriating the book and repurposing it into art, are telling us something?
And if the book is dead – what does that mean for civilisation? Is it time to revive oral storytelling? (Or to build a bunker from your book collection, stockpile ammunition and canned goods and hunker down with a candle and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road?)
Weird. All the University-bound folk I have met recently are studying courses that were not available when I trundled off to school. Disaster and emergency management degrees, and eco-therapy or nature-based counselling.
Which adds up to me to a great big dark thundercloud.
Is there any clearer sign that the world in the dark-days-parking lot, than that kids leaving high school are seeking careers in crisis management, be it through bureaucracy or nature-bonding?
As Steve Casimiro writes, do we really need $150/hour therapy advice to let us in on the secret that nature matters?
Do we really need some cultishly secret American Stonehenge to etch advice for the survivors of the human race onto giant granite tablets, reiterating LEAVE ROOM FOR NATURE – LEAVE ROOM FOR NATURE – LEAVE ROOM FOR NATURE.
Nature is awesome. And we have lost our sense of reverence… And that leaves us without a compass when disaster strikes.. and without enough sense of meaning to get through life without an eco-therapist.
Kids, it’s time to go outside. Get out of the city. Turn off all your devices. Unplug. Take a breath. And look around. Feed the wild in you by becoming part of the great big wild. Let that be your Sunday sacrament.
The Whistler Museum, which has been busy getting out of the box of a facility and taking stories to the streets, is partnering up with the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, to provide a free time-machine trip to anyone willing to journey back to Whistler’s past, excavate a story, and write it up.
The Whistler Writers Festival, through September’s month-long residency program, will provide all the technical support and mentoring an aspiring time-traveller will need.
Interested scribes should be available to blast off at the residency’s opening potluck and meeting on September 3. Contact Jehanne Burns at the Museum with questions or an expression of interest by Tuesday 25 August. education@whistlermuseum.org
The scholarship enables the time-traveller to benefit from one-on-one mentoring with Wayne Grady, weekly classes to help develop their skills and to learn how to give and receive feedback on their work. Over the course of the month of September, they will have the chance to research and develop a story that will add to the Museum’s efforts to showcase Whistler’s character and characters during the 2010 Olympics.
First Nations writers and storytellers will also have the opportunity to take part in the residency. The Pique is providing a scholarship to cover the residency fees. Interested writers should contact Gwen Barlee at the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre. gwen@slcc.ca
Felt a chill lately around the world of freelance writing? Or wanting to make the break into writing for magazines, despite the climate?
Julie H Ferguson, an instructor with Vancouver Community College’s creative writing program, has guided hundreds of writers to publishing success.
At the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, her session “Pitching in a Cold Climate” is the perfect prep course for the Pitcher’s Mound – 2.5 hours on how to turn yourself into an expert, value-add with photos, sidebars, web add-ons, and podcasts, and how to nail the pitch.
Then, take your newfound skills straight onto the field. Ten budding magazine writers will get an exclusive audience with 5 of Canada’s leading magazine editors. Step up to the plate with this one-shot to go all-star and sell your best story ideas to explore, Color,SBC Skier,BC Business and Western Living magazines, as James Little, Sandro Grison, Leslie Anthony, Matt O’Grady and Charlene Rooke slip on the catcher’s mitt and field the best pitches you can make.
Sign up early to log your spot at the Pitchers Mound, or nab a ticket to sit back in the audience and enjoy the gladiator spectacle!
1. Two months after being officially named the city of Vancouver in 1886, the entire town burned to the ground thanks to a routine slash and burn that got out of hand. The fire was so hot it melted fob watches and metal signage and turned folks to ash in seconds flat.
2. John Clough lived on a squat in what is now Stanley Park, and was the local lamplighter, poundkeeper and town drunk. Clough was put in jail so many times for being drunk the police finally made him jail warden. He was put in charge of the chain gang as well.
3. “Chinook jargon,” the old slang trade language used along the North Pacific Coast between Salish, Whites, Chinese and others who needed a common tongue to do business. With over a thousand words, highlights of chinook jargon include “chickamin,” which means money, and “eena,” which means beaver.
4. A herd of wild cattle roamed Stanley Park, before it was called Stanley Park, and were eventually all hunted down and shot by government men.
5. The Coast Salish people lived here for more than 5,000 years. They lived relatively peaceful and harmonious lives with their neighbours and natural surroundings. The first white child they ever saw was in 1873. The baby was H.O. Alexander, first son of R.H. Alexander, manager of Hastings Sawmill.
6. There were trees in Vancouver as tall and taller than the towering redwoods in Oregon, and wide enough (some were over 50 feet around) that a stump could double as a dancefloor at a New Year’s Eve party in 1886.
7. Opium was a legal and bustling enterprise for the debt-ridden Chinese immigrant community in Vancouver. That is, until 1908, when that all came to a halt after Mackenzie King, then the federal deputy minister of labour, successfully pushed for a federal law prohibiting the Chinese from selling or manufacturing opium. This was inspired by his visit to Vancouver a year earlier to witness the results of the anti-Asian labour riots. He returned to Toronto with anti-Asian horror stories that helped the country enact federal laws based entirely on racial prejudice, in order to help him secure the western vote.
8. The rivers were so loaded with salmon you could catch them with your bare hands.
9. Elk once roamed Vancouver, long before the white men laid eyes on the place.
10. Chester S. Rollston, a native of Vancouver and a clerk at a pioneer hardware store on Cordova Street in the early 1900s, invented the modern clothesline.
10.5. According to J.S. Matthews — Vancouver’s first historian, photographer, archivist and gas station owner — Chester Rollston’s father, J.C. Rollston, was the first gas station attendant in the world … at J.S. Matthews’ own gas station.
Am reading CC Humphreys‘ Vlad the Last Confession, an epic novel of the real dracula, and can’t put it down. It’s bloody, to be sure… but not in the way you’d think. Revelation: Dracula was a real person. But he wasn’t a vampire. Humphreys managed to separate the man from the myth – at least the blood-sucking myths – and recreate the life of Dracula… which is utterly compelling.
Hopefully, Chris can help exorcise the fiend when he takes part in the Whistler Writers Festival… Or maybe he’ll just scare the shit out of local students, when he visits schools before the Festival kicks off…
Dabble, splash about or dive down to the creative deep, urge the organisers of the 8th annual Whistler Readers and Writers Festival. Just get wet. There’s everything from water wings in the kiddie pool to full scuba outfits on hand…
For dabblers and tentative tootsies. Test the water:
Get Pickled with the Poets. A FREE guided poetry walk under the stars. Whistler poet laureates Pam Barnsley and Mary MacDonald will lead a 2 hour stroll by Alta Lake’s Poet’s Pause sculptures, with exercises and suggestions to help you meet your Muse. (Sunday, September 13, 4:30-6:30. Free. But register online at www.theviciouscircle.ca.)
Get Appraised. Got some notes and aren’t sure what they’re worth? Pull them from the billfold and show them to Whistler’s resident writers, Wayne Grady or Merilyn Simonds for a free, no-strings-attached manuscript evaluation. (Sunday, September 13, 2:00pm – 4:00pm)
Get Cranked Up. Wayne Grady and Merilyn Simonds offer a 2 hour crash course in cranking up your writing. Tips from the pros. Just $10. (Sunday, September 13, 4:30 – 6:30)
Pick One. Experts in philanthropy say that ‘intrapersonal tithing’, or giving to yourself, totally counts. So give yourself $25 and pick one session from the Festival’s Saturday seminars, and give yourself a taste of workshopping. Choose your pleasure – is it writing for kids? Bringing attitude to your storytelling? Starting out in screenplays? Learning how to pitch? Finding your voice?
Pick a Stream and Dive on in. 12 seminars. 4 streams. Focus on one stream, or splash across the lanes – there are no pool police.
Writing for Children. Writing is like giving birth. It’s all very well to be pregnant with ideas, but at some point, you have to get those ideas out into the world. And it doesn’t have to be painful, if you have the right team around you! Kick off with a morning session with young adult fantasy trilogist, CC Humphreys as he leads participants through a hands-on writing workshop on Characters in Action, then skip over to Kids TV, as prolific kids TV series screenwriter Cindy Filipenko shows you how to get your concept to market. Finally, Whistler children’s book author Sara Leach offers Writing for Children and how to take those bottom-drawer ideas and turn them into a published book.
Writing for Magazines. Break into the world of glossies with Julie H Ferguson’s crash course in How to Pitch in a Cold Climate, then take your new-found skills to the Pitchers Mound, where 5 magazine editors await to field your best story ideas. Hone the craft after lunch with some of Canada’s most widely published magazine writers and editors, Writing Peoplewith Wayne Grady, Where the Action Is with Leslie Anthony, or Bringing Attitude to Your Storytelling with Michel Beaudry.
Technique Tune-up: Getting your Prose Lean, your Characters Mean (or meaningful), and your Writing Voice Toned Up. Learn about the craft of Writing Place with Wayne Grady,or Finding Your Voice with Merilyn Simonds, then Trim the Fat with Merilyn’s session on editing, or Get Fierce with the Pleasure of Writing the Short Story with Nancy Lee.
Of course, these permutations and combinations are but a drop in the bucket of all the possibilities that exist if you’re willing to make a splash at the Writers Festival this fall.
Full Immersion involves signing on for the month-long writer-in-residence, in which participants work one-on-one with Wayne Grady or Merilyn Simonds, on a piece of work of their own choice. Two places are still available. Contact stella25@telus.net immediately!
Just Looking, Thanks. Prefer to watch? Sure. Every writer needs a reader, (or five thousand if you want to be a best-seller). There’s plenty of pool-side pleasure in just flaking out with a great book and slyly checking out the talent from behind your dark glasses.
Great spectating is to be had at:
Friday Night Gala. Novelists Lee Henderson (The Man Game), Claire Mulligan (The Reckoning of Boston Jim) and Annabel Lyon (The Golden Mean) get chatty with former host of CBC’s Hot Air, Paul Grant, on time-travel, the usefulness of philosophy degrees and naked wrestling. Cash bar and live entertainment. Legends at Creekside. $25.
The Pitchers Mound brings 5 Canadian magazine editors to the field, as brave aspiring writers pitch their fast balls and best ideas. $35 includes a seat at the gladiator ring, an insight into how the editorial mind works, a bag of magazines and lunch. Legends at Creekside.
Saturday Night Showdown.He Read, She Read: The Battle of the BookClubs, features Nancy Lee, Lee Henderson, Mike Berard, Chris Humphreys and Pam Barnsley debating the merits of reading collectively versus in a convent (“no boys allowed”). Plus, a spoken word performance by Shane Koyzan, setting the tone for the national debut of Haiku Idol, a speed poetry writing contest open to all. Free appies and drink specials, Players Chophouse, just $25.
Releasing the Salmonids. 20 emerging writers have been working on their stuff with our Writers in Residence, and on Sunday at Alta Lake Station House, they’ll brave the big bad world and share their works. Cheer them on as they go forth to face their destiny.
So, plan to get your feet wet, and wade on in to Whistler’s Fall Writers Fest. Full program details and ticket sales at www.theviciouscircle.ca.
Dedicating the 8th Whistler Readers and Writers Festival to anyone who wants to take their notebook scribbling to the next level, the Festival invites notebook keepers to join the September poaching ring with their Line-PoachRs Drop In HERE contest call.
Scan a page from your notebook, and email it to viciouspoachers@gmail.com for a chance to win a pass to your choice of Festival seminar.
Scannerless scribblers can pay a visit to Armchair Books, site of Whistler’s largest notebook stockpile, or Whistler Foto Source, the masters of capturing the perfect image, and use their scanners for free. BYO USB stick or CD, or take advantage of the “Vicious” discount at Whistler Foto Source to 007 your technology.
It’s Whistler’s most vexing issue – prompting many a 2am fisticuffs session outside Fat Tony’s… Who is a local? Just how long do you have to be resident in Whistler before you are entitled to a local’s discount, the bragging rights of being “local”?
Players Chophouse is one of Whistler’s newest restaurants, revamping the old Morgan’s Run at Creekside into a space that not only serves up sizzling steak, but is working hard to become a part of the community.
“We are not just a business situated in the community, we are a part of the community”, declared Nick McLaughlin, Restaurant Manager.
The Chophouse is playing host to the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival’s Saturday night Showdown, and we’re working hard to get executive chef Jon Campbell to trade his chef’s whites for a pencil and notebook for just 30 minutes – long enough to take part in the first ever Haiku Idol. Chef Campbell is whipping up special appetizers for the Showdown, to keep the crowd and Haiku Idol contestants as nourished on good food as on fast-flowing words, and specially discounted libations.
The Chophouse has gone for an all-inclusive definition of “local” – spreading the love to Whistler’s seasonal folk, who “are the working infrastructure of our community while they are here.”
The Whistler Readers and Writers Festival is all-inclusive too. Got stories? Are welcome.
Mulligan’s new novel, The Reckoning of Boston Jim, plunders tales of BC’s 1850 gold rush. “I became interested in that time in BC history after studying anthropology at UBC,” she told the Vicious Circle. “Then I realized that no one had written an novel set in that time and place. And so it seemed like something that needed to be written, more or less because I wanted read it (and hopefully others would, too).”
It seems Mulligan might have gone so deep into an era that she can’t get back. As this page from her notebook – (“a typical page, a mishmash of research, ideas, and passages of actual writing”) – reveals, she’s currently working on a book called The Dark.
“It’s based on the true story of the young Fox sisters who started (unintentionally) the spiritualist movement in the 1840s after playing a ghost trick on their mother,” she says. “Or was it a trick?”
Chris Humphreys has channelled his fantastic imagination into six historical fiction novels, a trilogy for young adults and his most recent book, ‘Vlad – The Last Confession’, the epic novel of the real Dracula.
In a move that threatens to put local writers at odds with the entire skiing and snowboarding community, the Vicious Circle, producers of the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, has pronounced September to be line-poaching month.
The Vicious gang were emboldened by the successful reception of several 2008 writing workshops under the guidance of Whistler’s current writer in residence, Wayne Grady, entitled: “The Frying Pan”, and “The Fire”, which focussed on how to poach lines from your own notebook, and grow them into something more substantial.
“This reverence for the perfect line… and for not poaching has got to stop,” a spokesperson for the group declared.
“The note-book is where it all begins. Anyone scribbling away at a journal or on random scraps of paper is a writer. They should get into the poaching ring.”
Dedicating the 8th Whistler Readers and Writers Festival to anyone who wants to take their notebook scribbling to the next level, the Festival invites notebook keepers to join the September poaching ring with their Line-PoachRs Drop In HERE contest call.
Scan a page from your notebook, and email it to viciouspoachers@gmail.com for a chance to win a pass to your choice of Festival seminar. With 20+ to choose from (check out the selection at www.theviciouscircle.ca), you’re sure to find a reason to drop-in.
Scannerless scribblers can pay a visit to Armchair Books, site of Whistler’s largest notebook stockpile, or Whistler Foto Source, the masters of capturing the perfect image, and use their scanners for free. BYO USB stick or CD, or take advantage of the “Vicious” discount at Whistler Foto Source.
Activity Day rule number one: Don’t run with scissors.
Actually, this Craft Fair is of a different kind. All you need is a stack of business cards and $35 (if you’re smart enough to be a member of BCAMP, Federation of BC Writers, Canadian Authors Association, Writers’ Union of Canada and Professional Writers Association of Canada. If not, you’re only penalised an additional $10.)
What you get – (no, not a misshapen clay ashtray to gift to your mother…) – is a chance to hobnob with a bunch on industry people, lunch, and the chance to soak up loads of info from three panel sessions on The Art of the Interview, Writing Online, and the Tricks of the Trades (opportunities from the often-overlooked outlet of trade publications.)
Presenters of the Whistler Writers Festival’s Pitching Session, the BC Association of Magazine Publishers, are running the Magazine Writers’ Craft Fair on Saturday August 15 at the SFU Harbour Centre in Vancouver (515 Hastings Street.)
I admit it. What we secretly want to do with the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival is create a critical mass of wickedly talented people in one place at one time, all riffing on ideas and inspiring each other.
Kind of the way I imagine it would be if Spike Jonze, heart-breaking genius Dave Eggers and wild thing godfather Maurice Sendak sat down together for tea.
Joan Richoz, once-upon-Whistler’s-founding librarian and arguably Whistler’s most well-read citizen, says her book-club takes the summer off.
Pemberton’s brain-trust is reading Niall Ferguson’s Empire. (Is that what happens when you mixed-sex your bookclub? Books that combine paper-weight with thesis?)
Stella Harvey, Writers Festival Director, has thrown down the guantlet to her bookclub – each member will read one of the books of the Festival’s Opening Night guests – either Claire Mulligan’s The Reckoning of Boston Jim, Annabel Lyon’s The Golden Mean, or Lee Henderson’s The Man Game. When the bookclub meets on September 24, they’ll have had the chance to have read the book and heard the author read and speak to it. Will they still discuss the essential themes at their September 24 meeting? Or will they talk about how the author’s voice and outfit recast their take on the story?
Finally, guest panelist for the He Said She Said: Battle of the Bookclubs chat, Mike Berard, says his bookclub just finished a three-book teenage fantasy series. The rules for his club is that everyone nominates a choice, and then the dice is cast. And teen fantasy trilogy is what the dice chose.
Is Whistler really full of cranky and cantankerous folk? Or is there an underground of stand-up comedians and satire sketch writers riffing on pay parking, zombies and the flavours of ice-cream?
The Pique has planted $400 in seed money to grow a few funny bones this summer. So look on the bright side of life, Brian, and send your material to the Piquemeisters by Friday August 28.
Hitting Whistler’s best alternative theatrespace at the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre (home to the sold-out February Joseph Boyden/Shelagh Rogers/Amanda Boyden/Steven Galloway love-in), a Festival combo pass runs for just $35, and provides entry to two plays over a choice of three nights, from Thursday August 27-Saturday August 29.
Joseph Boyden and Shelagh Rogers fill the house at one of Whistler's best alternative theatre venues, the Squamish Lil'wat Cultural Centre - soon to stage Problem Child for the inaugural Blank Slate Theatre Festival
Problem Child is the story of a young couple cooped up in a motel room waiting to hear if Children’s Services will return their baby to them. It’s a dark comedy about love, death, red-tape and drunken motel clerks. The play, funny and heartbreaking in equal measure won the Chalmers Ward for Best New Play and was written by member of the Order of Canada, one of Canada’s most widely produced playwrights, George F Walker.
Some Reckless Abandon is a one-woman show written by Leah Bailly, directed by Lori Triolo and performed by Cara Yeates.
Cara plays Madeleine, an 18 year old girl whose only hope of escaping her desparate Alberta hometown is to sign on for Teenage Jesus Summer Camp in Honduras, where she’ll learn to save souls, and pine to be busted free by her hometown cowboy.
The show comes straight from an acclaimed run at the Calgary Fringe Festival where it was hailed as one of the best shows of the Fringe, polished, professional, with a stellar script and convincing performance from Yeates.
How do you get the shot? What’s fact? What’s fiction? How much of an expert do you have to be to get your films shown and sold? For aspiring filmmakers and armchair enthusiasts, the Adventure Filmmaker Seminar is chock-full of flavour.
Tis the summer of U-pick, and if you don’t have a freezer full of berries, your palate will not forgive you when the fall hits, and you’re longing for strawberry smoothies or raspberry compote, or blueberry pie…
And in the spirit of U-pick and crowd-sourcing, the Vicious Circle seeks to harness the power of the collective in the selection of the official festival 2009 t-shirt.
Realising there is enough violence out there this summer, with forestfires raging and mercury busting out of thermometers, the Vicious Circle attempts a major peace-broking initiative, inviting rival factions to sit down together at Whistler’s Players Chophouse for He Said, She Said: The Battle of the Bookclubs, September 11 2009
Major diplomacy efforts have focussed on the drafting of a voluntary Convention on Readers Rights, which the Vicious Circle is proposing as Rules of Engagement to local leaders, librarians, booklovers, word-nerds and rabid book-group hosts.
Whereas the act of reading is often a solitary one, but it can sometimes be nice to get together with other humans and mutually discuss a book, we the undersigned agree that: 1. Readers have the right to gather together, under the pretext of discussing a book, and not really discuss the book much at all.
2. Readers have the right to declare their bookclubs to be all male or all female without breaching Canada’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms or being taken to the Supreme Court.
3. Readers are free to belong to more than one bookclub and to hold multiple alliances with, variously, the appreciators of trashy airport/beach fiction, advocates of the literary classics, and propagators of dense non-fiction tomes.
4. Readers, when discussing a book, should be willing to offer informed opinions, to agree to disagree, and if all intelligent thought fails, to like or dislike something “just because.”
5. The “just because” option is a ‘Get out of Jail Free’ card and should only be deployed sparingly.
The Vicious Circle has invited various faction leaders to the table at Players Chophouse on September 12 2009 to discuss the most controversial matters at hand. Lee Henderson, author of the Man Game, the Ethel Wilson prize-winning novel about Vancouver’s historic fight clubs, will be joined by member of all-male bookclub Mike Berard, whose bookclub members are forbidden from mentioning Fight Club.
the first rule of fight club is do not talk about fight club. the first rule of bookclub is you do not talk about fightclub.
Dual book club member, and writer, Pam Barnsley, will represent several different hat-wearing communities, while Vancouver authors Nancy Lee and Chris Humphreys add to the cacophony.
“I do believe,” says the Vicious Circle’s diplomatic envoy, a chronic peacebroker and enduring optimist, Stella Harvey, “that with adult discussion, a little bit of wine and some free appetizers, we will be able to discover our common ground and have a very hearty discussion about the mutual benefits of reading collectively.”
Harvey hopes that all faction leaders will endorse the Convention of Readers Rights, but admits that a temporary truce lasting from 7pm – 10pm, allowing people to enjoy spoken word poet Shane Koyczan, the Haiku Idol and the Battle of the Bookclubs, without any actual physical violence and a minimum of spilled drinks, is all she needs to go to bed happy.
Tickets for the Battle of the Bookclubs are limited and likely to sell out, so to avoid being elbowed out of the way in a front-door frenzy, book your ticket online. Bookgroups looking to represent their factions by deploying a sizable number of representatives are invited to contact the Stella aka “The General” Harvey, Festival Director, for group discount information. Tel: 604 932 4518, Stella25@telus.net
Annabel, a guest at this fall’s Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, has just completed her first novel (on the heels of two excellent story collections), The Golden Mean, and she will read from it, and speak to it, at the festival’s Friday night Gala, hosted by CBC’s Paul Grant.
Wigod hails Lyon as brainy and incisive, evidenced here in a piece she wrote for Quill and Quire on learning the craft of writing fiction.
The book has been described as “impeccably researched” and “brilliantly told.”
Also on Wigod’s watchlist is Salt Spring Island writer Brian Brett, whose new book Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life is coming out from Greystone in September, and plonks Brett fair and square in Michael Pollan terrritory.
So, I have been trying to craft a letter to my MLA, Joan McIntyre, the Minister of Education, Margaret MacDiarmid, and the Premier, Gordon Campbell, to express my support for libraries, and my concern that this funding might be slashed. But every sentence I craft makes me worried that I am giving them more ammunition… more reason to disable libraries… more rationale to weed out these dangerous and revolutionary hotbeds within our communities.
After all, in libraries, the flow of information is free.
I can find out about anything – how to can and preserve, how to start my own business, how to incorporate the pattern language into house design, how the gold rush influenced the settlement of this valley, where to get a fishing licence... And anything they don’t have there, they will order in for me, from another library, in this amazing pre-digital network of information-managers.
Everyone is an equal. The place is truly democractic. A semi-homeless guy and my community’s richest citizen can both equally avail themselves of the library’s services. My library offers free courses on digital photography and the internet for local seniors. It offers storytelling for new parents and their babies. (I always wondered how new moms automatically knew the words to all those nursery rhymes I have forgotten. I thought they just had better memories than me, making them eminently more qualified to procreate.) It offers storytelling in Japanese, because there are so many young families with one Japanese-speaking parent in this community.
Noone is tracking what I read. Even though my local librarians could probably put together a pretty good psychological profile on me, based on my borrowing patterns, they protect that information.
I can pursue entertainment – books, fiction, non-fiction, community classes and meetings, borrow books and music and audiobooks – without having to spend money.
Our entire culture is made up of people who have been living beyond their means for a long time. And the government is included. Trimming budgets, becoming a bit more frugal, analysing wants and needs – these are all important things.
Cutting operating budgets retrospectively, and potentially, from libraries, is a decision with the potential for hugely negative ramifications. Local media outlets are getting axed. Community reporting on programs like the CBC are getting shut down. Local libraries are one of the only places where local news can be gathered and disseminated.
Local libraries are one of the only places where a person living in a sharehouse with several other people, not working until they get called for a shift, scraping by with no spending money, can go, relax, hang out, read a book or some magazines (that they couldn’t otherwise afford to buy), use the internet (for free)… and we need these refuges in our current economic storm.
But then, maybe our elected officials don’t want politically literate constituents. Maybe they don’t want citizens who are able to navigate through information. Maybe they don’t want people to read, or to not spend money when they don’t have any, or to gather together and become stronger…
But I would like to believe that my elected officials are in office because they want to serve the community and to make the world a better place and to leave positive legacies for future generations. All that is incubating, constantly, in the library network across the province.
What do the cuts means? No more inter-library loans, author readings, summer reading club, baby book times, or Seniors Wednesdays at the Library.
Please don’t cut funding to libraries. Please be a little bit radical and allow us this public commons, this space in which, despite a desperate economy, we can enjoy abundance.
With today as their deadline, Whistler Reads folk have been busy creating a fountain of books in the Whistler Public Library, inspired by Contemporary Artist, Alicia Martin’s “Bilbliographia” installation in Cordoba, Spain, and the Whistler Artwalk.
All it took was 140 ft of custom bent rebar, 75 ft of rebar wire and hundreds of books donated by the Whistler community and the Library. It all ties in to tonight’s Whistler Reads discussion, ”Seven Days In The Art World” by Sarah Thornton.
American photographer Kyle Cassidy once wrangled an invitation to a party at award-winning sci-fi writer Michael Swanwick’s house. Mostly, he suspects, because he was mistaken for someone else.
While there, Cassidy asked if he could see the five Hugos Swanwick had won, and therewith found himself in Swanwick’s office.
“THIS” thought Cassidy, “is a place of great significance and it needs to be seen!”
Cassidy says it was like he’d cracked open Swanwick’s skull and seen the gears of his genius. He described the workspace as a nest, made out of books, as intricate and well assembled as a Nevelson sculpture.
His natural response, as a photographer, was to ask to document it.
And that launched a project, whereiwrite.org, in which Cassidy set out to explore the places writers build around themselves, to see if there’s any connection between where they work and the work itself.
Library use is up across the province. The Pemberton library, since moving into its new facility, saw a 70% increase in circulation in April, with 75 new members a month…
And the province is threatening to cut funding from libraries? Seriously? Is it a cunning plan to create a stupider, more compliant, less politically literate population? Is it part of an ongoing agenda to create a two-tier society of haves and have nots? Are the BC Liberals THAT offended by public spaces that not only do they want to privatise rivers, education, our railways, but they want to magic away the most democratic of public institutions – the library? Or is it just thoughtless?
The documents, poached from the notebooks of Wayne Grady and Merilyn Simonds reveal details from their works-in-progress as well as cunning plans on Grady’s part to subvert fiction through the continued support of creative non-fiction.
Further inquiries have revealed that the Vicious Circle is conspiring with the Resort Municipality of Whistler to turn the formerly disused residence, Alta Lake House, into headquarters for a growing gang of renegade scribblers, who are gathering in response to the call to arms issued by the Residency leaders Grady and Simonds.
Clearly in a move to avoid the attention of CSIS, CIA, Minster Kenney and the Canadian Border Police, Grady and Simonds are currently making their way by vehicle to Whistler, where they will hole up in their new headquarters, indoctrinate 20 warriors of the pen in a month-long training camp, and then remain installed in the house to work on their own nefarious projects throughout the fall.
Vicious Circle insiders advise that training camp still offers opportunities for would-be ink-slingers. All that potential residency collaborators require is a desire to commit themselves to the cause. No other training is required. Although a “manuscript” is due August 10, the workshop leaders are as capable of guiding a writer on how to grow a story from several pages of a notebook, as they are to workshop more developed manifestos.
A page from Merilyn Simond's notebook reveals the genesis of her current work-in-progress
Wayne Grady's notebook contains all the evidence needed
“For me, writing starts with a line, or some imagination, or some notion, and I just go with it as far as I can. You set yourself afloat on the language. And you think, I’ll see how far it can take me before this little raft I’ve cobbled together falls apart and everybody understands that I’m really just a fraud, or drowning—whichever comes first. But when it’s really working, readers go with you to the most unlikely places. They take big leaps with you.”
So says undertaker (and New York Times op-ed writer) Thomas Lynch in the Utne reader this month.
Working with the dead gives him a unique perspective – ““Yeats said to Olivia Shakespeare that the only subjects that should be compelling to a studious mind are sex and death. Those are the bookends. And think of it, what else do we think of, what else is there besides that? I think most people drive around all day being vexed by images of mortality and vitality. All they’re wondering about is how they’re going to die and who they’re going to sleep with, or variations on that theme—what job they’re going to have, whether they’re tall enough or skinny enough or short enough or smart enough or fast enough or make enough money, and all of it plays into these two bookends.
If you’re writing about life, you’re writing about death. If you’re writing about life, you’re writing about love and grief and sex and all that stuff.”
Once upon a time, he says, poets could change cultures… They were the ones who literally brought the news from one place to another, walking from town to town, “which is how we got everything to be iambic and memorable and rhymed and metered, because the tradition was oral before it was literary.”
Maybe instead of writers’ workshops, we should be hosting writers walk-shops… reconnecting the story with the feet, the beat, the action of blood-pump and armswing, as opposed to the navelgaze and swoon and angsty-pencil-chewing…
Because, says the undertaker, there is power in poetry. “Poetry is as good an ax as a pillow. You should be able to cut with it if you want to. But I do want to avoid hurting people inadvertently. I don’t mind hurting people I intend to hurt—inadvertent damage is the thing I fear. I think all writers are capable of it. You’re dealing with powerful tools, you know; words are powerful business. I’m not saying you should be guided by fear, but I think general kindness is still a better thing. It’s just evolution. We want to be better people.”
After more than a year of operating in Whistler, Players Chophouse is working hard to cater to the tastes and budgets of working locals – hence their summer initiative, 420 Fridays.
The laidback weekly patio session, as featured in the Pique’s Epicurious column, combines local musical talent coupled with a $10 pizza and beer special. If Mother Nature doesn’t co-operate and the heavens open, the party simply moves inside to the lounge and all appetizers on the menu are half-off.
New chef, Whistler’s Jon Campbell, has pared the menu to feature appies and plenty of dishes for sharing… a budget-conscious approach that follows along the lines of “save water, shower with a friend…”
Their current menu features 14 appetizers, like Quebec City poutine, bruschetta, creamy, traditional escargot, and delicious thin-crust prime rib pizza, all ranging in price from $8 to $18 apiece.
Official friends of the Slow Food and Green Table movements, Players Chophouse is also a friend of the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival. they’re far-sighted enough to know that literature is just as nourishing as a good meal.
We read in the summer, because long sultry days beckon us to slow down, to power down the crackberries and texts and tweets, and wallow in daylight that lasts until 9pm, and heat that thickens the blood, and a culture that celebrates a lazy day at the lake, or in a hammock… and the pace of a novel suddenly fits, in ways it struggles to do when you’re in the time-famine of a busy week with too much on the to-do list.
With a host of Canada’s best writers and novelists headed to Whistler this fall for the 8th Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, this summer is the perfect opportunity to beef up on your CanCon…
Here’s our top 5:
1. The Reckoning of Boston Jim, by Claire Mulliganis the book that changed bookseller, Robert J. Wiersma’s mind about historical fiction. “Deeply historical but with a strong contemporary approach and solid storytelling, it’s the sort of book the makes other novelists jealous… It deserves every accolade that can be applied to it, and more than that, it deserves readers.
Longlisted for the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize, The Reckoning of Boston Jim evokes the colony of British Columbia, 1863, amidst the chaos of the Cariboo Gold Rush. Long-abandoned mine-shafts and traplines are par for the course amongst the mountains of the Whistler region – this gripping account of life 150 years ago brings the ghosts of the Pemberton Trail era to life.
3. The Golden Mean, by Annabel Lyon is Lyon’s response to the question “what are you going to do with an undergrad degree in philosophy?” A tour of Greek history, brought to life by Lyon’s deft prose, The Golden Mean tells the story of the philosopher Aristotle who, for 7 years worked as the tutor to the prince’s son, the child who would grow up to become Alexander the Great. Exhilarating, brilliant and profound, hailed the reviewers.
4. February, by Lisa Moore In 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine’s Day storm. All eighty-four men aboard died, and the tragedy remains just below the surface of life for Newfoundlanders. February is a fictionalised story of Helen O’Mara, one of those left behind when her husband, Cal, drowns.
In the Globe and Mail, she tells John Barber: “I think a book is just part of a tree. The living thing is the story,” she said, adding that every book means something different to every reader. “When a reader speaks to me, it’s like the book is as much theirs as it is mine.”
Moore claims to love writing even more than she loves talking about it. “I think life just is deeper and richer when you reflect in the way you have to reflect in order to write about it. It’s an obsession. I absolutely love it. I love it, I love it”
To celebrate the forthcoming Slow Food Cycle, the Pemberton Library has designated the last week of July (Monday July 27 – Sunday August 2) Harvest Time for stories.
Storypickers are wanted for the Strange Summer Fruit project, to help the Library discover whether pickings are sweeter in summer or winter…
Mostly, the stories of people’s lives are told after they’re dead.
Instead of obits, the Pemberton & District Public Library is encouraging people to write “live bytes” about folk in their community, with the second round of Strange Fruit: A Community Story Harvest calling for contributors for the Slow Food Cycle summer exhibit.
Strange Fruit launched in the winter, when more than 30 folk, ranging from pioneers to new residents to former Mayors, war veterans, vodka brewers, coroners and various nominees for Citizen of the Year, were interviewed. Local photographers shot their portraits and the resulting “pickings” were exhibited at the Library during Winterfest.
To contribute a 300 word story-portrait from the Potato Nation for the summer harvest, writers/contributors can sign on at the Library. Stories will be due August 2.
Last summer, Watermark’s Lilli Clark took a break from event-producing (she produces Cornucopia and the TELUS World Ski and Snowboard Festival’s cultural line-up) to take up a coveted spot at New York’s Atlantic Acting School, founded by David Mamet and William H Macy.
This summer, she’s combining her multiple hats and passions – as event producer and actor – to launch Whistler’s first ever fringe theatre event, the Blank Slate Theatre Festival.
Two performances, both comedies with an edge, will enjoy a three-night run, using fantastic alternative venues at the Squamish Lillooet Cultural Centre and The Path Gallery – giving audiences a chance to mix up their weekend and get a decent fill of dark comedy. Tickets will only be $20 per show.
At last, a theatre project that doesn’t prop itself up with Shakespeare, and is willing to start small, indie and passionate… like great art oughta. Save the date.
Win a weekend at creative boot-camp in Whistler, September 11-13 2009 with accommodation, dinner and passes to attend the 8th Whistler Readers and Writers Festival. No push-ups necessary. All you have to do is answer this skill-testing question:
Which Vancouver-based author, and Whistler Writers Festival guest, wrote the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize 2009 winning novel, The Man Game?
Dinner for two at Players Chophouse, Creekside, Whistler’s freshest steak house. Two nights accommodation at the brand new mountain lodge, Evolution, in Whistler’s Creekside.
Books and art and life already enjoy a messy connection, spilling into each other’s realms like ingredients in a messy kitchen.
The Whistler Library, BookBuffet founder Paula Shackleton and the Whistler Art Walk are combining forces this week to combine the forces of life, books and art, by creating a book sculpture.
The project, and Paula’s statement that “Books are usually forgotten items that take up space on our shelves collecting dust”, draws parallels with the wave of post-modern sculptors who reclaim junk to make art, and a simultaneous commentary on our throw-away society… It also makes me wonder if we are watching the death of the medium. E-readers are in. And those old books are good for one thing – making elaborate artistic statements.
Visit the Whistler Library during Artwalk and let us know what the book art sculpture provokes for you.
David Sedaris says “I think the only difference between me and most people is that I carry a notebook around in my top pocket.”
There’s that. And the fact that Sedaris is freaking hilarious. Chatting with the CBC last weekend, he confessed that he isn’t sure why he’s done so well, that when he started journal writing he was pretentious, and that now, when he pulls out his notebook, people tend to get nervous. ”I exploit everyone and everything I come into contact with.”
But, the vital question is, does a book review make for more readers?
Or is a movie adaptation the only thing that is really going to bump a book onto bedside tables?
Ultimately, what brings any form of entertainment to life is that it has social currency. If there is buzz… if people are talking about a) the latest scandal afflicting Jon & Kate, b) Michael Jackson’s death, c) Annabel Lyon’s new book, or d) Sarah Palin’s memoir (25% more God!), it is as if there is a wind whooping through the yard, and those particular garments are puffed full of life, and dancing around on the washing line.
It is our interest in things that gives them currency – if we talk about books and writers and ideas, those books will grow a readership. Hence, the success of Canada Reads, to get people talking about certain books, to send them in great hordes to second hand bookstores and libraries and amazon.ca…
For these crudely articulated reasons, the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival (entirely dependent on there being a culture of reading) is amped to be working with the Tyee, Vancouver Review, and the Georgia Straight, who are all keeping the conversation spicy, sparkling and substantial. Because really, there’s no reason for the sagas of Jon and Kate to ever enter your frontal lobe…
‘Bedtime stories’ becomes a literal interpretation in the design of the Uroko House Book Igloo — a cozy, fort-like enclosure of bookshelves which encircle a bed. Being surrounded in slumber by books is a bibliophile’s dream, and Point Architects enables lovers of literature to wrap themselves up in their treasured tales while drifting off to sleep in this cleverly constructed lair. The backless shelves allow one to grab a book from inside or outside the Igloo. Conceptually designed for children, we think it’s a telltale sign that as adults, we’re equally smitten with the Uroko House Book Igloo, and wouldn’t mind curling up with a good book, or fifty, in one of our own.
“It goes without saying that one consequence of our evolution as cultural beings has been an increasing dependence on objects for survival and comfort. Compared wtih the hunter-gatherers, described by Marshall Sahlins, who were horrified by the idea of having to accept gifts because it meant having to carry one more blanket or kettle along on their nomadic journeys, we are slowly being buried under towering mounds of artifacts. Recently, it has been calculated that every American will own more than four hundred electronic appliances during his or her lifetime. (Massimini, 1989)
This proliferation of artifacts would not be a problem were it not for the fact that objects compete with humans for scarce resources in the same ecosystem. Forests are being destroyed to provide lumber, wood and pulp; metal and oil are consumed to build and propel vehicles. The potential energy contained in our environment is dissipated as we convert it into objects, which rapidly become obsolete; thus we accelerate the processes of entropy that degrade the planet.”
In short, we are defined by our shit.
All that we own, owns us, in some form. All the treasures our characters surround themselves with, covet, seek out, reveals what they value, what they seek, the way they want to be perceived…
For boot-camp creative writing exercise 19, tell us about the stuff that reveals and defines a character – the item that they double back into the house to grab after the evacuation order is issued… the totem they tuck under their daughter’s pillow to ward off the monsters that wake her each night… the secrets tucked into a shoebox in the top of the wardrobe that even their husband doesn’t know of… The thing that reveals them…
This fall, if you want to write deliberately, and take your work to another level, the woods of Whistler is your ground-zero. Wayne Grady and Merilyn Simonds will hunker down in Alta Lake Station House in Whistler this September, as the 3rd and 4th writers-in-residence to be hosted by the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival.
With 25 books between them, ranging from creative non-fiction to short stories to novels, the couple bring a wealth of writing know-how to Whistler to the benefit of 20 writers who will have the opportunity to work with one of them over the month of September.
Writers interested in taking part in the residency program need to register online at www.theviciouscircle.ca. A short synopsis of the work to be developed during the residency, plus a manuscript of no more than 20 double spaced pages, is due August 10, to enable Grady or Simonds to review the work in advance of the workshops.
Residency participants will receive four one-on-one sessions with Grady or Simonds throughout September to develop their manuscript, and will also be able to attend several group lectures on various aspects of the craft of writing. With only 20 spots available, and the residency costing just $250, places are expected to fill quickly.
Remember the fable? It starred several critters and finished with a message that didn’t seem like brainwashing at the time, but somehow, we’re still programmed to believe that slow and steady wins the race.
McSweeney’s has spent the past decade breathing new life into the oldest form of storytelling. Last year, issue 28 was dedicated entirely to the fable.
Let’s revive it. Boot-Camp Ex 18 invites you to get fabulous with the fabula… Your main character is an animal. What happens next?
Making headlines in the Pique this week: writing contests, writing residencies, writing retreats. What are you waiting for? Didn’t Chekhov teach you anything?
There is a connection between writing and reading… didja realise? It’s why the Whistler Writers Festival morphed into the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, even though it’s program remains anchored heavily on craft-development and writing workshops. It’s probably why other Festivals, including the Sunshine Coast of Written Arts and the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival are pitched more towards readers, of whom there are more, than writers…
Most writers, she says, learn to write by reading. They learn to love books, by reading. They are seduced by the shimmer and power of stories, by reading.
Did they learn to write from writer’s workshops and MFA programs, she asks, a longtime writing instructor herself…
Which brings us back to the quote that launched this website, one year ago, from John Gardner, a curmudgeonly writer and teacher, who wrote that the first value of a writer’s workshop is that it makes the writer feel not only abnormal, but virtuous. “In a writers’ community, nearly all the talk is about writing. Even if you don’t agree with most of what is said, you come to take for granted that no other talk is quite so important… Talk about writing is exciting. It fills you with nervous energy, makes you want to leave the party and go home and write. And it’s the sheer act of writing, more than anything else, that makes a writer.”
And perhaps, it’s the art of reading, that teaches one much of what one needs to know about how to do it right.
“By the time (Anton) Chekhov died of tuberculosis at the age of 44, he had written, in addition to his plays, approximately six hundred short stories. He was also a medical doctor. He supervised the construction of clinics and schools, he was active in the Moscow Art Theatre, he married the famous actress Olga Knipper, he visited the infamous prison on Sakhalin Island and wrote a book about that. Once, when someone asked him his method of composition, Chekhov picked up an ashtray.
‘This is my method of composition,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow I will write a story called “The Ashtray.”‘”
(from Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer)
2. It’s gonna be the biggest gathering of word-nerds Whistler has ever seen.
3. We’re moving to Creekside!
4. The Writer in Residence programming is DOUBLING, with guest writers Wayne Grady and Merilyn Simonds bunking down on the lake.
5. Hot off the press books include Annabel Lyon’s The Golden Mean, Claire Mulligan’s The Reckoning of Boston Jim, Lee Henderson’s The Man Game, and Whistler’s own Sara Leach with Jake Reynolds: Chicken or Eagle?
6. We’re getting violent. Well, not really. But if the pen is mightier than the sword, then a gathering of word-nerds is actually more warrior-like than one might think. And we’ll be slinging sentences, ink and poetry like it’s going out of style at the first ever Haiku Idol.
7. It’s batter up with the Pitching Mound. Magazine writers get their moment in the sun, when 5 of Canada’s leading magazine editors, James Little from Explore magazine, Leslie Anthony from Skier magazine, Sandro Grison from Color magazine, Matt O’Grady from BC Business magazine and Charlene Rooke from Western Living magazine, field pitches from aspiring contributors.
8. Free steak knives for everyone who signs on by June 1.
(Apologies to those who missed the free steak knives. But as a a special offer, we can entice you with FREE PARKING, a rare and precious thing in the pre-Olympic Whistler.)
All this and more! Check out the full program at www.theviciouscircle.ca
In Azar Nafisi’s book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, she writes, “Everything is political.” Even sex, she argued. Who’s on top. Who’s on bottom.
Michael Pollan argues that food is political. In fact, it is primarily a political phenomenon. He told The Tyee that “It is the first time you can control what you take into your body, and the first time you can say no to your parents and assert your identity. So I think food and politics are very intertwined.”
What you choose to eat (and therefore, become), and what industries and business models you are thereby supporting, is also a huge political statement.
Action or inertia. It’s right there, on your dinner plate, and on your bedside table. Michael Pollan makes for good reading. Substantial. Worth checking out. Like all those lucky folk who saw him speak last weekend as the UBC Save the Farm fundraiser.
Pajamas? Pyjamas? If you look to the stairwell, you will find bananas in them… Be they your preferred lounging attire, sleeping attire, or writing attire, PJs (from the Persian: “leg garment”) have inspired a DIY form of marketing that any aspiring writer should become familiar with.
All the more reason to come out to the Vicious Circle’s Summer Potluck on Monday. Meet other local writers, discover who makes the best spinach and artichoke dip. and enjoy a free session on pajama marketing, presented by Helen Gallagher.
Keeping a book alive today is the author’s responsibility, as the publishing industry promotes only their top authors. This session, based on Helen’s book: Release Your Writing: Book Publishing Your Way, includes dozens of practical strategies to give your book international exposure, most of which exist in the online world. (Thus, they are free or inexpensive, and things you can do in your p.j.’s at home.)
This marketing topic includes “Making Sense of Social Networking,” helping
writers determine where to focus their attention.
Dress code is casual. (Wear whatever “leg attire” you like.) 9327 Emerald Drive (second entrance to Emerald).
Enough with the 4000 acre fires and the Lost Lake drownings… the Pique offers up a little bit of medicine, of which laughter is meant to be the best.
Pique Newsmagazine is hosting the Summer of Funny, a humour-writing competition, with $400 in cash up for grabs for the top entries.
Send your stories, poems, scripts, long-format jokes or other humourous pieces to Pique Newsmagazine at andrew@piquenewsmagazine.com by Thursday, July 23.
Enter as many times as you like. Maximum length of 2,000 words per entry. Pique editorial staff will judge the entries and award prizes subjectively, with the maximum of $250 going to a single outstanding submission. The winning stories will be printed in the July 30th issue of Pique.
I asked Whistler writer, Rebecca Wood Barrett, how she knows if something has got the legs to make it all the way to a novel.
She said, “I think if an idea haunts you for a long time, it’s something worth exploring. Someone once said we don’t have to worry about finding our obsessions – they will find us! But recognising that “big idea” has a lot to do with faith, too.”
I’ve heard it said that you can analyse some writer’s works and see a recurring theme, an idea they keep revisiting and exploring, something that wouldn’t let them go… Stephen Spielberg, for instance, and the idea of the lost boy. Discovering your obsessions can lead to greatness.
How do you know what you’re obsessed with, though? What you keep circling back to?
For boot-camp exercise 17, take to the page with this task in mind. Write about something you didn’t like as a child… but that you do like now.
For $150, participants can choose up to six workshops from a selection of 10 different topics on Taking Care of Yourself as a Writer, Copyright and Libel Law, Grant-Writing, Setting up a Website, Technologies for Self-Promotion, Applying to Writing Programs, Self-Publishing, Tips from Editors, how to shape and revise a manuscript, and how to pitch your project ideas.
Distilled wisdom, wrapped in a cookie-shell. Was there ever a concept so perfect, so bizarre, so ripe for literary exploitation.
Geist magazine have thrown wide the dragon’s den, launching the Geist Fortune Cookie Cookie Contest.
500 words is all that is required of you to enter this writing contest based on faux wisdom and vague predictions.
Send Geist a piece of writing inspired by a fortune cookie message. The relationship can be as tangential as you like, as long as there is a connection to the initial fortune cookie prophecy or aphorism.
Don’t eat Chinese food? Find a fortune online or make one up.
Riff on the fortune—story, essay, poem, rant, whatever—in 500 words or less.
Winning entries will be published in Geist and at geist.com.
Submit your entry at geist.com by midnight, June 1 2009. Money, fame, a lifetime supply of noodles await.
(Okay. I lied about the noodles. But then, I am not a fortune cookie. I can lie if it makes a better story, right?)
A writing practice is simply picking up a pen — a fast-writing pen, preferably, since the mind is faster than the hand — and doing timed writing exercises.
The idea is to keep your hand moving for, say, ten minutes, and don’t cross anything out, because that makes space for your inner editor to come in. You are free to write the worst junk in America. After all, when we get on the tennis courts, we don’t expect to be a champion the first day. But somehow with writing, if we don’t write the opening paragraph of War and Peace the first time we sit down with our notebook, we feel we’ve failed.
You can use a computer, but I always say you should be able to write with a pen, because someday your computer might break, or you might not have access to electricity. It’s sort of like driving: you still have to know how to walk.
I consider writing an athletic activity: the more you practice, the better you get at it. The reason you keep your hand moving is because there’s often a conflict between the editor and the creator. The editor is always on our shoulder saying, “Oh, you shouldn’t write that. It’s no good.” But when you have to keep the hand moving, it’s an opportunity for the creator to have a say. All the other rules of writing practice support that primary rule of keeping your hand moving. The goal is to allow the written word to connect with your original mind, to write down the first thought you flash on, before the second and third thoughts come in.
Lawrence Lessig might be the godfather of the copyleft and Creative Commons movement.
Earlier this month, Mark Helprin, author of Digital Barbarism wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal arguing that writers and creators need to fight back against the chipping away of copyright protection.
Imagine a city of many millions of people who support themselves and their families solely by arranging words, images and sounds, or in the industries that make this work available to others. They neither farm, fish, mine, manufacture, manage, heal, teach, build nor defend. But what they do influences most everything, shapes politics and governance, provides a conception of our time, forges the culture such as it is, and stamps the imprint of the present for history to judge. Though builders may build, in the main they follow the plans of architects. Teachers teach, but they must have a text. Politicians govern, but only upon the flow of commentary that raises them up or casts them down.
Dispersed throughout the United States, the millions of this hypothetical city do exist, in professions dependent upon the copyright protection of intellectual property. More than anywhere else, they are concentrated in New York, where you see them walking at 60 miles per hour, fully absorbed in their novels, plans, melodies, compositions, essays or designs.
Their work is peculiarly vulnerable in that it is easy to appropriate. If they were farmers, industrialists or surgeons, their problems would be different. It is not possible to copy instantaneously and in virtually unlimited quantities either potatoes, aluminum or gall bladder surgeries, as one might a song or a scanned book.
Were this vulnerability unaddressed, the producers of intellectual property would be put out of business unless they were independently wealthy or worked either as amateurs or drew salaries at the pleasure of, and beholden to, boards, committees and overseers of every type. Always at risk, the independent voice, the guarantor of political freedom and personal dignity, would be dangerously depressed along with the arts that sustain civilization.
In his book, Digital Barbarism, he argues:
“The new digital barbarism is, in its language, comportment, thoughtlessness, and obeisance to force and power, very much like the old. And like the old, and every form of tyranny, hard or soft, it is most vulnerable to a bright light shone upon it. To call it for what it is, to examine it while paying no heed to its rich bribes and powerful coercions, to contrast it to what it presumes to replace, is to begin the long fight against it.
“Very clearly, the choice is between the preeminence of the individual or of the collective, of improvisation or of routine, of the soul or of the machine. It is a choice that perhaps you have already made, without knowing it, Or perhaps it has been made for you. But it is always possible to opt in or out, because your affirmations are your own, the court of judgment your mind and heart. These are free, and you are the sovereign, always. Choose.”
Whistler Reads is plunging straight into the icy waters of the Antarctic with its latest event: a discussion of Sir Ernest Shackleton’sGreat South Pole Exploration. The book chronicles the journey of Shackleton’s unsuccessful – nonetheless epic – expedition to the Antarctic during World War I.
“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages. Bitter cold. Long months of complete darkness and constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.” More than 5,000 replied to this ad, which was posted in the newspapers of London to recruit a crew for the expedition. Twenty-four crew were chosen.
Andrew Prossin, an adventurer and managing director of One Ocean Expeditions, will speak at the Whistler Reads event, sharing his stories and photos from the Antarctic region, while Whistler’s Chris Shackleton leads the discussion.
The Vicious Circle, Whistler’s Writers Group hosts its annual gathering on June 15, at 6:30pm at 9327 Emerald Drive. All writers are welcome. Bring a plate to share at the potluck meal, which will be followed by a presentation by Chicago-area writer and publishing consultant Helen Gallagher. She will be speaking about Pajama Marketing, and Making Sense of Social Networking.
Keeping a book alive today is the author’s responsibility, as the publishing industry promotes only their top authors. Pajama Marketing is a session based on Gallagher’s book Release Your Writing: Book Publishing Your Way, which includes dozens of practical strategies to give your book international exposure, most of which exist in the online world. (Thus, they are free or inexpensive, and things you can do in your p.j.’s at home.)
This marketing topic includes “Making Sense of Social Networking,” helping writers determine where to focus their attention. The 45 minute presentation will be followed by a Q and A.
Please RSVP to Stella Harvey, stella25 (at) telus (dot) net, if you’re interested in attending.
When the management team for the TELUS World Ski and Snowboard Festival moved to the Festival office in the Conference Centre in April, they underwent an annual ritual gathering just before the Festival kick-off to share bits of advice from previous years on the frontlines. “Don’t forget to eat.” “Get your laundry done tonight.” “Don’t get too hung up if someone forgets to say please and thankyou.” ”Try and get out to enjoy at least one of the events you are producing during the 10 days.” The information itself is of marginal use – but the real power in the ritual is that it transforms a room in the TELUS Conference Centre into sacred space, where a busy and stressed team could escape to, could seek refuge, could remember to breathe during a fortnight of non-stop pressure.
It’s ironic that, surrounded by the sacred space of the West Coast mountains, a bunker room in a basement would be called upon to serve that role… but sometimes sanctuary requires a wide open sky, and sometimes it requires a closed door and a little bit of privacy.
Sacred space, and the spiritual landscape of the West Coast, is up for exploration in Star Weiss’ new book, Havens in a Hectic World: Finding Sacred Places (TouchWood Editions, Spring, 2008).
On Friday May 22, at 7pm, the Whistler Public Library hosts Weiss as she launches the book to Whistler readers.
In interviews with a wide spectrum of British Columbians, from prison inmates to cloistered nuns; from artists to First Nations Elders, Weiss uncovers and discusses the diverse meaning of sanctuary in our society. From a mountain peak to an ancient village, a waterfall to a labyrinth, from the Ismaili Jamatkhana in Burnaby to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, each sacred place leads to a deeper inquiry: How can we find sanctuary in a world defined by productivity and efficiency? Where can we seek refuge? How are our connections to the divine changing? With Havens in a Hectic World, Weiss finds powerful answers that will invite you to find your own sacred place.
“I think every place is sacred. I have many of them,” says Rabbi David Mivasair, Vice Chair of Vancouver’s InterSpiritual Centre. “We create sacred space. My five-year-old daughter’s bedside, my mother-in-law’s kitchen, my garden, the holy blossom temple of a cherry tree….It’s really about opening our eyes, opening our hearts, opening our soul to where we are. It’s our attunement to what is there that makes it a sacred place.”
Douglas Todd, Ethics and Spirituality reporter for The Vancouver Sun, says, “Star Weiss has put together an incredibly well researched and engagingly written exploration of what it means for a place to be ’sacred.’ With the fresh eyes of a former New Yorker who has long been enchanted by her wild, mysterious chosen home on the West Coast, Weiss takes the reader on a thoughtful journey into the heart of contemporary spirituality.”
This week’s cover girl in the Whistler Question is Pemberton and District Library Director, Shannon Ellis, who must be doing something right – Pemby’s new library has seen a 70% increase in circulation in the last month, and 75 new members joining each month since the library opened its doors.
Even more revolutionary, it is one of the only library’s in Canada to eschew fines. Says Ellis, “Not everybody has the means to pay fines. I just don’t think that fines make people bring stuff back.”
Given the amount of money I’ve paid out in fines to the Whistler Public Library over the years, for books just one week late, I’m cheering on the Pemberton Library’s radical approach. And it certainly has freed up some change, which makes supporting the Library’s 30th anniversary bash, with champagne, live music and a raffle, an easy thing to dig into my pocket for. May 23, 7 – 10pm. Big kids only. Cos’ of the bubbles.
Flare magazine is celebrating 30 years – no mean feat of survival in today’s magazine publishing climate… and as part of their celebration, Flare is opening up the pages of the fashion bible to aspiring writers and fledgling journalists. 600 words on the most inspiring fashion moment of the past 30 years. Due May 10.
Flare suggests: ”Perhaps it was Karl Lagerfeld and the house of Chanel, or Betsey Johnson’s runway cartwheels. Or did Molly Ringwald’s prom dress from Pretty In Pink give you pause, or possibly Vivienne Westwood’s wedding dress for SJP (that is, Carrie Bradshaw). It may have been the inspiration of Lady Diana or the new elegance of Michelle Obama.”
??
I’m dead curious to know what Whistler’s fashion high-points and trend-setting moments would be… I suspect Leslie Anthony sporting Rob Boyd as a tattoo might come close?
The best thing about seasonal life is it makes you conscious of endings and beginnings, and there’s nothing like the thought “there’s only 2 weeks left” to revive a sagging momentum.
The worst thing about seasonal life is that sometimes the endings are just a long drawn-out anti-climatic whimper. The 10 day TELUS World Ski and Snowboard Festival works some audacious magic to ensure the end of winter happens with a bang… but 10 days of non-stop partying, skiing/riding, late nights and cultural overdoses can leave one mewling for mercy like a lost kitten.
The last hurrah for the Fest, strangely enough, is its most high-brow moment… though there’s nothing snooty about the Chairlift Revue. After all, chairlifts are the great equalisers. Billionaires join ripping 4 year olds join big-hearted bums… for 20 minutes of bonding. That’s the premise GD Maxwell has exploited with his theatre project – galvanising a host of local scribblers to put pen to paper and whip up an airy scene or two.
Sunday’s show was a full house – launching the Chairlift Review into the realm occupied by other cultural juggernauts, the Olympus Pro Photographer Showdown and the 72 Hour Filmmaker Showdown, both of which sold out 2 weeks in advance.
Congrats to Max, Heather Paul and her players, and those writers who embraced their inner puppet-master and discovered the joys of watching their words come to life in other people’s hands.
Once writing has had time to sit, it gets easier to see what’s stinky and rotten, what’s strong, what’s true and vulnerable… It’s less close to you. It’s easier to work on.
Pull out your prose, and eliminate the purple bits. Edit out the modifiers. Modifiers are words that limit verbs and nouns… typically adverbs and adjectives.
And put back the ones you can’t live without.
Rewrite. Cull. Excise repetitive prose. Expand ideas that resonate somewhere in your gut.
I read the perfect explanation McSweeney’s for why I hide out writing non-fiction instead of finishing those abandoned short-stories that litter my notebook.
They let Tower explain it himself, in the frontspiece notes.
“One thing that was screwing me up was all the long-form nonfiction work I’d been doing. Nonfiction – even literary nonfiction – calls for tools and processes that are pretty much useless when it comes to making short stories. in metalworking, they have this term, “cold connection”, which is when you take two pieces of metal and a rivet. A few smart bashes, and you’ve got a bracelet with lots of nice bangles on it, and you’ve spared yourself the hot, tedious business of soldering and sweating joints. In a pinch, nonfiction can squeak by on cold connections. You go out and witness things, and if you’ve got at least a few compelling scenes, you can fuse them together with the cold rivets of journalistic writing – the transition, the fraudulent hardware of arc and angle. Nine times out of ten, the reader won’t feel gypped, never mind that there’s no real heart thumping in the thorax of your tin man.
Fiction can’t be approached in such calculated fashion; at least I can’t approach it that way and feel good about myself in the morning. But I’d been given a firm deadline for the story, so I started cold-connecting a bunch of spare parts I had laying around.”
Wells confesses his sins.
“One question a smart teacher of mine liked to ask in fiction workshops is, ‘Was this written in good faith?’ I took this to mean: did the writer make himself as vulnerable to the story’s possibilities as he wishes his readers to be? Or more simply put: does the writer believe in what he wrote?”
To write well and deeply, we must be engaged… we must fully inhabit the particular corner of the world we are in. Spring continues to summons us outside, as snow melts, trails and 6 months worth of dogshit and last year’s construction debris are revealed…
Boot-Camp exercise 14 is a call to experience place. Go somewhere. Settle in. Slow the breath. Start to pay attention. Experience the location.
Write down everything you notice.
Keep breathing.
Write the things you didn’t notice in the first place.
Check back – sight? sound? smell? touch? taste? Got them all covered? Fill in your blanks… (We all rely on our stronger senses, and let the scrawny ones atrophy.)
Out of your notes, create a paragraph or page of description.
Having fed the seed of budding creative writers, the Vicious Circle (Whistler’s Writers Group) is now offering the blue square version of creative writing seminars, picking up where the first course left off. New attendees are also welcome. The course will run for six weeks beginning Thursday May 7, at the Whistler Public Library, and the cost will be $120.
The Blue Square program aims to open up new and challenging terrain for writers, teaching participants to recognise the germ of a good story and how to make it bloom.
Weekly lectures will cover topics including What is Story, and How is it Different from an Anecdote?; Building Blocks of Fiction: including Exposition, Narrative Summary, Scene (Dialogue and Action); Creating Characters; Advancing Plot; Deciding on Point of View and Tense; The Writer’s Voice; and Where and How to Publish your Story.
In-class exercises and feedback and revision will draw on the lecture topics over 6 weeks to develop one story, that, ultimately, will be ready to launch into the world. The final session, Wood Barrett will cover writing markets and where to publish the stories.
Wood Barrett is an honours graduate in Film Studies from Ryerson, and recently undertook her Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing at UBC. She is a published short story writer, an award-winning filmmaker, a television producer with Resort TV and winner of the 2008 Postcard Jam, or as she modestly says, “a bit of a genre-crosser.” She’s also delivered several workshops at previous Whistler Writers Festivals, including How to Pitch, and How to Write for Film.
To sign up for the course, which is offered for $120, go to www.theviciouscircle.ca.
New for 2009, the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival presents The Pitching Mound.
Ten budding magazine writers will get an exclusive audience with 5 Canadian magazine editors. Step up to the plate with this one-shot to go all-star and sell your best story ideas to explore, Color, Skier, BC Business and Western Living magazine, as James Little, Sandro Grison, Leslie Anthony, Matt O’Grady and Charlene Rooke slip on the catcher’s mitt and field the best pitches you can make.
Watch and learn, or participate and potentially close the deal.
The Pitcher’s Mound is just one of 20 amazing sessions being programmed for the September 11-13 2009 Whistler Readers & Writers Festival. Watch this space for more news and announcements.
Walt Whitman wrote: Now I see the secret of making the best persons, it is to grow in the open air, and eat and sleep with the earth.
My dental hygienist and I were talking about the impact of stress on the human body – a suspicion of teeth-grinding started the conversation. 68 pairs of muscles above and below the mandible, capable of exerting thousands of poounds of pressure. We are incredible machines, and delicate organisms. Brown thumbs know that “stress” can kill a plant… and yet, our culture wears being stressed as a badge of honour.
Spring is the call to get outside, and reconnect with our vital energies, get the sap running. Grow in the open air, eat and sleep with the earth.
Boot-camp exercise 13 is less about substance and more about space. This week, take your notebook outside somewhere. Breathe in the spring air. And write for as long as you can. 3 pages minimum. Move the hand, move the breath.
A long-time friend of the Whistler Writers Festival, Laisha Rosnau (The Sudden Weight of Snow) is celebrating the launch of her new book of poetry, Lousy Explorers, in Vancouver, at Heritage Hall (3102 Main Street) on Tuesday May 5 at 7:30pm.
Laisha is currently working on her third novel, having abandoned the second, and living in Prince George with her family. Rob Mclennan asks her 12 or 20 questions, and learns how much pureed fruit she wears on her pants, and that she eavesdrops on people for creative inspiration.
Laisha was a guest instructor at the Whistler Writers Festival in 2004 and 2006.
Doors open at 7:00pm. Refreshments will be served. Admission is free.
I could never quite entirely
believe anything, sadly.
Even the many million leaves
belong less to their trees
than to their kind of tree,
and to October.
This past October was maybe
the last truly scary
Halloween. The last of the Bush
masks trashed.
By November we were limp
with cold and thanks,
the kind of shiver and splay
that makes a tree bend
toward its own grateful,
painful change,
believing—inside-out,
barelimbed, entirely—
in everything. Even in winter.
Uncertain, sure, but no
longer numb with disbelief.
I thought only the future
enjoyed this kind of life:
I think I feel my limbs again.
###
May could be hopeful, too. Here in Sea to Sky, although we trail poetry in our skiing/snowboarding/mountainbiking wake, we haven’t seemed to have made the connection – local voters are lagging in getting on the electoral roll for the provincial May 12 election. Maybe it’s one of those chores on the list that people haven’t got around to yet? I can’t imagine if we lived under a dictator that we would feel so complacent… You can amend the list with the click of a mouse.
The Vicious Circle’s Green Circle creative writing workshops just wrapped, sprouting 19 new writers in Whistler, and feedback from the frontlines: “an excellent group, well led” “engaging and informative” “a great introduction for new writers” “had quite a few ‘aha’ moments” and finally “got me writing and inspired to write more!”
Now the course, with instructor, Rebecca Wood Barrett, is taking a roadtrip to Pemberton to enjoy the spring and get some serious planting underway. The Pemberton Library is partnering with the Whistler Writers Group to host the workshops each Monday evening, 7pm – 9pm, from April 6.
For information, call the Pemberton & District Public Library at 604.894.6916. Register online.
They say that those who can, do. And those who can’t, teach.
So let’s take our teachings from those who DID. (Not those who sat around talking about it.) This is our weekly call to action. You want to be a writer? Write. The verb is key.
Tolstoy wrote that, ”Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man’s life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.”
A person isn’t truly revealed to us, until they’re in a bind, until their back is up against the wall, they’re learning how to do something new and flailing around out of their element, until they’re given a choice to make, or their heart is bleeding open. Then, their colours are apparent.
Virtually Vicious Boot Camp exercise 12 comes this week from Fred Stenson’s “Thing Feigned or Imagined.”
Describe a man in three sentences.
Now, describe the same man. Baking a cake.
Next, describe the same man, baking a cake when sad.
Finally, describe that same man baking a cake when he’s sad, and you’re angry.
The Whistler Chamber of Commerce went looking last month for a creative writer to develop a series of 2010 Business Success stories, and they found Rebecca Wood Barrett.
All of which to say she is eminently qualified to tell stories about local folk who got a leg up from the Olympic juggernaut.
The first story that came to mind was about the Whistler Writers Group. That piece was submitted as an example of her writing, and is reproduced here. It’s longer than a blog-attention-span might typically last, but worth every minute.
This fall, Wood Barrett will teach a workshop on Writing a One-Page Screenplay, at the Whistler Readers & Writers Festival.
On an icy night in February, a hush falls over a Whistler theatre stuffed beyond capacity. Extra chairs have been squeezed onto the end of rows, and the opening presenter warns us that if there is a fire, everyone must leave in an orderly fashion. The audience laughs. They inch to the edge of their seats, eager for the presentation to begin.
But this is no show about hucking off cliffs, or shredding the gnar. There is no ski-bum speaker to regale us with tales of how they survived an avalanche, won a gold medal against all odds, or lived off-the-grid for two years in a van in Lot 4, chasing the powder dream. You won’t hear a pumping soundtrack, no tortured vocals by disaffected youth. This is no filmmaker showdown, no wet-T shirt contest, no homage to the extreme, featuring risky stunts in the mountains on boards or skis or bikes.
This is literature, baby. And it’s sold out.
If you didn’t snap up your tickets early, you can be forgiven. A literary reading and Q&A⎯even with a CBC icon⎯is not your typical high-octane Whistler spectacle. But it seems that the word-nerds have dug the spike of their literary crampons in and secured traction.
The apparent overnight success has in fact been germinating since 2003, when the Celebration 2010: Whistler Arts Festival and Whistler Arts Council granted seed money to the Whistler Writers’ Group to put on a literary event. The first plantings of the Literary Leanings Reading Series evolved in the attic space at a Creekside restaurant, where writers read to an audience of fifty. Along with up-and-coming authors Nancy Lee (Dead Girls), Lee Henderson (The Man Game), and Adam Lewis Schroeder (Kingdom of Monkeys), our own local writers read from their stories to an appreciative, but all-too-small audience.
Stella Harvey, founder of the non-profit Whistler Writers’ Group and organizer of the event, credits the annual injection of Olympic cultural funding as raising the profile of the literary arts by attracting quality authors to Whistler. Over the years, headliners have included Patrick Lane, Lorna Crozier, Michael Winter, Lisa Moore, Ivan E. Coyote, Noah Richler, Warren MacDonald, David Gilmour, John Valliant and Annette Lapointe. Harvey says “It also gives local writers from the Sea to Sky a chance to share the stage with their better known counterparts, to showcase their talents when they wouldn’t otherwise have this opportunity. The local writers come from Squamish to Pemberton, some of whom include Stephen Vogler, Lisa Richardson, Jude Goodwin and Pam Barnsley.”
Seven years on, Literary Leanings 2009 has grown in stature and become a must-see event at the month-long arts festival⎯which has now morphed into the Whistler Winter Arts Festival, co-presented by the Whistler Arts Council and Cultural Olympiad Vancouver 2010. The Whistler Winter Arts Festival was created in 2003 to build capacity and create excitement for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.
Harvey says, “The funding allows us to bring in a big name. It makes for a marketable show, something unique and different, and of a quality that people will come and watch. Now people want to attend a literary event⎯it put us on the map.”
The Big Name this year is Joseph Boyden, fresh from his Giller Prize win for his novel Through Black Spruce. Boyden’s wife and author Amanda Boyden (Babylon Rolling) and Steven Galloway (The Cellist of Sarajevo) join him onstage as Shelagh Rogers of CBC Radio moderates the discussion and interviews each writer. Later, the show will be broadcast to the country on national radio.
Take a step back, and you might ask why this cultural convergence, taking place in the exquisite venue of the Squamish Lillooet Cultural Centre, is being funded by the world’s greatest sporting event? What do Canadian Joseph Boyden, who is Metis, and Amanda Boyden, who is American and a former trapeze artist, have anything to do with the pinnacle tournament of winter sports? What can Galloway, who is bookish in glasses and with a self-deprecating wit, offer to the 2010 Olympics? No world records for speed skating or ski jumping are being broken tonight.
However, there is something strange and serendipitous happening, and the audience senses it. Rogers asks Galloway a question about how he came to write his book. In it, a cellist plays in a bomb crater in Sarajevo for 22 days to commemorate the same number of people who died one day during the siege. “We have a tendency,” Galloway says, “in North America in particular to view art as a luxury item, things like music or books as almost a frivolity. But the way Europeans look at it, and kind of the way I look at it, is that one of the points of art and music is to remind us of our innate humanity.”
The audience nods, as though Galloway has expressed a collective thought⎯yes, this is why we are here, listening to these authors read.
Is it possible then, that the three pillars of the modern Olympic Movement⎯sport, culture and environment⎯are the combined values that honour our very humanness? That the link between the desire to race beyond physical boundaries in the extremes of winter, is not so far from the hunger of writers to explore, through literature, the edges of our humanity in times of extreme duress?
Perhaps the audience seems to think so, for at the end of the evening the applause lasts a long time.
In the great Native hall after the show is over, the audience members line up to buy the authors’ books, and ask them for their autographs. In one year’s time, the world will come to Whistler to watch our athletes, and at the same time honour our artists, the core of our community.
In the Writing Life, Annie Dillard wrote, “Process is nothing: erase your tracks. The path is not the work.” I love her lack of sentimentality, the fierce Zen detachment she preaches. Even though, when you’re in the middle of the work, process is all you have. As Ray Lawrence, the director of the film Jindabyne said, “If I was worried about the outcome, I think it would fail, but I concern myself with the process so that’s one thing at a time, and focus on that, and trusting the process. You can’t really control the outcome. If we could, we’d have successes all the time.”
So, when you’re in the weeds, trust the process. And when you’re done, erase your tracks. Noone needs to know. Noone needs to see the trail of crumbs, and all the loops and circlings and ambulations that got you from A to B.
So, Annie is our guest virtual teacher for Boot-Camp Exercise 11.
Here’s the dharma: “Always locate the reader in time and space - again and agin. Beginning writers rush in to feelings, to interior lives. Instead, stick to surface appearances, hit the five senses, give the history of the person and the place, and the look of the person and the place. Use first names and last names. As you write, stick everything in a place and time. Don’t describe feelings.”
Pencils ready? Pick a feeling. Happiness. Sorrow. Heartbreak. Regret.
Now, write a scene, full of detail, that conveys that emotion. But stick to the surfaces. Don’t go inner monologue. Don’t describe the feeling. Do not use the word of that feeling even once. Just the facts, sarge. Names. Places. Senses. Surfaces. Show us what happiness, sorrow, heartbreak, regret look like. But let’s not talk about feelings…
Whistler Reads’ next book discussion will feature The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a slim, smart and subversive book that WR founder Paula Shackleton says is brilliantly written and easy to read in two sittings.
The narrator, Changez, is a Pakistani who went to Princeton, took a top job in finance, fell in love with a troubled young American woman – and then watched his warm feelings for his adopted homeland cool, after 9/11. In a Lahore cafe, he tells his story to an unnamed American who may or may not be a spy, just as Changez may or may not be a terrorist.
The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and has been optioned as a film.
Tickets are available at www.bookbuffet.com for $10, or $15 at the door, and include your first glass of wine. The gathering is set for March 19, 7:30-9:30 at the Nita Lake Lodge’s Library Room.
She’s too modest to claim the title of Poet Laureate, but Pam Barnsley is willing to answer to Mystery-Slinger, or Ink-stained Wretch.
She’s also a powerful advocate for Whistler’s poetic soul.
“Whistler is one of the best sports junkies’ towns in the world, but she’s way more than that. She’s full of interesting characters and artists and friends. People who’ve celebrated or wept at her wins and losses, her changes, her beauty, her roots. People who’ve persevered. That’s not as quantifiable as the number of vertical feet of rideable terrain, or the names of golf course designers or the length of the wine lists; but it’s that intangible something that makes us more than Disneyland. It’s what makes us a great place to live and grow. I think everyone who lives here—really is fully alive here—is an artist. Some of us just express it in different mediums; on the dance floor, in the powder, in community service, in pottery, in film, in a grappling with black marks on paper for the meaning of what it is to be human.”
Poetry kept Pam Barnsley prolific and purple-prosed as a hippie teen – she even self-published a few editions in purple-suede hand-stitched covers for like-minded dreamers. After working as a newspaper reporter, magazine writer, ad copy writer, selling short stories, and writing a few scripts and acting in the Beachcombers, Barnsley found her way back to poetry.
The appeal in poetry for a mystery novel scribe? “It’s both demanding and liberating to craft words into tiny emotional bobs, stories pared down to the bone, just the essence lingering so the reader has to do some of the work…”
If publishers are failing because they can’t get audiences to pay for words, where does that leave writers?
It leaves them, most certainly longing for the ‘heyday’ of over a century ago, when publisher William Randolph Hearst paid his 32 year old correspondent Richard Harding Davis $3000 for a month of work covering the anticipated war in Cuba.
Writes Wilkinson, “By some lights, this a golden age for writers, who can launch a blog, post their views online and reap the rewards of community, commenters and cross-referencing colleagues. This is all true. In addition to expanding the audiences of experienced writers, the web has created a showcase for extraordinary young talent like Matthew Yglesias, Ben Smith, Marc Ambinder, Ross Douthat, and Ezra Klein. On the web, no bureaucracy makes them wait their turn, no dunderheaded editors hold back their talents.
But for a host of other young writers, there is still the problem of getting paid.”
The number of people willing to write for free is vast. Writing, unlike oil-drilling, open-pit mining, or stocktrading, is an inherently satisfying act, something that people are intrinsically motivated to do. Follow the money, and you’ll find people trading their time for work that is not necessarily intrinsically satisfying, and potentially dangerous.
Still, a writer cannot live off words alone. If only the magic were sufficient that one could conjure a meal with a few recipe cards laid out on the table… Virginia Woolf wrote that a woman needed a room of her own, and L5000 a year, to pursue the craft. I always fixated on the room, but I think I was missing the point.
As Dickinson says, “on the whole, the writing game seems likely to become even more a province of the upper middle class and flat-out wealthy than it is already. The offspring of the affluent, branded college degrees in hand, can afford to give it a go. But anyone hailing from more hardscrabble environs may find it too difficult to get traction before succumbing to the dismal economics of it all.”
The Internet may have democratised the space, and the publishing platforms. But noone’s quite worked out how to make a living in the brave new world, especially without a trust fund to sustain them.
Whistler writer and citizen activist, Pina Belperio, is the new columnist at Rabble.ca, with a column The Word on the Rings, a behind-the-scenes examination on what’s happening surrounding the Vancouver and Whistler Olympics.
Her most recent column of March 7 reported on the recent alteration of the Resort Municipality’s communications policy, that will stream all interviews with the Mayor through the Communications Department. While the Mayor’s argument - that given the volume of calls he is receiving, it’s in Whistler’s interest to manage the community’s brand better – might wash with shareholders, it’s more troubling for citizens, and reporters, who are also struggling to provide timely and accurate accounts of what’s happening in the Valley against the shift of Council meetings from Monday to Tuesday evenings (providing almost no time for reporters to pursue in-depth analysis of local stories to meet the weekly Thursday publication date.)
Communication is a real balancing act – and it does require respect from all sides…
Departing from his prepared remarks, James Moore indicated that eligiblity for funding could potentially be restricted to those magazines with an annual circulation above 5000. With notable exceptions, the circulation of virtually every Canadian literary and arts magazine, large and small, is below 5000.
We have to make sure this possibility does not become an actuality, for if it does, as April 1, 2010, these important and praiseworthy magazines will no longer qualify for funding that they have been receiving for years from the CMF and PAP despite the excellent work that they undertake for the readers and writers across Canada (and around the world)!
The Coalition to Keep Canadian Heritage Support for Literary and Arts Magazine feels strongly that to render these magazines ineligible for this support would be unjust. To quote Andris Taskans, editor of Prairie Fire, to do so would be “a slap in the face”—not only to the magazines themselves but to the many writers that they publish, many of whom began illustrious, international careers in these seminal if modest publcations. To do so would also be a “slap in the face” to the ordinary (and extraordinary) Canadians who read them.
By joining the Coalition, readers and writers everywhere send a strong message to the Honorable James Moore, the Department of Canadian Heritage, and the Canada Periodical Fund that we believe in our literary and arts magazines and feel that they should continue to do so by supporting them through well-deserved and sustained financial support.
To do so, would be the cheapest economic stimulus package the Government of Canada could initiate. Every single dollar granted to us or paid to us by a subscriber or a newsstand buyer goes back into the economy.
Put it this way, when Canadians get into their Chrysler and GM cars, they have to drive somewhere. A lot of them drive to their newsstands and bookstores to buy a literary or arts magazine.
Say yes to continued Canadian Heritage funding through the Canada Periodical Fund for Canada’s arts and literary magazines!
So, words that aren’t used evolve or disappear more rapidly than those that are embedded in our culture, and irreplaceable, like I, who, we, thou, two, three, five…
Last week, Boot Camp Exercise 9 was a call to arms to preserve some of the most, apparently, vulnerable words in our language.
This week, your task is to take your paragraph/postcard/story, in which you used the Globe’s list of the 11 most vulnerable words, and rewrite it, without them.
My virtual writing teacher has been nominated for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, alongside Nino Ricci and Marina Endicott.
Fred Stenson, a Calgary-based writer of historical fiction, is also the author of Things Feigned or Imagined : The Craft of Fiction, an excellent book on the craft, filled with exercises that will find their way to forthcoming BootCamp drills.
Stenson’s nomination has not been without controversy. His wife, Dr Pamela Banting, was initially on the jury, but was subsequently removed. Stenson’s book, The Great Karoo, was also nominated for the 2008 Governor General’s Literary Award.
Best Book Marina Endicott (Canada) Good to a Fault Freehand Books
Kenneth J Harvey (Canada) Blackstrap Hawco Random House Canada
Nino Ricci (Canada) The Origin of Species Doubleday Canada
Jacob Ross(Grenada) Pynter Bender Fourth Estate
Jaspreet Singh (Canada) Chef Véhicule Press
Fred Stenson (Canada) The Great Karoo Doubleday Canada
Best First Book
Theanna Bischoff (Canada) Cleavage NeWest Press
Mark Blagrave (Canada) Silver Salts Cormorant Books
Craig Boyko (Canada) Blackouts McClelland and Stewart
Nila Gupta (Canada) The Sherpa and Other Fictions Sumach Press
Pasha Malla (Canada) The Withdrawal Method House of Anansi Press
Joan Thomas (Canada) Reading By Lightning Goose Lane Editions
Padma Viswanathan (Canada)The Toss of a Lemon Random House Canada
Robert F Kennedy Jr rallied a room full of Whistlerites on Wednesday, and even though there was something a little bit American-classist about the VIP seating and the section for the plebs, he still had some great things to say… inspiring and depressing in equal measure, as any reality check on the state of the economy and the state of democracy will yield.
“We’re not protecting the environment, as some of our critics say, for the sake of the fishes and the birds. We’re protecting nature because we recognize that nature is the infrastructure of our communities, and that if we want to meet our obligation as a generation, as a nation, as a civilization — which is to create communities for our children that provide them with the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment and prosperity and good health as the communities that our parents gave us – we’ve got to start by protecting our environmental infrastructure.”
1. The health of the environment and the robustness of a democracy are connected. Because the environment is essentially the public commons…
2. Enfranchising everyone, from the moment Jefferson endorsed it, is a dangerous thing… but to counter the risk that most uneducated people would sell out their democratic rights for a week of welfare, Jefferson mandated public education. Universal suffrage makes universal education necessary.
3. The most effective way to save the world today is to educate girls.
4. The free market is not the enemy. Huge subsidies to industries like oil, gas, auto manufacturing and Wall Street are sitting across the throat of a free market.
“I have nothing against corporations. I own a corporation. Corporations are good things. They drive our economy. They encourage people to assemble wealth and to risk it, and they create jobs, and that ultimately is what we want. But, they should not be running our government. And the reason they shouldn’t be running our government is because corporations don’t want the same thing for America as Americans want. Corporations don’t want democracy, and they don’t want free markets; they want profits. And the best way for them to get profits too often is to use our campaign finance system, which is just a system of legalized bribery, to get their hooks into a public official and use that public official to dismantle the marketplace and give them a competitive edge or monopoly control, and then to privatize the commons: to steal our air, our water, our public lands or our public treasury.”
5. There’s one more reason to preserve the wild environment – not just because our wealth, our future, our resources, our tools, our food and medicines are there… but because wild places feed our spirit. That the wild creation might be the best place for us to connect with the creator.
Finally. You really don’t want to be eating fish. There’s no happy endings. No there, there, go to sleep, everything’s going to be okay, when it comes to today’s planet. The pillagers are voracious. Vigilance, folks. Be vigilant about your democracy. That’s what it comes down to. Protecting the commons.
The novel is gruffly tender, a rising chorus to the addictive rush of surfing that any powder-junkie could appreciate.
But it’s the opening that grabbed me.
Some novels take a while to get their pace up, ask you to suspend disbelief and judgment for a few pages, until you’re caught up in the weft and warp of the story, the character, the cadence of the language.
But Winton snags you immediately.
Here:
We come sweeping up the tree-lined boulevard with siren and lights and when the GPS urges us to make the next left we take it so fast that all the fear slams and sways inside the vehicle. I don’t say a thing. Down the dark suburban street I can see the house lit like a cruise ship.
On Wednesday, the Globe and Mail featured a story about Indigo Books and Music’s plans to launch Shortcovers, an e-book service that is set to transform book sales the way iTunes revolutionised the music world.
The brave new world of e-books, Michael Serbinis, Indigo’s VP of info technology, marketing and online business, embraces the fact that people are reading differently, are “info-snacking”, leveraging downtime while waiting for a bus etc.
Leaving aside the whole dying romance of curling up somewhere quiet with a book, in favour of nibbling on bytes from your e-book in between sending texts and tweets, the deeply disturbing thing about the e-book revolution is in the tail of the Globe piece.
So I’ll take the library for my info-snacking any day. As well as my feasting, my nibbling and my potlucking. And Shortcovers can keep their profiling and data-mining to themselves. Sorry, brave new world. I’m not ready for you yet.
Kevin McFarland has revealed that the second Poet’s Pause call, for poems to be incorporated into Joan Baron’s scupltures on Alta Lake, resulted in 42 poems from 24 poets.
Last week, the jury reviewed the submissions, in a blind process with no names attached to the poetry, and selected poems by Pam Barnsley and Sheila Murphy.
Pam also won last year for her poem Two.
Said McFarland, “The jury was surprised Pam was the winning author again this year, as the poem is so different from the last one. They were also surprised to find that Sheila Murphy submitted her poem to our competition from Phoenix, Arizona”
The following words are evolving rapidly and likely to disappear:
dirty
squeeze
bad
because
guts
push (verb)
smell (verb)
stab
stick (noun)
turn (verb)
wipe
As languages evolve over centuries and millennia, the most frequently used words tend to remain unaltered, while rarer words are more likely to change.
So, for Boot Camp exercise 9, become a warrior for the disappearing… Save them, by using them! After all, they’re perfectly good words.
Write a piece, a paragraph, a postcard, a story, using these 11 words.
dirty / squeeze / bad / because / guts / push (verb) / smell (verb) / stab /
It ends with a whimper – a warning from Grace Westcott, a Toronto lawyer and vice-chair of the Canadian Copyright Institute, about the potential ripple effects of the Google Settlement and Google’s giant on-line library.
Canada’s growing technology gap is creating more and more of a digital ghetto: Canadian university libraries can’t access the Google archive, whereas all American libraries are entitled to free access on one terminal. Twitter killed outbound SMS messaging in Canada, due to constant rate hikes from Canadian cell providers.
Says Jesse Brown, CBC’s technology reporter:
“This growing list of backwards policies is already creating a sense of digital isolation: Canadians can’t stream the videos Americans stream, download the files Americans download, remix the media Americans remix, or tweet the way Americans tweet.
With the election of Barack Obama, digital culture in the U.S. hit a tipping point, where a robust online public sphere proved itself capable of changing the world.
Meanwhile, here in Canada we’re approaching our own tipping point, where a series of ignorances and capitulations threaten to turn our country into a digital ghetto. ”
Meanwhile, on the rooftops of the ghetto : a school principal from West Bench Elementary School in Penticton spends the night on the rooftop with his hair freshly dyed purple, to celebrate his kids having read 14,000 books. Listen to Stephen Quinn from CBC radio’s On the Coast chat to the spirited principal.
Stella Harvey’s words of thanks appear in this week’s local papers, hailing the success of the Between the Sheets Literary Leanings event on February 18. Kudos have been pouring in.
For word-nerds and lit-fans, the Vicious Circle will be defending its grant request for the 2009 Whistler Readers and Writers Festival before Council on Tuesday, March 3, at 2:45pm, at Millennium Place. Feel free to cheer them on.
She’s been keeping tabs on the arts in Whistler, amongst other things, since she first pulled out a tape recorder, and now Jennifer Miller, reporter at the Whistler Question, freelance writer, and Whistler Readers and Writers Festival 2008 guest presenter, has been nominated for a Ma Murray community newspaper award for arts writing, for her story “Dust settles, but will fest return” about the Pemberton Music Festival.
The Whistler Question has also been nominated for overall excellence. In an age when newspapers are collapsing like giant dust-mounds, we’re so fortunate in Whistler to have two robust local papers.
Tickets start at $20, with limited quantities, and are available at whistler.com or the Whistler Visitor Information Centre. There’s also the option of glamming it up with the VIP reception afterwards, but don’t hesitate – the ticket are as endangered as the species we are losing…
Amanda Boyden said her novel Babylon Rolling was a love song to her city, written in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, with a sense that nothing would ever be the same.
Wednesday evening saw the Squamish Lilwat Cultural Centre showcase the poetry of its architecture, as 120 folk gathered in the cedar-lined theatre to hear Shelagh Rogers tickle some truths from Joseph Boyden, Amanda Boyden and Steven Galloway. The interviews will be broadcast on Roger’s CBC program, The Next Chapter, which airs Saturdays at 3pm.
Everyone will have their take-away moments, but here are a few of mine:
Hearing Amanda Boyden admit that it can be hard being married to another writer, whose Canadianness has helped his career to have more pointy high-points, especially after watching her first novel fall alongside the World Trade towers in a cataclysm of bad timing. And then seeing them spontaneously, unselfconsciously, pick lint from each other’s shoulders.
Discovering that palmist lore suggests that if the lines on a person’s hand change, then their life will change as well.
Steven Galloway, amidst quips and jokes, throwing down a challenge to anyone who loves language – to despise the abuse of words by the use of phrases like “ethnic cleansing”, ‘because there’s absolutely nothing clean about it.’
And rallying around his call to protect civilisation through the arts, because civilisation is not about roads and bridges. They may be a result of a civilised society, but what civilisation is about, is an agreement between people to behave in certain ways, an implied agreement between Steven Galloway and Shelagh Rogers not to start smacking each other over the head with a microphone… and there are two ways we prop up civilisation, these contracts of agreed behaviours and limits – through the law, and the arts. And the law fails us before the arts do.
Shelagh Rogers referencing an early interview she had done with Timothy Findley, in which she asked him why he writes.
“Against despair.”
And for Galloway, Boyden and Boyden, this deeply moral act of writing seemed to be to write/right the wrongs… of Hurricane Katrina, of the siege of Sarajevo, of colonialism…
Power to all our scribblings. We are writing in our garrets, in the corners of Pasta Lupino, on our laps in the bus, against despair, against those who would turn a blind eye to suffering and press on in their campaigns for power and money, to hold up civilisation… Simple enough.
Felt a chill lately around the world of freelance writing? Or wanting to make the break into writing for magazines, despite the climate?
Dabble, splash about or dive down to the creative deep, urge the organisers of the 8th annual Whistler Readers and Writers Festival. Just get wet. There’s everything from water wings in the kiddie pool to full scuba outfits on hand…
