Freedom to Read week ends with Canada entering a digital ghetto

Feb 23-28 was Freedom to Read week.

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’s Oscar speech slash letter to the editor

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.

Huge props to the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre, The Four Seasons, the Whistler Arts Council, the Holiday Inn, Armchair Books, The Pique, The Question, The Vicious Circle board, and the public.

Check out some of Joern Rhode’s pictures from the evening.

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.

Whistler Question’s Jennifer Miller tapped for award

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.

The awards will be announced Saturday, April 4 2009, at the River Rock Casino.

The man-crush everyone had, before President Obama, Robert F Kennedy comes to Whistler, March 4

Whistler’s environmental advocacy group, AWARE, brings Robert F Kennedy Jr to town on Wednesday, March 4, for its Sustainability Speakers Series.

Kennedy was named as one of Time magazine’s “Heroes for the Planet” for his role as chief prosecuting attorney for the Hudson Riverkeepers, which helped restore the Hudson. Riverkeeper helped spawn more than 160 Waterkeeper organisations around the world, including in Canada. He was one of Obama’s frontrunners to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, a great sign that the EPA is about to start protecting the environment. He’s also the author of Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy

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…

Save the date for the 2009 Whistler Writers Festival, September 11-13

The graphic genius of Jasmine Robinson has put a picture to the wordfest, with this great design for the 2009 Whistler Readers and Writers Festival September program. The program will be announced as soon as it is finalised. In the meantime, bootcamp exercise 8 invites you to make your entire week a poem. Every day, write a poem. A snapshot of each day, for your album. Just as America’s poets are writing in Obama’s first 100 days, inaugurate yourself as Writer.

Amanda Boyden keeps singing for New Orleans

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.

Today in the Globe and Mail, she iterates the city’s charms and beckons visitors down to the bayou…

And here,  from the summer, is Steven Galloway’s review of Amanda’s book… which prove him to be not only a talented writer, but a gift of a reader, as well. (The love-in continues.)

Highlights from Between the Sheets of February, with Shelagh Rogers

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.

Chance for Whistler Writers to get business-like

If you have the right combination of sleuthing, cheerleading and creative writing skills, the Chamber of Commerce could be your next best client.

Issued today, at the WhistlerChamber.com website, is an RFP for a Creative Writer of 2010 Business Success stories.  The project, which runs from March 16 until December 31, with the potential to extend into 2010, involves researching and writing success stories about local or regional businesses who benefitted directly or indirectly from the Winter Olympics Games.

Certainly stories we’d all love to hear. Non-fiction writers only need apply. Proposals are due March 2.

America is breaking my heart with 100 poems, 100 days

Some days, my heart gets a little chip in it… I guess it’s winter. The windshield factor happens on the inside, too. Little stone flecks, smacks and cracks, suddenly arresting you from the reverie of a morning commute.

Today, on 100dayspoems.blogspot.com, Diane Wald writes a nonromantic obama valentine for america, february 14th, 2009.

This is just a snapshot of her lovely polaroid for the moment:

let us just make a note of one thing before traveling too far on:
obama eats the camera.

in every single photograph where he is smiling
the presidential teeth
require a taming of light, a scrooching in of every aperture

so the picture is not too far bedazzled.

in honor of this i send all america this nonromantic obama valentine command:
thou shalt smile!

for our president
is smiling.

just a man.
openly smiling.

not smirking.
not leering sneering grinning or baring clenched military teeth.
not snickering dickering
lying through pearls
not hooting snorting cackling or falling
all over himself like a word with a back-assward meaning or
a sentence all twisted up in itself
like pretzel dough gone wacko in the oven.

and if you have seen him in person you will say
he verily streams with wide openness
with a wild candor worthy of walt whitman
and no one is afraid.

…

A collaboration of two poets, and friends, Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker, 100 poems, 100 days is a daily poem submitted by poets from across the United States, one for each of President Obama’s first hundred days in office, keeping the torch from Inauguration poet and laureate, Elizabeth Alexander.

How about that for an Olympic countdown project? Enough with the cake. Let’s sink our teeth around something really substantial.

25 things about you, me and our gallery of invisible friends

Facebook’s latest meme, “25 things about me”, has probably landed in your updates page by now, if your face is on the book. Between Jan 26 and Feb 2, it manifested 5 million times. Commentators are heckling it as narcissistic, inane, and as dangerous and fast-spreading as a wildfire… but then, those commentators are also writing their own “25 things about me”, which they’re publishing in forums like the LA Times, so maybe they’re just jealous that the spotlight has shifted from them, for a moment, to ordinary people.

Here’s what the 25 things suggests to us – our own stories are fundamentally interesting to us. And typically neglected. Carving out the time to do a bit of fossicking into our ids and egos, is weirdly gratifying, and people are compelled to share. (“Hey look at this little bit of rock/nugget/shard of something ancient and dirty that I just excavated from the p-trap of my mind!”)

And for writers, what a great tool. Why not start every story with a 25 things brainstorm… a grocery list of odd facts and detritus about your character. Cos’ the truth is, every bit of mindexploding art and poetry started when someone saw the banal, and held it up to the light…

PS In case you need it spelled out – that’s exercise 7. Create 2 characters. Construct a 25 random things list for each of them. Turn the page. Now lob them into a common encounter – shared cab, double-date as moral support for friends, first on the scene of a car accident…

Squamish folk get scrappy with stories

The Squamish Arts Council is hosting Deanne Esdale of Texture Media on March 12, 2009, as part of Wild at Art. Deanne will run Planting Seeds for 2009, a Storytelling with Collage hands-on workshop, geared at building your life and work vision through collage…

 

140 character tweets make 250 words seem verbose

The great literary challenge for 2009 might be to tell stories of moment and meaning with a series of 140 character tweets.  Makes those 250 word postcard stories seem like the new era version of War and Peace.

For anyone who’s been in a coma for the last 6 months, the Boston Globe today explains the Twitterverse. Lexicographer, Erin McKean, also blogs at www.thedictionaryevangelist.com.

Why not try, for this week’s workout, to write a 250 word postcard story as a series of tweets… an opus for the attention-deficit multi-tasking web 2.0 prophets out there…

Think fast, hippie. Say what you want in 250 words.

250 words. That’s all muscle. No flab. And just 7 days to get it down on paper, and off to the Writers’ Union of Canada’s Postcard Story Competition. $500 is the prize. Which factors at $2 a word. And there’s nowhere that prose is yielding $2 a word. Not that I know of.

Submissions are only accepted snail mail… so start writing. You’ve got about 96 hours…

Word-nerd gathering in Whistler for Joseph Boyden

Holly Fraughton, the arts and entertainment editor at the Pique, has got your number.

You’re a word-nerd.

Admit it.

And the chance to get Between the Sheets with five-star authors like Joseph Boyden, Amanda Boyden, and Steven Galloway, as Shelagh Rogers probes for the intimate details, is something that word-nerds can’t resist.

It will be a gathering of word-nerds. A scrabble. A babel. A biblio-lust-fest.

It’s sold out, and it’s at the Squamish Lilwat Cultural Centre February 18 at 7:30. (Don’t miss forthcoming events – sign on to become a member of the Vicious Circle for the latest event and contest details. Or subscribe to the Vicious feed, to ensure you’re always the first to know.)

Boot-Camp busts out exercise 5

Story is the way we know ourselves. Those long winters in the cave, keeping the fire stoked, mending tools, playing games, watching for the sky to break, and telling stories, enabled us to emerge each spring with a stronger sense of who we were and of our place in the world.

So, for exercise 5, Imagine yourself, 20 years from now, alone at the end of a big day, a tough day. Maybe you’ve just put your kids to bed and you haven’t had a second to think for yourself, or maybe you’ve just dropped them off to University and returned to an empty house, maybe you just ran a marathon and you’re drained, maybe you just won an award but you had to go and accept it alone. Maybe someone who defined your reality was just buried.

You’re tired and a bit adrift, untethered.

And suddenly, in front of you, appears an image of your younger self, your present self, be that your 20 year old, your 34 year old, your 56 year old self.

And the older, untethered you says, Huh. I barely recognize you.

And you, the version of you right now, at 20, or 33 or 56… says, with a great big full heart, Sure you do. You remember when…

Start describing something that happened in the last 6 months… use specifics, use all the senses, as if you’re pounding pegs into the sand and they need to be strong enough to keep a great air balloon from drifting away…

Vicious Circle alumni launches book

Jennifer Cowan, a member of the Vicious Circle circa 2002, has published a young-adult fiction book, Earthgirl, about a 16 year old eco-evolutionary, Sabine Solomon.

And in a weird miracle of channelling, Earthgirl now has her own blog. You can even tune in to what she’s listening. Today, earthgirl is loving Sarah Harmer, Hawksley Workman and Alan Boyle.

Jenn is hoping to pay the Circle a visit from her Toronto stomping grounds, and do a little launch for the local writing scene, “since they were so important to my book’s life.”

Get inside Earthgirl’s mind at http://sabinetheearthgirl.wordpress.com/

Valentine’s workshop comes to Squamish

The Squamish Writers Group announces romance author Laura Drewry’s visit to Squamish Library just in time for Valetine’s…

Sharing her experiences in writing and how she got started and how an idea becomes a published work, romance author Laura Drewry will be at the Squamish library Feb 11, 7:00-9:00 pm