Politics can be beautiful – so register to vote.

If you don’t believe that being politically engaged can be a beautiful thing, take another look at the 100 Days poem project, and Brenda Shaughnessy’s Poem for Day 67, Citizen:

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.

Feeding the Seed creative writing course goes on the road to Pemberton

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.

 

Feeding the Seed creative writing course

Boot-Camp Ex 12

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.

 

Got some colours now?

Whistler Chamber hires writer Rebecca Wood Barrett

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.

Wood Barrett, a founding member of the Vicious Circle, is a local writer and filmmaker, a two-time finalist in the 72 Hour Filmmaker Showdown, documentary producer, the winner of the 2008 Whistler Select Writing Awards’ Postcard Jam contest and the 2008 Sea to Sky Literary Contest for Long Fiction. Most recently, she’s been working on her UBC Creative Writing MFA, wrangling a toddler, and launching the first green circle creative writing seminar series for Whistler, the Feeding the Seed program.

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.

Rebecca Wood Barrett reviews the Joseph Boyden/Shelagh Rogers event, and makes the case that the pillars of the Olympic movement are the things that anchor our humanness

No Boundaries

by Rebecca Wood Barrett

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.

Boot-Camp Exercise 11 – Let’s (not) talk about feelings

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 Mohsin Hasim’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

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.

Exclusive interview with Whistler’s [unofficial] poet laureate, Pam Barnsley

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. 

“I credit the Vicious Circle for getting me back into writing poetry, through a Susan Musgrave workshop at one of our Festivals,” she told us, “and through bringing some of Canada’s great poets – Lorna Crozier, George Bowering, Patrick Lane, and others.”

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…”

Barnsley’s most recent mystery novel, This Cage of Bones, was just announced as a finalist for the Crimewriters of Canada Best Unpublished Novel.

Her poetry has twice been selected by the Resort Municipality of Whistler to be featured on the Poets Pause public art sculpture installation.

Is Writing for the Rich? Recent article suggests it’s hard to make a living off words alone.

Francis Wilkinson, executive editor of The Week, asked last week, “Is Writing for the Rich?”

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 rabble-rouser charges Olympics with hog-tying local media

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…

Join the Facebook Coalition to Keep Canadian Heritage Support for Literary and Arts Magazines

Canadian literary and arts magazines publishing in either English and French are in danger of losing a key federal funding source.

On February 17, 2009, Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore announced in a speech he made in Montreal  that the Canada Magazine Fund and Publishing Assistance Program will be merged to create the Canada Periodical Fund. Initiatives from this new body will come on stream in 2010. 

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!

Say yes to the writers and readers of Canada!

For more details about these potential funding cuts, read coverage that appeared on the Quill & Quire website on February 20 and 24, 2009 (scroll through the news section to read both stories)

Join the group.

Evolve our language, Boot Camp Exercise 10

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.

Let’s see how redundant they are.

Commonwealth Writers Prize Watch-list

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.

Regional winners of best book and best first book will be announced on March 11 and then will compete for the overall best book and best first book award.

Last year’s winner of the Commonwealth Prize was Canada’s Lawrence Hill for The Book of Negroes, now a Canada Reads contender.

The shortlist for the Canada and Caribbean category is:

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

What RFK had to say…

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.

Tim Winton’s Breath of fresh air

The most in-demand book at the Pemberton Library right now might be Tim Winton’s 2008 novel, Breath. A local bookclub has nominated it as their next read. 

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.

Got it, she says before I can point it out.

Feel free to slow down.

Making you nervous, Bruce?

Something like that, I murmur.

 

The novel has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, to be announced March 11.

How Indigo’s e-book promoter just shot himself in the foot

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.

Serbinis proclaims the best part of the Shortcovers service is that “We’ll know exactly what you’re reading, how often, whether you’ve read the whole book that you’ve bought or not.” The marketing VP calls that “engagement information.” And isn’t shy about admitting they will use that to try and sell you your next e-book.

I call that invasion of privacy.

Even librarians know that what people are reading is deeply personal and private information. Librarians across North America have been great warriors protecting details of people’s reading habits.

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.

Pam Barnsley for Whistler’s first Poet Laureate

Vicious Circle member and 2008 Whistler Writers Festival presenter, Pam Barnsley, gets our vote for Whistler’s Poet Laureate. The wreathed one earns her laurels for being the first person ever to have two poems incorporated into the built landscape of Whistler.

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”

Clearly, Joan Baron’s idea of involving poets in a public art project has legs, because works rambled in from the Lower Mainland, the UK and Arizona.

Kevin says, “I’m sure it wasn’t the $200 commission value.”

More like the idea of embedding oneself into the landscape. Of creating a permanent song. Of joining one’s fellow artists in the commons of Whistler.

Save Our Words with Boot Camp exercise 9

Scientists at Britain’s Reading University have used a supercomputer called ThamesBlue to model the evolution of words in English and identify the most enduring, and the most at risk of fading into disuse.

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 /

stick (noun) / turn (verb) / wipe