Pull Back the Curtains on the Wizards of Ed, and batter up for the Pitchers Mound

What does a magazine editor really want?

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, BCBusiness is 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, Color magazine 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.

Award-winning theatre NIX gets set to melt the coldest hearts

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.

Whistler Writers Fest’s fearless leader confesses her mission

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

Indie theatre debuts in Whistler – Blank Slate Theatre Festival kicks off tonight!

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.

Time-travellers in demand in Whistler

Aspiring time-traveller? Aspiring writer? Little bit of both?

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…

Tell the poets to take a hike.

Poetry, it’s time to Take A Walk.

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.

Mary MacDonald and Pam Barnsley will lead a free poetry walk on Sunday at 4:30pm – an easy chance to stretch the legs of your inner Muse. Check out Mary’s article in this week’s Pique.

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

Are books building blocks? Or artefacts from a dying era?

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?)

Eco-therapy and disaster management?

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.

Overalls and pencil is all you need to excavate stories for the Whistler Museum

Okay. You don’t even need the overalls.

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

Annabel Lyon’s The Golden Mean has hit the shelves.

Time to devour the novel, which has been scooping up advance praise across the country, before Annabel joins the Opening Night crew at the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival.

There you’ll get the chance to find out how she writes at all, given that she has NEVER kept a notebook. And why her cover is “piano teacher.”

Julie H Ferguson will heat up your pitching… BATTER Up!

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!

10.5 Interesting items of historical Vancouver trivia learned during research for The Man Game, by Lee Henderson

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.

Lee Henderson’s novel, The Man Game, won the 2009 Ethel Wilson Fiction prize. He will appear at the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival’s opening Gala on Friday, September 11, 2009. Tickets are available here.

Help! I’m trapped in 1460s Transylvania…

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.

The reviews have said, “just don’t read it before you go to sleep.” Maybe that’s why I have these big bags beneath my eyes…

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…

The castle of Dracula

Making sense of the umbrella – Whistler Writers Festival says it’s time to get wet

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 People with 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.

Line-PoachRs Drop In HERE

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 to 007 your technology.

Players Chophouse throws down on Whistler’s hottest debate: What is a local?

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.

Claire Mulligan is a time traveller.

Claire Mulligan will be in Whistler as a guest of the 2009 Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, chatting with Paul Grant and fellow novelists Lee Henderson and Annabel Lyon, who are all equally prone to ransacking history for their own fictive purposes.

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?”

CC Humphreys’ notebook reveals an unhealthy obsession with unicorns…

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.

He’ll be at the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival this September with a 2.5 hour hands-on writing workshop on “Characters In Action.”

Chris will also join the Battle of the Bookclubs at Players Chophouse on Saturday, September 12 at 7:30pm. Hopefully, he won’t impale anyone.

Vicious Circle declares September to be line-poaching month

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.

BCAMP to host Magazine Writers’ Craft Fair

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.)

What do you get when you cross Maurice Sendak, Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze?

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.

They’ve come up with the film of Where the Wild Things Are. Feet Banks put us on to the trailer, for a little teaser-action.

Imagine what you could cook up in a collaboratory?

what stirs where the wild things are?

What do Sea to Sky’s summerbook clubs do?

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.

Go On. Crack Yourself Up.

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.

For inspiration, study this list of the 50 funniest comedy sketches of all time.

The Bard is Dead. Long Live the Bard.

“All the world’s a stage.” So said the Bard. But the Bard didn’t get invited to Whistler’s freshest theatre event, the Blank Slate Theatre Festival.

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.

It’s time, folks, to take back the night. Check out the Blank Slate Theatre Festival.

Squamish Mountain Fest offers 4 scoops on adventure filmmaking

The worse thing about the Gelato Carina store in downtown Squamish? Having to narrow almost 20 flavours of gelato down and choose just two…

No such dilemmas next weekend, when the Squamish Mountain Festival and Arc’teryx partner to present an Adventure Filmmaking Seminar.

Get all the flavours on offer with the full scoop on extreme filmmaking when Simon Yates (Touching the Void aka “the man who cut the rope”), Peter Croft, Ian Parnell and Christian Begin (Carts of Darkness) gather at the Squamish Adventure Centre for a 2 hour seminar and Q&A.

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.

Tickets ($15) available at the door or online.

Vicious Circle crowdsources t-shirt design.

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.

Which design do you prefer for the 2009 Whistler Writers Fest tee?(opinion)

Carnage on the Summer Reading Battlefield

Paperbacks or hardcovers? Admit that you’re dumber in the heat? Or pretend that you are really going to read Niall Ferguson’s Empire?  

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 Lyon is smart

The Vancouver Sun’s Rebecca Wigod lists 5 Canadian authors to watch, among them the “brainy and incisive” Annabel Lyon and Saltspring Island writer Brian Brett.

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.

 

Dear Joan, Please Save My Library

I signed the online petition. 

The BC government hasn’t released funds for our libraries’ 2009 operating grants... and the ongoing financial support for libraries seems to be in jeopardy.

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.

Local libraries are one of the only places where knowledge and literacy are deemed to be good things. Where a literate citizenry is being grown.

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.