Surge out of the gate with a subject and verb at the top of the sentence – and let that energy and clarity pull the rest of the story and sentence along.
In his book, Writing Tools, Clark says “guide the reader by capturing meaning in the first three words” of a sentence, as demonstrated by New York Times’ Lydia Polgreen’s lead:
“Rebels seized control of Cap Haitien, Haiti’s second largest city, on Sunday, meeting little resistance as hundreds of residents cheered, burned the police station, plundered food from port warehouses and looted the airport, which was quickly closed. Police officers and armed supporters of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled.”
A 37 word sentence so full of energy and activity could fly apart, if it weren’t anchored from the outset with clear meaning – action and actor. Verb and subject. Right out the gate.
This boot-camp exercise is a watching drill. Red-pencil while you read your local paper, the Globe and Mail, the Olympics souvenir program, or the NY Times… and mark the locations of subjects and verbs. Notice sloppy openings. Notice the way they cause a story to leak air before it’s begun… consider how much harder it is to be gripped by that fizzle. Rewrite soft openings by placing subject and verb at the beginning.
Sometimes a writer needs more than a pencil in their tool-belt to craft good sentences.
Sure, he could have skyped or texted me or emailed a photo from his phone. But when a postcard from my brother peeked out amongst all the uninspiring bills and how-did-you-find-me catalogues in my post box, I was pretty stoked. There’s an old school magic to postcards, and Geist is waving its magic wand and beckoning postcards and postcard stories its way.
It’s the writing contest whose name is almost as long as an entry – the 6th annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest - and 500 words is the max verbiage allowed, fiction or non-fiction, inspired by the image on a postcard, that must be sent as part of the entry.
Deadline has been extended to January 15. Yeehaa. Start scouring your old shoeboxes, postcard stands, art stores, museum gift shops…
Whistler’s 2009 Writer-in-residence took a group of non-fiction writers back in time this fall, with creative writing exercises aimed at excavating memories.
The drill – which spurred a round of frantic scribbling and several incredible pieces of writing – is resurrected here for bootcamp ex 21.
Draw a map of the first neighbourhood you can remember living in.
Sketch and scribble and wander again streets that are buried deep…
Research only in your own head. Leave aside had evidence – atlases and street maps and photographs. You’re excavating your stories…
Savour the immersion.
And then, start to write. A memory from that world.
Canadian indie rock princess, Leslie Feist, says, in this interview with Spinner’s “Interface” that “Canada is more about the spaces in between the cities than the cities themselves.” The power in music is often held in the space in between the notes. The drama in a story is often in the space in between two characters in conflict… the distance between what they really want and what they tell each other they want… and the story lies in how they bridge the distance and what goes wrong along the way.
At the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival in September, author (and actor) Chris Humphreys led a session on Characters in Action. Our back to boot-camp drill is inspired by Humphreys’ workshop. Humphreys’ magic formula is COMOCA – characters’ objectives meeting obstacles creates action. The questions for a compelling protaganist are : what do I want? what is stopping me getting to it? what am I going to do about it?
Write a scene in which two siblings are forced to work together, but both have different underlying objectives.
Juggle wine and cheese and celebrate her publishing debut, with Jake Reynolds: Chicken or Eagle? and Mountain Machines. Though Leach has been influencing young minds for years, in her role as elementary school teahcer, mother and teacher-librarian, she’s taking that to a whole new level, as author of books for young readers.Books will be available for purchase at the event, and are also on sale at Armchair Books.
Coming this October – something to warm you from the inside-out, as the mercury drops - Stephen Vogler’s new book, Only in Whistler: Tales of a Mountain Town. “If I found myself laughing at some part of the writing day,” says Vogler, of writing this book, “I figured I was hitting the mark.
The book, which took Vogler a year to write, “following 32 years of intensive research”, offers the kind of insider’s view that not many people can offer in Whistler. In a town where a person’s credibility is contingent on how long they’ve managed to live there, Vogler has seen 34 seasons turn, enough to give him the immersion necessary to scribe authoritatively about the community that lies, layered beneath the outerskins of marketing gloss, transient residents, and institutional amnesia. ”I don’t think my idea of Whistler has changed much since 1994 when the first pieces for Whistler Features were written,” says Vogler. “It’s still a place with a very glossed-over corporate veneer––which is what most people think of when they think of Whistler––while beneath that lies this seething mass of eccentric characters and stories that truly characterizes the place. It’s those characters and their stories that I dug into in this book.”
Anyone who has read Vogler’s debut collection, Whistler Features, knows how funny he can be. And anyone who has Top of the Passon their coffee table knows he also has a great eye for character and a poetic perspective, capturing a place with the help of local photographers Bonny Makarewicz and Toshi Kawano “where gravity drives the economy and the lifestyle.”
The biggest difference between Top of the Passand Vogler’s newest offering, Only in Whistler, is that this one has no pictures.
Says Vogler, “It’s all storytelling. In the last one, because it was a pictorial essay as well, I had to step back a bit with the writing so that the photos could tell part of the story, almost like a script. With this one I just dug into all the stories of growing up here and all the eccentric characters I’ve gotten to know over the last thirty-odd years. It begins in 1976 when I was 12 years old and we moved to Whistler. “
In the novel, eleven year old Jake Reynolds has to deal with his braver and cooler best friend Emily, the wolf that he suspects is stalking Hidalgo Island, and the reality that he might just be too chicken to be the hero of Hidalgo.
The book was born more than seven years ago, when Leach and her husband were walking on the beach and saw a seal pup lying on a boulder that poked out of the water. “As we watched,” Sara says, “an eagle almost managed to scoop it up and eat it for lunch, but the seal pup got away just in time. My husband turned to me and said, ‘You should write a story about two kids on an island like this. Imagine all the adventures they could have’. But the time we had walked home, Jake and Emily had started to take shape in my head.”
On Saturday September 12, at the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, she will offer up the inside scoop to aspiring children’s book writers, with her 2.5 hour interactive workshop on Writing for Children. Covering everything from what makes a good children’s book, to how to navigate the publishing gauntlet, Leach is an inspiring example of Whistler’s creative can-do. (and teach.)
Philosopher/writer Alain de Botton has moved into the airport at Heathrow as part of a marketing initiative that aims to humanise the bad-press-besieged Terminal 5.
The collaboration is turning the airport into a meeting place between the corporate sector and the creative sector – with de Botton being paid an undisclosed sum and granted full creative freedom to write stories that will be compiled into a book and given away to travellers.
Heathrow says it is the first airport to employ a writer-in-residence, but in-house writers have been adopted by institutions from prisons, shopping malls and football teams to London’s ritzy Savoy Hotel.
This fall, the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival hosts its third and fourth writers-in-residence, husband-and-wife authors Wayne Grady and Merilyn Simonds. They’ll hunker down at historic Alta Lake house for several months, first leading workshops for 20 participants in the residency program, and then, working on their own writing.
The Vicious Circle though, inspired by the Heathrow project, is looking at taking the writer-in-residence program to new heights. Anyone want to live on top of Whistler Mountain? Inspiration is pretty much guaranteed.
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
The RMOW started the poetry ball rolling, with their Poet’s Pause sculptures, and the Writers Festival is jumping in on the act, with a free poetry walk and writing session on Sunday September 13, which is aimed at helping people shut up their inner critic and fire off some deep thoughts.
The poet Robert Frost said that a poem begins as a lump in your throat. I’ve always experienced that first inkling more as a stone in my boot…(read more)
Pam Barnsley reads the poem that is about to become embedded in the Whistler landscape
Another (beautifully constructed) book sculpture was constructed at Lisbon’s Modern Art Centre. It’s evocative, to create landscapes and buildings from the very material that allows us to do the same thing, in our minds, from the ether…
I can’t help but to see a trend here… and wonder if the sculptors, by appropriating the book and repurposing it into art, are telling us something?
And if the book is dead – what does that mean for civilisation? Is it time to revive oral storytelling? (Or to build a bunker from your book collection, stockpile ammunition and canned goods and hunker down with a candle and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road?)
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
Am reading CC Humphreys‘ Vlad the Last Confession, an epic novel of the real dracula, and can’t put it down. It’s bloody, to be sure… but not in the way you’d think. Revelation: Dracula was a real person. But he wasn’t a vampire. Humphreys managed to separate the man from the myth – at least the blood-sucking myths – and recreate the life of Dracula… which is utterly compelling.
Hopefully, Chris can help exorcise the fiend when he takes part in the Whistler Writers Festival… Or maybe he’ll just scare the shit out of local students, when he visits schools before the Festival kicks off…
Mulligan’s new novel, The Reckoning of Boston Jim, plunders tales of BC’s 1850 gold rush. “I became interested in that time in BC history after studying anthropology at UBC,” she told the Vicious Circle. “Then I realized that no one had written an novel set in that time and place. And so it seemed like something that needed to be written, more or less because I wanted read it (and hopefully others would, too).”
It seems Mulligan might have gone so deep into an era that she can’t get back. As this page from her notebook – (“a typical page, a mishmash of research, ideas, and passages of actual writing”) – reveals, she’s currently working on a book called The Dark.
“It’s based on the true story of the young Fox sisters who started (unintentionally) the spiritualist movement in the 1840s after playing a ghost trick on their mother,” she says. “Or was it a trick?”
Chris Humphreys has channelled his fantastic imagination into six historical fiction novels, a trilogy for young adults and his most recent book, ‘Vlad – The Last Confession’, the epic novel of the real Dracula.
In a move that threatens to put local writers at odds with the entire skiing and snowboarding community, the Vicious Circle, producers of the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, has pronounced September to be line-poaching month.
The Vicious gang were emboldened by the successful reception of several 2008 writing workshops under the guidance of Whistler’s current writer in residence, Wayne Grady, entitled: “The Frying Pan”, and “The Fire”, which focussed on how to poach lines from your own notebook, and grow them into something more substantial.
“This reverence for the perfect line… and for not poaching has got to stop,” a spokesperson for the group declared.
“The note-book is where it all begins. Anyone scribbling away at a journal or on random scraps of paper is a writer. They should get into the poaching ring.”
Dedicating the 8th Whistler Readers and Writers Festival to anyone who wants to take their notebook scribbling to the next level, the Festival invites notebook keepers to join the September poaching ring with their Line-PoachRs Drop In HERE contest call.
Scan a page from your notebook, and email it to viciouspoachers@gmail.com for a chance to win a pass to your choice of Festival seminar. With 20+ to choose from (check out the selection at www.theviciouscircle.ca), you’re sure to find a reason to drop-in.
Scannerless scribblers can pay a visit to Armchair Books, site of Whistler’s largest notebook stockpile, or Whistler Foto Source, the masters of capturing the perfect image, and use their scanners for free. BYO USB stick or CD, or take advantage of the “Vicious” discount at Whistler Foto Source.
Realising there is enough violence out there this summer, with forestfires raging and mercury busting out of thermometers, the Vicious Circle attempts a major peace-broking initiative, inviting rival factions to sit down together at Whistler’s Players Chophouse for He Said, She Said: The Battle of the Bookclubs, September 11 2009
Major diplomacy efforts have focussed on the drafting of a voluntary Convention on Readers Rights, which the Vicious Circle is proposing as Rules of Engagement to local leaders, librarians, booklovers, word-nerds and rabid book-group hosts.
Whereas the act of reading is often a solitary one, but it can sometimes be nice to get together with other humans and mutually discuss a book, we the undersigned agree that: 1. Readers have the right to gather together, under the pretext of discussing a book, and not really discuss the book much at all.
2. Readers have the right to declare their bookclubs to be all male or all female without breaching Canada’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms or being taken to the Supreme Court.
3. Readers are free to belong to more than one bookclub and to hold multiple alliances with, variously, the appreciators of trashy airport/beach fiction, advocates of the literary classics, and propagators of dense non-fiction tomes.
4. Readers, when discussing a book, should be willing to offer informed opinions, to agree to disagree, and if all intelligent thought fails, to like or dislike something “just because.”
5. The “just because” option is a ‘Get out of Jail Free’ card and should only be deployed sparingly.
The Vicious Circle has invited various faction leaders to the table at Players Chophouse on September 12 2009 to discuss the most controversial matters at hand. Lee Henderson, author of the Man Game, the Ethel Wilson prize-winning novel about Vancouver’s historic fight clubs, will be joined by member of all-male bookclub Mike Berard, whose bookclub members are forbidden from mentioning Fight Club.
the first rule of fight club is do not talk about fight club. the first rule of bookclub is you do not talk about fightclub.
Dual book club member, and writer, Pam Barnsley, will represent several different hat-wearing communities, while Vancouver authors Nancy Lee and Chris Humphreys add to the cacophony.
“I do believe,” says the Vicious Circle’s diplomatic envoy, a chronic peacebroker and enduring optimist, Stella Harvey, “that with adult discussion, a little bit of wine and some free appetizers, we will be able to discover our common ground and have a very hearty discussion about the mutual benefits of reading collectively.”
Harvey hopes that all faction leaders will endorse the Convention of Readers Rights, but admits that a temporary truce lasting from 7pm – 10pm, allowing people to enjoy spoken word poet Shane Koyczan, the Haiku Idol and the Battle of the Bookclubs, without any actual physical violence and a minimum of spilled drinks, is all she needs to go to bed happy.
Tickets for the Battle of the Bookclubs are limited and likely to sell out, so to avoid being elbowed out of the way in a front-door frenzy, book your ticket online. Bookgroups looking to represent their factions by deploying a sizable number of representatives are invited to contact the Stella aka “The General” Harvey, Festival Director, for group discount information. Tel: 604 932 4518, Stella25@telus.net
Annabel, a guest at this fall’s Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, has just completed her first novel (on the heels of two excellent story collections), The Golden Mean, and she will read from it, and speak to it, at the festival’s Friday night Gala, hosted by CBC’s Paul Grant.
Wigod hails Lyon as brainy and incisive, evidenced here in a piece she wrote for Quill and Quire on learning the craft of writing fiction.
The book has been described as “impeccably researched” and “brilliantly told.”
Also on Wigod’s watchlist is Salt Spring Island writer Brian Brett, whose new book Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life is coming out from Greystone in September, and plonks Brett fair and square in Michael Pollan terrritory.
American photographer Kyle Cassidy once wrangled an invitation to a party at award-winning sci-fi writer Michael Swanwick’s house. Mostly, he suspects, because he was mistaken for someone else.
While there, Cassidy asked if he could see the five Hugos Swanwick had won, and therewith found himself in Swanwick’s office.
“THIS” thought Cassidy, “is a place of great significance and it needs to be seen!”
Cassidy says it was like he’d cracked open Swanwick’s skull and seen the gears of his genius. He described the workspace as a nest, made out of books, as intricate and well assembled as a Nevelson sculpture.
His natural response, as a photographer, was to ask to document it.
And that launched a project, whereiwrite.org, in which Cassidy set out to explore the places writers build around themselves, to see if there’s any connection between where they work and the work itself.
The documents, poached from the notebooks of Wayne Grady and Merilyn Simonds reveal details from their works-in-progress as well as cunning plans on Grady’s part to subvert fiction through the continued support of creative non-fiction.
Further inquiries have revealed that the Vicious Circle is conspiring with the Resort Municipality of Whistler to turn the formerly disused residence, Alta Lake House, into headquarters for a growing gang of renegade scribblers, who are gathering in response to the call to arms issued by the Residency leaders Grady and Simonds.
Clearly in a move to avoid the attention of CSIS, CIA, Minster Kenney and the Canadian Border Police, Grady and Simonds are currently making their way by vehicle to Whistler, where they will hole up in their new headquarters, indoctrinate 20 warriors of the pen in a month-long training camp, and then remain installed in the house to work on their own nefarious projects throughout the fall.
Vicious Circle insiders advise that training camp still offers opportunities for would-be ink-slingers. All that potential residency collaborators require is a desire to commit themselves to the cause. No other training is required. Although a “manuscript” is due August 10, the workshop leaders are as capable of guiding a writer on how to grow a story from several pages of a notebook, as they are to workshop more developed manifestos.
A page from Merilyn Simond's notebook reveals the genesis of her current work-in-progress
Wayne Grady's notebook contains all the evidence needed
“For me, writing starts with a line, or some imagination, or some notion, and I just go with it as far as I can. You set yourself afloat on the language. And you think, I’ll see how far it can take me before this little raft I’ve cobbled together falls apart and everybody understands that I’m really just a fraud, or drowning—whichever comes first. But when it’s really working, readers go with you to the most unlikely places. They take big leaps with you.”
So says undertaker (and New York Times op-ed writer) Thomas Lynch in the Utne reader this month.
Working with the dead gives him a unique perspective – ““Yeats said to Olivia Shakespeare that the only subjects that should be compelling to a studious mind are sex and death. Those are the bookends. And think of it, what else do we think of, what else is there besides that? I think most people drive around all day being vexed by images of mortality and vitality. All they’re wondering about is how they’re going to die and who they’re going to sleep with, or variations on that theme—what job they’re going to have, whether they’re tall enough or skinny enough or short enough or smart enough or fast enough or make enough money, and all of it plays into these two bookends.
If you’re writing about life, you’re writing about death. If you’re writing about life, you’re writing about love and grief and sex and all that stuff.”
Once upon a time, he says, poets could change cultures… They were the ones who literally brought the news from one place to another, walking from town to town, “which is how we got everything to be iambic and memorable and rhymed and metered, because the tradition was oral before it was literary.”
Maybe instead of writers’ workshops, we should be hosting writers walk-shops… reconnecting the story with the feet, the beat, the action of blood-pump and armswing, as opposed to the navelgaze and swoon and angsty-pencil-chewing…
Because, says the undertaker, there is power in poetry. “Poetry is as good an ax as a pillow. You should be able to cut with it if you want to. But I do want to avoid hurting people inadvertently. I don’t mind hurting people I intend to hurt—inadvertent damage is the thing I fear. I think all writers are capable of it. You’re dealing with powerful tools, you know; words are powerful business. I’m not saying you should be guided by fear, but I think general kindness is still a better thing. It’s just evolution. We want to be better people.”
Win a weekend at creative boot-camp in Whistler, September 11-13 2009 with accommodation, dinner and passes to attend the 8th Whistler Readers and Writers Festival. No push-ups necessary. All you have to do is answer this skill-testing question:
Which Vancouver-based author, and Whistler Writers Festival guest, wrote the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize 2009 winning novel, The Man Game?
Dinner for two at Players Chophouse, Creekside, Whistler’s freshest steak house. Two nights accommodation at the brand new mountain lodge, Evolution, in Whistler’s Creekside.
“It goes without saying that one consequence of our evolution as cultural beings has been an increasing dependence on objects for survival and comfort. Compared wtih the hunter-gatherers, described by Marshall Sahlins, who were horrified by the idea of having to accept gifts because it meant having to carry one more blanket or kettle along on their nomadic journeys, we are slowly being buried under towering mounds of artifacts. Recently, it has been calculated that every American will own more than four hundred electronic appliances during his or her lifetime. (Massimini, 1989)
This proliferation of artifacts would not be a problem were it not for the fact that objects compete with humans for scarce resources in the same ecosystem. Forests are being destroyed to provide lumber, wood and pulp; metal and oil are consumed to build and propel vehicles. The potential energy contained in our environment is dissipated as we convert it into objects, which rapidly become obsolete; thus we accelerate the processes of entropy that degrade the planet.”
In short, we are defined by our shit.
All that we own, owns us, in some form. All the treasures our characters surround themselves with, covet, seek out, reveals what they value, what they seek, the way they want to be perceived…
For boot-camp creative writing exercise 19, tell us about the stuff that reveals and defines a character – the item that they double back into the house to grab after the evacuation order is issued… the totem they tuck under their daughter’s pillow to ward off the monsters that wake her each night… the secrets tucked into a shoebox in the top of the wardrobe that even their husband doesn’t know of… The thing that reveals them…
This fall, if you want to write deliberately, and take your work to another level, the woods of Whistler is your ground-zero. Wayne Grady and Merilyn Simonds will hunker down in Alta Lake Station House in Whistler this September, as the 3rd and 4th writers-in-residence to be hosted by the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival.
With 25 books between them, ranging from creative non-fiction to short stories to novels, the couple bring a wealth of writing know-how to Whistler to the benefit of 20 writers who will have the opportunity to work with one of them over the month of September.
Writers interested in taking part in the residency program need to register online at www.theviciouscircle.ca. A short synopsis of the work to be developed during the residency, plus a manuscript of no more than 20 double spaced pages, is due August 10, to enable Grady or Simonds to review the work in advance of the workshops.
Residency participants will receive four one-on-one sessions with Grady or Simonds throughout September to develop their manuscript, and will also be able to attend several group lectures on various aspects of the craft of writing. With only 20 spots available, and the residency costing just $250, places are expected to fill quickly.
Remember the fable? It starred several critters and finished with a message that didn’t seem like brainwashing at the time, but somehow, we’re still programmed to believe that slow and steady wins the race.
McSweeney’s has spent the past decade breathing new life into the oldest form of storytelling. Last year, issue 28 was dedicated entirely to the fable.
Let’s revive it. Boot-Camp Ex 18 invites you to get fabulous with the fabula… Your main character is an animal. What happens next?
There is a connection between writing and reading… didja realise? It’s why the Whistler Writers Festival morphed into the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, even though it’s program remains anchored heavily on craft-development and writing workshops. It’s probably why other Festivals, including the Sunshine Coast of Written Arts and the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival are pitched more towards readers, of whom there are more, than writers…
Most writers, she says, learn to write by reading. They learn to love books, by reading. They are seduced by the shimmer and power of stories, by reading.
Did they learn to write from writer’s workshops and MFA programs, she asks, a longtime writing instructor herself…
Which brings us back to the quote that launched this website, one year ago, from John Gardner, a curmudgeonly writer and teacher, who wrote that the first value of a writer’s workshop is that it makes the writer feel not only abnormal, but virtuous. “In a writers’ community, nearly all the talk is about writing. Even if you don’t agree with most of what is said, you come to take for granted that no other talk is quite so important… Talk about writing is exciting. It fills you with nervous energy, makes you want to leave the party and go home and write. And it’s the sheer act of writing, more than anything else, that makes a writer.”
And perhaps, it’s the art of reading, that teaches one much of what one needs to know about how to do it right.
“By the time (Anton) Chekhov died of tuberculosis at the age of 44, he had written, in addition to his plays, approximately six hundred short stories. He was also a medical doctor. He supervised the construction of clinics and schools, he was active in the Moscow Art Theatre, he married the famous actress Olga Knipper, he visited the infamous prison on Sakhalin Island and wrote a book about that. Once, when someone asked him his method of composition, Chekhov picked up an ashtray.
‘This is my method of composition,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow I will write a story called “The Ashtray.”‘”
(from Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer)
2. It’s gonna be the biggest gathering of word-nerds Whistler has ever seen.
3. We’re moving to Creekside!
4. The Writer in Residence programming is DOUBLING, with guest writers Wayne Grady and Merilyn Simonds bunking down on the lake.
5. Hot off the press books include Annabel Lyon’s The Golden Mean, Claire Mulligan’s The Reckoning of Boston Jim, Lee Henderson’s The Man Game, and Whistler’s own Sara Leach with Jake Reynolds: Chicken or Eagle?
6. We’re getting violent. Well, not really. But if the pen is mightier than the sword, then a gathering of word-nerds is actually more warrior-like than one might think. And we’ll be slinging sentences, ink and poetry like it’s going out of style at the first ever Haiku Idol.
7. It’s batter up with the Pitching Mound. Magazine writers get their moment in the sun, when 5 of Canada’s leading magazine editors, James Little from Explore magazine, Leslie Anthony from Skier magazine, Sandro Grison from Color magazine, Matt O’Grady from BC Business magazine and Charlene Rooke from Western Living magazine, field pitches from aspiring contributors.
8. Free steak knives for everyone who signs on by June 1.
(Apologies to those who missed the free steak knives. But as a a special offer, we can entice you with FREE PARKING, a rare and precious thing in the pre-Olympic Whistler.)
All this and more! Check out the full program at www.theviciouscircle.ca
Pajamas? Pyjamas? If you look to the stairwell, you will find bananas in them… Be they your preferred lounging attire, sleeping attire, or writing attire, PJs (from the Persian: “leg garment”) have inspired a DIY form of marketing that any aspiring writer should become familiar with.
All the more reason to come out to the Vicious Circle’s Summer Potluck on Monday. Meet other local writers, discover who makes the best spinach and artichoke dip. and enjoy a free session on pajama marketing, presented by Helen Gallagher.
Keeping a book alive today is the author’s responsibility, as the publishing industry promotes only their top authors. This session, based on Helen’s book: Release Your Writing: Book Publishing Your Way, includes dozens of practical strategies to give your book international exposure, most of which exist in the online world. (Thus, they are free or inexpensive, and things you can do in your p.j.’s at home.)
This marketing topic includes “Making Sense of Social Networking,” helping
writers determine where to focus their attention.
Dress code is casual. (Wear whatever “leg attire” you like.) 9327 Emerald Drive (second entrance to Emerald).
I asked Whistler writer, Rebecca Wood Barrett, how she knows if something has got the legs to make it all the way to a novel.
She said, “I think if an idea haunts you for a long time, it’s something worth exploring. Someone once said we don’t have to worry about finding our obsessions – they will find us! But recognising that “big idea” has a lot to do with faith, too.”
I’ve heard it said that you can analyse some writer’s works and see a recurring theme, an idea they keep revisiting and exploring, something that wouldn’t let them go… Stephen Spielberg, for instance, and the idea of the lost boy. Discovering your obsessions can lead to greatness.
How do you know what you’re obsessed with, though? What you keep circling back to?
For boot-camp exercise 17, take to the page with this task in mind. Write about something you didn’t like as a child… but that you do like now.
For $150, participants can choose up to six workshops from a selection of 10 different topics on Taking Care of Yourself as a Writer, Copyright and Libel Law, Grant-Writing, Setting up a Website, Technologies for Self-Promotion, Applying to Writing Programs, Self-Publishing, Tips from Editors, how to shape and revise a manuscript, and how to pitch your project ideas.
A writing practice is simply picking up a pen — a fast-writing pen, preferably, since the mind is faster than the hand — and doing timed writing exercises.
The idea is to keep your hand moving for, say, ten minutes, and don’t cross anything out, because that makes space for your inner editor to come in. You are free to write the worst junk in America. After all, when we get on the tennis courts, we don’t expect to be a champion the first day. But somehow with writing, if we don’t write the opening paragraph of War and Peace the first time we sit down with our notebook, we feel we’ve failed.
You can use a computer, but I always say you should be able to write with a pen, because someday your computer might break, or you might not have access to electricity. It’s sort of like driving: you still have to know how to walk.
I consider writing an athletic activity: the more you practice, the better you get at it. The reason you keep your hand moving is because there’s often a conflict between the editor and the creator. The editor is always on our shoulder saying, “Oh, you shouldn’t write that. It’s no good.” But when you have to keep the hand moving, it’s an opportunity for the creator to have a say. All the other rules of writing practice support that primary rule of keeping your hand moving. The goal is to allow the written word to connect with your original mind, to write down the first thought you flash on, before the second and third thoughts come in.
Lawrence Lessig might be the godfather of the copyleft and Creative Commons movement.
Earlier this month, Mark Helprin, author of Digital Barbarism wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal arguing that writers and creators need to fight back against the chipping away of copyright protection.
Imagine a city of many millions of people who support themselves and their families solely by arranging words, images and sounds, or in the industries that make this work available to others. They neither farm, fish, mine, manufacture, manage, heal, teach, build nor defend. But what they do influences most everything, shapes politics and governance, provides a conception of our time, forges the culture such as it is, and stamps the imprint of the present for history to judge. Though builders may build, in the main they follow the plans of architects. Teachers teach, but they must have a text. Politicians govern, but only upon the flow of commentary that raises them up or casts them down.
Dispersed throughout the United States, the millions of this hypothetical city do exist, in professions dependent upon the copyright protection of intellectual property. More than anywhere else, they are concentrated in New York, where you see them walking at 60 miles per hour, fully absorbed in their novels, plans, melodies, compositions, essays or designs.
Their work is peculiarly vulnerable in that it is easy to appropriate. If they were farmers, industrialists or surgeons, their problems would be different. It is not possible to copy instantaneously and in virtually unlimited quantities either potatoes, aluminum or gall bladder surgeries, as one might a song or a scanned book.
Were this vulnerability unaddressed, the producers of intellectual property would be put out of business unless they were independently wealthy or worked either as amateurs or drew salaries at the pleasure of, and beholden to, boards, committees and overseers of every type. Always at risk, the independent voice, the guarantor of political freedom and personal dignity, would be dangerously depressed along with the arts that sustain civilization.
In his book, Digital Barbarism, he argues:
“The new digital barbarism is, in its language, comportment, thoughtlessness, and obeisance to force and power, very much like the old. And like the old, and every form of tyranny, hard or soft, it is most vulnerable to a bright light shone upon it. To call it for what it is, to examine it while paying no heed to its rich bribes and powerful coercions, to contrast it to what it presumes to replace, is to begin the long fight against it.
“Very clearly, the choice is between the preeminence of the individual or of the collective, of improvisation or of routine, of the soul or of the machine. It is a choice that perhaps you have already made, without knowing it, Or perhaps it has been made for you. But it is always possible to opt in or out, because your affirmations are your own, the court of judgment your mind and heart. These are free, and you are the sovereign, always. Choose.”
The Vicious Circle, Whistler’s Writers Group hosts its annual gathering on June 15, at 6:30pm at 9327 Emerald Drive. All writers are welcome. Bring a plate to share at the potluck meal, which will be followed by a presentation by Chicago-area writer and publishing consultant Helen Gallagher. She will be speaking about Pajama Marketing, and Making Sense of Social Networking.
Keeping a book alive today is the author’s responsibility, as the publishing industry promotes only their top authors. Pajama Marketing is a session based on Gallagher’s book Release Your Writing: Book Publishing Your Way, which includes dozens of practical strategies to give your book international exposure, most of which exist in the online world. (Thus, they are free or inexpensive, and things you can do in your p.j.’s at home.)
This marketing topic includes “Making Sense of Social Networking,” helping writers determine where to focus their attention. The 45 minute presentation will be followed by a Q and A.
Please RSVP to Stella Harvey, stella25 (at) telus (dot) net, if you’re interested in attending.
Having fed the seed of budding creative writers, the Vicious Circle (Whistler’s Writers Group) is now offering the blue square version of creative writing seminars, picking up where the first course left off. New attendees are also welcome. The course will run for six weeks beginning Thursday May 7, at the Whistler Public Library, and the cost will be $120.
The Blue Square program aims to open up new and challenging terrain for writers, teaching participants to recognise the germ of a good story and how to make it bloom.
Weekly lectures will cover topics including What is Story, and How is it Different from an Anecdote?; Building Blocks of Fiction: including Exposition, Narrative Summary, Scene (Dialogue and Action); Creating Characters; Advancing Plot; Deciding on Point of View and Tense; The Writer’s Voice; and Where and How to Publish your Story.
In-class exercises and feedback and revision will draw on the lecture topics over 6 weeks to develop one story, that, ultimately, will be ready to launch into the world. The final session, Wood Barrett will cover writing markets and where to publish the stories.
Wood Barrett is an honours graduate in Film Studies from Ryerson, and recently undertook her Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing at UBC. She is a published short story writer, an award-winning filmmaker, a television producer with Resort TV and winner of the 2008 Postcard Jam, or as she modestly says, “a bit of a genre-crosser.” She’s also delivered several workshops at previous Whistler Writers Festivals, including How to Pitch, and How to Write for Film.
To sign up for the course, which is offered for $120, go to www.theviciouscircle.ca.
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.
On an icy night in February, a hush falls over a Whistler theatre stuffed beyond capacity. Extra chairs have been squeezed onto the end of rows, and the opening presenter warns us that if there is a fire, everyone must leave in an orderly fashion. The audience laughs. They inch to the edge of their seats, eager for the presentation to begin.
But this is no show about hucking off cliffs, or shredding the gnar. There is no ski-bum speaker to regale us with tales of how they survived an avalanche, won a gold medal against all odds, or lived off-the-grid for two years in a van in Lot 4, chasing the powder dream. You won’t hear a pumping soundtrack, no tortured vocals by disaffected youth. This is no filmmaker showdown, no wet-T shirt contest, no homage to the extreme, featuring risky stunts in the mountains on boards or skis or bikes.
This is literature, baby. And it’s sold out.
If you didn’t snap up your tickets early, you can be forgiven. A literary reading and Q&A⎯even with a CBC icon⎯is not your typical high-octane Whistler spectacle. But it seems that the word-nerds have dug the spike of their literary crampons in and secured traction.
The apparent overnight success has in fact been germinating since 2003, when the Celebration 2010: Whistler Arts Festival and Whistler Arts Council granted seed money to the Whistler Writers’ Group to put on a literary event. The first plantings of the Literary Leanings Reading Series evolved in the attic space at a Creekside restaurant, where writers read to an audience of fifty. Along with up-and-coming authors Nancy Lee (Dead Girls), Lee Henderson (The Man Game), and Adam Lewis Schroeder (Kingdom of Monkeys), our own local writers read from their stories to an appreciative, but all-too-small audience.
Stella Harvey, founder of the non-profit Whistler Writers’ Group and organizer of the event, credits the annual injection of Olympic cultural funding as raising the profile of the literary arts by attracting quality authors to Whistler. Over the years, headliners have included Patrick Lane, Lorna Crozier, Michael Winter, Lisa Moore, Ivan E. Coyote, Noah Richler, Warren MacDonald, David Gilmour, John Valliant and Annette Lapointe. Harvey says “It also gives local writers from the Sea to Sky a chance to share the stage with their better known counterparts, to showcase their talents when they wouldn’t otherwise have this opportunity. The local writers come from Squamish to Pemberton, some of whom include Stephen Vogler, Lisa Richardson, Jude Goodwin and Pam Barnsley.”
Seven years on, Literary Leanings 2009 has grown in stature and become a must-see event at the month-long arts festival⎯which has now morphed into the Whistler Winter Arts Festival, co-presented by the Whistler Arts Council and Cultural Olympiad Vancouver 2010. The Whistler Winter Arts Festival was created in 2003 to build capacity and create excitement for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.
Harvey says, “The funding allows us to bring in a big name. It makes for a marketable show, something unique and different, and of a quality that people will come and watch. Now people want to attend a literary event⎯it put us on the map.”
The Big Name this year is Joseph Boyden, fresh from his Giller Prize win for his novel Through Black Spruce. Boyden’s wife and author Amanda Boyden (Babylon Rolling) and Steven Galloway (The Cellist of Sarajevo) join him onstage as Shelagh Rogers of CBC Radio moderates the discussion and interviews each writer. Later, the show will be broadcast to the country on national radio.
Take a step back, and you might ask why this cultural convergence, taking place in the exquisite venue of the Squamish Lillooet Cultural Centre, is being funded by the world’s greatest sporting event? What do Canadian Joseph Boyden, who is Metis, and Amanda Boyden, who is American and a former trapeze artist, have anything to do with the pinnacle tournament of winter sports? What can Galloway, who is bookish in glasses and with a self-deprecating wit, offer to the 2010 Olympics? No world records for speed skating or ski jumping are being broken tonight.
However, there is something strange and serendipitous happening, and the audience senses it. Rogers asks Galloway a question about how he came to write his book. In it, a cellist plays in a bomb crater in Sarajevo for 22 days to commemorate the same number of people who died one day during the siege. “We have a tendency,” Galloway says, “in North America in particular to view art as a luxury item, things like music or books as almost a frivolity. But the way Europeans look at it, and kind of the way I look at it, is that one of the points of art and music is to remind us of our innate humanity.”
The audience nods, as though Galloway has expressed a collective thought⎯yes, this is why we are here, listening to these authors read.
Is it possible then, that the three pillars of the modern Olympic Movement⎯sport, culture and environment⎯are the combined values that honour our very humanness? That the link between the desire to race beyond physical boundaries in the extremes of winter, is not so far from the hunger of writers to explore, through literature, the edges of our humanity in times of extreme duress?
Perhaps the audience seems to think so, for at the end of the evening the applause lasts a long time.
In the great Native hall after the show is over, the audience members line up to buy the authors’ books, and ask them for their autographs. In one year’s time, the world will come to Whistler to watch our athletes, and at the same time honour our artists, the core of our community.
In the Writing Life, Annie Dillard wrote, “Process is nothing: erase your tracks. The path is not the work.” I love her lack of sentimentality, the fierce Zen detachment she preaches. Even though, when you’re in the middle of the work, process is all you have. As Ray Lawrence, the director of the film Jindabyne said, “If I was worried about the outcome, I think it would fail, but I concern myself with the process so that’s one thing at a time, and focus on that, and trusting the process. You can’t really control the outcome. If we could, we’d have successes all the time.”
So, when you’re in the weeds, trust the process. And when you’re done, erase your tracks. Noone needs to know. Noone needs to see the trail of crumbs, and all the loops and circlings and ambulations that got you from A to B.
So, Annie is our guest virtual teacher for Boot-Camp Exercise 11.
Here’s the dharma: “Always locate the reader in time and space - again and agin. Beginning writers rush in to feelings, to interior lives. Instead, stick to surface appearances, hit the five senses, give the history of the person and the place, and the look of the person and the place. Use first names and last names. As you write, stick everything in a place and time. Don’t describe feelings.”
Pencils ready? Pick a feeling. Happiness. Sorrow. Heartbreak. Regret.
Now, write a scene, full of detail, that conveys that emotion. But stick to the surfaces. Don’t go inner monologue. Don’t describe the feeling. Do not use the word of that feeling even once. Just the facts, sarge. Names. Places. Senses. Surfaces. Show us what happiness, sorrow, heartbreak, regret look like. But let’s not talk about feelings…
She’s too modest to claim the title of Poet Laureate, but Pam Barnsley is willing to answer to Mystery-Slinger, or Ink-stained Wretch.
She’s also a powerful advocate for Whistler’s poetic soul.
“Whistler is one of the best sports junkies’ towns in the world, but she’s way more than that. She’s full of interesting characters and artists and friends. People who’ve celebrated or wept at her wins and losses, her changes, her beauty, her roots. People who’ve persevered. That’s not as quantifiable as the number of vertical feet of rideable terrain, or the names of golf course designers or the length of the wine lists; but it’s that intangible something that makes us more than Disneyland. It’s what makes us a great place to live and grow. I think everyone who lives here—really is fully alive here—is an artist. Some of us just express it in different mediums; on the dance floor, in the powder, in community service, in pottery, in film, in a grappling with black marks on paper for the meaning of what it is to be human.”
Poetry kept Pam Barnsley prolific and purple-prosed as a hippie teen – she even self-published a few editions in purple-suede hand-stitched covers for like-minded dreamers. After working as a newspaper reporter, magazine writer, ad copy writer, selling short stories, and writing a few scripts and acting in the Beachcombers, Barnsley found her way back to poetry.
The appeal in poetry for a mystery novel scribe? “It’s both demanding and liberating to craft words into tiny emotional bobs, stories pared down to the bone, just the essence lingering so the reader has to do some of the work…”
If publishers are failing because they can’t get audiences to pay for words, where does that leave writers?
It leaves them, most certainly longing for the ‘heyday’ of over a century ago, when publisher William Randolph Hearst paid his 32 year old correspondent Richard Harding Davis $3000 for a month of work covering the anticipated war in Cuba.
Writes Wilkinson, “By some lights, this a golden age for writers, who can launch a blog, post their views online and reap the rewards of community, commenters and cross-referencing colleagues. This is all true. In addition to expanding the audiences of experienced writers, the web has created a showcase for extraordinary young talent like Matthew Yglesias, Ben Smith, Marc Ambinder, Ross Douthat, and Ezra Klein. On the web, no bureaucracy makes them wait their turn, no dunderheaded editors hold back their talents.
But for a host of other young writers, there is still the problem of getting paid.”
The number of people willing to write for free is vast. Writing, unlike oil-drilling, open-pit mining, or stocktrading, is an inherently satisfying act, something that people are intrinsically motivated to do. Follow the money, and you’ll find people trading their time for work that is not necessarily intrinsically satisfying, and potentially dangerous.
Still, a writer cannot live off words alone. If only the magic were sufficient that one could conjure a meal with a few recipe cards laid out on the table… Virginia Woolf wrote that a woman needed a room of her own, and L5000 a year, to pursue the craft. I always fixated on the room, but I think I was missing the point.
As Dickinson says, “on the whole, the writing game seems likely to become even more a province of the upper middle class and flat-out wealthy than it is already. The offspring of the affluent, branded college degrees in hand, can afford to give it a go. But anyone hailing from more hardscrabble environs may find it too difficult to get traction before succumbing to the dismal economics of it all.”
The Internet may have democratised the space, and the publishing platforms. But noone’s quite worked out how to make a living in the brave new world, especially without a trust fund to sustain them.
Departing from his prepared remarks, James Moore indicated that eligiblity for funding could potentially be restricted to those magazines with an annual circulation above 5000. With notable exceptions, the circulation of virtually every Canadian literary and arts magazine, large and small, is below 5000.
We have to make sure this possibility does not become an actuality, for if it does, as April 1, 2010, these important and praiseworthy magazines will no longer qualify for funding that they have been receiving for years from the CMF and PAP despite the excellent work that they undertake for the readers and writers across Canada (and around the world)!
The Coalition to Keep Canadian Heritage Support for Literary and Arts Magazine feels strongly that to render these magazines ineligible for this support would be unjust. To quote Andris Taskans, editor of Prairie Fire, to do so would be “a slap in the face”—not only to the magazines themselves but to the many writers that they publish, many of whom began illustrious, international careers in these seminal if modest publcations. To do so would also be a “slap in the face” to the ordinary (and extraordinary) Canadians who read them.
By joining the Coalition, readers and writers everywhere send a strong message to the Honorable James Moore, the Department of Canadian Heritage, and the Canada Periodical Fund that we believe in our literary and arts magazines and feel that they should continue to do so by supporting them through well-deserved and sustained financial support.
To do so, would be the cheapest economic stimulus package the Government of Canada could initiate. Every single dollar granted to us or paid to us by a subscriber or a newsstand buyer goes back into the economy.
Put it this way, when Canadians get into their Chrysler and GM cars, they have to drive somewhere. A lot of them drive to their newsstands and bookstores to buy a literary or arts magazine.
Say yes to continued Canadian Heritage funding through the Canada Periodical Fund for Canada’s arts and literary magazines!
So, words that aren’t used evolve or disappear more rapidly than those that are embedded in our culture, and irreplaceable, like I, who, we, thou, two, three, five…
Last week, Boot Camp Exercise 9 was a call to arms to preserve some of the most, apparently, vulnerable words in our language.
This week, your task is to take your paragraph/postcard/story, in which you used the Globe’s list of the 11 most vulnerable words, and rewrite it, without them.
My virtual writing teacher has been nominated for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, alongside Nino Ricci and Marina Endicott.
Fred Stenson, a Calgary-based writer of historical fiction, is also the author of Things Feigned or Imagined : The Craft of Fiction, an excellent book on the craft, filled with exercises that will find their way to forthcoming BootCamp drills.
Stenson’s nomination has not been without controversy. His wife, Dr Pamela Banting, was initially on the jury, but was subsequently removed. Stenson’s book, The Great Karoo, was also nominated for the 2008 Governor General’s Literary Award.
Best Book Marina Endicott (Canada) Good to a Fault Freehand Books
Kenneth J Harvey (Canada) Blackstrap Hawco Random House Canada
Nino Ricci (Canada) The Origin of Species Doubleday Canada
Jacob Ross(Grenada) Pynter Bender Fourth Estate
Jaspreet Singh (Canada) Chef Véhicule Press
Fred Stenson (Canada) The Great Karoo Doubleday Canada
Best First Book
Theanna Bischoff (Canada) Cleavage NeWest Press
Mark Blagrave (Canada) Silver Salts Cormorant Books
Craig Boyko (Canada) Blackouts McClelland and Stewart
Nila Gupta (Canada) The Sherpa and Other Fictions Sumach Press
Pasha Malla (Canada) The Withdrawal Method House of Anansi Press
Joan Thomas (Canada) Reading By Lightning Goose Lane Editions
Padma Viswanathan (Canada)The Toss of a Lemon Random House Canada
Kevin McFarland has revealed that the second Poet’s Pause call, for poems to be incorporated into Joan Baron’s scupltures on Alta Lake, resulted in 42 poems from 24 poets.
Last week, the jury reviewed the submissions, in a blind process with no names attached to the poetry, and selected poems by Pam Barnsley and Sheila Murphy.
Pam also won last year for her poem Two.
Said McFarland, “The jury was surprised Pam was the winning author again this year, as the poem is so different from the last one. They were also surprised to find that Sheila Murphy submitted her poem to our competition from Phoenix, Arizona”
The following words are evolving rapidly and likely to disappear:
dirty
squeeze
bad
because
guts
push (verb)
smell (verb)
stab
stick (noun)
turn (verb)
wipe
As languages evolve over centuries and millennia, the most frequently used words tend to remain unaltered, while rarer words are more likely to change.
So, for Boot Camp exercise 9, become a warrior for the disappearing… Save them, by using them! After all, they’re perfectly good words.
Write a piece, a paragraph, a postcard, a story, using these 11 words.
dirty / squeeze / bad / because / guts / push (verb) / smell (verb) / stab /
Amanda Boyden said her novel Babylon Rolling was a love song to her city, written in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, with a sense that nothing would ever be the same.
Wednesday evening saw the Squamish Lilwat Cultural Centre showcase the poetry of its architecture, as 120 folk gathered in the cedar-lined theatre to hear Shelagh Rogers tickle some truths from Joseph Boyden, Amanda Boyden and Steven Galloway. The interviews will be broadcast on Roger’s CBC program, The Next Chapter, which airs Saturdays at 3pm.
Everyone will have their take-away moments, but here are a few of mine:
Hearing Amanda Boyden admit that it can be hard being married to another writer, whose Canadianness has helped his career to have more pointy high-points, especially after watching her first novel fall alongside the World Trade towers in a cataclysm of bad timing. And then seeing them spontaneously, unselfconsciously, pick lint from each other’s shoulders.
Discovering that palmist lore suggests that if the lines on a person’s hand change, then their life will change as well.
Steven Galloway, amidst quips and jokes, throwing down a challenge to anyone who loves language – to despise the abuse of words by the use of phrases like “ethnic cleansing”, ‘because there’s absolutely nothing clean about it.’
And rallying around his call to protect civilisation through the arts, because civilisation is not about roads and bridges. They may be a result of a civilised society, but what civilisation is about, is an agreement between people to behave in certain ways, an implied agreement between Steven Galloway and Shelagh Rogers not to start smacking each other over the head with a microphone… and there are two ways we prop up civilisation, these contracts of agreed behaviours and limits – through the law, and the arts. And the law fails us before the arts do.
Shelagh Rogers referencing an early interview she had done with Timothy Findley, in which she asked him why he writes.
“Against despair.”
And for Galloway, Boyden and Boyden, this deeply moral act of writing seemed to be to write/right the wrongs… of Hurricane Katrina, of the siege of Sarajevo, of colonialism…
Power to all our scribblings. We are writing in our garrets, in the corners of Pasta Lupino, on our laps in the bus, against despair, against those who would turn a blind eye to suffering and press on in their campaigns for power and money, to hold up civilisation… Simple enough.
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.
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…
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.)
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…
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.”
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
The Walrus magazine provides a great assignment for this week’s Virtual Boot-Camp.
After all, the love story is the simplest narrative known. It’s the story we all know instinctively. Boy sees girl. Boy wants girl. Boy gets girl.
Of course, the variations are endless. Girl wants girl. Boy doesn’t know how to get girl. Happily ever after is thwarted by a dozen things. Girl loves work and has no room for boy, girl or other… Boy discovers his true love is his dog, just as dog dies from nasty, twitching, rabid pox.
Still, in the beginning, was the love story. And the love story started, often, with a letter.
So. 500 words. A love letter. By Valentine’s Day. Send it to the Walrus. Let them see how drenched we are in passion, longing, and all things requited and un… out here in Whistler.
The winning love letter will be announced on March 1, 2009. The letter that wins the judges’ hearts will earn a $1,000 GRAND PRIZE, as well as another $1,000 in prizes from Deutsche Grammaphon. The letter will also be published on the Walrus website.
Runners-up prizes include:
A ROMANTIC GETAWAY weekend for two
A LOVE LETTER FROM BIGFOOT, written by Graham Roumieu
Your love letter PUBLISHED for all to read on the Walrus website
Signed copies of Four Letter Word
Prize packages from DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON
Producers of the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival (in addition to Literary Leanings, the Collective Novel Experiment and a host of other geeking-out-together-on-words events), the Vicious Circle, as Whistler Writers Group is known, was founded in 2001 to provide a forum for local writers to develop their craft and connect ... Continue reading »
Whistler Writers Group decides to fold Festival in favour of deep retreat residency and regular classes throughout year http://bit.ly/5H9JNP2 weeks ago
