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.

That’s it. I’m moving to the USA. Gordo’s slashing funds for libraries…

What kind of a government decides to trim spending in a ‘let’s-not-call-it-a-depression’ by cutting funding to libraries?

All my smugness about living in a highly evolved social democracy is rapidly evaporating. Surely there’s a mini-Obama in Canada somewhere.

Library use is up across the province. The Pemberton library, since moving into its new facility, saw a 70% increase in circulation in April, with 75 new members a month…

And the province is threatening to cut funding from libraries? Seriously? Is it a cunning plan to create a stupider, more compliant, less politically literate population? Is it part of an ongoing agenda to create a two-tier society of haves and have nots? Are the BC Liberals THAT offended by public spaces that not only do they want to privatise rivers, education, our railways, but they want to magic away the most democratic of public institutions – the library? Or is it just thoughtless?

If this makes you stomping mad, check out www.stopbclibrarycuts.ca.

Write to your MLA and the Premier. Let them know that literacy is not-negotiable.

Books as portal to another world, or objet d’art?

Books and art and life already enjoy a messy connection, spilling into each other’s realms like ingredients in a messy kitchen.

The Whistler Library, BookBuffet founder Paula Shackleton and the Whistler Art Walk are combining forces this week to combine the forces of life, books and art, by creating a book sculpture.

The project is inspired by Spanish Contemporary artist, Alicia Martin and her Madrid-based Bibliographia piece, made of 5000 books. 

The project, and Paula’s statement that “Books are usually forgotten items that take up space on our shelves collecting dust”, draws parallels with the wave of post-modern sculptors who reclaim junk to make art, and a simultaneous commentary on our throw-away society…  It also makes me wonder if we are watching the death of the medium. E-readers are in. And those old books are good for one thing – making elaborate artistic statements.

Visit the Whistler Library during Artwalk and let us know what the book art sculpture provokes for you.

13 Whistler Writers prepare to Grow the Seed of Story

The Growing the Seed course with instructor Rebecca Wood Barrett kicks off Thursday, May 7 at the Whistler Public Library, from 7:30 – 9:30.

13 writers will arm themselves with paper and pen, and gird up to embrace the art of the story.

The 6 week program builds on the success of the Vicious Circle (Whistler Writers’ Group)’s Green Circle creative writing seminars.

Feeding the Seed course sprouts into Season 2 – Growing a Story

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.

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

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

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

Departing from his prepared remarks, James Moore indicated that eligiblity for funding could potentially be restricted to those magazines with an annual circulation above 5000. With notable exceptions, the circulation of virtually every Canadian literary and arts magazine, large and small, is below 5000. 

We have to make sure this possibility does not become an actuality, for if it does, as April 1, 2010, these important and praiseworthy magazines will no longer qualify for funding that they have been receiving for years from the CMF and PAP despite the excellent work that they undertake for the readers and writers across Canada (and around the world)! 

The Coalition to Keep Canadian Heritage Support for Literary and Arts Magazine feels strongly that to render these magazines ineligible for this support would be unjust. To quote Andris Taskans, editor of Prairie Fire, to do so would be “a slap in the face”—not only to the magazines themselves but to the many writers that they publish, many of whom began illustrious, international careers in these seminal if modest publcations. To do so would also be a “slap in the face” to the ordinary (and extraordinary) Canadians who read them. 

By joining the Coalition, readers and writers everywhere send a strong message to the Honorable James Moore, the Department of Canadian Heritage, and the Canada Periodical Fund that we believe in our literary and arts magazines and feel that they should continue to do so by supporting them through well-deserved and sustained financial support. 

To do so, would be the cheapest economic stimulus package the Government of Canada could initiate. Every single dollar granted to us or paid to us by a subscriber or a newsstand buyer goes back into the economy. 

Put it this way, when Canadians get into their Chrysler and GM cars, they have to drive somewhere. A lot of them drive to their newsstands and bookstores to buy a literary or arts magazine.

Say yes to continued Canadian Heritage funding through the Canada Periodical Fund for Canada’s arts and literary magazines!

Say yes to the writers and readers of Canada!

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

Join the group.

Valentine’s workshop comes to Squamish

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

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