Jack Christie’s Whistler Book is the ultimate handbook for corridor adventurers, but he will be taking readers by the hand quite literally on Saturday, signing books at Whistler’s Armchair Books from 2pm-4pm. If you’ve got stockings that need stuffing, look no further. The man has authored 17 adventure guides – he’s no flash in the pan. He’s Jumpin’ Jack Flash. Pop by and say hi this weekend.
On 25 November, 2009, the Globe and Mail reported the following story:
Cultural Olympiad artists say they’re being muzzled.
The arts-festival portion of the 2010 Olympics risks sliding into a squabble over free speech, as artists who signed on to be part of the Cultural Olympiad learn of a clause in their contracts that prohibits negative comments about the Games and its corporate sponsors.
Four days later, the story appears to have been removed from the Globe and Mail website. Attempts to access the archived story generate an error message. CTVglobemedia is the official media partner for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.
The Marsha Lederman-authored piece was still online at ctvolympics.ca as of November 29 at 10:00am.
The rest of the text of the piece is below:
Some artists contacted by The Globe and Mail, along with organizers of other Olympic and Commonwealth Games cultural events, called the requirement unusual and disturbing. Several artists didn’t realize they had signed such an undertaking.
“This is Canada. I can’t believe that we’re being asked to limit our comments to the press,” said Andrew Laurenson, artistic director of Vancouver’s Radix Theatre, whose critical comments about arts funding and the Olympics have drawn the attention of the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC).
Laurenson’s Radix Theatre group is to be part of HIVE, an innovative theatrical event involving 12 local companies performing in a single, huge location as audience members move from show to show.
He sent out a newsletter in September that decried cuts in British Columbia government funding for arts and culture and addressed the perception that “massive overrides in Olympic expenditures” were at least partly to blame.
“Good news: HIVE 3 is coming,” he wrote. “Bad news: It involves Olympic money.”
A VANOC representative called HIVE’s producer after the newsletter was sent out, and the producer subsequently sent an e-mail titled Gentle Reminder to everyone involved in HIVE about the need to keep commentary separate from the logo of the Cultural Olympiad. A HIVE 3 image – including the Cultural Olympiad logo – had been sandwiched between Laurenson’s good-news/bad-news comments.
The controversial clause in the VANOC contract signed by artists involved in the three-year, $20-million Cultural Olympiad festival reads: “The artist shall at all times refrain from making any negative or derogatory remarks respecting VANOC, the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Olympic movement generally, Bell and/or other sponsors associated with VANOC.”
The Olympics have previously faced criticism over possible restrictions on public demonstrations during the Games and the police questioning of Olympic critics.
Other VANOC contracts contain similar clauses, and the Cultural Olympiad’s program director, Robert Kerr, says it is standard practice for an event of this scale.
Artists say otherwise and appear to have backing from organizers of similar events. “There was nothing from Salt Lake in which we in any way censored or shackled [our artists] through their work of art or in anything they wanted to say about the Olympics,” said Ray Grant, artistic director for the Cultural Olympiad at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002.
“If this is a trend, it’s a bit of a dangerous trend for the arts.”
Nor was there any such language for artists participating in the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Australia.
“I cannot recall anything which forbade artists from saying anything negative about the Games,” Andrew Bleby, executive producer of performing arts for Melbourne’s Cultural Program, wrote in an e-mail. “Our artists certainly signed no such thing.”
One HIVE participant interpreted the VANOC response to Laurenson’s letter this way: “Are you in or are you out? Don’t be in [the Cultural Olympiad] and then stab us in the back, basically.”
Kerr said the newsletter did raise eyebrows at VANOC. “We were a little surprised, but we didn’t put any handcuffs on anybody. It was more a question of, is the artist still comfortable being a part of it,” he said.
Kerr insists VANOC is not interested in controlling artistic content and points out that many of the works involved in the Cultural Olympiad have dealt with difficult subjects.
Indeed, a visual-art exhibition that was part of the 2008 Cultural Olympiad featured a restaging of an infamous anti-Olympic protest photo. When asked about the photograph in a January, 2008, interview, Kerr was emphatic.
“These are artists expressing their views and observations and I think we have to embrace that,” he told The Globe. “We can’t shy away and try to put a lid on things.”
In an interview last week, Kerr again stressed his belief in artistic freedom, but said there has to be some control.
“If someone were to get up in the middle of a production and all of a sudden start coming off on an anti-Olympic rant, well that would be completely antithetical to the context of the work and the Games and the presenter,” he said, later adding: “We’re not asking anyone to promote our sponsors, but that they not come out and disrespect our sponsors.”
At an executive meeting of the Whistler Writers Group Thursday night, the 8th Whistler Readers and Writers Festival was toasted, hailed and put to rest.
The Festival will not return in 2010.
Instead, the group will continue to incubate local literary talent through the annual Writer in Residence program and through Never-Ever, green circle and blue square workshops offered periodically throughout the year.
The Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, which took place in September 2009, was the eighth incarnation of an event that sprouted in Stella Harvey’s living room with 20 people. The 2009 Festival enjoyed an unprecedented amount of support from community partners, media partners and funding agencies. While organisers agreed the 2009 event was a success, with 40% attendance increases over the last two years, they have decided to focus the group’s energy more narrowly, and look to alliances with groups like the library, Whistler Reads, the Arts Council, local bookclubs, bookstores and schools to initiate and support author visits. The Whistler Writers Group will also extend its support to the development of The Point, an artist-run centre proposed for the former Youth Hostel site on Alta Lake, which could serve as a hub for future workshops, author visits and retreats.
Says founder, Stella Harvey, who has served as a volunteer Director of the Festival for eight years, “We wanted to put Whistler on the literary map. And we have definitely done that. As we move forward, that buzz about Whistler as a creative hive will continue to build, mostly because of the successes our local authors are having. Continuing to nurture them in the development of their careers is our primary focus.”
At this weekend’s Bizarre Bazaar, five local authors are sharing a table to sell their recent books, including Leslie Anthony (Snakebit), Stephen Vogler (Only in Whistler), Karen Kay (Harvest Cuisine: Whole Foods Cooking), Tracy Higgs (The Alphabet Goes to Ski and Snowboard School) and Sara Leach (Mountain Machines, Jake Reynolds: Chicken or Eagle.) Leach took the initiative to book the shared table – the clearest evidence that the local literary community has grown over the past eight years in depth, calibre and cooperation.
“The future looks bright,” says Harvey. “Our local writers are only going to enjoy a higher and higher profile. And our primary focus is to nurture and incubate that talent.” Which means more time writing, and less time organising festivals and events.
To that end, the Whistler Writers Group will continue to support writers at all levels. For black diamond writers, deep retreat is the approach. An annual Writer in Residence will provide manuscript development and intensive coaching. The Group is applying for support from the Canada Council of the Arts for the 2010 residency, after farewelling 2009 resident authors, Merilyn Simonds and Wayne Grady.
Never-ever, green circle and blue square writers living throughout the Sea to Sky corridor will have a variety of opportunities throughout the year to come out of the creative closet, as the Group puts together a wide range of courses and seminars that could be available throughout the year, and offered in partnerships with groups like the local libraries or municipal recreation programming.
“In essence, the Festival opportunities will just be spread out throughout the course of a year, instead of being crammed into one weekend,” explains Harvey. ”The arts and culture communities are facing unprecedented funding cuts, and we need to collaborate more effectively and make sure we’re not duplicating each other’s efforts. So, we’re hoping to partner more effectively with community groups who celebrate authors. So if the library were to bring in a guest author, we won’t host any events that compete with that, but we may be able to work in concert with the library to invite that guest author to run a writing workshop the next day.”
Annabel Lyon finally walked away a winner, expounding “Holy profanity. I didn’t expect this at all. At all,” upon collecting the 2009 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize tonight.
Jurors Marina Endicott, Miriam Toews, and R.M. Vaughan said the book is “alarmingly confident,” “transporting,” and “chortles and sings like an earthy romance.”
Lyon confessed however, that she would have given the prize to Alice Munro. “Because I revere Alice Munro.”
Salt Spring Islander, Brian Brett, won the $25,000 Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize for Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life.
Yasuko Thanh of Victoria won the $10,000 Writers’ Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize, which is awarded to the best short story or excerpt from a novel-in-progress first published in a Canadian magazine or journal, for her story “Floating like the Dead.” Thanh’s story originally appeared in the Vancouver Review, which receives $2,000 for her win.
Guess it was time for BC writers to enjoy a moment in the sun.
Will “The Curse of the Three” play out at tonight’s Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize announcement?
No writer nominated for all three of Canada’s top book awards in one year has ever taken home a prize at the end of awards season.
In 2008, Rawi Hage was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for Cockroach. No cigar for Hage.
The year before, MG Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song was a triple nominee that failed to nab any of the prizes.
This year, Annabel Lyon’s The Golden Mean shot up the “must-read” list when it was nominated for all three. The Giller was won by Linden MacIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man. The Governor General’s Award was awarded to Kate Pullinger for her book The Mistress of Nothing.
Lyon’s debut novel is in contention alongside Douglas Coupland’s Generation A, Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness, Nicole Brossard’s Fences in Breathing (translated by Susanne de Lotbinier-Harwood) and Andrew Steinmetz’s Eva’s Threepenny Theatre.
The judges, 2008 winner Miriam Toews, Marina Endicott and RM Vaughn read more than 140 months in 6 months as part of their duties.
Alice Munro was also originally nominated for all three prizes, but withdrew her name from the running for the Giller in August, to the disappointment of her publisher, as well as literary pundits looking forward to an Atwood-Munro showdown. Munro’s official reason was to leave the field open for younger writers, given that she had won the Giller twice before.
Unofficially, maybe she was avoiding the Curse of the Three?
We wondered why year-long experiments had become de rigeur in non-fiction writing and publishing… and Aristotle has the answer. (Always go back to first principles!) Narratives, the great philosopher suggests in his “Poetics”, the earliest surviving work of literary theory, work best if they’re arranged around some pre-existing unit of time : sunrise to sunset, January to December. Such stories satisfy our in-built need for symmetry, for repetition, for order amidst the chaos.
Make meaning early in your writing.
That’s the lesson for today, from Roy Peter Clark, vice president of the Poynter Institute and author of Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer.
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.
In his article, Turning the Page, in the Walrus magazine, former Whistler Writers’ Group guest author Noah Richler, pins the publishing industry to the dartboard and begins throwing some very well-aimed projectiles at it.
For example, why are Canada’s automakers holding tight to archaic technology, but Canada’s publishers so willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater and jump into bed with e-publishing before they’ve even had an STD test?
And why do publishers equate their product with toilet paper – you run out, you buy some more. Toilet paper that sells better if the publisher has paid for a big bin full of titles located in prime floorspace…
What Richler says that’s most interesting and insightful is that most books sell, because people want to be talking about what everyone is talking about. One interpretation – we’re all lemmings. Or, alternatively, a book needs to be part of common conversations to be a success. So what are you talking about? And is anybody listening?
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.
The worst thing that can happen to you, when you embark on an adventure, is not actually that you get lost, or forget the bottle-opener, or get caught in a sudden downpour… Those things are part of the adventure.
The worst thing is ending up in the hands of the wrong guide. You know the type – he won’t stop telling self-aggrandising stories about himself, or he encourages you to duck the ropes when he doesn’t know the conditions, or she won’t listen to you when you tell her that you’re a bit out of your element… Whether the guide is real or virtual, the person who planted the seed and led the charge for your adventure is critical to its success.
And Jack Christie is a great guide. Dubbed “Mr BC” by the Toronto Sun, and a long-time outdoors columnist with the Georgia Straight, Christie and his wife Louise have been enthusiastically traipsing around the Coast Mountains for decades… (he’s 63 and has no intention of retiring – hell, there are too many adventures to be had.)
Out in time for the Olympics, Christie has updated The Whistler Book: An All-Season Outdoor Guide, providing directions to the gateways of hundreds of adventures to be had in the Sea to Sky corridor. Be you staycationers, vacationers, or 100-mile-adventurers, The Whistler Book should be in every corridor home, alongside the telephone book and the Joy of Cooking. It’s like a user’s manual to your backyard. Factual and funny, the Whistler Book might hold the ultimate test of the true local – once you can check off having done 75% of these adventurers, you’re in.
And the thing Christie is most amped about ride now? The Sea to Sky trail. I guess it’s the easiest way to have it all.
Whistler Blackcomb is getting set to premiere their new film, “On the Shoulders of Giants” online at on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at noon, Pacific Standard Time.
The 22 minute doco gets in ahead of the December 23 screening of the story of the construction of the PEAK2PEAK gondola on the Discovery Channel.
WB’s story focusses less on the technical feats, and more on bigger context, exploring the way the challenge of Whistler Blackcomb’s terrain has inspired generations of visionaries, athletes and innovators to keep raising the bar.
“The original motive for this film was to document the building of the PEAK 2 PEAK Gondola. As filming progressed and interviews were captured it became clear, the way Whistler inspires people to constantly do things bigger and better was really the story we needed to tell,” says Stuart Rempel, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing.
Featuring trailblazing icons like Eric Pehota, Mike Douglas and Jim McConkey, the film’s production also tapped the local talent well, with Jim Budge directing, Lisa Richardson developing the script, Christian Begin joining the cinematography crew and Sean Horne providing editing and animation expertise.
Tune in to Whistlerblackcomb.com on Tuesday, November 10 at noon (PST) for the world premiere. The film will remain available on-line for those interested, following the premiere.
If a new federal bill is passed, magazine freelancers will be able to enrol in EI and collect benefits starting 2011. The challenge is to maintain earnings for at least $6000 a year through self-employment in the year before the claim. The changes will also offer the prospect of maternity benefits of up to 15 weeks for mothers and up to 35 weeks of parental benefits for the self-employed – which is a sizable part of Sea to Sky’s workforce.
Just when the world was despairing for a saviour – someone to make snowboard magazines interesting again, someone willing to poke suitable amounts of fun at the Olympics, someone with an artistic aesthetic and a free distribution model – the Star of Pemberton is shining.
The King is here. King Snow. What may be the greatest snowboard magazine ever produced (in Canada this month.)
Lovingly crafted by a crew of former Future Snowboarding, SBC and Big Brother alumni, King of All Snowboard Magazines hits all your favourite snowboard shops on Monday November 9. It’s free. It can jump tall buildings in a single bound. It will fly. So get your copy fast.
Check out a preview here.
Annabel Lyon has been busy. Not writing. No, the shy and thoughtful writer, “Can-lit’s newest golden girl” according to the Globe and Mail, has been beyond-busy on the circuit and in the spotlight, a place she is not entirely at ease with.
“You could not possibly complain about it,” Lyon told Toronto Star writer Vit Wagner, of the surge in interest in her as her novel The Golden Mean earns nominations for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. But it has hit her like a freight train, which makes it tricky to bask in the moment.
November, when all three prizes will be announced, will be a tense month for Lyon. (The awards are announced Nov 10, 17 and 24.)
The reason writers in Whistler will be rooting for her? Not just because she’s a new mother who’s honest about the struggle of balancing family and the creative life, (and who looks kick-ass in a pair of knee high boots), but for her measured words, shared at the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival this September.
Trust your constitution, as a writer, she said. The pace you write at, the tone of voice, the things that interest you. As much as she may have wanted to write a hip, post-modern, overflowing tome like Lee Henderson’s The Man Game, Lyon’s book is tight and spare and conventionally told. As much as she may have wanted to pound forth at the keyboard great volumes of text, she wrote in tiny chunks of time, stolen between babies’ naps. She trusted her constitution, though it was not always effortless. Her novel is wonderful. And deservedly acclaimed.
Magazine writers, don’t despair! The industry is rallying to remind people that magazines are still being read. (Albeit in funkified 140-character doses.)
Magazines are like a personal branding statement – your coffee table (or toilet mag-stand) is a proclamation to the world of who you are? Urban hipster? Dwell magazine. Red-blooded male just this side of forty? Men’s Health. Canadian intellectual? The Walrus.
And while advertisers are redeploying their marketing budgets online, they might have missed the most critical fact of all – magazine readers are often reading the magazine FOR the ads.
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.
Funny that the only real push-back to Google’s plan to dominate the digital literary landscape, are the Chinese.
As reported in the New York Times today, two Chinese writers’ groups are demanding protection from Google’s unauthorised copying.
Chinese authors know life under Big Brother… so maybe they’re less inclined to take for granted the idea that words and books should move freely… should not be under the control of one entity… even if (especially if) that entity’s motto is ‘don’t be evil.’
As David L Ulin of the LA Times wrote, after Amazon.com remotely deleted digital copies of George Orwell’s novels 1984 and Animal Farm from customers’ control, ”the issue is not that Amazon erased material from people’s Kindles, or de-ranked gay and lesbian writers, but that it can.“
Vigilance. As Thomas Jefferson famously said, the price of democracy is vigilance. And being vigilant means when someone like Google or Amazon.com says “Trust us,” we think hard and watch carefully and speak up…
Doors open at 7pm and Stephen will read and give a slide show presentation at 7:30pm. Books will be for sale and there will be some nibblies and beer.
Back before the Sea to Sky Highway finished getting its epic facelift, it was such a construction hot-spot that it inspired the fascination of children. Food writer, Andre Lariviere, recalls his toddler daughter dubbing the road “the Land of Diggers.” And Whistler author, Sara Leach, boned up on her heavy machinery vocabulary, turning her son, Ben, into a two year old who knew the difference between a front-end-loader, a grader, and a dump-truck.
As Leach told the Pique’s Holly Fraughton, of her rhyming counting book for children, Mountain Machines: “I wrote it when my son was two and he was completely obsessed (with machines). It was right at the start of all the construction on the highway, so we’d drive down the highway and he’d just start getting cranky as we hit the construction.”
To keep him happy and entertained, Leach would spend the next half-hour of the drive pointing out and naming the machinery they drove past, which turned out to be a learning experience for both the child and the parent.
“All of a sudden I knew all these machines – I used to think they were all just tractors!” she said with a laugh.
The book is full of rhyming text about groomers, pipe dragons, gondolas and other ski hill machinery that is all too familiar in Whistler. The text is accompanied by colourful, cartoony illustrations by California-based artist, Steven Corvelo. “Steven’s illustrations are amazing, I’m so pleased with them and the kids love them. I read it to about four or five classes at school now and honestly, I could be speaking German – they’re not actually listening to what the words are, they’re laughing themselves silly!”
Steven Corvelo and Sara Leach at the Whistler launch of Mountain Machines, a rhyming counting picture book
My friend Molly had a bath and then went running through the house, trailing suds and puddles, yelling, “I’m naked! I’m naked!”, exhilerated to be at that meeting point of the naughty and the natural. She was only 3.
Stephen Vogler’s equally exhilerating ride through Whistler’s underbelly, Only in Whistler, also got the ‘too naughty’ nod this week, with BC Ferries admitting that the cover was not family friendly enough for them to stock it.
Stephen Vogler has always been an anti-establishment kind of guy. Not in a lock-up-your-children kind of way… more of a ooh-he-just-asked-a-question-that-is-making-the-gentry-here-squirm-in-their-starched-pants. After all, the man drives a converted school bus with enough letters peeled away to dub it the “C OOL BUS”, has his own soapbox, and was vocal in protesting the “deforestation’ of the lot that will now house the Celebration/Medals Plaza in Whistler.
That unique and uncensored voice (in the face of vigilant cops with video cameras) is the reason Harbour Publishing chose him to pen two books about Whistler. After all BC Ferries’ concern about the naughtiness of bare bums strikes at the heart of an age-old tension in Whistler – between the free spirited and the straighter-laced, the boho-ski-bum and the investor, the early squatter and the indignant member of the “Alta Lake Ratepayers Assocation” who kept having their toilet paper nicked by freeloading ferals. (And that was in the days before Costco.)
Enter the Olympics (TM) painting another layer of whitewash on the community, and the question arises: Will the RMOW be enacting a by-law to prevent streaking? Why not celebrate Whistler’s proud history of nudity? It doesn’t cost a thing.
Whistler author Sara Leach is launching TWO books for children – positioning herself as the Queen of Multi-Tasking – on Friday, October 23, at 7pm at the Adele Campbell Fine Art Gallery in the Hilton.
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.
Stu McNolty and Mount Currie artist Donna Jane Dan have collaborated on a new kid’s book, The Snot Monster.
Written in Pemberton, illustrated in Mount Currie and published in Squamish, it’s the first 100 Mile Literature project to come from the corridor.
McNolty joins several local writers who have turned their talents to kids’ books, including Tracy Higgs (The Alphabet Goes to Ski and Snowboard School), Katherine Fawcett (MushKid) and Sara Leach’s forthcoming Mountain Machines.
The Snot Monster tells the tale of (what else?) a monster who lives in a weeping willow tree and does particularly gooey things to children.
Currently, the book is available locally at Pemberton’s Frontier Street Pharmacy as well as from McNolty himself through grandpastalltales@gmail.com.
A test for your pattern recognition skills: what do The 100 Mile Diet, Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, The Year of Living Biblically, Nickel and Dimed, and the recent No Impact Man have in common? (Apart from the fact they mostly began as blogs, they have mostly been optioned for movies, they threatened to disintegrate marriages, they made various best-seller lists and they fall into the dubious literary category of “ordeal” books or “immersion journalism”…)
They were all year-long experiments, in which their authors took a hypothesis and made themselves guinea pigs. It’s a gonzo tradition – Morgan Spurlock ate only McDonald’s for 30 days, Grant Stoddard didn’t sleep for a month. (He also had sex with himself, but that’s a whole other story.) But a month is an experiment. A year is an ordeal. It takes a different level of commitment. (A level of commitment that lasts long enough for a publishing house to discover what you’re up to.)
The year-long ordeal might be an effective gimmick to cut publishing deals. But it also seems to tie into a bigger longing – the longing for transformation. All the makeover shows we can tune into at night serve up fairy godmothers to bad parents, bad money-managers, bad dressers, bad dieters, bad dancers, and magic-wand them to a better place.
Reading, being the slow food equivalent in the entertainment world, reveals transformations that require at least 365 days to take hold. And if a new habit takes 21 days to establish, then a year is probably needed to undo your reflexive reach for the remote control/frozen pizza dinner/VISA card as life crutch.
And the thing is, we only really get things in life once we’ve lived them. Sure, we can know something, intellectually, but it’s not until we experience it, viscerally, that we really truly bodily KNOW it… and so, life actually is an experiment, and we need to get out of our thought-bubbles and get messy to really know what it’s like to be in this incarnation, this time around, to know what really might be possible. How far could one year take you?
Whistler Reads anchorwoman, Paula Shackleton, did some serious prep work for last week’s book club get-together on Alice Munro and the short story.
Here’s her top ten cribsheet:
1. The short story derived from oral traditions that could be enjoyed at one sitting.
2. Through the centuries the rhymed verse of Homeric-type epics evolved to Canterbury Tales, Aesop fables evolved to Grimms Fairy Tales, and parables evolved to anecdotes, which finally trended to realism and the modern short story.
3. Every short story uses 5 elements: Plot, Character, Conflict, Theme, Setting.
4. Writers have introduced styles within the short story genre: Philip Roth evokes Jewish writing and others continue the trend of cultural identity. Feminism and other socio-political themes explore all corners of the human condition. The 90s saw a period of magic realism. Alice Munro sits firmly in the “Minimalist Camp” along with noted short story writers: John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, and Hemingway (among others).
5. Minimalism is characterized by a single plot line, few characters, one theme, precise writing where the protagonist is not exceptional and their attributes are revealed to the reader through context. Alice to a T.
6. A short story ranges from 1,000 words to 20,000 words but averages 7,500 words.
7. It is considered the most demanding oeuvre because the length is inversely proportional to its impact.
8. I did a quick review of all the noted short story writers and luxuriated in those I’ve read that still resonate:
Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter),
Herman Melville (Bartleby the Scrivener),
Edgar Allan Poe (The Black Cat),
Nikolai Gogol (The Overcoat),
Guy de Maupassant (The Necklace),
Anton Chekhov. (The entire list)
Jorge Luis Borges (The Garden of Forking Paths)
Kurt Vonnegut (Canary in the Cathouse), John Cheever, Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald (who paid all his bills with short stories.)
Canadian specialists like: Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Jane Urquart, and Mordecai Richler. I’m sure you have your own favourites.
9. How do we know these writers? It is because of all the dedicated publications that print a short story per edition, which puts bread on writers’ tables and enables them to compile books of short stories, and also publishers to print short story anthologies. We love: The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Saturday Evening Post, Scribners, and then there is all the esteemed literary journals: The Paris Review, Granta, Quill & Quire, etc.
10. Talking about stories can be as much fun as reading them.
Who’d want to win the Pulitzer when they could win the 2009 Best of Pemberton Favourite Writer poll?
Lisa Richardson, hype-mistress for the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, contributor to Tourism Whistler’s award-winning media room, and NBCOlympics.com correspondent, joins Cindy Filipenko (Best of Pemberton Favourite Writer 2007, 2008), GD Maxwell (Best of Whistler Favourite Writer, 1998-2005, 2006-2008), Natalie Langmann (runner-up 2008), Feet Banks (2006), Stephen Vogler (runner-up 2007), as some of the scribes keeping the local arts and culture scene kicking.
Imagine it – a place in which gravity exerts such a profound force on the local culture and economy, has so many people engaged in the power of text.
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 Pass on 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 Pass and 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. “
Looking through Festival photos and seeing a common theme: writers speak with their hands… What does it mean?
From the Pique today, West Vancouver writer Pauline Ahoy Logan writes:
A heartfelt thanks to Stella Harvey, organizers, panelists, participants and fellow voyeurs of the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival. I was very impressed by the enthusiasm everyone enjoyed and shared for the written word. The insightful sessions led by Wayne Grady and the writing aerobics of Michel Beaudry greatly inspired me to press pen to paper. An evening among the literati of the Sea-to-Sky corridor (and Brazil!) was great fun to hear the ageless gender debate, be captivated by the poetic lyricism of Shane Koyczan and participate in the illuminating haiku competition! A wonderful event for inspiration and networking.
The Festival organisers have been busy crunching data into bytes and reports, to discover the following:
The Pique covers some more details in their post-mortem today.
#1. For the weekend of September 11-13 2009, in Whistler, book sales are up, crime stats are down.
#2. High school students are overheard, after visit of author CC Humphreys, saying “I am reading the French Executioner and it’s awesome” and “I never would have picked up this book (The Fetch) but because I met him, I did and I really like it. I think it’s because I already understand what’s happening. It’s kinda cool to meet the author in person.”
#3. Sixty people walked into a bar, and before the night was through, 20 of them had written poems.
#4. Attendance grows by 15% over the 2008 Festival, despite the economy, beautiful weather and Stephen Harper’s War on Culture.
#5. 100% of attendees say they are “likely” or “very likely” to attend the Festival in the future.
#6. Aspiring magazine writers pitch story ideas to editors and several hear the magic invitation, “let’s talk more.”
#7. Random people skip through Whistler behind a flautist and write poetry on the dock by Alta Lake. It’s an inspiring setting. Might as well make the most of it.
#8. Author Nancy Lee (Dead Girls) proclaims the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival top-notch, with a higher calibre of professionalism, communication and regard for the visiting writers than any out-of-town festival, including festivals in the UK and Paris.
#9. 240 people have direct and intimate contact with a professional working writer, and come away having charged up their word-power decoder rings. Word POWER!@)!#
#10. The Festival Director gets a good night sleep for the first time in months, and bounces up the next morning with plans for the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival 2010.
And most importantly, the day after the Festival, people are writing.
As rare as the Bigfoot, several sightings of writers in Whistler were captured on camera this past weekend. Spontaneous gatherings took place, both indoors and outdoors. Most creatures were wielding notebooks, often scribbling frantically, sometimes staring into the distance, occasionally reading out loud. Experts in the paranormal say, “There must have been some kind of convergence we weren’t aware of. It certainly seems that an important gathering took place this weekend. What it means, over the long-term, is just something we’ll have to watch for. But I definitely think this is a phenomenon we should pay attention to.”
Photographic evidence has been posted at www.flickr.com/photos/elvicious.
Stella Harvey is the Whistler Writers Festival’s Little Engine That Could. She receives herewith her eighth nomination for Best Director in a Drama Series, Best Supporting Everything in a Cast of Thousands Production, and Best Friend of the Arts and Literary Community in Whistler.)
But to help move this word-nerd-train, she enlisted the support of a host of folk, and we want to throw out huge virtual applause to them, with thanks, for jumping on board the 8th Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, and enabling over 150 writers to take the journey.
Food and Shelter: Before we can self-actualise, we need to get our basic needs met. Thanks to Legends at Whistler Creek, Evolution at Creekside, Alta Lake Station House (the RMOW), Players Chophouse, Whistler Cooks Catering and Blenz Coffee for essential sustenance and hosting.
Funding support: Grants and funding support from the Whistler Arts Council, the Resort Municipality of Whistler’s Community Enrichment Program, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Writers Union of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts and the 2009 Cultural Capitals program enabled us to bring a host of professional writers to town to anchor this critical mass of word-nerds!
Media partners: For helping us to get the word out, thanks to the BC Association of Magazine Publishers, the Pique, the Georgia Straight and Sub-Terrain magazine, as well as The Tyee, the Question, Vancouver Review and BC Bookworld. Thanks also to Tourism Whistler. And our wonderful local journalists for spilling ink for us – Jennifer Miller and Holly Fraughton, as well as Pique contributors Rebecca Wood Barrett, Mary McDonald and Pam Barnsley.
For going the extra mile: The Pique newsmagazine and the Whistler Museum and Archives stepped up to support two young individual writers, enabling them to attend the Writer in Residence program through September, and to develop a project of their own. Huge thanks to Bob Barnett and Jehanne Burns for answering the call and being our partners in creative crime!
Community partners: Where would we be without Dan and Armchair Books? With nothing to read. Without temptation. Walking into a corporate megalith store’o'books to the sound of our souls sucking away. Thank you Armchair Books for standing behind the Writers Festival for the last eight years, and for part of what makes the Whistler retail experience wonderful and unique.
You, the brave: Annie Dillard wrote, “You can’t test courage cautiously.” It takes courage to get out of your comfort zone, out of your couch’s vortex, or to admit, ‘yes, I am a word-nerd.’ Thank you to all the bold attendees of the 8th annual Whistler Readers and Writers Festival for keeping the word-stoke fired. Welcome to the Vicious Circle.
Getting there is half the adventure.
While Friday and Saturday’s events will take place at Creekside (hit Legends Hotel at the foot of the mountain, and Players Chophouse for Saturday night’s shenanigans), Sunday will take place at Alta Lake Station House.
Best way to get into a writerly frame of mind is to get out of the car. Access to Alta Lake Station House, where the Poetry Walk will commence, and where the manuscript appraisal, readings and writing workshop on Sunday will take place, is on foot or bike, via the Valley Trail.
Hit the trail from the Alta Lake Road side (5.3km from Alpine Way traffic light), or Wayside Park. Parking is available at both ends. From the Alta Lake Road side, start at the yellow boom gates and follow the (not yellow, not brick, not road) path (black, bitumen)… for a relaxed 5 minute-ish jaunt. The house is identified by a couple of small “Shhh! Workshop in progress” signs.
The five month countdown to the Olympics is marked, by coincidence, this Saturday, with the debut of Haiku Idol, a live-poetry writing contest that has its genesis in a national poetry slam held during the Calgary Cultural Olympiad.
The Whistler Readers and Writers Festival takes the Olympic analogies even further this week, with Rebecca Wood Barrett’s feature in the Pique, comparing novel writing to the speed skating long track (endurance, much time spent going round in circles, draft after draft), short story writing with the halfpipe (compact site plus high aptitude for risk forces practitioners to go big), or magazine writing with the bobsled (it’s all about nailing that torpedo-start to grab the advantage and the reader’s attention.)
Profile your prowess… After all, making it as a writer is as audacious an accomplishment as winning a medal. We’ve got more in common than we realise.
They’ve been raiding the bookstore and ReUse It Centre, and putting 20 local writers through their paces, as Whistler’s Writer in Residency program gets underway.
Wayne Grady and Merilyn Simonds, profiled in today’s Question, will be feature instructors at the Writers Festival on Saturday. Learn about Writing Place, Writing People, Discovering Your Writer’s Voice, and Discovering Your Editor’s Muscle with Trimming the Fat with two of Canada’s most beloved writers.
1. Success in writing is about who you know. It’s shitty to admit that merit alone is insufficient, and god bless Obama for actually creating a meritocracy across the border and telling kids to work hard, but the world is about networks and relationships and it takes other human beings to open doors, especially when your arms are full of manuscripts. We bring those door-opening people to you – writers, publishers, editors. The Whistler Readers and Writers Festival is an intimate industry event for people in the fields of words and stories.
2. It could be the last festival. You never know. You might also be dead by this time next year. Bottom line, why put off until tomorrow what you could do today? Carpe diem, remember.
3. Guest authors are making history come alive. We need that rear-view mirror to the past to put everyday life, depressing headlines and minor personal crises into context. Many of the Festival’s guest authors, Lee Henderson, Claire Mulligan, Merilyn Simonds, Annabel Lyon and Chris Humphreys excavate history to create tremendously readable novels.
4. An ideas-fest always gets your brain tingling. As stoked as I am to read the first Buyer’s Guide of the year, with all the ski and snowboard gear reviews, there are only so many conversations I can have about sidecut and camber and binding mounting devices before I feel like standing up and screaming, “Can’t we just talk about our feelings for five fucking minutes?” The moment usually passes. But for one weekend a year, at the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, I can immerse myself in conversations that make life, and the life of the mind, seem incredibly rich.
5. It will kickstart your creative mojo. Motivation is a slippery little sucker. Sometimes a bootcamp is what we need. A few teachers. A few inspiring fellows. A few skills and drills. Maybe even someone yelling at you. (Or shouting down that little voice inside your mind that has been getting too much airplay – “you can’t. You’re not good enough. You don’t dare.”)
As Annie Dillard said, You can’t test courage cautiously.
Available in limited quantities at Armchair Books, this special souvenir notebook was designed by Whistler’s own Jasmine Robinson.
Otherwise known as a brain-fart, Mommy-alzheimers or the momentary space walk, that experience of losing one’s words (“um, she’s like a really good friend of mine and her name is…??”), we’ve all been noun-challenged. Thwarted by the disappearing person, place, thing. It’s okay. Learning how to fill in the blanks when your words abandon you just better prepares you for travel in countries where you don’t speak the language.
But when it comes to writing, you want to get that person-place-thing thing dialled. The crux of a good story is at the nexus between those three things.
Enter the three Wise Men.
The place is Whistler. Legends Hotel at Creekside, to be exact.
The people are writers Wayne Grady, Chris Humphreys and Leslie Anthony.
The things? All your ideas and ambitions. Stories. Notebooks. Pens. Whatever talisman you carry in your pocket. Frankincense. Myrrh.
Saturday, 11 September. Grab coffee. Get started with Writing Place, or Characters in Action.
After lunch, Write People like a Profiler.
Wrap it up with the whole package – Writing for the action sports world by nailing person to place to thing.
It’s not a tricky equation, once you have the tools.
Sugar and spice and all things nice? Not necessarily. There’s no need for poetry to be as saccharine as a Hallmark greeting card… especially when it’s written in the adrenaline-boosting, fat-free zone of Whistler, and inspired by a shot of fine Scotch.
To free up your Muse to be spicy and articulate, the poets are talking a long walk on the beach. Join them on Sunday. It’s free.
I dutifully crack open the spine of Annabel Lyon’s new novel, The Golden Mean. She’s coming to Whistler on Friday as part of the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival. Plus, she writes about Aristotle and I really should know something about one of the greatest thinkers in western civilisation.
Two sentences in, any sense of obligation is out the window. I am reading for pure pleasure, chasing my own curiosity through the annals of 350 BC, not stopping until I’m at page 284 and can close the book and turn off the light. Sure, it was a rainy Sunday. But if I had known that philosophy could be so muscular and bawdy and vigorous, I too would probably turn to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in times of trouble.
Lyon’s novel has been praised for its brilliance and its intellectual depth, and deservedly so. But such words suggested to me a dense tome that might bring on faint headaches from the effort. The Golden Mean had the opposite effect. It was exhilarating to be transported so effortlessly to a long ago place and time, peopled by vaguely familiar characters – Aristotle, Plato, Cleopatra, Alexander the Great – who now skitter about vividly in my mind’s eye.
I spent the day in ancient Macedonia. And I can’t wait to get back.
The latest darling for designers is the book.
Following up on earlier posts about large-scale sculptures made from books, we stumbled upon a feature in Elemente magazine, showcasing various innovations in the world of interior design. From book-shelves to vases to table-lamps, those remaindered books are getting new life.
UK designer Not Tom pulled some books out of the trash at the end of a jumble sale. Dutch designer Bom makes reading lamps from old books. UK design grad, Laura Cahill, is making lamp stands and reading stools from old books. (Just the perfect place for kicking back with the e-reader…)
Inspired by the Calgary 1988 Olympics, the home of the 2010 Games is about to play host to a contest that organisers worry might get out of control.
After all, the stakes don’t get any higher for a poet than when there’s a chance to get paid.
Haiku Idol debuts in Whistler on Saturday September 12 2009, to mark the 6 month countdown to the 2010 Winter Olympics.
The live, high-speed, poetry-writing contest involves one bag of money, one thesaurus, and 20 writers ranging from the celebrated to the obscure, who will test their mettle, with hopefully, a minimum of spittle, when they’re given one torn-out page from the thesaurus, one pencil, one notebook and one half hour as everyone else heads to the bar, to scribe a poem, of any length and any style.
When the bell rings, its pencils down and mikes up, as they take the spotlight to read, and reveal what the crucible created. The winner takes the money, and runs.
Due to limited seating, potential poetry-slammers and audience members are advised to purchase their tickets in advance at www.theviciouscircle.ca.
The Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, September 11-13 2009 presents He Read, She Read: The Battle of the Book Clubs, followed by Haiku Idol, Saturday September 12, 7:30pm, Players Chophouse, Whistler Creekside, $25
To those who agree with the old adage “those who can do, and those who can’t teach”, I present my rebuttal. Sara Leach.
She can. She does. And she teaches.
The Whistler-based elementary school teacher-librarian is about to launch her debut children’s novel with Orca Book Publishers, Jake Reynolds: Chicken or Eagle. (The book will launch at Kidsbooks in Vancouver on October 15.)
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.”
Leach is also about to publish a children’s picture book illustrated by Steven Corvelo called Mountain Machines.
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.)
Shane Koyczan is the icing. Listen.
This is what the experience of poetry is meant to feel like.
Pam Barnsley explains in today’s Pique why this is a show you shouldn’t miss.
Koyczan anchors the all-star line-up at this year’s Whistler Readers and Writers Festival on Saturday, September 12, at Players Chophouse.
The self-confessed nerd from Penticton is the first poet from outside the US to win the USA Individual National Poetry Slam.
Get your tickets, chillun’. Sometimes, the day must be seized… must not be allowed to slip-slide away.
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.
Nibble away at different hors d’oevres, or sit down for a multi-course masterpiece… Regardless of your style - graze or slow-feast , sharpen your pencils and chopsticks and pick and scribble your way through the brain-bounty of the 8th annual Whistler Readers and Writers Festival.
Writers, get ready, there's a brainstorm coming... picking up passengers, coast to coast...
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.
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.
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
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.
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…
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
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?)
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.
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
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.”
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!
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.
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
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
With today as their deadline, Whistler Reads folk have been busy creating a fountain of books in the Whistler Public Library, inspired by Contemporary Artist, Alicia Martin’s “Bilbliographia” installation in Cordoba, Spain, and the Whistler Artwalk.
All it took was 140 ft of custom bent rebar, 75 ft of rebar wire and hundreds of books donated by the Whistler community and the Library. It all ties in to tonight’s Whistler Reads discussion, ”Seven Days In The Art World” by Sarah Thornton. 
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.
Wired magazine calls his project : Cribs for the literary set. Check out Neil Gaiman’s writing cabin there.
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.
Undercover agents of the Vicious Circle have secured top secret documents that suggest a conspiracy is afoot to turn Whistler into a hotbed for Canadian writers.
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.”
After more than a year of operating in Whistler, Players Chophouse is working hard to cater to the tastes and budgets of working locals – hence their summer initiative, 420 Fridays.
The laidback weekly patio session, as featured in the Pique’s Epicurious column, combines local musical talent coupled with a $10 pizza and beer special. If Mother Nature doesn’t co-operate and the heavens open, the party simply moves inside to the lounge and all appetizers on the menu are half-off.
New chef, Whistler’s Jon Campbell, has pared the menu to feature appies and plenty of dishes for sharing… a budget-conscious approach that follows along the lines of “save water, shower with a friend…”
Their current menu features 14 appetizers, like Quebec City poutine, bruschetta, creamy, traditional escargot, and delicious thin-crust prime rib pizza, all ranging in price from $8 to $18 apiece.
Official friends of the Slow Food and Green Table movements, Players Chophouse is also a friend of the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival. they’re far-sighted enough to know that literature is just as nourishing as a good meal.
We read in the summer, because long sultry days beckon us to slow down, to power down the crackberries and texts and tweets, and wallow in daylight that lasts until 9pm, and heat that thickens the blood, and a culture that celebrates a lazy day at the lake, or in a hammock… and the pace of a novel suddenly fits, in ways it struggles to do when you’re in the time-famine of a busy week with too much on the to-do list.
With a host of Canada’s best writers and novelists headed to Whistler this fall for the 8th Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, this summer is the perfect opportunity to beef up on your CanCon…
Here’s our top 5:
1. The Reckoning of Boston Jim, by Claire Mulligan is the book that changed bookseller, Robert J. Wiersma’s mind about historical fiction. “Deeply historical but with a strong contemporary approach and solid storytelling, it’s the sort of book the makes other novelists jealous… It deserves every accolade that can be applied to it, and more than that, it deserves readers.
Longlisted for the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize, The Reckoning of Boston Jim evokes the colony of British Columbia, 1863, amidst the chaos of the Cariboo Gold Rush. Long-abandoned mine-shafts and traplines are par for the course amongst the mountains of the Whistler region – this gripping account of life 150 years ago brings the ghosts of the Pemberton Trail era to life.
2. The Man Game, by Lee Henderson was “one of the most intense books I’ve read this past year”, says CBC Hot Air host, Paul Grant, who will be stepping up to emcee the Festival’s Gala Opening and Saturday night Battle of the Bookclubs. Winner of the 2009 Ethel Wilson prize for Best Book of Fiction published in BC, The Man Game creates a mythology for the city of Vancouver, with time travel and naked, dirty, lumberjack wrestling.
3. The Golden Mean, by Annabel Lyon is Lyon’s response to the question “what are you going to do with an undergrad degree in philosophy?” A tour of Greek history, brought to life by Lyon’s deft prose, The Golden Mean tells the story of the philosopher Aristotle who, for 7 years worked as the tutor to the prince’s son, the child who would grow up to become Alexander the Great. Exhilarating, brilliant and profound, hailed the reviewers.
4. February, by Lisa Moore In 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine’s Day storm. All eighty-four men aboard died, and the tragedy remains just below the surface of life for Newfoundlanders. February is a fictionalised story of Helen O’Mara, one of those left behind when her husband, Cal, drowns.
5. The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbours by Hal Niedzviecki. Toronto writer makes it to Oprah’s list of 25 Books You Can’t Put Down with this exploration on the way twitter, blogs and social media are changing us. Hal’s working on a documentary about “peeping” – expect the buzz to build.
Got hot tips? Loop us in.
No surprise to Whistler readers that Lisa Moore’s newest novel, February, (excerpted here at The Walrus) has been garnering rave reviews. Her appearance at the 2006 Literary Leanings readings series in Whistler won her a solid local fan base.
In the Globe and Mail, she tells John Barber: “I think a book is just part of a tree. The living thing is the story,” she said, adding that every book means something different to every reader. “When a reader speaks to me, it’s like the book is as much theirs as it is mine.”
Moore claims to love writing even more than she loves talking about it. “I think life just is deeper and richer when you reflect in the way you have to reflect in order to write about it. It’s an obsession. I absolutely love it. I love it, I love it”
Add it to your summer reading list.
To celebrate the forthcoming Slow Food Cycle, the Pemberton Library has designated the last week of July (Monday July 27 – Sunday August 2) Harvest Time for stories.
Storypickers are wanted for the Strange Summer Fruit project, to help the Library discover whether pickings are sweeter in summer or winter…
Mostly, the stories of people’s lives are told after they’re dead.
Instead of obits, the Pemberton & District Public Library is encouraging people to write “live bytes” about folk in their community, with the second round of Strange Fruit: A Community Story Harvest calling for contributors for the Slow Food Cycle summer exhibit.
Strange Fruit launched in the winter, when more than 30 folk, ranging from pioneers to new residents to former Mayors, war veterans, vodka brewers, coroners and various nominees for Citizen of the Year, were interviewed. Local photographers shot their portraits and the resulting “pickings” were exhibited at the Library during Winterfest.
To contribute a 300 word story-portrait from the Potato Nation for the summer harvest, writers/contributors can sign on at the Library. Stories will be due August 2.
For more information, visit http://Strangefruit2009.wordpress.com, or visit the Pemberton Library.
Last summer, Watermark’s Lilli Clark took a break from event-producing (she produces Cornucopia and the TELUS World Ski and Snowboard Festival’s cultural line-up) to take up a coveted spot at New York’s Atlantic Acting School, founded by David Mamet and William H Macy.
This summer, she’s combining her multiple hats and passions – as event producer and actor – to launch Whistler’s first ever fringe theatre event, the Blank Slate Theatre Festival.
Two performances, both comedies with an edge, will enjoy a three-night run, using fantastic alternative venues at the Squamish Lillooet Cultural Centre and The Path Gallery – giving audiences a chance to mix up their weekend and get a decent fill of dark comedy. Tickets will only be $20 per show.
At last, a theatre project that doesn’t prop itself up with Shakespeare, and is willing to start small, indie and passionate… like great art oughta. Save the date.
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?
and you could win:
2 Festival passes to the 8th Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, September 11-13 2009, Whistler, BC
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.
Enter at the straight.com before September 2.
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.
David Sedaris says “I think the only difference between me and most people is that I carry a notebook around in my top pocket.”
There’s that. And the fact that Sedaris is freaking hilarious. Chatting with the CBC last weekend, he confessed that he isn’t sure why he’s done so well, that when he started journal writing he was pretentious, and that now, when he pulls out his notebook, people tend to get nervous. ”I exploit everyone and everything I come into contact with.”
Listen to David Sedaris on North by North West for tales of life with his notebook… and revelations about the number of women who have drunk or baked with their own breastmilk…
This summer, THIS magazine urges the CBC to review more books, and revive the art of professional book-reviewing, rather than paying people to review Hollywood films.
But, the vital question is, does a book review make for more readers?
Or is a movie adaptation the only thing that is really going to bump a book onto bedside tables?
Ultimately, what brings any form of entertainment to life is that it has social currency. If there is buzz… if people are talking about a) the latest scandal afflicting Jon & Kate, b) Michael Jackson’s death, c) Annabel Lyon’s new book, or d) Sarah Palin’s memoir (25% more God!), it is as if there is a wind whooping through the yard, and those particular garments are puffed full of life, and dancing around on the washing line.
It is our interest in things that gives them currency – if we talk about books and writers and ideas, those books will grow a readership. Hence, the success of Canada Reads, to get people talking about certain books, to send them in great hordes to second hand bookstores and libraries and amazon.ca…
For these crudely articulated reasons, the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival (entirely dependent on there being a culture of reading) is amped to be working with the Tyee, Vancouver Review, and the Georgia Straight, who are all keeping the conversation spicy, sparkling and substantial. Because really, there’s no reason for the sagas of Jon and Kate to ever enter your frontal lobe…
What does a literary event look like? Whistler design talents have turned their hands to the art of manifesting words…
From our 2009 Gallery of Graphic Greats:
Something for word nerds from the folk at Inhabitat. What books would make your sleeping nest/fortress?
by Beth Shea
‘Bedtime stories’ becomes a literal interpretation in the design of the Uroko House Book Igloo — a cozy, fort-like enclosure of bookshelves which encircle a bed. Being surrounded in slumber by books is a bibliophile’s dream, and Point Architects enables lovers of literature to wrap themselves up in their treasured tales while drifting off to sleep in this cleverly constructed lair. The backless shelves allow one to grab a book from inside or outside the Igloo. Conceptually designed for children, we think it’s a telltale sign that as adults, we’re equally smitten with the Uroko House Book Igloo, and wouldn’t mind curling up with a good book, or fifty, in one of our own.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi examines what makes life worth living, and speaks of his journey in this great TED presentation.
It’s all about finding a practice, to allow you to achieve flow state. Writing works.
Check out The Walrus’ Summer Fiction issue, featuring stories by (Whistler Writers Festival guests) Joseph Boyden, Lee Henderson, as well as Rivka Galchen and Stephen Marche. (Marche’s science fiction piece, The Crow Procedure, is spectacular, spooky, sublime.)
The celebration of ‘genre’ fiction run the gamut of fiction, western, romance and sci-fi, but neglected horror. To make amends, The Walrus online offers improvised and hand-written horror stories from three of the authors.
Be inspired. Sign on for the Walrus’ Guilty Pleasures Writing Contest.
Win a prize package from Fairmont Hotels & Resorts or the Walrus, and have your work published at walrusmagazine.com.
To enter, write the first paragraph of a novel in one of the following genres:
Science Fiction, Romance, Western, Ghost Story/Gothic.
Your challenge: to make that paragraph the most gripping, titillating, and action-packed read of the summer.
Send your submission to guiltypleasures@walrusmagazine.com by July 31.
Put a face to the 2009 Festival… We’re on facebook.
It’s true that now the CIA can track all our activities… but so can our friends. Check out breaking news and who’s gonna be there Sept 11-13 2009.
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?
Making headlines in the Pique this week: writing contests, writing residencies, writing retreats. What are you waiting for? Didn’t Chekhov teach you anything?
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…
The correlation is strong and invigorated in Francine Prose’s 2006 book, Reading Like A Writer, which we happily found in the stacks of the Squamish Library.
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)
What’s new for the 2009 Whistler Writers Festival?
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
In Azar Nafisi’s book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, she writes, “Everything is political.” Even sex, she argued. Who’s on top. Who’s on bottom.
Michael Pollan argues that food is political. In fact, it is primarily a political phenomenon. He told The Tyee that “It is the first time you can control what you take into your body, and the first time you can say no to your parents and assert your identity. So I think food and politics are very intertwined.”
What you choose to eat (and therefore, become), and what industries and business models you are thereby supporting, is also a huge political statement.
Action or inertia. It’s right there, on your dinner plate, and on your bedside table. Michael Pollan makes for good reading. Substantial. Worth checking out. Like all those lucky folk who saw him speak last weekend as the UBC Save the Farm fundraiser.
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).
Enough with the 4000 acre fires and the Lost Lake drownings… the Pique offers up a little bit of medicine, of which laughter is meant to be the best.
Pique Newsmagazine is hosting the Summer of Funny, a humour-writing competition, with $400 in cash up for grabs for the top entries.
Send your stories, poems, scripts, long-format jokes or other humourous pieces to Pique Newsmagazine at andrew@piquenewsmagazine.com by Thursday, July 23.
Enter as many times as you like. Maximum length of 2,000 words per entry. Pique editorial staff will judge the entries and award prizes subjectively, with the maximum of $250 going to a single outstanding submission. The winning stories will be printed in the July 30th issue of Pique.
Let’s see how much wit is at large in Whistler…
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.
Fortune cookie never lie.
So my friend Vicki tells me.
Distilled wisdom, wrapped in a cookie-shell. Was there ever a concept so perfect, so bizarre, so ripe for literary exploitation.
Geist magazine have thrown wide the dragon’s den, launching the Geist Fortune Cookie Cookie Contest.
500 words is all that is required of you to enter this writing contest based on faux wisdom and vague predictions.
Send Geist a piece of writing inspired by a fortune cookie message. The relationship can be as tangential as you like, as long as there is a connection to the initial fortune cookie prophecy or aphorism.
Don’t eat Chinese food? Find a fortune online or make one up.
Riff on the fortune—story, essay, poem, rant, whatever—in 500 words or less.
Winning entries will be published in Geist and at geist.com.
Submit your entry at geist.com by midnight, June 1 2009. Money, fame, a lifetime supply of noodles await.
(Okay. I lied about the noodles. But then, I am not a fortune cookie. I can lie if it makes a better story, right?)
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.”
Which way do you choose?
Whistler Reads is plunging straight into the icy waters of the Antarctic with its latest event: a discussion of Sir Ernest Shackleton’sGreat South Pole Exploration. The book chronicles the journey of Shackleton’s unsuccessful – nonetheless epic – expedition to the Antarctic during World War I.
“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages. Bitter cold. Long months of complete darkness and constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.” More than 5,000 replied to this ad, which was posted in the newspapers of London to recruit a crew for the expedition. Twenty-four crew were chosen.
Andrew Prossin, an adventurer and managing director of One Ocean Expeditions, will speak at the Whistler Reads event, sharing his stories and photos from the Antarctic region, while Whistler’s Chris Shackleton leads the discussion.
The discussion takes place at the Whistler Public Library on Sunday, May 31 from 3 to 5 p.m. Admission is by donation at the door (suggested donation $10). To find out more about Whistler Reads and the upcoming event, visit www.bookbuffet.com.
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.
When the management team for the TELUS World Ski and Snowboard Festival moved to the Festival office in the Conference Centre in April, they underwent an annual ritual gathering just before the Festival kick-off to share bits of advice from previous years on the frontlines. “Don’t forget to eat.” “Get your laundry done tonight.” “Don’t get too hung up if someone forgets to say please and thankyou.” ”Try and get out to enjoy at least one of the events you are producing during the 10 days.” The information itself is of marginal use – but the real power in the ritual is that it transforms a room in the TELUS Conference Centre into sacred space, where a busy and stressed team could escape to, could seek refuge, could remember to breathe during a fortnight of non-stop pressure.
It’s ironic that, surrounded by the sacred space of the West Coast mountains, a bunker room in a basement would be called upon to serve that role… but sometimes sanctuary requires a wide open sky, and sometimes it requires a closed door and a little bit of privacy.
Sacred space, and the spiritual landscape of the West Coast, is up for exploration in Star Weiss’ new book, Havens in a Hectic World: Finding Sacred Places (TouchWood Editions, Spring, 2008).
On Friday May 22, at 7pm, the Whistler Public Library hosts Weiss as she launches the book to Whistler readers.
In interviews with a wide spectrum of British Columbians, from prison inmates to cloistered nuns; from artists to First Nations Elders, Weiss uncovers and discusses the diverse meaning of sanctuary in our society. From a mountain peak to an ancient village, a waterfall to a labyrinth, from the Ismaili Jamatkhana in Burnaby to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, each sacred place leads to a deeper inquiry: How can we find sanctuary in a world defined by productivity and efficiency? Where can we seek refuge? How are our connections to the divine changing? With Havens in a Hectic World, Weiss finds powerful answers that will invite you to find your own sacred place.
“I think every place is sacred. I have many of them,” says Rabbi David Mivasair, Vice Chair of Vancouver’s InterSpiritual Centre. “We create sacred space. My five-year-old daughter’s bedside, my mother-in-law’s kitchen, my garden, the holy blossom temple of a cherry tree….It’s really about opening our eyes, opening our hearts, opening our soul to where we are. It’s our attunement to what is there that makes it a sacred place.”
Douglas Todd, Ethics and Spirituality reporter for The Vancouver Sun, says, “Star Weiss has put together an incredibly well researched and engagingly written exploration of what it means for a place to be ’sacred.’ With the fresh eyes of a former New Yorker who has long been enchanted by her wild, mysterious chosen home on the West Coast, Weiss takes the reader on a thoughtful journey into the heart of contemporary spirituality.”
This week’s cover girl in the Whistler Question is Pemberton and District Library Director, Shannon Ellis, who must be doing something right – Pemby’s new library has seen a 70% increase in circulation in the last month, and 75 new members joining each month since the library opened its doors.
Even more revolutionary, it is one of the only library’s in Canada to eschew fines. Says Ellis, “Not everybody has the means to pay fines. I just don’t think that fines make people bring stuff back.”
Given the amount of money I’ve paid out in fines to the Whistler Public Library over the years, for books just one week late, I’m cheering on the Pemberton Library’s radical approach. And it certainly has freed up some change, which makes supporting the Library’s 30th anniversary bash, with champagne, live music and a raffle, an easy thing to dig into my pocket for. May 23, 7 – 10pm. Big kids only. Cos’ of the bubbles.
Join the Pemberton Library’s facebook group for all the latest news.
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.
Flare magazine is celebrating 30 years – no mean feat of survival in today’s magazine publishing climate… and as part of their celebration, Flare is opening up the pages of the fashion bible to aspiring writers and fledgling journalists. 600 words on the most inspiring fashion moment of the past 30 years. Due May 10.
Flare suggests: ”Perhaps it was Karl Lagerfeld and the house of Chanel, or Betsey Johnson’s runway cartwheels. Or did Molly Ringwald’s prom dress from Pretty In Pink give you pause, or possibly Vivienne Westwood’s wedding dress for SJP (that is, Carrie Bradshaw). It may have been the inspiration of Lady Diana or the new elegance of Michelle Obama.”
??
I’m dead curious to know what Whistler’s fashion high-points and trend-setting moments would be… I suspect Leslie Anthony sporting Rob Boyd as a tattoo might come close?
The best thing about seasonal life is it makes you conscious of endings and beginnings, and there’s nothing like the thought “there’s only 2 weeks left” to revive a sagging momentum.
The worst thing about seasonal life is that sometimes the endings are just a long drawn-out anti-climatic whimper. The 10 day TELUS World Ski and Snowboard Festival works some audacious magic to ensure the end of winter happens with a bang… but 10 days of non-stop partying, skiing/riding, late nights and cultural overdoses can leave one mewling for mercy like a lost kitten.
The last hurrah for the Fest, strangely enough, is its most high-brow moment… though there’s nothing snooty about the Chairlift Revue. After all, chairlifts are the great equalisers. Billionaires join ripping 4 year olds join big-hearted bums… for 20 minutes of bonding. That’s the premise GD Maxwell has exploited with his theatre project – galvanising a host of local scribblers to put pen to paper and whip up an airy scene or two.
Sunday’s show was a full house – launching the Chairlift Review into the realm occupied by other cultural juggernauts, the Olympus Pro Photographer Showdown and the 72 Hour Filmmaker Showdown, both of which sold out 2 weeks in advance.
Congrats to Max, Heather Paul and her players, and those writers who embraced their inner puppet-master and discovered the joys of watching their words come to life in other people’s hands.
Pull out your page from last week’s boot-camp.
Once writing has had time to sit, it gets easier to see what’s stinky and rotten, what’s strong, what’s true and vulnerable… It’s less close to you. It’s easier to work on.
Pull out your prose, and eliminate the purple bits. Edit out the modifiers. Modifiers are words that limit verbs and nouns… typically adverbs and adjectives.
And put back the ones you can’t live without.
Rewrite. Cull. Excise repetitive prose. Expand ideas that resonate somewhere in your gut.
I read the perfect explanation McSweeney’s for why I hide out writing non-fiction instead of finishing those abandoned short-stories that litter my notebook.
Cos’ fiction is harder.
In Issue 30 of McSweeney’s the “forge-ahead/throwback issue”, writer Wells Tower produces a story, Retreat, which is a reworking of a story of his, entitled Retreat, that McSweeney’s had published in issue 23.
Huh?
They let Tower explain it himself, in the frontspiece notes.
“One thing that was screwing me up was all the long-form nonfiction work I’d been doing. Nonfiction – even literary nonfiction – calls for tools and processes that are pretty much useless when it comes to making short stories. in metalworking, they have this term, “cold connection”, which is when you take two pieces of metal and a rivet. A few smart bashes, and you’ve got a bracelet with lots of nice bangles on it, and you’ve spared yourself the hot, tedious business of soldering and sweating joints. In a pinch, nonfiction can squeak by on cold connections. You go out and witness things, and if you’ve got at least a few compelling scenes, you can fuse them together with the cold rivets of journalistic writing – the transition, the fraudulent hardware of arc and angle. Nine times out of ten, the reader won’t feel gypped, never mind that there’s no real heart thumping in the thorax of your tin man.
Fiction can’t be approached in such calculated fashion; at least I can’t approach it that way and feel good about myself in the morning. But I’d been given a firm deadline for the story, so I started cold-connecting a bunch of spare parts I had laying around.”
Wells confesses his sins.
“One question a smart teacher of mine liked to ask in fiction workshops is, ‘Was this written in good faith?’ I took this to mean: did the writer make himself as vulnerable to the story’s possibilities as he wishes his readers to be? Or more simply put: does the writer believe in what he wrote?”
So he sought atonement. And rewrote the story.
To write well and deeply, we must be engaged… we must fully inhabit the particular corner of the world we are in. Spring continues to summons us outside, as snow melts, trails and 6 months worth of dogshit and last year’s construction debris are revealed…
Boot-Camp exercise 14 is a call to experience place. Go somewhere. Settle in. Slow the breath. Start to pay attention. Experience the location.
Write down everything you notice.
Keep breathing.
Write the things you didn’t notice in the first place.
Check back – sight? sound? smell? touch? taste? Got them all covered? Fill in your blanks… (We all rely on our stronger senses, and let the scrawny ones atrophy.)
Out of your notes, create a paragraph or page of description.
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.
New for 2009, the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival presents The Pitching Mound.
Ten budding magazine writers will get an exclusive audience with 5 Canadian magazine editors. Step up to the plate with this one-shot to go all-star and sell your best story ideas to explore, Color, Skier, BC Business and Western Living magazine, 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.
Watch and learn, or participate and potentially close the deal.
The Pitcher’s Mound is just one of 20 amazing sessions being programmed for the September 11-13 2009 Whistler Readers & Writers Festival. Watch this space for more news and announcements.
Walt Whitman wrote: Now I see the secret of making the best persons, it is to grow in the open air, and eat and sleep with the earth.
My dental hygienist and I were talking about the impact of stress on the human body – a suspicion of teeth-grinding started the conversation. 68 pairs of muscles above and below the mandible, capable of exerting thousands of poounds of pressure. We are incredible machines, and delicate organisms. Brown thumbs know that “stress” can kill a plant… and yet, our culture wears being stressed as a badge of honour.
Spring is the call to get outside, and reconnect with our vital energies, get the sap running. Grow in the open air, eat and sleep with the earth.
Boot-camp exercise 13 is less about substance and more about space. This week, take your notebook outside somewhere. Breathe in the spring air. And write for as long as you can. 3 pages minimum. Move the hand, move the breath.
A long-time friend of the Whistler Writers Festival, Laisha Rosnau (The Sudden Weight of Snow) is celebrating the launch of her new book of poetry, Lousy Explorers, in Vancouver, at Heritage Hall (3102 Main Street) on Tuesday May 5 at 7:30pm.
Laisha is currently working on her third novel, having abandoned the second, and living in Prince George with her family. Rob Mclennan asks her 12 or 20 questions, and learns how much pureed fruit she wears on her pants, and that she eavesdrops on people for creative inspiration.
Laisha was a guest instructor at the Whistler Writers Festival in 2004 and 2006.
Doors open at 7:00pm. Refreshments will be served. Admission is free.
If you don’t believe that being politically engaged can be a beautiful thing, take another look at the 100 Days poem project, and Brenda Shaughnessy’s Poem for Day 67, Citizen:
I could never quite entirely
believe anything, sadly.
Even the many million leaves
belong less to their trees
than to their kind of tree,
and to October.
This past October was maybe
the last truly scary
Halloween. The last of the Bush
masks trashed.
By November we were limp
with cold and thanks,
the kind of shiver and splay
that makes a tree bend
toward its own grateful,
painful change,
believing—inside-out,
barelimbed, entirely—
in everything. Even in winter.
Uncertain, sure, but no
longer numb with disbelief.
I thought only the future
enjoyed this kind of life:
I think I feel my limbs again.
###
May could be hopeful, too. Here in Sea to Sky, although we trail poetry in our skiing/snowboarding/mountainbiking wake, we haven’t seemed to have made the connection – local voters are lagging in getting on the electoral roll for the provincial May 12 election. Maybe it’s one of those chores on the list that people haven’t got around to yet? I can’t imagine if we lived under a dictator that we would feel so complacent… You can amend the list with the click of a mouse.
The Vicious Circle’s Green Circle creative writing workshops just wrapped, sprouting 19 new writers in Whistler, and feedback from the frontlines: “an excellent group, well led” “engaging and informative” “a great introduction for new writers” “had quite a few ‘aha’ moments” and finally “got me writing and inspired to write more!”
Now the course, with instructor, Rebecca Wood Barrett, is taking a roadtrip to Pemberton to enjoy the spring and get some serious planting underway. The Pemberton Library is partnering with the Whistler Writers Group to host the workshops each Monday evening, 7pm – 9pm, from April 6.
For information, call the Pemberton & District Public Library at 604.894.6916. Register online.
Feeding the Seed creative writing course
They say that those who can, do. And those who can’t, teach.
So let’s take our teachings from those who DID. (Not those who sat around talking about it.) This is our weekly call to action. You want to be a writer? Write. The verb is key.
Tolstoy wrote that, ”Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man’s life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.”
A person isn’t truly revealed to us, until they’re in a bind, until their back is up against the wall, they’re learning how to do something new and flailing around out of their element, until they’re given a choice to make, or their heart is bleeding open. Then, their colours are apparent.
Virtually Vicious Boot Camp exercise 12 comes this week from Fred Stenson’s “Thing Feigned or Imagined.”
Describe a man in three sentences.
Now, describe the same man. Baking a cake.
Next, describe the same man, baking a cake when sad.
Finally, describe that same man baking a cake when he’s sad, and you’re angry.
Got some colours now?
Whistler Reads’ next book discussion will feature The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a slim, smart and subversive book that WR founder Paula Shackleton says is brilliantly written and easy to read in two sittings.
The narrator, Changez, is a Pakistani who went to Princeton, took a top job in finance, fell in love with a troubled young American woman – and then watched his warm feelings for his adopted homeland cool, after 9/11. In a Lahore cafe, he tells his story to an unnamed American who may or may not be a spy, just as Changez may or may not be a terrorist.
The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and has been optioned as a film.
Tickets are available at www.bookbuffet.com for $10, or $15 at the door, and include your first glass of wine. The gathering is set for March 19, 7:30-9:30 at the Nita Lake Lodge’s Library Room.
Whistler writer and citizen activist, Pina Belperio, is the new columnist at Rabble.ca, with a column The Word on the Rings, a behind-the-scenes examination on what’s happening surrounding the Vancouver and Whistler Olympics.
Her most recent column of March 7 reported on the recent alteration of the Resort Municipality’s communications policy, that will stream all interviews with the Mayor through the Communications Department. While the Mayor’s argument - that given the volume of calls he is receiving, it’s in Whistler’s interest to manage the community’s brand better – might wash with shareholders, it’s more troubling for citizens, and reporters, who are also struggling to provide timely and accurate accounts of what’s happening in the Valley against the shift of Council meetings from Monday to Tuesday evenings (providing almost no time for reporters to pursue in-depth analysis of local stories to meet the weekly Thursday publication date.)
Communication is a real balancing act – and it does require respect from all sides…
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)
So, words that aren’t used evolve or disappear more rapidly than those that are embedded in our culture, and irreplaceable, like I, who, we, thou, two, three, five…
Last week, Boot Camp Exercise 9 was a call to arms to preserve some of the most, apparently, vulnerable words in our language.
This week, your task is to take your paragraph/postcard/story, in which you used the Globe’s list of the 11 most vulnerable words, and rewrite it, without them.
Let’s see how redundant they are.
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.
Last year’s winner of the Commonwealth Prize was Canada’s Lawrence Hill for The Book of Negroes, now a Canada Reads contender.
The shortlist for the Canada and Caribbean category is:
Best Book
Marina Endicott (Canada) Good to a Fault Freehand Books
Kenneth J Harvey (Canada) Blackstrap Hawco Random House Canada
Nino Ricci (Canada) The Origin of Species Doubleday Canada
Jacob Ross(Grenada) Pynter Bender Fourth Estate
Jaspreet Singh (Canada) Chef Véhicule Press
Fred Stenson (Canada) The Great Karoo Doubleday Canada
Best First Book
Theanna Bischoff (Canada) Cleavage NeWest Press
Mark Blagrave (Canada) Silver Salts Cormorant Books
Craig Boyko (Canada) Blackouts McClelland and Stewart
Nila Gupta (Canada) The Sherpa and Other Fictions Sumach Press
Pasha Malla (Canada) The Withdrawal Method House of Anansi Press
Joan Thomas (Canada) Reading By Lightning Goose Lane Editions
Padma Viswanathan (Canada)The Toss of a Lemon Random House Canada
The most in-demand book at the Pemberton Library right now might be Tim Winton’s 2008 novel, Breath. A local bookclub has nominated it as their next read.
The novel is gruffly tender, a rising chorus to the addictive rush of surfing that any powder-junkie could appreciate.
But it’s the opening that grabbed me.
Some novels take a while to get their pace up, ask you to suspend disbelief and judgment for a few pages, until you’re caught up in the weft and warp of the story, the character, the cadence of the language.
But Winton snags you immediately.
Here:
We come sweeping up the tree-lined boulevard with siren and lights and when the GPS urges us to make the next left we take it so fast that all the fear slams and sways inside the vehicle. I don’t say a thing. Down the dark suburban street I can see the house lit like a cruise ship.
Got it, she says before I can point it out.
Feel free to slow down.
Making you nervous, Bruce?
Something like that, I murmur.
The novel has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, to be announced March 11.
On Wednesday, the Globe and Mail featured a story about Indigo Books and Music’s plans to launch Shortcovers, an e-book service that is set to transform book sales the way iTunes revolutionised the music world.
The brave new world of e-books, Michael Serbinis, Indigo’s VP of info technology, marketing and online business, embraces the fact that people are reading differently, are “info-snacking”, leveraging downtime while waiting for a bus etc.
Leaving aside the whole dying romance of curling up somewhere quiet with a book, in favour of nibbling on bytes from your e-book in between sending texts and tweets, the deeply disturbing thing about the e-book revolution is in the tail of the Globe piece.
Serbinis proclaims the best part of the Shortcovers service is that “We’ll know exactly what you’re reading, how often, whether you’ve read the whole book that you’ve bought or not.” The marketing VP calls that “engagement information.” And isn’t shy about admitting they will use that to try and sell you your next e-book.
I call that invasion of privacy.
Even librarians know that what people are reading is deeply personal and private information. Librarians across North America have been great warriors protecting details of people’s reading habits.
So I’ll take the library for my info-snacking any day. As well as my feasting, my nibbling and my potlucking. And Shortcovers can keep their profiling and data-mining to themselves. Sorry, brave new world. I’m not ready for you yet.
Vicious Circle member and 2008 Whistler Writers Festival presenter, Pam Barnsley, gets our vote for Whistler’s Poet Laureate. The wreathed one earns her laurels for being the first person ever to have two poems incorporated into the built landscape of Whistler.
Kevin McFarland has revealed that the second Poet’s Pause call, for poems to be incorporated into Joan Baron’s scupltures on Alta Lake, resulted in 42 poems from 24 poets.
Last week, the jury reviewed the submissions, in a blind process with no names attached to the poetry, and selected poems by Pam Barnsley and Sheila Murphy.
Pam also won last year for her poem Two.
Said McFarland, “The jury was surprised Pam was the winning author again this year, as the poem is so different from the last one. They were also surprised to find that Sheila Murphy submitted her poem to our competition from Phoenix, Arizona”
Clearly, Joan Baron’s idea of involving poets in a public art project has legs, because works rambled in from the Lower Mainland, the UK and Arizona.
Kevin says, “I’m sure it wasn’t the $200 commission value.”
More like the idea of embedding oneself into the landscape. Of creating a permanent song. Of joining one’s fellow artists in the commons of Whistler.
Scientists at Britain’s Reading University have used a supercomputer called ThamesBlue to model the evolution of words in English and identify the most enduring, and the most at risk of fading into disuse.
The following words are evolving rapidly and likely to disappear:
dirty
squeeze
bad
because
guts
push (verb)
smell (verb)
stab
stick (noun)
turn (verb)
wipe
As languages evolve over centuries and millennia, the most frequently used words tend to remain unaltered, while rarer words are more likely to change.
So, for Boot Camp exercise 9, become a warrior for the disappearing… Save them, by using them! After all, they’re perfectly good words.
Write a piece, a paragraph, a postcard, a story, using these 11 words.
dirty / squeeze / bad / because / guts / push (verb) / smell (verb) / stab /
stick (noun) / turn (verb) / wipe
Feb 23-28 was Freedom to Read week.
It ends with a whimper – a warning from Grace Westcott, a Toronto lawyer and vice-chair of the Canadian Copyright Institute, about the potential ripple effects of the Google Settlement and Google’s giant on-line library.
Canada’s growing technology gap is creating more and more of a digital ghetto: Canadian university libraries can’t access the Google archive, whereas all American libraries are entitled to free access on one terminal. Twitter killed outbound SMS messaging in Canada, due to constant rate hikes from Canadian cell providers.
Says Jesse Brown, CBC’s technology reporter:
“This growing list of backwards policies is already creating a sense of digital isolation: Canadians can’t stream the videos Americans stream, download the files Americans download, remix the media Americans remix, or tweet the way Americans tweet.
With the election of Barack Obama, digital culture in the U.S. hit a tipping point, where a robust online public sphere proved itself capable of changing the world.
Meanwhile, here in Canada we’re approaching our own tipping point, where a series of ignorances and capitulations threaten to turn our country into a digital ghetto. ”
Meanwhile, on the rooftops of the ghetto : a school principal from West Bench Elementary School in Penticton spends the night on the rooftop with his hair freshly dyed purple, to celebrate his kids having read 14,000 books. Listen to Stephen Quinn from CBC radio’s On the Coast chat to the spirited principal.
Stella Harvey’s words of thanks appear in this week’s local papers, hailing the success of the Between the Sheets Literary Leanings event on February 18. Kudos have been pouring in.
Huge props to the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre, The Four Seasons, the Whistler Arts Council, the Holiday Inn, Armchair Books, The Pique, The Question, The Vicious Circle board, and the public.
Check out some of Joern Rhode’s pictures from the evening.
For word-nerds and lit-fans, the Vicious Circle will be defending its grant request for the 2009 Whistler Readers and Writers Festival before Council on Tuesday, March 3, at 2:45pm, at Millennium Place. Feel free to cheer them on.
She’s been keeping tabs on the arts in Whistler, amongst other things, since she first pulled out a tape recorder, and now Jennifer Miller, reporter at the Whistler Question, freelance writer, and Whistler Readers and Writers Festival 2008 guest presenter, has been nominated for a Ma Murray community newspaper award for arts writing, for her story “Dust settles, but will fest return” about the Pemberton Music Festival.
The Whistler Question has also been nominated for overall excellence. In an age when newspapers are collapsing like giant dust-mounds, we’re so fortunate in Whistler to have two robust local papers.
The awards will be announced Saturday, April 4 2009, at the River Rock Casino.
Whistler’s environmental advocacy group, AWARE, brings Robert F Kennedy Jr to town on Wednesday, March 4, for its Sustainability Speakers Series.
Kennedy was named as one of Time magazine’s “Heroes for the Planet” for his role as chief prosecuting attorney for the Hudson Riverkeepers, which helped restore the Hudson. Riverkeeper helped spawn more than 160 Waterkeeper organisations around the world, including in Canada. He was one of Obama’s frontrunners to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, a great sign that the EPA is about to start protecting the environment. He’s also the author of Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy
Tickets start at $20, with limited quantities, and are available at whistler.com or the Whistler Visitor Information Centre. There’s also the option of glamming it up with the VIP reception afterwards, but don’t hesitate – the ticket are as endangered as the species we are losing…
Amanda Boyden said her novel Babylon Rolling was a love song to her city, written in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, with a sense that nothing would ever be the same.
Today in the Globe and Mail, she iterates the city’s charms and beckons visitors down to the bayou…
And here, from the summer, is Steven Galloway’s review of Amanda’s book… which prove him to be not only a talented writer, but a gift of a reader, as well. (The love-in continues.)
Some days, my heart gets a little chip in it… I guess it’s winter. The windshield factor happens on the inside, too. Little stone flecks, smacks and cracks, suddenly arresting you from the reverie of a morning commute.
Today, on 100dayspoems.blogspot.com, Diane Wald writes a nonromantic obama valentine for america, february 14th, 2009.
This is just a snapshot of her lovely polaroid for the moment:
let us just make a note of one thing before traveling too far on:
obama eats the camera.
in every single photograph where he is smiling
the presidential teeth
require a taming of light, a scrooching in of every aperture
so the picture is not too far bedazzled.
in honor of this i send all america this nonromantic obama valentine command:
thou shalt smile!
for our president
is smiling.
just a man.
openly smiling.
not smirking.
not leering sneering grinning or baring clenched military teeth.
not snickering dickering
lying through pearls
not hooting snorting cackling or falling
all over himself like a word with a back-assward meaning or
a sentence all twisted up in itself
like pretzel dough gone wacko in the oven.
and if you have seen him in person you will say
he verily streams with wide openness
with a wild candor worthy of walt whitman
and no one is afraid.
…
A collaboration of two poets, and friends, Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker, 100 poems, 100 days is a daily poem submitted by poets from across the United States, one for each of President Obama’s first hundred days in office, keeping the torch from Inauguration poet and laureate, Elizabeth Alexander.
How about that for an Olympic countdown project? Enough with the cake. Let’s sink our teeth around something really substantial.
Facebook’s latest meme, “25 things about me”, has probably landed in your updates page by now, if your face is on the book. Between Jan 26 and Feb 2, it manifested 5 million times. Commentators are heckling it as narcissistic, inane, and as dangerous and fast-spreading as a wildfire… but then, those commentators are also writing their own “25 things about me”, which they’re publishing in forums like the LA Times, so maybe they’re just jealous that the spotlight has shifted from them, for a moment, to ordinary people.
Here’s what the 25 things suggests to us – our own stories are fundamentally interesting to us. And typically neglected. Carving out the time to do a bit of fossicking into our ids and egos, is weirdly gratifying, and people are compelled to share. (“Hey look at this little bit of rock/nugget/shard of something ancient and dirty that I just excavated from the p-trap of my mind!”)
And for writers, what a great tool. Why not start every story with a 25 things brainstorm… a grocery list of odd facts and detritus about your character. Cos’ the truth is, every bit of mindexploding art and poetry started when someone saw the banal, and held it up to the light…
PS In case you need it spelled out – that’s exercise 7. Create 2 characters. Construct a 25 random things list for each of them. Turn the page. Now lob them into a common encounter – shared cab, double-date as moral support for friends, first on the scene of a car accident…
The Squamish Arts Council is hosting Deanne Esdale of Texture Media on March 12, 2009, as part of Wild at Art. Deanne will run Planting Seeds for 2009, a Storytelling with Collage hands-on workshop, geared at building your life and work vision through collage…
The great literary challenge for 2009 might be to tell stories of moment and meaning with a series of 140 character tweets. Makes those 250 word postcard stories seem like the new era version of War and Peace.
For anyone who’s been in a coma for the last 6 months, the Boston Globe today explains the Twitterverse. Lexicographer, Erin McKean, also blogs at www.thedictionaryevangelist.com.
Why not try, for this week’s workout, to write a 250 word postcard story as a series of tweets… an opus for the attention-deficit multi-tasking web 2.0 prophets out there…
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.”
Get inside Earthgirl’s mind at http://sabinetheearthgirl.wordpress.com/
Dianne Dunn and Angela Prettie are coordinating a workshop on non-violent communication at Myrtle Phillip on Tuesday, February 10, from 7pm to 9pm.
Admission is by donation.
Non-Violent Communication or Compassionate Communication follows the footsteps of Ghandi, and is based on the work of Dr Marshall Rosenberg, teaching people to speak and listen from the heart, in the hopes of trading conflict for clarity.
“Read this book, be entertained, be ashamed, and then do something to stop the insanity.”
Thomas-Homer Dixon, author of The Upside of Down
Join the Council of Canadians and the Community Foundation of Whistler on Monday, January 26, at the Whistler Library’s Community Room.
At 7pm, award-winning Canadian investigative journalist, Andrew Nikiforuk, author of Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, will be joined by Kim Needham of the Climate Project Canada, to give you some insight into whether you should be building a greenhouse, windmill and stockpiling spare bicycle parts, NOW.
Admission by donation, with proceeds going to the Community Foundation of Whistler’s Environmental Legacy Fund.
Looking for a writing project?
Here’s what’s on the books:
You have one week to compose a poem on the theme of listening, or togetherness, for the RMOW’s Poet’s Pause project.
You have just under one month to celebrate the great icon of Whistler – the chairlift – with a one act play. It’s easier than it sounds. It’s just “noodling around with dialogue” as GD Maxwell has said. Write your own Chairlift Revue. It’s the funnest research you’ll ever do.
Finally, you have just five days to order in your special supplies of Bundaberg Rum, Vegemite, Timtams or Violet Crumbles, and memorise all the words to I Love A Sunburnt Country, for an authentic Australia Day celebration…
Feeding the Seed, the Green Circle creative writing class that starts Jan 28, is sold out. If you missed out, contact the Vicious Circle and let them know you’re into taking part in the second round. There’s also talk of taking the tour on the road, up the road to Pemberton.
In the meantime, get some virtual training under your belt.
Here’s exercise 3.
It’s said that every seven years, all of our cells are replaced, and we are essentially new beings.
Try writing a series of descriptions of yourself, starting now, and going back every seven years, imagining that with each seven year leap, you are completely fresh and rebooted. A new character. Describe them…
If you’re coming late to Virtual Boot-Camp, here’s a quick catch-up.
1. The Quest for skill or expertise requires 10,000 hours. No time to waste, Alice. Better get started now.
2. Push-ups are good. Moving your pen is better.
3. Exercise 1 was simply to get you used to being the master of someone’s fate. It’s the great writerly powertrip.
Now you’re caught up. We’re still warming up. Stretching. Getting the blood flowing. Building up to cliff hucking and other finesse-y moves.
So, you’re wondering where to start?
This week, try clustering. Gabriele Lusser Rico writes in her book, Writing the Natural Way, “Clustering is a nonlinear brainstorming process akin to free association… It’s a writing tool that accepts wondering, not-knowing, seeming chaos, gradually mapping an interior landscape as ideas begin to emerge.” It’s a great tool to use for a launching pad.
Take the topic “listening”. Or “togetherness.” They’re the themes for the RMOW’s call for poetry, due January 28.
Grab a scrap of paper, pick one topic, and get messy. Use “listening” or “togetherness” as the nucleus, then start spidering out, as your brain associates things with the topic. See what strange fruit clusters might appear… Once you’ve exhausted all the associations you can, start on a fresh page and start writing a poem on the same topic. When you’re done, send it to Kevin McFarland, a Parks Planner with a poetic heart. He’ll be stoked.
Stella Harvey tells Holly Fraughton at the Pique that the new Feeding the Seed workshop, the green circle creative writing classes offered by the Vicious Circle from January 28, is for those closeted writers who said, “What I really need is an assignment!”
Kevin Damaskie, Whistler’s 2020 Sustainability Coordinator says the Vicious Circle of pain and perseverance has scripted a wonderful chapter in Whistler’s journey towards a diverse economy and a thriving learning and cultural sector. Read his piece and see if you can count how many literary puns he’s managed to cram into 500 words.
GD Maxwell is scouting for talent, or balls, or a little of both.
If you’ve lived in Whistler for more than a few days, you’re sure to have spent some quality time riding a chairlift. Sure to have had or witnessed some interesting conversations – the kinds of things that only get said when you’re dangling in the air from a cable with a motley mishmash of friends/lovers/strangers.
So why not offer up a few words for the humble chairlift?
Max is looking for submissions for this April’s Chairlift Revue, a performance of one-act plays that will take place at the TELUS World Ski and Snowboard Festival, April 17-26, 2009.
10-12 minutes. Subject matter is wide open. Characters can range from one to a gondola-full. Deadline, February 15. Drop Max a line for more info at maxandmarlene at telus.net.
Read Ski Press editor in chief and Chairlift Revue contributor, Jules Older’s account of last year’s Revue, with its grand finale surprise marriage proposal, here.
So you’ve always wanted to write? or you’ve been wishing you had more time to write?
Well, welcome to the Virtual Vicious Boot-Camp, where there’s no whining, no excuses, (and no boots, actually. It’s virtual, remember?) Just one exercise landing in your lap every week, to get your creative self all juicy. (You can do the 20 push-ups before or after you do the exercise. Your choice. You have until Sunday to complete your task, before the next exercise comes scudding in to your in-box. If you’d like to share the fruits of your labour, and there isn’t a real person handy, feel free to post it in the comments section.)
Exercise One.
The New Year is freshly cracked. The planets are aligned and the astrologers have made their predictions for the year. If you read your horoscope for 2009, you may have been told to expect hot sex, home renovations, and exciting travel plans in the months to come.
Exercise One at Boot-Camp is just geared at getting the hand moving, shutting the internal editor up (that was the voice calling you a maggot), and getting flirty.
So, here goes. Craft a horoscope. 150 words. It could be straight up, an earnest imitation of the form. Or you could write it as if you’re a mama-to-be, waiting for her belly to drop, and imagining the personality and fate of the little seedpod inside. How about a generic horoscope that you could send in lieu of New Year’s greetings to all those people you forgot to send a Christmas letter to? Or you could be an astrologer crafting a message specifically for the eyes of the boy who just broke her heart…
Pick up pen. Move pen on page. Write until you can write no more. Then, 20 push-ups.
That will be all, maggots.
Judith Timson, in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, argues the case against New Year’s resolutions. Although it’s persuasive (ie we don’t really need any more flagellation when we’re already getting whipped by the Late ‘08 Depression), we’re not quite willing to dump the list.
Here’s the Vicious approach.
1. Read more. Makes you a better writer. Makes you a better person. Even makes surgeons better doctors. ‘Nuff said.
2.Work out. We want to make it easy, cos’ we know, if it ain’t easy, it ain’t happening. Subscribe to the whistlerwriters.wordpress.com RSS feed, and every week, we’ll carrier-pigeon a writing exercise into your in-box. You can have all week to make time for it. It’s all geared at putting the care and feeding of your creative self at the top of your to-do list. Every week. Consider it your new year’s bootcamp. Booyah!
3. Avoid regrettable behaviour. And missing the February 18 gig with Joseph and Amanda Boyden, Shelagh Rogers and Steven Galloway would be regrettable indeed. Tickets are selling fast, so the Whistler-casual last minute dash might not be the best strategy. $20 via Paypal at www.theviciouscircle.ca. Too easy. Rogers will be taping some of the discussions for her new show, The Next Chapter, and probing Amanda and Joseph on life inside a literary marriage.
4. Embrace one’s inner double black diamond. For the green circle creative writers you know, don’t forget the Writers Group’s new 6 week course for Never-Ever writers. Because even the experts had to start at the beginning (Stance and balance). If your comfort level on the bunnyslopes is high then get writing and have your manuscript ready for the Writer-in-Residence program this coming fall, led by Wayne Grady and Merilyn Simonds.
Happy Old Year. ElVicious, Out.
The Vicious Circle does maths.
Variable one, from Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers:
“The emerging picture from studies [in expertise] is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert – in anything,” writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin. “In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again…Noone has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”
PLUS
Variable two, from Brian Kitely, author of The 3AM Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercises That Transform Your Fiction:
“Learning how to write is the same as writing. Golfer Jack Nicklaus said, ‘The more I practice, the luckier I get.’ All the other arts – as well as athletics, obviously – take the notion of practice and exercise very seriously. Too many writers make a fetish of the natural, untroubled writer who just breathes out a great story.”
EQUALS
aha.
And here I was, blaming my chiropractic issues on a too-heavy school-bag. The latest evidence from the white coats, however, give you all the ammunition you need for curling up with a good book.
American hospitals are adding the study of literature into medical residency programs because its making doctors kinder.
According to this New York Times article, residents who are invited to discuss poetry and short stories as part of their daily rounds are scoring significantly better on patient evaluations. They start doing radical things like always talking to the family, gently touching patients, and continually explaining the course of treatment and what the doctors are thinking so patients know.
Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons found that doctors interacting with literature were more willing to adopt another person’s perspective, sometimes after just four one-hour workshops.
Seems like an easy way to change the world. Read more. Grow your empathy. How radical.
Just announced today: the Whistler Writers Group offers a 6 week course for Never-Ever Writers, Wednesdays, from January 28 2009.
Think of it as a bunnyhill for aspiring creatives. Sharpen your pencils, and away you go.
Kind and patient instructor, Rebecca Wood Barrett, will deliver a weekly lecture on the craft of writing, give brief assignments in class, followed by homework assignments that will be brought back to the group to workshop so participants can learn how to critique effectively. Roundtable discussions on the practical aspects of being a writer are also on the agenda.
Rebecca has a one year old son, so she’s adept at fitting a lot of productivity into a short window of time. She’s also a published short story writer, an award-winning short filmmaker, a TV producer with Resort TV, winner of the 2008 Postcard Jam, and a soon-to-be graduate from UBC’s MFA program. Trust me, you’ll be in good hands.
Feeding the Seed : Growing the Brand New Writer starts at Spring Creek Elementary School on Wednesday, January 28. The 6 week course is offered for $120. Spaces are limited. Sign up soon. There’s a whole mountain of terrain awaiting you. www.theviciouscircle.ca
The illustrator? Or the scribe?
It’s too vexing to consider, really. Especially given a recent move to outsource news reporting to writers in the developing world who work for $7 a day. (See here.) For now, I will be happily rendered mute, and stand aside for Amelia Rachlin, Marketing Coordinator at the Whistler Arts Council, who designed the poster for the Feb 18 reading event. Watch for it around Whistler soon. Says it all, really.
Gasp! So I admit, I’ve had a little crush on Joseph Boyden every since he read in Whistler in 2007. But I’m switching allegiances. I just finished Amanda Boyden’s newest novel, Babylon Rolling, and would have to dub it my Pick of the Year 2008. Assured, compassionate, un-put-down-able… I guess that’s what happens when you’ve been a contortionist – you become skilled at holding people’s attention with dazzling feats, and making them look easy…
So, here’s my bedside table round-up for the year, Top 5 Reads 2008
1. Babylon Rolling, by Amanda Boyden.
Because it’s pitch-perfect. Here, from the early days: “There, there, there. The grill is on top of Roy. Cerise rushes down the stairs and goes to lift the grill. Her body and her brain both have nothing to do with it. She lays her hands on.”
2. The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall.
Because of the 6 page shark attack rendered only in typeface.
3. The Flood, by David Maine.
Because someone finally answered my Sunday School question of where the women in Genesis were.
4. Charlie Wilson’s War, by George Crile.
Because the book is always better than the movie, and in this case, the movie was surprisingly good, and the book tells the backstory to Afghanistan that we oughta know about.
5. Charlotte Gray, by Sebastian Faulks, and The Cellist of Sarajevo, by Steven Galloway.
Because it’s a good exercise to imagine your town in a state of siege, and what would become of you, your crazy neighbour, your best friend, your boss…
What is a literary marriage made of?
That’s just one of the intimacies to be revealed on February 18, when the Vicious Circle, in conjunction with the Whistler Winter Arts Festival and 2010 Cultural Olympiad, presents Between the Sheets.
Shelagh Rogers, host of CBC’s Sounds Like Canada from 2002 to 2008, and the new program The Next Chapter, gets up close and personal with Giller Prize 2008 winner, Joseph Boyden, (Through Black Spruce, Three Day Road) at Whistler’s 8th annual Literary Leanings in February. What will his wife, novelist and former trapeze artist Amanda Boyden (Babylon Rolling) have to say about that? How will Steven Galloway(The Cellist of Sarajevo) round out the threesome?
Join the Vicious Circle on Wednesday February 18 from 7:30pm at the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre, as we host three of North America’s leading novelists. Cash bar, hosted by the Four Seasons. Tickets available at www.theviciouscircle.ca for $20.
In the weekend Vancouver Sun (Dec 13) Colin Holt reviews Snakebit and The Lizard King, two new releases featuring the legless, cold-blooded and phobia-inducing fauna that define a herpetologists world. And Anthony’s Snakebit comes up trumps. “Laugh out loud funny” and “leaves the reader wishing there were more.”
In the weekend Vancouver Sun (Dec 13) Colin Holt reviews Snakebit and The Lizard King, two new releases featuring the legless, cold-blooded and phobia-inducing fauna that define a herpetologists world. And Anthony’s Snakebit comes up trumps. “Laugh out loud funny” and “leaves the reader wishing there were more.”
Whistler Writers Festival 08 presenter Susan Reifer is finishing her year in style.
Susan has won the 2008 Alto Tourism Media Award for excellence in travel journalism for her feature “Alberta Unbound,” which ran in SKI Magazine in November 2007.
Separately, Susan has been named a finalist for the Tourism Industry Association of Canada’s 2008 Tourism Excellence Travel Media Award; this award, sponsored by the Globe and Mail, will be presented at TIAC’s leadership summit in November. Susan’s nomination is based on her body of published work about Canadian travel experiences.
Founding member of the Vicious Circle, Sara Leach, has inked a publishing deal with Orca Book Publishers for a children’s book set in the Gulf Islands. The book’s working title is Jake Reynolds: Chicken or Eagle.
Sara Leach, an elementary school teacher, and mother of 2 children, has been published in the Pique newsmagazine, Whistler Question, and been a featured writer at Literary Leanings and at the Whistler Writers Festival.
Said Leach recently, “I never could have achieved this without Whistler’s wonderful critique group or all the work everyone has put in to bring the many presenters to the festival and the writer-in-residence to town.”
Leach is also the author of Mountain Machines, a children’s picture and counting book, that is currently being prepared for publication.
It’s here at last. Whistler scribe Leslie Anthony is celebrating the launch of his new book: Snakebit: Confessions of a Herpetologist.
Billed as the Far Side meets the Orchid Thief, with a nod to Bill Bryson, Snakebit is in stores everywhere, just in time for Christmas. Although it’s geared to a wide audience, the hot tip is that it’s the ultimate stocking stuffer for the armchair naturalist, traveller, adventurer, bio/conservation type and lover of schadenfreude, in your life.
For real life insight into what a powder-obsessed snake-lover actually looks like, you can meet Leslie at the Whistler Library this Monday. November 17, 7pm.
MARGARET ATWOOD took a swipe at the Prime Minister’s anti-arts stance on Thursday in the Globe and Mail. (Read the entire piece here – )
My favourite part is below, where she rallies to the defence of ordinary people and our innate capacity and desire to be creative. Even when it actually costs us money.
“In fact, less than 10 per cent of writers actually make a living by their writing, however modest that living may be. They have other jobs. But people write, and want to write, and pack into creative writing classes, because they love this activity – not because they think they’ll be millionaires.
Every single one of those people is an “ordinary person.” Mr. Harper’s idea of an ordinary person is that of an envious hater without a scrap of artistic talent or creativity or curiosity, and no appreciation for
anything that’s attractive or beautiful. My idea of an ordinary person is quite different. Human beings are creative by nature. For millenniums we have been putting our creativity into our cultures – cultures with unique languages, architecture, religious ceremonies, dances, music, furnishings, textiles, clothing and special cuisines. “Ordinary people” pack into the cheap seats at concerts and fill theatres where operas are brought to them live. The total attendance for “the arts” in Canada in fact exceeds that for sports events. “The arts” are not a “niche interest.” They are part of being human.
Moreover, “ordinary people” are participants. They form book clubs and join classes of all kinds – painting, dancing, drawing, pottery, photography – for the sheer joy of it. They sing in choirs, church and other, and play in marching bands. Kids start garage bands and make their own videos and web art, and put their music on the Net, and draw their own graphic novels. “Ordinary people” have other outlets for their creativity, as well: Knitting and quilting have made comebacks; gardening is taken very seriously; the home woodworking shop is active. Add origami, costume design, egg decorating, flower arranging, and on and on … Canadians, it seems, like making things, and they like appreciating things that are made.”
| Harbour Author Wins National Award for Travel Writing - September 8, 2008 |
| Harbour Publishing would like to congratulate Stephen Vogler, author of Top of the Pass, on receiving the Whistler Select Writing Award for travel writing. Award recipients are selected based on submissions from three categories–published journalism featuring Whistler from the past year, the telling of an untold Whistler story, and the best undiscovered fiction from the Whistler region. Stephen’s piece “The Bomb Shack Ski Patrol Museum,” published in Mountain Life Magazine, took the $1,000 prize. As the Whistler Select Writing Awards offer one of the largest cash prizes available in North America in the field of travel writing, this is a tremendous achievement for Stephen. Congratulations once again from everyone at Harbour Publishing. |
Vogler’s story was published in Mountain Life in the Winter of 2007, and can be read here, at page 17-18.
And in the end, there were 3 postcard people, whose stories would win prizes, and they would open the Pique tomorrow, and read them there. As would 60,000 other people, over their morning coffees, or grapefuit juice, or hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-me-Caesars.
And those three would come to jam out. Before a crowd of supporters. 300 word jam sessions. To see who would win the crown of Postcard Grand Poobah.
You, too, can vote. By applause and hootin’ and hollerin’. But you’ve got to be there, amongst the melee, at MY place on Saturday.
All hail the Poobah.
Today, the Sun’s books editor, Rebecca Wigod, scopes out this fall’s crop of coming books, and is looking forward to Leslie Anthony’s forthcoming non-fiction title, Snakebit: Confessions of a Herpetologist, in which he leads the reader through desert and jungle to reveal the strange world of snakes and the often stranger fraternity that pursues them.
We chatted with Anthony, in anticipation of his appearance at the 7th annual Whistler Readers and Writers Festival next weekend, and discovered that Snakebit started as a lauded magazine article in Explore, and is best described as The Far Side meets The Orchid Thief.
Said Anthony, “When I look at the Far Side, I see myself, or at least, I see everyone I know. I was award that I spent my career lockstep with these pith-helmet clad nerds in the jungle, but I never considered myself one, which admittedly is a weird optic.”
For more revelations, including why he’s afraid of a taxidermied fish, and how he narrowly escaped becoming a butterfly scientist, download this article. the-doctor-is-in-leslie-anthony1
Anthony will lead a seminar on Breaking Into Magazines (details at writers-fest-08_v4), on Saturday September 13, at 4pm, Millennium Place. Tickets are still available for purchase here.
Get the low-down on how to write a mystery novel from a master of the genre. William Deverell is profiled by Whistler mystery writer, Pam Barnsley, in the Pique, today, where he reveals not “whodunnit”, by how-he-dunnit.
But don’t just take our word for it. As Jennifer Miller of the Whistler Question writes today, Mel Hurtig, Canada’s prolific author, political activist and former bookseller and publisher, says he’s learned in his 76 years that “the most interesting people are people who read a lot.”
Read the full story here.
Hurtig is set to deliver the keynote address at the seventh annual Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, which takes place Sept. 12 and 13. He said he’ll talk about his latest book, The Truth About Canada: Some Important, Some Astonishing, and Some Truly Appalling Things All Canadians Should Know About Our Country.
After his talk at the Whistler festival, he’ll take questions from authors on how to prepare a manuscript, decide which publishers to send it to, and provide other tips, he said.
If the Democratic convention has been absorbing your post-Olympic TV viewing, then you’ll definitely want to nab tickets to hear Mel Hurtig in Whistler on Friday night, September 12.
Whistler writer, Rebecca Wood Barrett, has won the 2008 Sea to Sky Literary Contest’s Long Fiction Category with her story, “His Nickname”. It will be published in the upcoming Sea to Sky Literary journal Soundings, which will be distributed throughout the Sea to Sky Corridor by the Squamish Chief. There will also be a celebration at the Brackendale Art Gallery on Wednesday, Aug. 27 at 7pm.
Rebecca is one of the guest writers featured at the forthcoming Whistler Readers and Writers Festival. A writer and filmmaker, with several published stories and 25 short films under her belt, Rebecca will be leading the seminar, Script to Screen, on Saturday 13 September, from 8:30am to noon, exploring the wealth of creative tools that filmmaking offers to take ideas from the script page onto the big screen.
Watch also for Rebecca’s interview with Wayne Grady, 2008 Festival guest, in Whistler’s Pique newsmagazine.
If you’re among the people a little pissed at what Stephen Harper’s been doing while in office, you’ll want to be in the audience at Mel Hurtig’s September 12 talk in Whistler, to kick off the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival.
Hurtig is more than pissed. Love him or hate him, he’s been a tireless patriot for Canada, and he continues to defend the survival of the country, rabble-rousing and calling it as he sees it, in his new book, The Truth About Canada: Some astonishing, and some truly appalling things all Canadians should know about our country.
He himself calls it the most anti-establishment book ever published in his lifetime.
He spoke with Whistler activist, Council of Canadians board member, Pina Belperio, in the latest issue of the Pique.
Whistler Writers Group member, Sara Leach, has written an awesome article in this week’s Pique.
In it, she says that : “A good husband never says your jeans make you look fat. A good girlfriend tells you the straight up truth. The same is true of writing. Our family members want us to succeed and feel good about ourselves. They don’t always give us an unbiased opinion of our work. This is where a good critique group comes in. A critique group is a group of writers who come together to share and comment on each other’s work. While it is the job of family members to extol the virtues of your writing, no matter how much work it might still need, a good critique group offers constructive feedback about your writing, while keeping your self-esteem intact.”
Sara, a teacher and founding member of the Whistler Writers Group, will team up with fellow scribe Pam Barnsley to facilitate two sessions on Saturday, Sept. 13 at the festival. Feedback Blitz: How to Give and Receive Feedback, will take place Saturday at 4 p.m.
They’ll also facilitate a free drop-in class on Saturday morning at 8:30 a.m., Top 10 Tips to Crank Up Your Writing, a host of exercises geared at getting hands moving across the page.
1. It’s in Whistler, and not a Siberian gulag, that other outpost of prolific literary inspiration.
2. It’s the first literary event ever to feature LIVE WRESTLING. If you ever wondered what you would get if you crossed a poet, a politician and a priest, (apart from a Police song with no lyrics in its chorus), the Friday night “Who Gives a $^%?! About Words” muckrakers debate is for you. Witness the verbal carnage as a preacher, a politican, a lawyer and an opinion columnist fight for their lives in the gladiator room of the Whistler Public Library.
3. There’s $2500 cash up for grabs. And to witness the raw emotion when starving artists are handed $1000 cash is better than reality television. September 12 and 13 will see the celebration of the winners of the first Whistler Select Writing Awards, recognizing excellence in travel journalism, the best telling of an untold story and winning postcard-length short fiction.
4. You can rub shoulders with real life celebrities. They may not have the detox dramas of Lindsay, Paris or Britney, nor the cosmetic enhancements of Pamela, Jessica or Arnie, but the Whistler Reader and Writers Festival’s 2008 line-up features the real deal when it comes to the constellations of Can-lit. Witness the star power of Mel Hurtig, Wayne Grady, William Deverell, Shaena Lambert, Carrie Mac, Nancy Warren, Leslie Anthony and Susan Reifer. If they all went on strike, Canada would suddenly be eerily quiet. (Pity Lindsay, Paris and Britney haven’t considered it.)
5.“Writer-chic” is the new black. Scrabulous is fabulous and a good vocabulary is sexy as hell. Upgrade your literary status with an intensive day of seminars on fiction, non-fiction and writing from life. Whether you need a kick in the bum to get your creative mojo going, a reverential review of your latest work, or just a chance to come out of the closet/garret/cubicle/bike park for the day, the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival is so confident that at least one of its 15 seminars will work for you, that if you’re not happy with your experience, we will immediately escort you back to the gulag.
Today, the Whistler Writers group sent out a mass reminder to Sea to Sky writers about the Postcard Jam contest.
They figured that Sea to Sky residents, however new to the region, are likely familiar with traffic jams, rail jams, strawberry jam, and toe-jam.
They may be less up-to-speed with postcard jams – a situation worth redressing quickly, given the August 25 deadline in the Postcard Jam short fiction contest, presented as part of the first ever Whistler Select Writing Awards.
Postcard Jam submissions are being sought from all manner of writer, real or fake, pro or rookie, regardless of age, provided they are based in the Sea to Sky corridor. $500 cash, publication in the Pique, a spot on stage alongside Leslie Anthony, Candas Jane Dorsey and William Deverell, as well as the title of Postcard Grand Poobah are ALL up for grabs.
The real question is : why is it called a Jam?
Stories must be under 300 words? That’s the postcard part…
Submitted by August 25? That’s the ACT NOW part…
There’s an online application form at www.theviciouscircle.ca, so you don’t even need a stamp, or a postcard, or a pen to participate.
To enter, visit : http://www.theviciouscircle.ca/submissions/postcard-jam.php
William Deverell, award-winning crime writer, will speak at the September 2008 Whistler Writers Festival.
A former criminal lawyer, William Deverell is the creator of Street Legal and has published fourteen novels including April Fool, which won the Arthur Ellis Award in 2006. His new novel, Kill All the Judges, heralded by the Quill & Quire and Canadian Living Magazine for its dark wit and compelling plot, partly takes place in Ottawa as one of the protagonists run for a Federal by-election with the Green Party.
Deverell will also join an all-star panel on Saturday night at Millennium Place, alongside snake-charmer Leslie Anthony, and writer-in-residence and speculative fiction writer Candas Jane Dorsey. Check out the entire Festival program, or order tickets online at www.theviciouscircle.ca
Happily, Whistler writers are sufficiently ghettoised by the mountain bikers, snowboarders, longboarders, and endurance athletes, that we’re just happy to be geeking out on words, be you high-brow, low-brow, no-brow, genre-fiction, non-fiction or superherographicfiction… September’s fest says, BRING IT ON.
Early this summer, the Vicious Circle (Whistler’s Writers Group) announced that Candas Jane Dorsey would serve as the 2008 Whistler Writer in Residence.
Dorsey will be installed at the heritage Alta Lake House in Whistler for a month from September 1st through to September 30th and will meet weekly with ten writers in one-on-one sessions and weekly workshops.
The Vicious Circle had the chance to check in with Dorsey and discovered that strangers have tattooed her poetry on their body parts, that she bids on thesaurauses at auctions, and she thinks the reason for bad writing making it into print is more attributable to cock-ups than conspiracies.
Q: Are you superstitious? Do you knock on wood, refuse to talk about a work in progress for fear of stalling it, have weird little rituals or worry about jinxing yourself?
I’m not so superstitious, but I have learned one or two things over the years. Refusing to talk about a work in progress, for instance, is not a superstition but a safeguard. As Dorothea Brande wrote in 1934 in Being a Writer, the subconscious doesn’t care what form the creativity is expressed in, only that it gets expressed. For many writers, talking about it is a surefire way of not writing it. If a person is a writer like that, it’s better to be silent.
That doesn’t mean that people should be shy about joining this writer-in-residence programme — that delicate point is very early in the process for most of us.
Just remember that you need 20 pages ON PAPER. As Natalie Goldberg’s Zen roshi said to her, “Thinking is thinking. Writing is writing.”
Read the entire interview here… http://www.theviciouscircle.ca/retreat/index.php?id=51
By Holly Fraughton
The Whistler Writers Group, better known to most as the Vicious Circle, is launching a new series of writing awards with $2,500 in cash prizes.
The Whistler Select Writing Awards debuts this year, with three categories of awards: Whistler Features, Whistler Untold, and the Postcard Jam. Respectively, the three categories recognize the best published journalism that features Whistler, the best telling of an untold local story, and the best undiscovered work of fiction from the Whistler region.
“We’re launching this awards series to celebrate craft, community, place and perspective, which we believe are the key ingredients required to cook up a great story,” said Lisa Richardson, coordinator of the awards. “And we’re thrilled to have the support of local businesses like Whistler-Blackcomb, Watermark Communications, and Pique Newsmagazine. It’s really exciting to launch this recognition of great writing through a partnership between the tourism, arts and business communities in Whistler.”
With a total of $2,500 to be awarded, the new Whistler Select Writing Awards boast one of the largest cash prizes ever offered in the field of travel writing.
The winner of the Whistler Features category will receive $1,000 for their piece of published journalism featuring Whistler that has appeared in a print magazine or newspaper between Aug. 15, 2007 and Aug. 15, 2008.
The best piece of non-fiction writing under 2,000 words that presents a new tale, twist or character from Whistler to the rest of the world, or provides a new and creative take on a Whistler story, will receive $1,000, as well.
Finally, $500 in cash prizes will be awarded to the top three submissions in the Postcard Jam category. These stories must be no longer than 300 words and should not have appeared in print before. The top three stories will be published in Pique Newsmagazine and the winner will be invited to read their piece alongside guest writers at the Whistler Writers and Readers Festival, Sept. 12-13.
Submissions should be sent via www.theviciouscircle.ca by Monday, Aug. 25.
Writer in residence
In addition to their generous new writing awards, the Vicious Circle will also be holding their Writer in Residence program during the month of September.
Canadian author, Candas Jane Dorsey, will be meeting with a group of 10 writers from Sept. 1 to 30, offering up advice and guidance through one-on-one sessions and weekly group workshops.
Stella Harvey, Director of the Writer in Residence program, explained that they look for a well-rounded writer to help participants expand and improve their abilities.
“We’re always looking for different kinds of writers,” Harvey said. “People who are experimenting in different genres and who have a broad base of experience with various genres.”
They accept 10 participants at different levels of abilities, and the enrolment fee is $250.
This year’s program is almost full already, but those interested in participating should contact Stella Harvey at stella25@telus.net.
“…the first value of a writers’ workshop is that it makes the young writer feel not only not 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.” On Becoming A Novelist, John Gardner
