Ahhh, The Idea Stage By Karen Macleod

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you were driving at, say 90km/h, and put your vehicle in reverse? Nothing, as it turns out. Although, what’s that smell?

I’m driving to the airport, ABBA blaring. Heck, I’m even doing that yell-singing thing you can only do when you’re alone. Waterloo!!! Lalalalalala wanted to….Waterloo! lalalalalala be with you…

And the idea hits.

That’s why, when I gear down like I’m supposed to, I gear up, to N, oops, then to R, ouch! That’s why I turn into the next viewpoint to record the banter between my two characters who have unexpectedly joined me on the road. I take my notebook out of my purse (I use a Grade One lined exercise book. They’re cheap, small but not too small). But I don’t have a pen. I typically write my first draft in cursive handwriting, but I have no choice. I pick up my Blackberry and open the notepad app. Thumb, thumb, thumb.

This is a dialogue I tried to write two weeks ago. I was at a beach on Galiano Island. While my boys collected beach glass, I sat against a log in the sand, surrounded by the senses of the sea. The ideal setting for a writer. You’d think. After a couple of hours I had nothing. I had worse than nothing. I had bad writing.

After about ten minutes, I pull back onto the highway. Only, my two passengers don’t give a care that I have a flight to catch, and they keep talking. I make another stop. Thumb, thumb, thumb. And at every red light, thumb, thumb, thumb. I’m not really mad at them. I’m actually pretty thrilled.

Ahhh, the idea stage.

The Woefield Poultry Collective by Susan Juby. Review by Libby McKeever.

The Woefield Poultry Collective by Susan Juby

Review by Libby McKeever.

Excerpt:

 

Prudence: I allowed the mood to continue for twenty minutes. Any longer than that would be wallowing.

 

Seth: I don’t know if you’re familiar with Def Leppard. Now there’s a band that has seen some trouble…After the scene at Home Depot I felt like Def Leppard in their darkest days, only without the album sales, the groupies or the fame.

 

Earl: I ain’t played in front of nobody since I left the band when I was seventeen years old. Sure I still play some, but only when there’s nothing on TV. The old man used to spend hours listening. I figured I might as well play for him since we weren’t doing nothing anyway.

 

Sara: My mom stayed in the car and told me to go and introduce myself to the lady who owns the farm and tell her about my birds and what they need. I think my mom just wanted to be alone in the car. Sometimes, when my dad and her aren’t getting along, she goes and sits in the car in the driveway.

 

When Prudence’s only relative, Great-Uncle Harold dies and leaves her his Vancouver Island farm, she jumps at the opportunity to leave her stalled writing career in New York and live her dream as a back-to-the land farmer. She arrives to find a dilapidated farm house (and equally decrepit farm hand – Earl), a half shorn sheep named Bertie, and land that seems to only grow rocks. Reneging is an unknown to Prudence and she takes on Woefield Farm with the view that “enthusiasm counts for a lot in dancing and in life.”

This very funny account is told in the truly genuine voices of the four main characters, Prudence, Seth Earl and Sara. The Woefield Poultry Collective chronicles the revival of not only the farm, but the characters themselves.

Seth, after a painful public humiliation involving his grade 11 drama teacher spent the last two years drinking and blogging on Hollywood scandals and heavy metal bands.

Earl, a talented mandolin player who left the family band, The Lonesome Boys decades ago, is lonely and bitter.

Sara, an eleven-year-old girl, caught in the middle of her parent’s marital issues has one passion, raising poultry and a leader’s determination.

Prudence, undeterred by obstacles (or lying) takes on the farm with this band of loveable misfits to create something quite special.

 

It was difficult to finish this book. It meant the end of my journey with these offbeat, crazy characters. I will miss them.

Susan Juby is the author of several successful books, including The Alice Macleod Trilogy (Alice, I Think (2000), Miss Smithers (2004), Alice Macleod: Realist at Last (2005).  Juby’s other Young Adult titles are, Another Kind of Cowboy (2007) and   Getting the Girl: A Guide to Private Investigation, Surveillance and Cookery (2008). Juby’s first non-fiction book, Nice Recovery (2010) recounts the story of her struggle with alcoholism as a youth.

The Woefield Poultry Collection (2011) is her first specifically adult fiction book, although the Alice series has also been enjoyed by adults and youth alike. Her latest book, Bright’s Lights, a dystopian thriller, is due to be released in September. Susan will appear at the 2012 Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, October 12 – 14^th.

Creative Coaster Composition Competition

Get it? Write.

The Whistler Readers and Writers Festival proudly presents Whistler’s first ever alcohol-induced literary frenzy, with proceeds directly benefitting the Whistler Writer’s Festival.

A measly $12 includes a burger, a beer, some great entertainment, and a chance to win big!!!

• The Assignment: Compose a piece of proper prose, a bubbly blurb, a rambling rap, a mini-masterpiece, a pithy poem, a touching tome, a ditty, a doodle or a diatribe that could fit on the average coaster (max 500 words)
• The Catch: Somewhere in the piece there must be a reference—either thematically or tangentially—to a coaster. (A beermat? A person who lives by the sea? One who coasts? Doesn’t matter. We ain’t picky.)
• The Reward: Winners receive some tasty libations. We have gathered a stash from our generous sponsors and unwitting friends. And we’re even giving some of it away!
• The Details:

Whistler Brewery in Function Junction

Tuesday, Sept 11, 6:30 pm.

Readings begin at 8:00.

NB: You can come prepared or write it on the night

• The Judging: Winning Coaster Compositions are based on Audience Response-O-Meter. Participants must read their own work.

All proceeds support the Whistler Writers Festival, which runs October 12-14, 2012. For more information check out our website at http://www.theviciouscircle.ca

(Please note that the Vicious Circle Writers’ Group in no way advocates reckless consumption of alcoholic beverages. We always use coasters.) 

Reading Alistair MacLeod. A film review by Libby McKeever.

	Reading Alistair MacLeod.William D. MacGillivray (Writer & Director). Terry Greenlaw (Picture Plant Producer). Kent Martin (NFB Producer). Montreal, PQ: National Film Board of Canada, 2005. 88 min., VHS or DVD, $99.95. Order Number: C9105 185.Grades 10 and up / Ages 15 and up.Review by Libby McKeever. **** /4

excerpt:

All of us are better when we’re loved. (Alistair MacLeod.)

Reading Alistair MacLeod takes viewers into the life of the Canadian writer and the inspiration behind the storyteller. Filmmaker William D. MacGillivray has interspersed MacLeod’s personal annotates with various famous Canadian writers who read from his work. These writers include Margaret Atwood, David Adams Richards, Russell Banks, Wayne Johnston and Colm Toibin. Although they all read from different titles, there is a common thread of reverence for Macleod’s lyrical craft and a great fondness for him as person.

     Although MacLeod was born in Saskatchewan, when he was a boy his parents returned to resettle on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island. Macleod followed the path of many young islanders when he left the island to work in the mines. He eventually settled with his wife and children in Windsor, ON, where he taught Creative Writing at the university and returned to Cape Breton Island each summer with his wife and children. Macleod would set off early on these summer mornings to hike the headland to his writing shack and would return at lunchtime to spend the remainder of the day with family. Author Lisa Moore commented that MacLeod’s writing tells of the contrast between the tenderness and brutality of life in Cape Breton and of the tightknit community who live there. He builds his stories around characters, and, as one islander remarked, there is a common thread of Cape Breton Island people being both compelled to leave and then to return, if only in their minds.

MacLeod had early success with his short stories in the United States and was published in Best American Short Stories. MacLeod’s son Alexander reads from one of the early stories and comments that he feels these are his father’s very best work, stories that explore humanity while sometimes cutting deeply to expose the raw story underneath. Author Wayne Johnston states that MacLeod “writes prose as you would poetry,” and Margaret Atwood praises the “folkloric quality” of his work and the deceptive simplicity that reads so beautifully. Composer Christopher Donison has created an opera called “The Island” which is based on MacLeod’s short story collection of the same name. Throughout the film, viewers see McLeod and Donison confer over the music as performers sing his words.

Reading Alistair MacLeod is a delightful and inspiring glance into the life of one Canada’s foremost storytellers. MacGillivray has used a humorous and gentle lens to allow viewers some insight into the story behind the tales that have touched so many. The film’s cover photograph captures MacLeod and his battered briefcase outside a small white building, his writing shack. Perched on top of a grassy headland, the shack overlooks a pebbled beach and out towards Prince Edward Island, one of the beautiful images portrayed in the film. The back cover shows part of the MacLeod clan, some wearing tartan, gathered outside a small church. This is also the closing scene to the film and leaves viewers with the impression of family man who is touched by landscape of the human story.

Alistair MacLeod has published 14 short stories, collected in The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories (1986). His acclaimed novel, No Great Mischief (1999) received several awards and his most recent book,Island (2000) is a collection of his short stories. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2007.

Reading Alistair MacLeod would be well suited to English, media arts, Canadian literature and Canadian cultural students in the Senior Secondary grades.

Highly Recommended.

Libby McKeever is a Youth Services Librarian who works at the Whistler Public Library and at Whistler Secondary School in Whistler, BC.

The Strangeness of Writing By Sara Leach

I’ve been spending a part of every summer on Hernando Island, near Desolation Sound, since I was one year old. This island is probably one of the safest places on earth. Most of the time, the only predators are the ones who eat mice and fish. When I was about seven years old, however, a wolf swam onto the island. Yes, you read that right. Wolves swim.

            I never saw the wolf. I never heard the wolf. I never even saw any sign of the wolf. But it scared the scat out of me. Which is why 25 years later when I started writing a children’s novel set on an island just like Hernando, it featured a wolf. Two wolves, in fact.

This is where it starts to get strange. Because when I was seven, the wolf didn’t even last a full year on the island. It was scared off. Possibly by a shotgun, if the rumours are true. But years after I finished my draft of the novel, had it rejected, put it in a drawer, and then pulled it out to rewrite again, two wolves swam back to the island. They feasted on the deer. I saw their scat, their hair and their paw prints. I even heard them howling. All those details went straight into the rewrite.

The wolf population on the island swelled to eleven. The number of deer shrank from 400 to 2. The wolves, growing hungry, started coming closer to humans. You aren’t allowed to relocate a wolf—another detail that made it into my book. You are allowed to shoot one. Which is exactly what happened. A hunter was hired, the alpha male was shot, and most of the pack swam away. Last year there were two wolves on the island. No sign of any this year.

It’s a shame. Because, unlike when I was seven, I would love to see a wolf now. From a distance. I don’t need to relive my book too closely.

It’s probably just as well that I haven’t seen one. Because the other strange thing about writing, especially writing fiction based on a real place and a few real events, is that the lines between fact and fiction get blurred. Did I really see an eagle almost snatch a seal pup, or did I imagine it? Did my daughter’s finger get bitten by a chicken, or was that only in the story? One thing I can say for certain is that I have never faced down two wolves while lost in the middle of the island during a thunderstorm.

Let’s hope I never do. After all, the book is published now and it’s too late for a rewrite.

My favourite place to write – Stella Leventoyannis Harvey

In the wilderness with my head stuck outside a tent, a headlamp on, an hour before dawn in a valley surrounded by mountain peaks. In the bathroom late at night with only the scratch of my pen keeping me company. In the garden, wrestling with my great nemesis, the common weed (well that and my unrealistic need for perfection). At my laptop with its bright light guiding me forward, early morning, every morning when I’d rather be asleep like everyone else in the quiet world. Ideas can’t wait for a proper time and place even as I wish they would. Like all writers, I’ve written in many places, have notebooks and several scraps of paper I have misplaced. When I’m lucky enough to find these scratches of ideas again, I find a character who refuses to leave me alone, an ending with no beginning, a beginning with no middle, a question that can only be answered in story. Yes, I write in all these places and others too, but my favourite place is sitting here at my desk. It was specially designed and built for me and when I sit at it, I feel the love that went into making it, I marvel at the craftsmanship and I push myself not to disappoint. At this desk I suffer uncertainty, humility, terror, frustration, hopelessness and joy. The former happens frequently, the later not so much.

I used to write at a beautiful antique desk I found in a small shop in Rome. I walked past it several times over several days before I went in and bought it. We still have it, but it was never meant for the computer age and the long hours spent staring at a screen wishing somehow the right words would appear, hopefully in perfectly formed sentences.  Then one day I got an email. My step son-in-law, Arnel was doing an assignment for his furniture-making program. He’d heard me complain of stiff shoulders and an achy neck long enough and wondered if he could build me a desk.

So we started on the road to designing a desk. Along the way, my mom got sick. I couldn’t give Arnel much advice. Then my mom died and I really didn’t care about having a desk. I could barely think, let alone write. It seemed so frivolous to spend so much time in the imaginary world when my real world was, real and heartbreaking and overwhelming. Arnel kept at it. Even though his emails went unanswered. One of the last conversations I had with him before my mom died was to say I couldn’t think about the design right now, I trusted him to go with whatever he wanted to do.

Here is the gist of one of the emails Arnel sent me regarding the design of the desk. His poetic words not mine:

Reflecting on the old design centered around carving and shaping (a direction I’d like to explore in my work), and I want to incorporate some of this in the rails and legs. But, I really thought about you, who I see as you, what has influenced you, and I always think about the diversity in the places you have come from, lived, travelled and been. You are constantly on the move, on the go. Then I thought, and I am not sure why, but your being born in Egypt has always been the one thing that has struck me. So I looked at it. The arch in the legs and rail was inspired by the flow of curves in Egyptian art – long, subtle and blended. I think of rivers and grasses. I find a tie to nature, with a stylized, elegant look. I can achieve an aesthetic and functionality that I think will satisfy you, I think will complement your decor, but stand on its own as a piece, satisfy my craving to carve and shape and my schools technical requirement for a mark. I will expose selective joinery as well, to add some character and designate the piece as handcrafted, but keep it hidden like a hieroglyph. And thank you again for the opportunity to make the table, I think it filled a lot of things in life that I needed to do.

When I told Arnel about this blog idea, here was his response.

Very cool blog idea – where you write – I definitely thought of your workspace while I was designing and constructing. A woodworker’s bench is much the same – a place for tools, functionality, expression, inspiration, a place to create.

His very best was what he delivered last summer. My desk, complete with my name and his etched into the wood at the back, a mark that we have been here, have actually lived and breathed and brought this desk to life (him more than me). It has curved and tapered legs and is made of beautiful cherry wood so clear you can see the ripple of the grain. It has dovetail joints, a floating top and all sorts of woodworking cuts and seams I will never know the names of. But what I love most is that it fits me, it doesn’t hurt to sit here hour upon hour. I especially love the small drawers. They hold all my scraps of paper, the stories I have found again.

Arnel’s completed project

The desk hard at work

Introduction to the Blogs

With just under three months to go before the 11^th annual Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, we reignite our blog machine with a theme provided to us by our very own, Libby McKeever. The theme this year: The strangeness of writing, odd places we write, odd things we write on, and with. Guest and local writers will share their thoughts and experiences. Enjoy the ride; see you in October at the festival.

Take a tour of Snowdom’s most storied places with Skiing The Edge

For less than the cost of a newstand magazine, ski freaks, mountain lovers and word nerds can get their fill of the year’s best feature writing, thanks to the debut release of Skiing The Edge, a collection of stories from top ski and travel writers from around the world, including Whistler writers and festival regulars, GD Maxwell, Leslie Anthony, Michel Beaudry and Lisa Richardson. Whistler also stars in Lori Knowles account of riding the old Peak Chair in a blizzard and Gerry Wingenbach’s tale of life in the Whistler lock-up.

Anyone who’s been stupid enough to try it knows that standing on the back of someone’s skis and trying to slide makes for a Wild Ride. This brand new anthology, rounding up true tales from 20 of the best ski and snowboard writers in the game, is exponentially wilder – given that the madmen and women in the driver’s seat are hyperactively articulating the entire adventure as you go. (That means, shutting your eyes and holding on for grim life won’t help a bit.) Still, if you’ve ever wondered what it was like to spend a night in the Whistler lock-up, be caught in an avalanche, dodge gunfire from trigger-happy Lebanese lifties, or be a woman in Boyland, these are your guides. And with credentials like theirs, you can be assured, you’re in good hands.

Skiing The Edge, a brand new collection of tall tales and true about skiing and playing in the mountains, does for ski writing what #longreads is doing for long form journalism, what Utne Reader is doing for the alternative press, what Dave Eggers is doing for contemporary writing with his annual Best American Non Required Reading – it culls out all the fluff and hands you the best feature writing, from the game’s leading ski and lifestyle journalists, on a silver platter.

As the publishing opportunities for long form journalism, features and short stories contract, perhaps “best of” anthologies are going to take their place. The Skiing The Edge experiment suggests an exciting new opportunity for writers. And for readers.

At just $3.99, now available for download on iTunes and Amazon, Skiing The Edge : Humor, Humiliation, Holiness and Heart, edited by Jules Older, will also be available from Sony and Barnes & Noble by the end of December.

The Countdown to Story Time is Over. The Whistler Readers and Writers Fest is here!

Yes, the countdown is over. Once Upon A Time is echoing from the hilltops – the 10th Whistler Readers and Writers Festival is here. It begins tomorrow. So brace yourself for an infusion of wordpower and entertainment… For anyone who has ever lost themselves in a book, in a daydream, in a blank page… the Festival has 6 reading events, 10 workshops and 3 panel discussions to ensure there’s something for every type of wordlover.  Here are some of the not-to-be-missed highlights:

Opening Night Gala kicks off with Madeline Sonik, Miriam Toews, Antanas Sileika, John Glenday, Angie Abdou, Randy Boyagoda and writer-in-residence Sarah Selecky, all MC-ed by local scribe Stephen Vogler.

The party continues at Saturday’s Creative 5 Eclectic eventwith spoken word artist Barbara Adler. This event will also host an open mic for musicians and writers alike.

Sunday starts with a lively Lit Grit Tribute Breakfast, where Miriam Toews, Wayne Johnston, Sarah Selecky and Andreas Schroeder debate careers, read from their work and answer your questions over croissants.

Sunday night closes with PechaKucha, Japanese for “chit chat” – a mixture of show-and-tell, open mic and happy hour, where 10 speakers show 20 slides in 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Presenters’ topics range from architecture, graphic design and sculpture, to the PooFont. Ten dollars gets you entry, and a drink.

If the reading events inspire you to write your own words, sign up to push your characters around with Angie Abdou or go on a writing adventure with Leslie Anthony (Whistler’s Indiana Jones of the outdoor – and the written - escapade).

The festival runs from 14 to 16th October, tickets are on sale at www.theviciouscircle.ca or at the door.

Full program details available at the same site or if you’re just interested in the reading events, you can buy tickets at this
link: http://www.theviciouscircle.ca/store/category.php?cat_id=26

Where are you going to be this Saturday night? Gettin’ eclectic?

It’s so much more fun than apoplectic.

 

 

Creative 5 Eclectic is back and has teamed up with the 10th Annual Whistler Readers and Writers Festival. Please join us at The Elephant & Castle in Whistler Village for a lively evening featuring Vancouver spoken word artist and anti-polka provocateur Barbara Adler. Hosted as always by Stephen Vogler with Rajan Das on upright bass. Following our featured artist, the mic will be open for creators of all stripes to take the stage and do what they do best: sing, dance, rant, read, tell a joke, blow a horn … you get the picture. See you there!

Saturday, October 15, 8pm
The Elephant & Castle
18-4308 Main Street, Whistler Village
604 962-0330
Tickets $10 at www.theviciouscircle.ca or at the door.