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.