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.