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It's official: The new "Canada Periodical Fund" will not be providing funding to magazines with less than 5,000 circulation, or to any literary or arts magazines. If you can hack it, read this post at the Quill & Quire, and the comment attached. Note the funding disparities even before this slash, in 2007-2008: Canadian Poetry, $56 in funding (yes, $56) - Chatelaine, about $2.5 million. Million.
(Erratum: The "Hobbit" sequel is apparently an Internet myth. I'll take the word of Kevin McKeever on this, who is the marketing guy from Harmony Gold who I saw at Otakuthon last weekend. What? Misinformation on the Interweb? Oh nos!)
I've had two Literary Landscape shows since the last post, and I meant to reflect on them. Maybe even post them. But somehow it didn't happen.
I thought when I started hosting the show that 30 minutes would be just fine - more than enough. Now, I'm starting to think as I walk away from an interview that it would have been great to have another half hour to talk about stuff.
For example: I spoke to Marie Bilodeau last night about her latest book, Warrior of Darkness, the second in a fantasy trilogy. I know Marie (we're friends) so interviewing her was a strange feeling, but we got into an interesting conversation about writing in a second language. Marie's first language (could you have guessed?) is French, and in fact she claims her English was terrible when she was in junior high and high school. Now, she writes her novels in English. I'm interested in that, and in how it affects your writing. I was interested in her process: I also wanted to talk longer about French genre writing, which seems to be quite different from English genre writing. And I didn't get to get into the ghettoization of genre.
Ah well. Next time.
Kate Heartfield (who will be hosting the Dune event on the 17th) just posted a short piece on her blog about the same subject - with the added mention of the *shudder* Jackson/del Toro "Hobbit" sequel (rumoured to be about the events between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - here is not the place to geek out about how weird that sounds.)
It does my little heart good to see, though, that she also loved Robin McKinley's Damar books. (Oh, and lor' bless Wikipedia: I didn't know Robin McKinley and Peter Dickinson were married! That explains so much about my childhood.)
What's with the sudden bloom of 'authorized sequels' to series whose original authors are dead? H, the companion to Wuthering Heights, might have kicked it off in the mainstream eye, but then there were more...in the last year I've come across (because I run the Writers Festival's young readers program) Before Green Gables, and Return to the Hundred Acre Wood. Tim Burton's doing a (sorta) sequel to Alice in Wonderland. The Writers Festival is hosting Brian Herbert in a couple of weeks, who, along with Kevin J. Anderson, has been continuing his father's Dune series. Christopher Tolkien recently re-released The Children of Hurin as a seperate book (it was originally one of the fragments in Tolkien's The Silmarillion, which was itself posthumous.) Eoin Colfer, of Artemis Fowl fame, has written the official 6th book in the increasingly erroneously named Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy Trilogy. (You can listen here to one of my favorite recently discovered YA authors interviewing him about it.)
I'm not sure what it's all about... just something I've been noticing (especially working with YA.)
This is kinda sad... Third Wall's had to cancel the final show of their 2009-2010 season, Woyzeck, because although subscription sales were really high this year, individual ticket sales dropped too far to make it feasible. Damn that economic downturn. I thought when times are hard, people head to entertainment... oh, right, you can go to a movie for $13 and a play's usually more like $30. But still. What if we banned movies for a couple of months? Now there's an economic stimulus. People would be forced to buy books and go to plays.
Anyway, I digress. The thing is, this means that you can get a subscription to Third Wall Theatre for the other two shows (Old Times and As You Like It, the latter with that really interesting dedicated Shakespeare Troupe of theirs) for $50. Check out Third Wall here - they're one of my favorites. Pick up a subscription! Cheap seats and the chance to support a great group.
I'm once again re-reading Cory Doctorow on internet copyright, file sharing, and all the other things that he has such controversial stuff to say about. Mostly because I'm gearing up to bring him to Ottawa schools with his book Little Brother, which (at the risk of gushing) is possibly the best YA book I've read in years. Because it's fun, because - to paraphrase Neil Gaiman - it makes me wish I was a teenager so I could read it and then go save the world, and because it's really important to remember that the technology we live with comes with a responsibility to understand it so that it can't be used against us.
And I checked out the multitude of available formats to download the book in, and found myself rereading Cory's statement about copyright and why he makes all his books available free under a Creative Commons license.
To snag one quote at random from this thought-provoking and oddly exciting foreword/manifesto: "If you're not making art with the intention of having it copied, you're not really making art for the twenty-first century. There's something charming about making work you don't want to be copied, in the same way that it's nice to go to a Pioneer Village and see the olde-timey blacksmith shoeing a horse at his traditional forge. But it's hardly, you know, contemporary. I'm a science fiction writer. It's my job to write about the future (on a good day) or at least the present. Art that's not supposed to be copied is from the past."
Yeah, some things are going to have to change in the face of 21st century technology - and that's not a bad thing. It just means business models have to be reworked . . . which probably hurts the people living off the business models as they are, but as Darwin said, "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the most adaptive to change."
Augh!
Tonight: The Dusty Owl Play Date, my usual weekly dose of creative juice, is at 8:00. Voices of Venus is presenting Jessica Ruano at 7:00. Ruthanne Edward will be telling spooky strange stories at the Tea Party at 7:00. And Sean Moreland's 'Last Dance At Zaphods' is apparently kicking off around 10:00.
I can only physically do two of the above. Augh.
I've now got a savings jar going (metaphorically speaking) for the Folk Festival. Just saw the lineup. I want a pass. Don't expect to see me on the weekend of August 21-23. Unless you're in Britannia Park. In which case I'll share my sunscreen with you!
This shot is the "Ottawa Support" for the LiPS finals - judges Kevin Matthews, Greg Ritallin Frankson, John Akpata, Ikenna Onyegbula, Cathy MacDonald-Zytveld, and me, scorekeeper Ruthanne Edward, and host Rusty Priske.
I've been wrestling with computer issues so I wasn't able to write this yesterday, but... I got to be a "celebrity judge" for the Live Poetry Society slam finals. They're the rural slam that takes place in the Valley: I was a judge for the finals last year as well, and it's amazing to see what's happened in that community in the last year. Last year there was some great poetry - but it was clear that a lot of the poets were just starting out, just getting a feel for slam and how it works, and this year the finalists came out with vastly more polished and well-delivered poetry.
Being a judge is exhausting, and as Rusty Priske, who was hosting the slam, said, it's actually kind of ridiculous. How are you supposed to listen to a poem and then assign it a number? They tell you half the score is content and half is presentation, but then should I assign higher points when a poem speaks to me directly, or is about a particularly moving topic, or is particularly brave in its openness? Because a lot of the LiPS poetry is extremely brave and confessional. Should I take marks away because I don't think a lot of thought went into the structure of the poem? Well... I do, because I feel that what makes a poem a poem, and not a monologue or story, is structure and language. Rhyme, repetition, metaphor, craft. But it's damn hard to know where that line is.
The finalists: note the overwhelming female majority. Rare in slam.
A fascinating aspect of LiPS is that it's mostly women up there on the stage. Slam is heavily male-dominated, usually, but this community placed twelve finalists on the stage and only two of them were men. Maybe that's the reason that their collective voice seems to have developed in the personal and confessional mode. The majority of the poems Friday night were about the poets' own struggles with self-image, with abuse, with relationships, with mental health. The community seems to have embraced poetry as a way of giving themselves voices and speaking out about things that have happened to them, whether it's sexual abuse or depression or discrimination. They're powerful poems, and the support the poets get from the rest of the community is healthy and healing in more ways than one, I think.
And how much of that is due to the phenomenal Danielle Gregoire? She moved out to Almonte, started a rural slam, and now look what's happened. She's just a Force For Good, that woman.
The LiPS National Team! Danielle K.L. Gregoire, Ken Kicksee, Tammy Mackenzie, Monica, and Emily Kwissa.
