Where I Write. Dot Com.

Some more of the strangeness of the web - here's a page that simply shows you a series of photos of SF and fantasy authors in their creative spaces. 

There's something kind of interestingly - cohesive? - about these spaces, and I think I need to sit back and look through them to pin it down. (Samuel R. Delany, however, is a whole other ball of wax, but then that's to be expected. I'm also fascinated by Harry Harrison's tiny little exposed desk in what looks to be a main hallway. Odd.)

Agitate - OutWrite

I'm passing on the word because the last Agitate event I went to for Pride was awesome.

Agitate! presents...
OutWrite! - queer/trans/two-spirit writers of colour and indigenous writers refuse to be written out!

Thursday, August 20th, doors open at 6:30 pm, reading at 7 pm
Montgomery Legion Hall, 330 Kent St, near Somerset
wheelchair accessible
Tickets at the door: $10-20 sliding scale
all ticket proceeds to Migrants' Trade Union of South Korea

Agitate! presents an exciting reading event and panel of writers and poets in celebration of Pride. Often writers of marginalized identities face
challenges in presenting and publishing their own points of view coupled with the threat of their voices being tokenized and co-opted in the process. Featuring both emerging and established writers from Ottawa and beyond, this panel will explore issues of representation, intersectionality and how identity and experience are expressed in the writers' craft.

Panel:
Nalo Hopkinson
Trish Salah
Kalyani Pandya
Rob Friday

Additional reading performances by:
Salimah Valiani
Faye Estrella

This event will also be a fundraising effort for the Migrant Trade Union
(MTU) in South Korea. MTU is a union of documented and undocumented migrant workers in South Korea, the only union of its kind in the world today. The MTU has joined in the struggle of GLBT people in South Korea, including defending the needs of its own GLBT members. Agitate feels it is important to connect our work with the struggle of other racialized people in the world, especially as the rights of migrant workers in Canada continue to be largely ignored.

Agitate! is an Ottawa-based collective of queer indigenous women, mixed race women and women of colour. For more information, please contact agitate_ottawa@yahoo.ca

http://agitate.wordpress.com

...and my inner word nerd smiles...

... Cory Doctorow used the word "suasion" on Twitter today. In a post having to do with a parent who objected to his book Little Brother - not because of the teen protagonist's attempts to subvert homeland security, not because of the explicit descriptions of torture, no. Because of the off-camera loss of virginity. Then he couldn't respond to the parent because of a school firewall that blocked anything with the word 'sexual' in it.

So, yeah, all that too. But I was jazzed that he used the word 'suasion.' On Twitter. Which is usually so jammed with #s and shorthand it's bloody unreadable. 

Oh, yeah, and there's something kind of iffy about a school that won't allow the word 'sexual.' Isn't school supposed to be where we all get The Talk these days?

More on colour
This post on Alas, A Blog fires another salvo in the whole racefail argument I've been vaguely tracking, and does it in a really clear way. Reminds me of Ursula Le Guin's complaint when she spoke here in the spring, about the editions of A Wizard of Earthsea that made Ged (described in the book as a reddish sort of guy) blond and blue-eyed...

More on sequels

Following up on that earlier post about sequels to established classics - I've run across an interesting article about J.D. Salinger's lawsuit to try and block the publication of a book called 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye.

The description from the article: "There is no question that "60 Years Later," written by Swedish humorist Fredrik Colting under the pen name "John David California," is based on "Catcher in the Rye." The hero, Mr. C., is clearly the alienated teenager Holden Caulfield, now an old man (who leaves a retirement home to go to New York, echoing Holden's flight from boarding school). A few other characters from the Salinger novel also appear, along with original ones - and with Salinger himself. Indeed, on the copyright page, the book is described as 'An Unauthorized Fictional Examination of the Relationship Between J. D. Salinger and his Most Famous Character.'"

The article looks at what, if anything, is the point of some readings of copyright law - should you be able to block the publication of a book like Wide Sargasso Sea? - and also talks about the importance of borrowing in creativity (in much the same way as Cory Doctorow talks about inviting his readers to remix and remake his work: he says that art that's not meant to be transformed is just plain outdated in this century.)

AUGH!

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.

Language, and other updates

(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. 

Addendum to yesterday

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.)

Sequels and Returns

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.) 

Third Wall Theatre cancels Woyzeck

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.