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.

The Copyright Thing

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."

The night of conflicting schedules

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.

Back from Vacation
I have an excuse for the web silence . . . and that excuse is called Mink Lake. Been at a cottage with no internet access for a whole week... what a strange and oddly liberating feeling. Although, I do admit to a massive indulgement in analog communications the day after I returned, in which I telephoned many family members, and started an actual paper letter. Back in screen mode now... but as a tribute to a lovely week spent in the great outdoors swimming, campfiring, guitaring, caving, whitewater rafting and watersliding, I'm going to post the schedule for A Company of Fools' Torchlight Shakespeare 2009. Much Ado About Nothing. One of my all-time favorite Shakespeare plays. Sheer fun in the outdoors, in honour of summer.

Not exactly words related but...

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!

LiPS Finals

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.

 

 

Broadcasting and Podcasting

My second ever episode of Literary Landscape is broadcasting tonight at 6:30 on CKCU (93.1 fm) - as long as I can manage to press the right buttons. . .

I'm also listening again to the Masterclass Series from the Writers Festival last fall, and working on posting them to the discussion board. Today, I've been listening to the class on emotion and form in poetry with Sonnet L'Abbe and Steven Heighton: interesting that both poets talk about using form to keep a rein on emotion, to keep it from getting trite or maudlin (Heighton says he can't write a good poem about his daughter without using some kind of formal constraint, and L'Abbe says the same thing about love poems in general... that they're the hardest kind of poem to write, and that they need to have some kind of form imposed on the feelings to keep them from getting, well, lame.)

I suggested the topic for this Masterclass, actually, because I'm interested in the way in which poetry (when it's good) can really get into the complexity of emotion, and the way in which so much bad, lazy, or sloppy poetry latches on to the simplest and most accessible emotions (love, anger, longing.)

With luck I'll have that up soon, and I can follow it with the rest of the Masterclass Series. I know this one is sixth out of eight Masterclasses from last fall, but I'm going to post the poetry one first because - ha! - I can. 

Busy busy...

... I'm doing a five-class session on graphic design with a couple of grade 6 classes at Vincent Massey this week and next (using Photoshop to make ad posters: it's part of the media literacy curriculum.) I must say that Vincent Massey, to follow up on my previous post about visiting schools with children's authors, is on the 'good list.' This is a school that, as far as I can tell, innovates, encourages, and integrates - and that has had a number of artists visit as part of the Learning Through The Arts program, which is how I wound up there. I'm always happy to bring authors to Vincent Massey, and now to work there. Partly, their commitment to accessibility impresses me. Each time I bring an author there, they have sign language interpreters ready to translate the reading and the question period, for the handful of hearing impaired students in the room. 

Also... my second ever installment of "Literary Landscapes" will broadcast tomorrow at 6:30 PM on CKCU 93.1fm. I'll be talking to Mark Frutkin and Michael Blouin about their upcoming appearances at Westfest. 

Speaking of which, are you going? The literary reading will be at 1:00-2:30, featuring Mark Frutkin, Michael Blouin, Priscilla Uppal, Saleema Nawaz and Nichole McGill. There's also a spoken word showcase from 2:30-3:30, featuring Luna Allison, Marcus Jameel, Shannon Beahen and Matt Peake. Love Westfest. Love the celebration of the local. Love that someone's got a festival all about how cool Ottawa is as a city, not just as a national capital.

If you're NOT going to Westfestlit, then maybe you want to go to the Library and Archives Canada to join the Canadian Book Binders and Book Artists Guild for their Book Arts Show and Sale.  It starts at 10:30 AM and goes till 4:00, and features talks and presentations on things like bookbinding, paper making, calligraphy, gold leaf, wood engraving,  book history and book collecting. Bookbinding is an awesome ancient art. There's just something... monkish about it. I'm a fan.

Or maybe you're still tied up with the world class theatre going on at Magnetic North, lots of which I'm missing because I'm manning the book table for Playwrights Press. Ah, the hectic life of the jack-of-all-trades.

Aaaaugh!
Paul Dutton, founding member of the Four Horsemen and legendary sound poet, is reading for the AB Series this Saturday and Sunday and I won't be able to make it because of a craptastic lineup of other things I absolutely have to do... so if you can make it in my place, you totally should.