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When Words Collide

8/15/2013

7 Comments

 
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In case you didn't already know, I'm expecting a baby. Since I did this once before, I think I've got some idea of how much time I'll have for decadent, frivolous free-time stuff after this baby arrives (i.e. not much). So I signed up for something frivolous, last weekend... just because I still could.

I went to a local event called "When Words Collide - A Festival for Readers & Writers." It's the third time this unique annual festival has taken place. I've been to a few academic conferences about literature (and here are some sketchnotes from one such), but this multi-layered event combined academic panels, informal group discussions, one-on-one sessions with experts in various fields (writers, publishers) and a hodgepodge of other writerly stuff. So it was pretty accessible to anyone (I even saw some school-aged kids), while also offering specialized info sessions for professionals.

The festival isn't about mainstream literature, though. When Words Collide features "genre fiction": sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, YA (Young Adult), and any number of sub-genres I probably haven't heard of (I did hear some folks talking about "Zombie Erotica"... that's a genre?!!). If you've been reading this blog, you might know I am a fan of YA fiction (in fact, that's pretty much all I read). But I like those other genres too (well, the first ones I mentioned - probably not the zombie erotica, I have to confess).

I did have cause to reflect, while I was there, that it's a funny thing that YA fiction gets lumped in with these other categories - in much the same way indie comics get lumped in with superheroes, TV show fans, toy collectors, and cosplayers, at the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo. Drawing sketchnotes about this weekend's event, I kind of felt the same way I did at the Expo earlier this year - kind of on the periphery of a bunch of stuff I don't know anything about.

But maybe that's part of the reason for putting all those things under one umbrella. You come looking for one thing, and you end up learning about another. Here's what I took away.
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And now I have a confession to make. I couldn't resist putting a little piece of my own writing onto this anonymous slush pile. There's this story I always write when I have time (which is hardly ever. Even writing this blog is ridiculous, considering the stuff I should be getting done RIGHT NOW). So it's pretty slow going - I've been working on it for, oh, twenty years or so. Anyway, it's in no shape to send to a publisher, but I did think it was in good enough shape for an anonymous critique such as this one. (And luckily, it seemed to go over OK.)

But here's the funny part. Until I came to this panel, I had completely forgotten that I had, once before, submitted a piece of this same old story to a panel of critics. This would have been in 1997. I had just moved back to Calgary. A friend of mine told me about this group called the Imaginative Fiction Writers' Association. I had just finished taking a senior Creative Writing course at the University of Toronto (in which, of course, I worked on this same story... it's the only one I got!) - and I was feeling kinda "writerly" - so I submitted an excerpt from it to this group for a critique.

After that, though, I started painting and writing indie comics instead of writing fiction, and I haven't really been moving in Calgary's Imaginative Fiction Writers scene (in fact, I only just this moment looked them up and found out that they still exist!). But when I came to this panel I suddenly thought, "Hey... I bet these same folks, who are now local superstars and who are organizing this conference, were all part of that old IFWA group from fifteen years ago!" And I was right.

Here's what I dug out of my old story box of files when I got home (yes, I keep all that story-related stuff in one big box... pretty organized, no?):

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And just as I expected. There they were - these same folks! Still driving Calgary's writing community after all this time. Now there's commitment to both craft and community.

Besides the critiques written by Randy McCharles, Hayden Trenholm, and Tony King, some of the other ones in my box were Al Onia, Liz Westbrook, and Sandy Fitzpatrick - names I also glimpsed here at When Words Collide 2013.

I should add that the story I submitted all those years ago was entirely forgettable... and I kind of was, myself, too. I'm much more interesting now. And those fifteen years of self-editing have really paid off, judging by the more recent comments I received! Ha, ha.

Ok - thanks for indulging me in that lengthy digression. Now let's dive back into the festival.

Here are some notes from an entertaining group discussion with author Jefferson Smith about names. Everybody knows that sci-fi and fantasy stories are full of weird made-up names. But there's a method to the madness...
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Personally, I give first prize for made-up names in literature to Ursula K. LeGuin. Not because her names are always the best (it's hard to beat Tolkien at that) - but because she does it again with every new book: each imagined world filled with convincing names for people, geography, technology, you name it.

By the way, I should add that Ursula K. LeGuin, who is 83, is the last surviving one of my four favourite authors. The others all passed away not too long ago: Diana Wynne Jones (died in 2011, aged 76); Margaret Mahy (died in 2012, aged 76); E. L. Konigsburg (died in 2013, aged 83). Hang in there, Ursula!
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And now you should take a look at Linda Kupecek's website. The fact that I only ever read YA fiction is my excuse for not knowing more (if anything) about local writers who write anything else. So I am always excited to find out more. Meanwhile, I also see that Linda's site features a blog, in which she also wrote about her weekend at When Words Collide (she's clearly much quicker on the draw than I am - but then, she didn't have to upload all these cumbersome images). From the sound of her review, it sounds like she had a great time!

For fans of speculative fiction in Alberta, here's "On Spec". And for fans of virtual reality, here's the "Oculus".

Couldn't find the banjo player online, though.
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Something (someone) else I couldn't find - online OR at When Worlds Collide: Vance Neudorf! Vance, where are you? Ok, so Vance has no idea who I am. But I know who he is, because in about 2009 I bought his self-published, locally-set fantasy novel "The Hammer" at the now-seemingly-defunct Calgary Children's Book Fair & Conference. Since I was right in the throes of new parenthood back then, I didn't get around to writing about how promising I thought The Hammer was at the time - though I did mention it recently in this post about novels set in Calgary. Anyway, Vance, I hope you haven't given up - I thought your book was great and I thought it should have been at this event!

Maybe Vance just takes fifteen years to complete his writing projects - like me. OK, so back to the festival again. This next panel was about children's literature - a bit more up my alley.

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Here's Gordon Lightfoot's Canadian Railroad Trilogy. (It's a song - not a book!) And here's Ian Wallace, who drew the pictures for this particular book featuring the song.
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Ginger Mullen's retelling of the story of the prince who married the tortoise reminded me of another tale - The Flying Carpet, illustrated by the three-time-Caldecott-Medal-winning Marcia Brown. I have a lot of books from my childhood, but this one has been lost along the way. However, I can remember it pretty vividly and a quick Google search yielded this brief blog post about it - featuring the fabulous comment that the illustrations "are like what you’d get if Marc Chagall were an Arab." Um, awesome - and accurate!

Ginger Mullen also mentioned that countless fairy tales feature the motif of a human who marries an animal. This reminded me of another children's book that tells just such a story: Errol Le Cain's The White Cat (which, I'm amazed to see, seems to be out of print). Luckily, I still have it:

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More unforgettable illustrations.

The next panellist spoke about this book pictured on the right. I've seen Sherman Alexie's book around, but I haven't read it. Now, I think I'd better!
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This next talk was another academic panel featuring three speakers. Here are the first two:
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Ok, so, first: with regards to Jessica Bay's talk about books that cross genre boundaries: even though I wasn't familiar with the books she discussed, I love her subject. And so, in aid of that, here's Ursula K. LeGuin again, with a quote to that effect (from an essay I wrote a long time ago, back when I actually had to type my text, print it out, cut it out, glue it on to the page I'd illustrated, and then photocopy that. Luckily, Photoshop has changed my life since then).
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And now to Paula Johanson. To judge by her talk, she likes Ursula K. LeGuin, too (well... who doesn't?).

I can blame my aforementioned exclusive reading of YA books for my utter ignorance of The Curve of Time. Sounds pretty interesting... even if the book was lousy (which it sounds like it's definitely not), the premise sounds great: the true story of a single mother in the depression who takes her five children on boat trips along Canada's northwest coast... and then writes a book about it? Why hasn't every Canadian heard of this cool mama?

Hey, I took my son camping this year and I lasted one night... sleeping in a tent while pregnant did not agree with me. I felt kind of guilty to be such a wimp, and now I feel even more guilty (and wimpy). But hey, I'm making up for my lack of outdoorsy-ness in other ways, right? Like: just ask me to rattle off the names of a whole lot of Canadian YA books about outdoorsy stuff! I can do that with my eyes closed! Don't even get me started!

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Here's where you can find out about The Centennial Reader - an intriguing-sounding initiative.

Actually, here's something I just read on its "Call for Submissions" page: a description of the project that sounds very much like something that might be a good description for When Words Collide, too:

The Centennial Reader straddles both worlds: the academic world and the popular publication world. Submissions should therefore apply intellectual thought to topical concerns, offered in an entertaining and popular way.

And now - the last panel (for me). I couldn't attend on Sunday, by the way, so all these sketchnotes are just from Friday & Saturday's talks.
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I was looking forward to this discussion about books set in Canada, but although it was fun, I think it only really scratched the surface of a topic I've given probably way too much thought to over the past ten years or so. If you feel like it, you can read this blog post I wrote about it not too long ago, in response to a post by Amy Jo Espetveidt of awesome local blog Calgary is Awesome, who was looking for books set in Calgary.
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I actually bought a book at When Words Collide - a new YA book (something I rarely do. I like to buy second-hand books. And I like to wait until they've been out for a while, so I know they're more likely to be on the shelf because they're good, and not just because they're being well-hyped).

I know - I should have gone to the "What's new in YA fiction?" panel!! It was on the top of my list! But it was also at 10 AM on Saturday morning and I had to help out at the (amazing) Inglewood Night Market the night before... so it didn't happen. (Check it out, folks - there's only one more Night Market this year, and it's on Friday, September 13th.)

Anyway - I missed the panel and had to take a guess with regards to something good in new YA fiction. I chose a book called Run like Jaeger from Owl's Nest Books. I chose it for two reasons: one, it was by an Alberta author (Karen Bass - who also worked as a librarian, like my favourite author Margaret Mahy). And two, it looked like it was set in Germany. I used to go there a lot, but I haven't been there in almost two years, so I figured this story might keep me in the loop a bit. Then, after I bought it, I realized it was about an exchange student from Calgary who spends a year in Germany! Well. I did that too, a really long time ago.

Funnily enough, even though the action of the story takes place in Germany, the protagonist's "real" home is in Calgary, so that's ALMOST one for Calgary is Awesome's list of  books set in Calgary.

Almost.

Thanks, When Words Collide, for a great weekend... it's nothing short of inspiring to glimpse what's going on out there in the world of local literature! Now I'll be retreating to my neighbourhood again for a while. But not too long. I promise it won't take me another fifteen years to finish that neverending story.

7 Comments

Calgary Books... or, the lack thereof

5/18/2013

1 Comment

 

Samantha's Secret Room

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When I read Calgary Is Awesome's post about fiction set in Calgary, I thought: Oh, I love this subject!!!

CIA's Amy Jo Espetveidt writes about her experience reading a novel while literally immersed in its local (Ontario) setting. I had a kind of similar experience. When I was a voraciously-reading kid of about eight or ten, my grandmother gave me this YA novel: Lyn Cook's "Samantha's Secret Room" (because of the name. Back then there weren't as many girls named Sam, so it was cool to read this one). The setting of the story didn't register with me back then - I just remember loving the twisty plot, the romantic older cousin, and other important details like that alluring turquoise hairband.

Later (when I was sixteen), my grandparents built a family cottage near to the Ontario town of Penetanguishene (a name that confounded all my German friends). My grandparents were Toronto people - they didn't really know the Penetang area at all. Why do I mention this? Because about ten years after that (when I was about twenty-six) and I had started to pay a lot of attention to YA fiction, I realized that everywhere in Penetang you'd come across that same old book: Samantha's Secret Room.

So I read it again and I realized it was set in Penetang (in the 1950's). Reading the book as a grown-up, I realized that it was 1) still a great read, and 2) it was a fabulous example of a YA novel making brave, bold, unapologetic use of a local Canadian setting! And doing so in the 1950's, no less! Reading that story after I'd actually been to all of those places, was delightful. And it was even more delightful to think that my grandmother, who, to my knowledge, had never been to Penetang and knew nothing about its local stories, had just happened to give that book to me so long ago, without knowing that it held the story of a place she'd later come to call home herself.

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Here are some Penetang pics. But now back to Calgary Is Awesome's call for Calgary-based fiction.

Local Settings in Canadian Teen Fiction

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I pretty much only read teenager books ("Young Adult Fiction" so-called), but I read them a lot. And I have some pretty strong feelings about the importance of placing stories in real, local settings. So I thought it would be fun - and easy - to come up with some Calgary-based YA story suggestions to send over to CIA.

But it turned out that this was really hard to do.

Let me give you some context. I know a bit about Canadian YA fiction. From Farley Mowat's The Black Joke to the contemporary fiction of Canadian writers like Tim Wynne-Jones, I love finding Canadian places referenced in YA novels (If you haven't read anything by Tim Wynne-Jones, rush out and do so right away. The Maestro, his compelling tale of a unlikely comraderie that is born in the northern Ontario wilderness, would be one good place to start).

But the settings don't have to be overt. When Monica Hughes writes about a nameless futuristic city in a YA sci-fi novel, it's close enough to Edmonton for me. When the amazing (amazing!!!) Beth Goobie describes her characters strolling along a well-described riverbank, I cheer for the unnamed, but implied, Saskatoon. But don't get me wrong - I also love it when authors place their Canadian settings front and centre (yes, that's centre with a -tre!), from Ethel Wilson's back-to-the-land classic Swamp Angel, to Cora Taylor's evocative prairie tale Julie, to Nan Gregory's Vancouver-based I'll Sing You One-O. (Swamp Angel isn't exactly a teenager book, but it's close enough for me.)
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But Calgary?
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Calgary is Awesome did track down a few titles for its blog, which is more than I was able to do.

So, there's local author Shirlee Smith Matheson. I've only read her non-fiction books - which certainly tell tales of local history - but I know she has a collection of YA books too, which I'm pretty sure are packed with Alberta - and probably Calgary - places and people. If this is the case, she's my one and only bona fide Calgary-setting YA author.

And there's longtime Calgary author Judd Palmer (who no longer resides here, I've heard) - who brought some cachet to the metier of being a Calgary author with his really beautiful-looking "Preposterous Fables for Unusual Children," (but didn't actually set any of his books in Calgary, as far as I know). These books are original and lovely, but I've always felt they might have missed the mark - supposedly for youngsters, I think they're actually enjoyed more by grown-ups. It makes them hard to categorize. But I digress, as usual.

I thought of Ted Stenhouse's Across the Steel River. I loved this book about the friendship between two young men - one Indigenous, the other a settler - not least because I had to wonder if there was a gay subtext in there (maybe I was reading into that - gay-themed YA fiction is a favourite subject of mine - and another genre of books which, though growing, isn't big enough for me. More on that another time). The novel is set in a 1950's Canadian prairie town which - I can't remember - may or may not be somewhere around Calgary. I might just associate it with Calgary because I bought it at the Calgary Children's Book Fair and Conference. This event, which was held at the Hillhurst Sunnyside Community Association for a few years, doesn't seem to be scheduled for this year (the person to ask would be Simon Rose, an enthusiastic Calgary children's author - but another one whose works may or may not actually be set in Calgary, as far as I know). Is this event no more? It was a great collaboration of local readers and writers!
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And there's Vance Neudorf, whose impressively self-published first novel The Hammer (2008), as I recall, is set in a prairie town not far from Calgary (could be Three Hills - I'm pretty sure Neudorf hails from there himself).

I really liked The Hammer. I read it back in 2008 and really wanted to write about it, but got distracted by having a baby. I had been reading another new Canadian YA author - Ontario author James Bow - whose novel The Unwritten Girl was a bit of a sly homage to Madeleine L'Engle. Bow's novel incorporated a whole lot of references to her work. However, intentionally or not, it was Neudorf whom I felt was actually channelling L'Engle in his novel. Maybe it's the fact that both Neudorf and L'Engle seem to be fuelled by a strong spiritual Christianity, which inspires, rather than detracts from, their excellent storytelling skills. I thought The Hammer - at least, the early copy I read - needed some editing. But other than that, it was one of the strongest new local novels I'd read in a long time. That was in 2008. What's Vance Neudorf doing now, I wonder? Writing, I hope!

Why I Care About All This

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Part of the reason I've thought so much about the importance of local settings is because of my own roundabout process of coming to terms with being a Calgary person.

As I wrote in this comic strip, I used to feel ashamed of coming from such a cultureless hick town. Then, inspired by New Zealand's brilliant children's writer Margaret Mahy, I started to feel that it actually behooves "hick town" residents to write about their towns, thereby transforming them into places worthy of culture and art.

A while ago, I wrote an essay that's partly about how Margaret Mahy overcame her inability to envision her hometown - and her home country - as places worthy of setting stories in. Here's a bit about that:
Mahy writes, "For a variety of reasons, partly because my own childhood reading was so predominantly British, my first stories were set in nowhere – or rather, in that place where all stories co-exist, where story is nothing but itself." However, Mahy's settings began increasingly to incorporate elements of a New Zealand setting, although initially, these elements were not necessarily apparent to readers. Mahy has said of her 1982 novel The Haunting: "In my mind the characters... lived in New Zealand, though there is no real clue to this in the story..." 

...

"You'd think," says Mahy, interviewed in a 2005 article, "[that] you'd automatically be able to write about the place you've lived in all your life – but the stories I'd had read to me as a child [set predominantly in the United Kingdom] somehow disinherited me." Elsewhere, she has explained: "the landscape in which I had grown up and the idiom I heard every day seemed somehow unnatural to me..."  Mahy's changeover from a writer labouring under what she has called an "imaginative displacement" from her native New Zealand, to a writer who, decades later, was able to say that she "felt quite triumphant over writing a story set in [her] own country," has been well documented, in numerous interviews, as well as in her own book of essays and criticism, A Dissolving Ghost, and Tessa Duder's 2005 biography, Margaret Mahy: A Writer's Life.
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The conclusion to the essay was written as a comic strip, and this is part of it. You can read the rest of it here.

But you know what - I don't think this is the reason I can't find contemporary YA novels set in Calgary. It's not a case of that Canadian humility that makes us feel our hometowns aren't worth writing about. Most Canadian authors have gotten past that. It's something about Calgary.

Why Not Calgary?

OK, here's my theory.

I think there's a critical mass thing that happens - when enough people live somewhere, or at least know about that place, authors feel like they can write about it. So we have novels set in Paris and songs about Sunset Boulevard (or maybe that's a movie. But you know what I mean.) American authors always seem curiously unafraid to place their fiction in unapologetic local settings (even naming their stories after those place names - even when those places are fictional - from Centerburg Tales to Winesburg, Ohio) - but I think there's a different culture of place down there. As far as Canada goes, Ontario might be history/population-heavy enough that writers aren't afraid to throw down those weighty place names. At least, there are certainly a lot (a lot!!!) of YA novels set in Ontario.

On the other hand, there's also a strong precedent for nameless, placeless and/or fictional "Canadian" settings. From Margaret Laurence's Manawaka (based on Neepawa) to Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (set in the fictional town of Mariposa, modelled after Orillia), to James Bow's aforementioned The Unwritten Girl (set somewhere on the Bruce Peninsula, if I remember right). And there are countless stories that are just set "somewhere" - all specific references to location omitted - presumably (it always seems to me), so that the stories will be more "accessible" to American markets.

So here's what I think. Maybe Calgary falls into an awkward spot between a really well-known place (say, Paris) and that ambiguous, nameless "somewhere". Authors, or publishers, or somebody, must have the feeling that placing a story in Calgary places it somewhere in a reader's mind: somewhere limiting enough that it will distract from the universality of the story, or worse, dissuade the buyer.

Setting a story in some unnamed ambiguous prairie town gives the enormous markets - I mean, readers - in Ontario/the USA/etc the freedom to imagine the story in a prairie town of their choice. But saying it's in Calgary will immediately bring up an image in the minds of those buyers - er, readers - which might not appeal. Like... you name it... cowboys? Engineers? Right-wingers? Oil barons? Whatever it is, it's presumably not as "universal" as, say, an imagined character who lives in Toronto. That could be ANYBODY!

But ANYBODY could live here, too... and does. Are we letting Canadian readers know?
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So What Can We Do?

We just have to keep telling stories about Calgary. We have to set stories in Calgary until it's as common to find stories set in Calgary, as it is to find stories set in Paris, or London, or New York. Or at least until "Calgary" doesn't read synonymously with "limited appeal" to publishers.

Am I totally wrong about this theory? Please let me know if that's the case! After all, I'm just making this up in my living room at 2 AM. Someday it would be fun to go listen in on what some real scholars have to say about all this.

Meanwhile, if you want your city to be known for the arts, you have to make the art yourself, and let people know where it's happening. That's why I'm writing comic strips about my neighbourhood. And I actually chose @calgaryhester as my Twitter handle (something I would never have dreamed of doing ten years ago... even if I could have imagined something like Twitter). (By the way, I realized afterwards that this handle might be awkward if I actually do ever leave Calgary, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.)

OK, I'm waiting for a bunch of indignant local authors who have set their novels in Calgary to set me straight. And I hope they've written to tell Calgary is Awesome that they're out there, too!

Notes... because I haven't said enough about all this

A few random related/unrelated things crossed my mind while I was writing all that...
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1. Brooke's Blog

Back in university I made a friend who liked books, just like me (maybe even more). It seems we still have a few interests in common, because these days he's blogging about stories from around the world that refer to Canada. Not Canadian books - not books entirely set in Canada - but places in which Canada gets a mention from a non-Canadian point of view. This is a fun and actually pretty enlightening subject to read about. Brooke's blog about "Canada through the eyes of World Literature" is called Wow - Canada! And you should check it out. Even though he lives in Toronto (ha, ha).

There are quite a few pictures of Brooke in the Drawing Book, but here's the only one I can find right at the moment - from a very short comic strip called "Eulogy for a Scarf."

When I first saw Brooke's blog, I thought right away of this one tantalizing, seemingly throwaway reference to a Canadian setting in a non-Canadian book: it's from Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom (Faulkner is one of the few "grown up" authors I really love), and shows up in the last line of the last page of the book, at the end of a list of the characters' brief biographies:

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After wading through this gigantic long novel about the Deep South, we find out that one of the main characters is from Edmonton, of all places! In fact, since he seems to have outlived all the other characters in the story, it looks like this one guy in Edmonton is the sole surviving keeper of the whole epic tale. Why Edmonton??? We never find out any more about it, despite the fact that this is a book that's all about finding out the reasons behind things. So you know there's got to be a reason. Just not what the reason is. That's one heck of an enigmatic Canadian reference.

Luckily, I'm not the only one who's been wondering. It looks as though a scholar by the name of Kayoko Shimanuki, apparently a doctoral student at Kyoto University sometime after 2006, wrote a paper called Absalom, Absalom! Reconsidered: A Story of Canadian Shreve. It doesn't explain why Faulkner picked Edmonton, but it does talk about how Shreve's Canadian-ness influences his perspective on this American story. I hope Shimanuki got that PhD.

2. More about Margaret Mahy

Here's some more from that essay about how Mahy struggled to overcome a whole nation's history of literaturelessness... and how Canada has suffered from the same trouble. But not anymore, right?
Mahy's "displacement" is accredited (in a 2004 interview) in part to "the default assumption then, [when Mahy was a child] and for a long time afterwards, ...that New Zealand experiences were less interesting and valuable than British or European ones" (Ridge 2004). Contributing to this kind of assumption was the absence of a solid oeuvre of New Zealand writing. Mahy explains elsewhere: "Other contemporary New Zealand writers also had difficulty in writing about New Zealand at that time, partly because there was so little to draw on. The indigenous writing of the 1930s and 1940s was very self-conscious" (Eccleshare). As Mahy says of her reaction to this literary climate: "I didn't imaginatively believe my own New Zealand stories in the ways I believed in the fantasies and such things that I'd been writing" (Larsen).

Some aspects of New Zealand's developing literary climate could be said to have had their parallels in Canada. Jennifer Andrews has written that the respected Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock "may have believed that Canadian humour... was better positioned to compete on the world stage when it was not overtly defined as Canadian" ("Humouring"). A traditional view of Canada's cultural output was expressed by British children's literature critic John Rowe Townsend in 1976: "Canada, in children's books as in much else [including, presumably, comics], remains in the American shadow" (210).
3. Proof that I'm insane

Once, I recorded... and graphed (!!??)... all the references to Canada that were made in over 20 years of "For Better of For Worse." (Actually, I think my multi-talented friend Andrew helped me make the graph.) I'm too sleepy to say any more about this now, for which I'm sure you will be truly grateful.



1 Comment

Imagine Calgary

3/19/2013

2 Comments

 
I've had this cool group of local visionaries on my radar since 2007 or 8, when I first heard of "Plan It Calgary." That visioning process has evolved into the imagineCALGARY of today (follow that link to see their lovely new website). But I've always been watching from the sidelines since I was (first) usually out of town, and (later) always at home being a new mom.

Well, now that my son is four years old, I can actually find a little free time now and then to get out and participate in these exciting conversations. I was really looking forward to attending my first imagineCALGARY event this morning. I imagined myself talking with grown-ups about far-sighted, complicated visions, and most of all, enjoying a change of pace from my usual life at home building train tracks with my four-year-old. It's a bit ironic that one of the big selling points of this particular event was that we'd get to play with Lego. Honestly, if I never see any Lego again, I'd probably be ok with that. At least it wasn't train tracks!

Joking aside (the Lego was fun), this was an awesome crowd of thinkers and doers. The opportunity to learn about what they've been up to, and what they want to do next, was inspiring. Here are my sketchnotes:
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I was drawn to Bob Miller's suggestion that everyday citizens could engage their neighbourhood spaces with simple activities such as front-yard gardening. This idea reminded me of the 23rd Avenue Artwalk & Street Celebration I helped to organize on my street in Ramsay last year: an event that grew out of a desire to share and showcase the creative talents of a street full of neighbours.

Our one-day event certainly convinced me that getting neighbours out on their front lawns is a great way to forge connections, make streetscapes more lively and lovely, and enjoy all sorts of excellent long-lasting "by-products" into the bargain (neighbourhood safety... friendships... inspiration... not to mention a line on local vegetables, if your neighbours happen to be the Leaf Ninjas). Anyway, I joined this group of thinkers who were working on building a lego model of what our "living sidewalks" (enlivened by gardens, art and general neighbourhood creativity). Here's Mike Fotheringham showing the street we designed.
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It's a cul-de-sac that features a painted street, gardens and art installations in front yards, as well as all sorts of other front-yard features to entice visitors over: a bench, a firepit, a gazebo, and an empty lot featuring a tire filled with potatoes. Oh, and some chickens - or at least, a representational chicken leg.
Our group discussion unearthed other ways to engage our street- and sidewalkscapes:

Pop-Ups (shameless plug: take a look at find it!)
Home business ventures, from lemonade stands to yard sales to craft fairs
Street festivals
Firepits for chilly evenings (with hot chocolate for neighbours who stop by)
"Little Free Libraries"
Water tanks & rain barrels for watering gardens
Public art (for some great homegrown examples courtesy of Calgary is Awesome, see here)
(And by the way, public art can sometimes serve a purpose as well as plain old street beautification: witness the Painted Utility Box Program and Sunalta's muralized pedestrian crossing)

Good things about this kind of engagement:
It doesn't have to cost a lot
It doesn't (have to) require jumping through a lot of bureaucratic hoops
It can have great side-effects (traffic calming; crime prevention; neighbourhood networking; creative inspiration; healthy outdoor activity... the list is endless!)
And... it can get people (such as elderly folks) engaged, who wouldn't usually have that kind of opportunity

If you need more inspiration about this kind of thing, look no further than this TED Talk by Jason Roberts of Austin, Texas, in case you haven't heard about his brilliant "Better Blocks."

Well - our group of imagineCALGARIANS talked about staying in touch in order to make something happen on our own streetscapes. Stay tuned! I'll let you know what we come up with!

Thanks, imagineCALGARY, for a great morning. And now back to the train tracks.

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Calgary is Awesome at the artwalk

1/7/2013

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Can you believe it, the wonderful folks at Calgary is Awesome wrote this great photo essay about our 23rd Avenue Artwalk & Street Celebration, and I didn't even know about it until recently! I will have to put this lovely montage up on the artwalk site. But for now I'm just putting it here because it is so nice. Thanks a million, CIA!


A COMMUNITY THAT CARES:
Last weekend the community of Ramsay exploded at the seams with great art and I got to take some of it in on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. Known as the Artists’ Avenue, 23rd Ave SE in Ramsay threw open its doors, lawns and garages for an epic art stroll last weekend. Everyone was so friendly and more than happy to share their passions for art and gardening with everyone who came by.
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Photos by Amy Jo Espetveidt, Quadrophonic Image

1. Vienna, 6-years-old, shows off her artwork. 2. Everyone gathers to chat and share. 3. Brenda Taylor’s Taylor Made Glass. 4. Laurie & Jack the 23rd Ave Resident Scientists display their work. 5. San Gimigniano by Sam Hester. 6. Paintings by Matthew Page-Hanify. 7. Sam Hester Comics. 8. Sierra Love ROBOTS! 9. Artwork at the Leaf Ninjas’ table. 10. Painting by Mariah David. 11. Ceramics by Andrew Tarrant. 12. A couple checks out the Leaf Ninjas’ table. 13. Filmmaker Andrea Mann plays her work. 14. Knitting & Yarn-Dying by Franki Morgan-Fenemore. 15. Heather Stump’s Printmaking. A whole rundown on the artists and artisans that took part can be found here.
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    sam hester

    I am a graphic recorder based in Calgary. I like local stories. I write comics when I have free time. And I leave eraser shavings everywhere I go.

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    contact me

    sam@the23rdstory.com
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    my website

    www.the23rdstory.com started as a blog and now includes some information about my graphic recording practice as well.

    I also have an (old) website which features a lot of my (old) work. Look out, it's a bit clunky and there are a lot of links that don't go anywhere, but there are still a few interesting things there:
    www.thedrawingbook.com


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