Top Shelf on the Left

magical video about Type Books on Queen

2012-01-10T11:03:00.001-08:00

Carole Giangraden reading my poems!

2012-01-02T07:59:00.001-08:00

www.wordstogopodcast.com

Like everyone else recently, I seem to post nothing but posters!

2011-10-09T12:53:00.001-07:00

further thoughts on punctuation

2011-09-27T14:30:00.000-07:00

Don't be a serial killer - save the Oxford comma!

2011-09-19T11:21:00.000-07:00

Mysterious paper sculptures - Central Station Blog post

2011-09-12T09:41:00.000-07:00

Mysterious paper sculptures - Central Station Blog post

my life in a nutshell

2011-08-03T05:54:00.000-07:00

Sketch of me by Ryerson Student Jamie Ferenczi

2011-07-20T15:47:00.000-07:00

let`s hope that my wisdom was as full as my chins...

Anthology of Creative Non-Fiction, due out August 2011

2011-07-03T20:48:00.000-07:00

Slice Me Some Truth: An anthology of Canadian creative non-fiction
by Luanne Armstrong and Zoë Landale
August 2011
350 pages | ISBN: 978-1-894987-60-8
$29

Luanne Armstrong and Zoë Landale have put together a thorough survey of the growing body of Canadian creative non-fiction, covering the areas of memoir, personal essay, cultural journalism, lyric essay and nature or place essays. These works are only a sampling of the diversity of Canadian writing, but together they create the best possible beginning for the exploration of this intriguing genre.

And yes, I have a piece in it!!

nifty little piece on a nifty little site

2011-06-27T20:33:00.000-07:00

http://www.sheilaheti.net/2012.html

My niece Zoe' s Book Blog!

2011-06-15T06:46:00.000-07:00

http://inthenextroom.blogspot.com/

Cartoon for June (yes, that rhymes!)

2011-06-10T12:52:00.000-07:00

The Questionless Books Interview: Poet, Novelist, and Children's Author Susan Glickman | Open Book: Toronto

2011-06-06T06:27:00.000-07:00

The Questionless Books Interview: Poet, Novelist, and Children's Author Susan Glickman | Open Book: Toronto

Bernadette in the Doghouse

2011-05-12T06:04:00.000-07:00

The second in my series of early readers for Second Story Press is due out OCTOBER 15th 2011! Love the cover! Melanie Allard is a great illustrator!

spring hopes eternally

2011-03-26T15:18:00.001-07:00

Earlier this week I saw my first golden crocuses and dainty snowdrops and ran home to rake up the leaf mulch in an ecstasy of anticipation. Two days later it snowed. Not a dainty, lace-doilies-floating-down-on-a-zephyr kind of snow, but an aspiring blizzard. I replaced the rake with a shovel.

It's important to have the right tools for the job, whatever the job is. But what kind of a job is a blog, I wonder?

I began writing this back when my first novel was coming out, because I was assured by those in the know that I needed "an Internet presence." Then I made myself a web-site, for the same reason. Was the blog thereby rendered redundant? Not really, because the website is a kind of central clearing house of SG-related data, whereas the blog purported to be more immediate: a kind of diary of idiosyncratic ramblings intended to create a personal relationship with potential readers so that they would like me and want to (ahem) buy my books. Because let's be honest, I am a writer.

However, even though maintaining this blog is a kind of writing, it is not the kind I prefer to do, and takes me away from my real work -- even if all that real work consists of is wrestling with commas or doing arcane and ultimately irrelevant research. In addition, I like you, whoever you are, but I don't even know you! And if I don't have enough time to visit my real friends, why should I spend it flirting with strangers in cyber-space?

Because that is how you cultivate readers, according to My Agent -- and everybody else's. Because if you can't find SUSAN GLICKMAN in flashing disco lights when you are aimlessly trolling the net to avoid doing your taxes (which you should be doing, right about now, by the way) then you won't remember my name the next time you have to suggest a book for your book club to read, or buy a present for your mother-in-law's birthday, or borrow something from the library to read whilst working out at the gym. Or so the thinking goes.

I would really like to know if anybody ever DOES beg borrow or buy a book because they read someone's blog and thought the font that person chose was dead sexy. Am I wasting my time here? Can I go back to hunting for errant commas? Or should I try to be wittier, smarter, altogether more appealing and hope that I can seduce someone into giving my books a read?

Nice interview with me on another site!

2011-03-11T06:25:00.001-08:00

http://www.bookclubbuddy.com/getting-2-know-u/getting-2-know-susan-glickman/

What is your favourite thing about writing?

My favourite thing about writing fiction is the sensation, when it’s going well, of inhabiting another world and other bodies; of living more than one life. It’s exhilarating and terrifying because you have no idea where you are going or how long it will last. My favourite thing about writing poetry is the sensation, when it’s going well, of making something fine; finer than I’d ever hoped I could. In the best of all possible worlds, both these sensations happen simultaneously and that, right there, is my reason for living.

But there are lots of other things I love about writing that keep me going even when I’m not in the zone. I love sharpening pencils, for example. I love having an excuse to make endless cups of tea. I love going for walks with my dog Toby because we both need a break from sitting, for God’s sake, and then finding that the impasse is resolved after about a half an hour of chasing squirrels and admiring my neighbours’ gardens. I love not needing an excuse to buy more books. I love not having to dress up to go to work. I love having articulate friends. I love writing on napkins in cafés and on in little notebooks on trains. I love doing cryptic crossword puzzles and playing Scrabble and reading Roget’s Thesaurus and calling such activities “research.”

Good thing you didn’t ask me what I don’t like about writing however, because there are just as many things I could list there! For instance, I don’t love that look on people’s faces when they ask you what you do and you say you’re a writer and they want to know if you’re famous because of course any good writer would be famous, right? I don’t like the loneliness, and the endless waiting when you send stuff out, and the lack of money. But you didn’t ask, so I won’t answer.

What do you think readers would be most surprised to learn about you?

I’m really funny. But so far that hasn’t made it into my books. I don’t know why. It may be that my humour is a defense against feeling the kinds of things I let myself feel in my writing. Or it may be that my humour is just too improvisational to merit transcription.

New comic!

2011-01-17T09:11:00.001-08:00

Great Essay from Slate magazine about the "one or two spaces after a period" controversy!

2011-01-17T09:06:00.000-08:00

Space Invaders
Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period.

By Farhad ManjooPosted Thursday, Jan. 13, 2011, at 6:20 PM ET
SLATE

Last month, Gawker published a series of messages that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had once written to a 19-year-old girl he'd become infatuated with. Gawker called the e-mails "creepy," "lovesick," and "stalkery"; I'd add overwrought, self-important, and dorky. ("Our intimacy seems like the memory of a strange dream to me," went a typical line.) Still, given all we've heard about Assange's puffed-up personality, the substance of his e-mail was pretty unsurprising. What really surprised me was his typography.

Here's a fellow who's been using computers since at least the mid-1980s, a guy whose globetrotting tech-wizardry has come to symbolize all that's revolutionary about the digital age. Yet when he sits down to type, Julian Assange reverts to an antiquated habit that would not have been out of place in the secretarial pools of the 1950s: He uses two spaces after every period. Which—for the record—is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.

Oh, Assange is by no means alone. Two-spacers are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste. You'd expect, for instance, that anyone savvy enough to read Slate would know the proper rules of typing, but you'd be wrong; every third e-mail I get from readers includes the two-space error. (In editing letters for "Dear Farhad," my occasional tech-advice column, I've removed enough extra spaces to fill my forthcoming volume of melancholy epic poetry, The Emptiness Within.) The public relations profession is similarly ignorant; I've received press releases and correspondence from the biggest companies in the world that are riddled with extra spaces. Some of my best friends are irredeemable two spacers, too, and even my wife has been known to use an unnecessary extra space every now and then (though she points out that she does so only when writing to other two-spacers, just to make them happy).
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What galls me about two-spacers isn't just their numbers. It's their certainty that they're right. Over Thanksgiving dinner last year, I asked people what they considered to be the "correct" number of spaces between sentences. The diners included doctors, computer programmers, and other highly accomplished professionals. Everyone—everyone!—said it was proper to use two spaces. Some people admitted to slipping sometimes and using a single space—but when writing something formal, they were always careful to use two. Others explained they mostly used a single space but felt guilty for violating the two-space "rule." Still others said they used two spaces all the time, and they were thrilled to be so proper. When I pointed out that they were doing it wrong—that, in fact, the correct way to end a sentence is with a period followed by a single, proud, beautiful space—the table balked. "Who says two spaces is wrong?" they wanted to know.

Typographers, that's who. The people who study and design the typewritten word decided long ago that we should use one space, not two, between sentences. That convention was not arrived at casually. James Felici, author of the The Complete Manual of Typography, points out that the early history of type is one of inconsistent spacing. Hundreds of years ago some typesetters would end sentences with a double space, others would use a single space, and a few renegades would use three or four spaces. Inconsistency reigned in all facets of written communication; there were few conventions regarding spelling, punctuation, character design, and ways to add emphasis to type. But as typesetting became more widespread, its practitioners began to adopt best practices. Felici writes that typesetters in Europe began to settle on a single space around the early 20th century. America followed soon after.

Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. It's one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion designers know to put men's shirt buttons on the right and women's on the left. Every major style guide—including the Modern Language Association Style Manual and the Chicago Manual of Style—prescribes a single space after a period. (The Publications Manual of the American Psychological Association, used widely in the social sciences, allows for two spaces in draft manuscripts but recommends one space in published work.) Most ordinary people would know the one-space rule, too, if it weren't for a quirk of history. In the middle of the last century, a now-outmoded technology—the manual typewriter—invaded the American workplace. To accommodate that machine's shortcomings, everyone began to type wrong. And even though we no longer use typewriters, we all still type like we do. (Also see the persistence of the dreaded Caps Lock key.)

The problem with typewriters was that they used monospaced type—that is, every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space. This bucked a long tradition of proportional typesetting, in which skinny characters (like I or 1) were given less space than fat ones (like W or M). Monospaced type gives you text that looks "loose" and uneven; there's a lot of white space between characters and words, so it's more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule—on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read. Here's the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. First electric typewriters and then computers began to offer people ways to create text using proportional fonts. Today nearly every font on your PC is proportional. (Courier is the one major exception.) Because we've all switched to modern fonts, adding two spaces after a period no longer enhances readability, typographers say. It diminishes it.

Type professionals can get amusingly—if justifiably—overworked about spaces. "Forget about tolerating differences of opinion: typographically speaking, typing two spaces before the start of a new sentence is absolutely, unequivocally wrong," Ilene Strizver, who runs a typographic consulting firm The Type Studio, once wrote. "When I see two spaces I shake my head and I go, Aye yay yay," she told me. "I talk about 'type crimes' often, and in terms of what you can do wrong, this one deserves life imprisonment. It's a pure sign of amateur typography." "A space signals a pause," says David Jury, the author of About Face: Reviving The Rules of Typography. "If you get a really big pause—a big hole—in the middle of a line, the reader pauses. And you don't want people to pause all the time. You want the text to flow."

This readability argument is debatable. Typographers can point to no studies or any other evidence proving that single spaces improve readability. When you press them on it, they tend to cite their aesthetic sensibilities. As Jury says, "It's so bloody ugly."

But I actually think aesthetics are the best argument in favor of one space over two. One space is simpler, cleaner, and more visually pleasing (it also requires less work, which isn't nothing). A page of text with two spaces between every sentence looks riddled with holes; a page of text with an ordinary space looks just as it should.

Is this arbitrary? Sure it is. But so are a lot of our conventions for writing. It's arbitrary that we write shop instead of shoppe, or phone instead of fone, or that we use ! to emphasize a sentence rather than %. We adopted these standards because practitioners of publishing—writers, editors, typographers, and others—settled on them after decades of experience. Among their rules was that we should use one space after a period instead of two—so that's how we should do it.

Besides, the argument in favor of two spaces isn't any less arbitrary. Samantha Jacobs, a reading and journalism teacher at Norwood High School in Norwood, Col., told me that she requires her students to use two spaces after a period instead of one, even though she acknowledges that style manuals no longer favor that approach. Why? Because that's what she's used to. "Primarily, I base the spacing on the way I learned," she wrote me in an e-mail glutted with extra spaces.

Several other teachers gave me the same explanation for pushing two spaces on their students. But if you think about, that's a pretty backward approach: The only reason today's teachers learned to use two spaces is because their teachers were in the grip of old-school technology. We would never accept teachers pushing other outmoded ideas on kids because that's what was popular back when they were in school. The same should go for typing. So, kids, if your teachers force you to use two spaces, send them a link to this article. Use this as your subject line: "If you type two spaces after a period, you're doing it wrong."

Become a fan of Slate and Farhad Manjoo on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.

2010-12-14T13:05:00.000-08:00

Everything I Know About Writing A Novel (written for my Ryerson Class)

2010-11-26T06:28:00.001-08:00

Useful Hints for Writing
or
more or less everything I know, in two pages

1. Write a story that means something to you; that you care about. Write a story only you can write! Otherwise you will not enjoy what you are doing, and you will not bring anything special to it.

2. You don’t have to know everything that happens before you begin, but it’s useful to make some kind of an outline, mapping where you want to go, and to keep filling it and changing and rearranging as you go along, so that you do not lose sight of your intentions, and so that you have the confidence to keep going.

3. Write more detailed instructions to yourself at the end of each bit you’ve finished writing so that you know what to do when you get back to it. Especially if your schedule doesn’t permit you to write every day, it will be a huge relief to read: “Now he has to go into the restaurant and try to guess which of the middle-aged ladies picking at their salads and sipping iced-tea is his birth-mother. Unfortunately, the restaurant is full of middle-aged ladies. He is, in fact, the only man there.” Or whatever.

4. Having an outline will also prevent “writer’s block” because you will always be able to write a bit that takes place earlier or later if you’re not comfortable with what comes next in the linear progression of the plot. But in order to write a random bit out of sequence, you have to know, at least roughly, what the sequence is!

5. Write sketches of all your characters. Make family trees. Get everyone’s ages right, and link their chronology to the time-line of your plot. A lot of this may never get into your finished story, but you still have to know it. It makes a difference whether your character was 5 or 15 when his parents split up, or if she was 14 or 20 when she ran away from home. It makes a difference whether your protagonist had siblings, or grandparents, or lived in the city or on a farm. And so on.

6. And about that city or farm – imagine it fully; again, more fully than necessary. When you see your character stepping outside to get a breath of fresh air, is she on the balcony of a 12th floor downtown condo or standing in a wheat field under an endless prairie sky? You need to be able to see the world of your book, to smell it, and to taste it, not only so that your characters behave appropriately but also so that your readers can inhabit it imaginatively.

7. If you are writing a story set long ago or far away, you may have to do a lot of research. Let the research inform your understanding of the setting and fill you with confidence but don’t let it weigh the story down with tedious exposition. Don’t forget, the people in your story already know all about the place and time they inhabit! Only put in whatever information is necessary so that the reader can understand what is going on too.

8. Avoid clichés not only of speech but of thought; not only of character but of situation. When you reread your work, be vigilant. Consider revising whenever you find laziness and shortcuts; always try to find fresh ways of seeing things and therefore of saying things. AT THE SAME TIME (and this is important) don’t strain after novelty when it isn’t required. Being fresh doesn’t mean using bizarre, ornate, or improbable imagery and obscure language. Sometimes simple language is a knife to the heart.

9. Accept that it may take you a very long time indeed to arrive at a story you are satisfied with. But enjoy the journey! You are getting to improvise, to play make-believe, finally, again, after all these years. Let your mind wander and go down weird digressions; give your characters freedom to become who they must; write descriptions of what fascinates you. And then accept that you will have to trash a lot of what you have written, and start over. As Samuel Beckett says wryly, "Fail again. Fail better."

10. Don’t be precious. Don’t hoard what you’ve written. Know that there will be more where that came from. Respect the story, and let it become better, no matter how much it costs you. Remember: No effort is wasted. You are serving an apprenticeship to a craft. You can only learn to write by writing.

Scott Griffin brings poetry into Canadian schools

2010-11-26T06:28:00.000-08:00

Scott Griffin brings poetry into Canadian schools

new comic

2010-10-08T20:24:00.000-07:00

Why you should (not) date a writer

2010-09-18T12:41:00.000-07:00

offended by rank OBJECTIFICATION of writers

There is this thing currently going around tumblr about why dating a writer is good. I think it’s nice that this thing is going around, because I like writers, and lots of us could use more dates. As a writer who has dated people, though — including other writers — I would like to offer some correctives to this list.

The items in bold are the alleged reasons to date a writer. I have replaced the original commentary with my bleak corrective, in lightface.

1. Writers will romance you with words. We probably won’t. We write for ourselves or for money and by the time we’re done we’re sick of it. If we have to write you something there’s a good chance it’ll take us two days and we’ll be really snippy and grumpy about the process.

2. Writers will write about you. You don’t want this. Trust me.

3. Writers will take you to interesting events. No. We will not. We are busy writing. Leave us alone about these “interesting events.” I know one person who dates a terrific writer. He goes out alone. She is busy writing.

4. Writers will remind you that money doesn’t matter so much. Yes. We will do this by borrowing money from you. Constantly.

5. Writers will acknowledge you and dedicate things to you. A better way to ensure this would be to become an agent. That way you’d actually make money off of talking people through their neuroses.

6. Writers will offer you an interesting perspective on things. Yes. Constantly. While you’re trying to watch TV or take a shower. You will have to listen to observations all day long, in addition to being asked to read the observations we wrote about when you were at work and unavailable for bothering. It will be almost as annoying as dating a stand-up comedian, except if you don’t find these observations scintillating we will think you’re dumb, instead of uptight.

7. Writers are smart. The moment you realize this is not true, your relationship with a writer will develop a significant problem.

8. Writers are really passionate. About writing. Not necessarily about you. Are you writing?

9. Writers can think through their feelings. So don’t start an argument unless you’re ready for a very, very lengthy explication of our position, our feelings about your position, and what scenes from our recent fiction the whole thing is reminding us of.

10. Writers enjoy their solitude. So get lost, will you?

11. Writers are creative. This is why we have such good reasons why you should lend us $300 and/or leave us alone, we’re writing.

12. Writers wear their hearts on their sleeves. Serious advice: if you meet a writer who’s actually demonstrative, be careful.

13. Writers will teach you cool new words. This is possibly true! We may also expect you to remember them, correct your grammar, and look pained after reading mundane notes you’ve left for us.

14. Writers may be able to adjust their schedules for you. Writers may be able to adjust their schedules for writing. Are you writing? Get in line, then.

15. Writers can find 1000 ways to tell you why they like you. By the 108th you’ll be pretty sure we’re just making them up for fun.

16. Writers communicate in a bunch of different ways. But mostly writing. Hope you don’t like talking on the phone — that shit is rough.

17. Writers can work from anywhere. So you might want to pass on that tandem bike rental when you’re on vacation.

18. Writers are surrounded by interesting people. Every last one of whom is imaginary.

19. Writers are easy to buy gifts for. This is true. Keep it in mind when your birthday rolls around, okay?

20. Writers are sexy. No argument. Some people think this about heroin addicts, too.

Alternate solution: it will be pretty much like dating anyone else who likes to do a particular thing, you know?

(Source: 52hearts)
Cite Arrow reblogged from douglasmartini

I love David Mitchell and you should too!

2010-08-10T18:18:00.000-07:00

what to do with your books after you get an e-reader

2010-08-09T09:39:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/magazine/08fob-consumed-t.html

Bronte Sisters Action Figures

2010-07-27T08:21:00.000-07:00

excellent advice on how to use a semi-colon!!

2010-02-25T17:45:00.001-08:00

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon

2009-11-09T19:46:00.000-08:00

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."

-- Flannery O'Connor

A few thoughts about lyric poetry

2009-10-30T09:45:00.000-07:00

A Few Thoughts about Lyric Poetry

Originally, the lyric was thought of as a song; even today, we call the words that accompany music “lyrics.” Traditionally it was opposed to narrative and dramatic forms of poetry because originally all literature was written in the formal metre we call verse. But these days narrative and drama are written in prose, not verse, so when people talk about poetry they are usually referring only to the lyric, and thinking of the interiorized first-person meditation, usually rather short, that we associate with the Romantics and Moderns: the kind of poem Wordsworth called “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”

Such poetry gives the illusion of privacy: it is usually not directed towards a particular audience but seems to be overheard rather than heard. This stance tends to limit the subject matter to the personal realm; moreover the brevity of the form tends to keep the focus on a single thought, feeling, or situation. It also creates the illusion of spontaneity, thereby allowing the reader to experience the material of the poem as it unfolds in the speakers mind.

“Unlike the drama, whose province is conflict, and unlike the novel or narrative, which connects isolated moments of time to create a story multiply peopled and framed by a social context, the lyric voice speaks out of a single moment in time. ”
- Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time.

This singleness also extends to voice: whereas in narrative and drama we have a clash of different voices as embodied in several different characters, in the lyric poem conflict and contradiction are situated in the mind of a single speaker as internal tensions or ambiguities. The lyric becomes “dramatic” when it presents a struggle between conflicting points of view either within the speaker, or between the poet (implied narrator) and his or her lyric persona.

The lyric provides the occasion to create unified objects of textual beauty and precision far beyond what is possible in longer art forms: every sound, rhythm, and meaning, the pausing and pacing and emphasis, can all work together to create a persuasive experience with nothing extra, nothing out of place, nothing sloppy. On the other hand such intensity limits the range of the lyric; its focus on the “I” (and just as frequently, the “eye”) can seem stifling, leaving out so much that is messy, complex and unresolved, contradictory and vague, in life. One of the reasons there is constant experimentation in poetry is that poets are always seeking ways to solve this dilemma, keeping the aesthetic control and tonal intimacy of poetry without sacrificing the amplitude available in some of the longer art forms.

I haven't posted for far too long, so by way of apology...

2009-10-07T14:38:00.001-07:00

I am the guest columnist at ARC this month

2009-08-15T12:10:00.000-07:00

with a little piece about a Yehuda Amichai poem that I hope you'll like. Read it at:

http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2009_08_glickman.php

Get Me Off This Freaking Moor! great cartoon about the Brontes.

2009-08-11T17:48:00.001-07:00

http://beatonna.livejournal.com/109102.html

Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters

2009-07-17T11:36:00.000-07:00

My cousin Ruth who was just visiting from England informs me she has swine flu, so I immediately start worrying that I have it too...

2009-07-16T08:05:00.000-07:00

I should have known that any superhero I composed would end up sounding like a yoga asana

2009-07-13T12:45:00.000-07:00

I went to this website called http://www.cpbintegrated.com/theherofactory/and selected all the traits suitable for my own personal superhero and came up with this dame who they called "Impenetrable Butterfly." Hot Damn! Perhaps after a summer of unlimited Pilates classes, I may resemble her more than I do at the moment...

OK, I admit it, I love Hugh Laurie even though he's an outrageous mugger

2009-07-06T13:21:00.000-07:00

Sign outside Brampton (from Spacing)

2009-06-05T07:13:00.000-07:00

Why I should consider getting a BEAR instead of a dog

2009-05-29T05:59:00.000-07:00

The trained behaviours of Bart the Bear II, as per his online resume.(stolen from Dani Couture's Facebook notes)

http://www.bartthebear.com/bears/bart2.html

"Trained Behaviors:

1. Goes to mark
2. Goes from mark A to mark B, either slow, walking or running
3. Stays on mark or wherever he is asked to be
4. Backs up
5. Looks in a riveted manner in any direction
6. “Roars” - opens mouth wide and shows all teeth and fangs
7. Stands on back legs
8. Walks on back legs
9. Comes into camera from mark - slowly, walking or running
10. “Blows” - snorts through nose
11. Strikes with front paw
12. Charges in to camera
13. Lowers head and looks in menacing way
14. Sits
15. Begs up
16. Waves “bye-bye”
17. Lays down
18. Lays down with head on ground as if asleep or dead
19. Rolls over on back
20. Gets to all fours on command
21. Limps - walks with one front leg held off the ground
22. Fetches most anything - fake fish, stuffed rabbits or life-sized actor dummy doubles
23. "Lifts” - holds object with front paws while sitting
24. “Holds” - lays on back and holds and bounces objects with all four paws
25. “Flipper” - flips any object in front of him such as fake fish or soccer ball, etc.
26. Shakes head back and forth
27. Pushes trees, cars, tents, cabin doors, etc
28. “Happy Bear” - jumps from front feet to back feet
29. Dives on cue, does a running dive into river or pond
30. “Yoga” - holds back toes with front claws
31. Great “attack” behaviors, running hits, mauling, wrestling, full contact, with instant “off” command
32. Trained to come and be leashed on command and goes back into his trailer on command
33. No wasted time on set
34. Does a routine of multiple behaviors in a fluid sequence, for example: Come, Hit Mark, Look, Stand Up, Roar, Turn Head to Left, Exit Frame Right, all in one take"

ANOTHER CARTOON

2009-05-24T20:03:00.001-07:00

enjoy

2009-05-24T18:24:00.000-07:00

A column I did for Canadian Literature

2009-05-24T00:50:00.000-07:00

Reading

It was what I'd been waiting for almost forever, when the letters
danced together to make sounds, the sounds I heard in my head, or
anyone's. When I first realized I was doing it I thought I was
cheating, borrowing the "ook" from "book" to make "took" and
"look," like copying someone else's tree in my drawing instead of
making up my own: central pillar, three branches, a pillowy
crown, five apples. Shouldn't each word have its own special, its
own personal letters? But there could never be enough letters,
enough angles and curves and loopy loops, to make all the words I
knew and those I didn't know yet but would. And so I learned the
economy of language, to borrow and copy and make do, remaking
meaning. Someone else's tree in my drawing, curly smoke from the
chimney, two windows, tulips all around. "Look" what I "took"
from the "book!"

"Reading" originally appeared in Canadian Literature #121, "What the Archives Reveal"

Interview
Is there a specific moment that inspired you to pursue poetry?

It seems to me that from the first moment I heard poetry, before I could even read, it entranced me. In those early days my fascination was more with the sounds and rhythms of words than their meanings, and I continued making up rhyming poems for many years after I learned to read.

I think I only started writing poems that didn't rhyme once I was in high school, once my experience of language became more grounded in text than in the speaking and singing voice. The first poet who made me think that maybe I could pursue poetry seriously was Leonard Cohen; I bought The Spice Box of Earth at a book fair in my school gymnasium when I was in grade ten and it took the top of my head off.

How/where do you find inspiration today?

I used to find inspiration in books, then in landscapes and lovers. Now it's just everywhere. I don't even think of it as something as exalted as "inspiration"-- it's more humbly "material." Every single thing I experience can pass through poetry.

Poetry is like Lyra's alethiometer in The Golden Compass. By writing it I come to know the world.

What is your writing process?

I try to make time to write every day, even if all I can muster up is the energy to edit stuff I wrote the day before. I usually need to spend about an hour warming up at my desk by reading my email, paying bills, just getting my butt firmly fixed in the chair. Then once I get going I find it really hard to stop. Sometimes I'll even get up in the middle of the night to keep working.
What is your revision/editing process?

With prose, I edit fanatically, constantly, incessantly, as I go. Each day I go over the previous days work and edit it, adding and deleting, adding and deleting, and eventually moving forward. With poetry, there tends to be a lot more deleting and revising than adding as I refine exactly what it is that needs to be said. Sometimes if I'm lucky, with a shortish lyric, I get the first draft the first day and then just fiddle with it for ages. With a long poem it may take months.

What inspired "Reading"?

I can't remember.

What poetic techniques did you use in "Reading"?

It's a prose poem, which means it dispenses with the white spaces between lines that make poetry slow down and give emphasis to certain syntactical units and instead relies on ordinary devices, primarily punctuation but also sentence structure, to control the pace. But I still use a lot of "poetic" devices, primarily repetition and rhyme, to give it the density we associate with the lyric.

Do you use any resources that a young poet would find useful (e.g. websites, text books, etc.)?

I use memory. That's a damn fine resource! Except when you can't remember things (see above).

When you were high school aged, what would have been helpful/motivating to hear from a published poet?

Read lots, write lots. Learn your craft. Think about how you learn to play an instrument, or a sport—practice is everything. That means you MUST revise. Don't assume that your first draft is the best you can do!!

I'm following my bliss

2009-05-12T09:36:00.001-07:00

Sorry folks,

I know you are waiting breathlessly each morning for my blog but I've just been too darn busy DOING THINGS to write. Spent ten days in England, some of it on the magical coast of Cornwall, and came home obsessed with gardening. So that's where you'll find me, most days, getting down and dirty.

Which reminds me of a conversation I had recently with Stephen Heighton. When I told him how much I loved the poem he published in The Walrus, "Some Other Just Ones," he replied, with some bemusement, that he'd had exceptional feedback from that poem and wondered why he didn't write more happy stuff. I said that happiness is not conducive to sitting alone in a room, scribbling; it wants to get outside and dance.

So bye, y'all.

Much more interesting article than anything I could write at the moment

2009-05-12T09:33:00.000-07:00

http://www.slate.com/id/2217815/pagenum/all/#p2

Review of Bernadette and the Lunch Bunch from the School Library Journal

2009-04-15T09:08:00.000-07:00

Gr 2-4–

Bernadette Inez O’Brian Schwartz is about to start third grade, and without her best friend, who moved away, it’s going to be “the worst year ever.” This curious girl is an engaging and quirky character who loves to ask “Why?” and investigate the world around her through science. Bernadette is seeing a lot of changes in her life this year, in addition to the loss of Jasmine, and she doesn’t like it. One of the big changes is that she has to eat lunch at school every day. This is a most terrifying prospect without a best friend, but after a few weeks she becomes friends with Annie, Keisha, and Megan and they team up to form the “Lunch Bunch.” Written with light humor throughout, the story unfolds nicely to share many of the challenges Bernadette faces, such as not having a talent to showcase in the talent show and not being able to enter the science fair. Bernadette is good at developing “strategies” to figure out how to deal with different situations, and, with the help of her friends, she always comes out on top. A few black-and-white illustrations are scattered throughout. This is a fun read with accessible language and appeal for early chapter-book readers.

–Bethany A. Lafferty, Henderson District Public Libraries, NV
© School Library Journal 2009

HOW TO PROMOTE YOURSELF__ SO FUNNY YOU HAVE TO CRY

2009-04-01T08:09:00.000-07:00

Chicken poetry reading

2009-03-25T13:47:00.000-07:00

New review of The Violin Lover

2009-03-25T06:10:00.001-07:00

I was totally thrilled to get a good review of The Violin Lover from an expert on violin music! She says, "The Violin Lover is a beautifully written novel, one that fans of violin music, as well as readers of serious literary fiction, will particularly appreciate."

If you're interested, you can read the rest of the review at http://violinandbooks.wordpress.com/

Stolen from Wally Keeler's "Signs of the Rhymes"

2009-02-20T14:12:00.001-08:00

dark night of the soul

2009-02-04T09:24:00.001-08:00

"Fun" site

2009-02-04T06:34:00.000-08:00

Poet Michael Lista sent this to Bookninja; I just had to post it here!

http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/

Fiction and Memoir: a few thoughts

2009-02-03T16:59:00.000-08:00

FICTION VERSUS MEMOIR

Memoir combines the aesthetic challenge of fiction with the obligation to be as truthful as possible. It is true that memoir is understood to be a subjective recreation of events in the author's life — there is some latitude because it is only one person’s truth, not “the” truth. But that doesn’t mean you can flagrantly distort or exaggerate for effect. If the only way to get at the emotional truth you feel is to make things up, then you need to write fiction, not memoir. Otherwise you are betraying the reader, who trusts you.

How is making things up a betrayal of the reader? Because in fiction, the author and the narrator are understood to be different people, while in memoir they purport to be the same person, someone who is saying: “Pay attention. This really happened to me.” You’ve asked the reader to trust you, and this is a privilege not to be abused. To justify this trust, your focus needs to be on making your story worth the reader’s while, which means it must be reliable. Veracity is a necessary condition for any document that claims to be a memoir.

But although veracity is necessary, it is not sufficient. A memoir is not a private document like a journal; it is not therapy. The mere fact that something happened doesn’t make it worth reading about. You must find the heart of your story and work back and forth from that, choosing to represent only those events that illuminate that centre. We don’t need to know everything you know; we just need to know the really important things. If the art of fiction is knowing how much to put in, the art of memoir is knowing how much to leave out!

In other words, even memoir needs a plot! What is a plot? Not mere narrative sequence — this happened and then this and then that — but the interconnection and relationship of events through cause and effect. Ultimately, a good memoir must contain the same elements you find in good fiction: setting, description, dialogue, and character. You need to build scenes and provide lots of imagery; it’s not enough to talk about feelings. The more you make us see the more we will believe.

hOW NOT to WriTE a NoVEl

2009-01-26T13:47:00.000-08:00

If I can't have that writing studio in the woods you can buy me this instead...

2009-01-22T12:28:00.000-08:00

http://datamancer.net/keyboards/scrabble/scrabble.htm

or this!!!

http://www.rebound-designs.com/catalog/show/904.htm

it's minus 25 outside and I'm drawing cartoons...

2009-01-16T10:01:00.000-08:00

why I need a bigger office or a secretary or something...

2009-01-16T05:21:00.000-08:00

I thought I was pretty organized, frankly. Most people think of me that way, but apparently all of us were wrong. Because recently, when an artist I met wanted to see an alphabetical bestiary I wrote several years and two computers ago, I couldn't find the damn thing. Somehow, I managed to leave it behind when transferring files from desktop to desktop to laptop, perhaps discouraged by too frequent rejections.

Eventually I found a print-out in one of many bankers' boxes that are scattered across my office like foundation stones for the library of my dreams. But it was a close call.

You know you are getting old when you start thinking about all the work you've lost, misplaced, or abandoned over the years! But my friend Robert Priest has the right attitude: when I remarked that I now had as many unpublished books as published ones, he quipped, "I have as many unwritten books as written ones."

First Review of Bernadette and the Lunch Bunch!

2008-12-22T10:28:00.000-08:00

Oddly enough, I got my first review in the USA, where the book hasn't come out yet, rather than in Canada, where it has!

From Kirkus Reviews, January 2009:

First her best friend moves away and then the school system excludes third graders from the science-fair competition. For third grader and budding scientist Bernadette Inez O’Brian Schwartz, this promises to be the worst school year ever. Bernadette is an original—imaginative, organized, moody, but resourceful. Slowly, she makes new friends, a Lunch Bunch with whom she can share strategies for making lunch at school interesting. She has a pirate party, comes to terms with being nothing more than one of the audience for the Talent Show, concocts a project that makes her sad friend Megan smile and circumvents the science-fair decision. Poet and literary critic Glickman’s first novel for children realistically captures elementary-school life with sympathy and humor. Allard’s occasional line drawings show a diverse cast of characters and add to the appeal of this substantial chapter book first published in Canada in 2008.

(Fiction. 7-9)
© Kirkus 2009

A nice review of The Violin Lover

2008-12-22T09:28:00.000-08:00

THE VIOLIN LOVER

SUSAN GLICKMAN

Goose Lane Editions

The violin lover of this carefully crafted novel is Ned Abraham, a physician, a passionate lover of violin music and the dispassionate lover of Clara Weiss, a struggling widow. The only thing Ned and Clara have in common is Clara's young son Jacob, a gifted pianist who, as Ned's musical protege, is instrumental in bringing them together. Otherwise, their clandestine love affair is rife with contradictions: Ned claims to dislike children but is a father figure to Jacob; Clara is a conventional Jewish widow and devoted mother but momentarily neglects one of her children for a tryst with her lover; Ned is a warm and caring physician who doesn't believe in holding hands; Clara values motherhood more than anything else, yet betrays her instincts in a manner that will haunt her for the rest of her life. Small missteps lead to bigger missteps with tragic consequences for all.

This small family drama takes place against the backdrop of a London under siege by blackshirts and a Europe trembling under Hitler's boots. The Violin Lover is not just a love-story gone awry. It is also a celebration of music and beauty. Ned's ability to pluck the violin makes him better at taking a patient's pulse. Clara's skills as an amateur painter help her teach her children to observe nature closely. Zayde, Jacob's grandfather, is able to forget the horrors of pogroms in his native Russia while listening to his grandson play the piano. Magda, Ned's sophisticated long-time lover and friend, befriends her rival Clara in an unexpected show of female solidarity.

Susan Glickman is primarily a poet and a literary critic. However, in this novel she has revealed the keen eye of a painter, the discriminating ear of a musician and that most precious of talents: the ability to write prose like a poet.

In Ned's own words, "music is what you hear when you really listen." The Violin Lover will pluck your heartstrings.

Maya Khankhoje's short story "Going Home" received an honourable mention in the 2007 CBC-QWF writing competition.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Herizons Magazine, Inc. 22-SEP-08

A short film of my husband blowing glass

2008-12-19T08:41:00.000-08:00

http://www.oneofakindshow.com/spring08/hof.php?pname=TKlein&q=wmv

what I want for Channukah...

2008-12-18T17:10:00.000-08:00

http://vimeo.com/1696112

new cartoon

2008-12-05T10:55:00.001-08:00

new cartoon (I haven't done one of these for a while!)

2008-12-03T07:35:00.001-08:00

Bernadette gets some attention in the online Quill and Quire

2008-11-28T09:18:00.000-08:00

Industry news

News
Girls get Gutsy in new series from Second Story

November 28, 2008 | 5:50 PM | By Danielle Ng-See-Quan

There’s American Girl, there’s Gossip Girl, and now Second Story Press is introducing Gutsy Girl, a YA fiction series inspired by author Susan Glickman’s fall 2008 title Bernadette and the Lunch Bunch.

“They’re stories about girls who confront the world in wonderful and energetic and brave ways,” says Second Story president and publisher Margie Wolfe. “The idea is to inspire the readers to show that the world is truly open to them, and all they have to do is work for it.”

Though Bernadette and the Lunch Bunch was conceived and published as a standalone novel, Wolfe felt there was more there to capitalize on. The series won’t always feature the same characters, says Wolfe, but some may recur, and several different authors have been lined up to pen the books.

The first Gutsy Girl selection, which will be published next spring, is Home Free by Sharon Jennings, a story set in 1960s small-town Ontario about a girl named Lee who is “a bit of a loner and has a huge passion for Anne of Green Gables and loves the whole notion of being an orphan,” says Wolfe. When Cassandra – an actual orphan who has just been adopted – moves in across the street, Lee learns that the reality is a lot different from the fantasy.

The Gutsy Girl idea follows in the vein of Second Story’s Kids’ Power series, which was launched in fall 2007 and focuses on youth activism. Wolfe says the Kids’ Power series has been well received abroad, with international publishers purchasing several installments of the series at once, instead of just individual titles. Wolfe says the international marketplace is where one tends to find an audience for this type of series. “What we found with publishers when we told them about this Gutsy Girl series – everyone got a big smile on their faces,” says Wolfe. “They knew there wasn’t going to be another series out there [like it].”

The Ethics of Governor General's Awards Juries

2008-11-23T08:01:00.000-08:00

An unfortunate situation vis a vis the current GG poetry prize has led to some serious discussion -- not for the first time, by any means -- of the jury system, which clearly needs an overhaul. See the following thread from the great blog Bookninja:

http://www.bookninja.com/?p=4770

Just for the record, my last eligible poetry book wasn't even SUBMITTED by my publisher, so couldn't be considered for the prize by any jury, impartial or not. SO some of us have worse obstacles than juries to overcome.

Stolen from Evie Christie, who stole it from the New Yorker

2008-11-21T16:34:00.000-08:00

Link to mp3 file

2008-11-17T07:57:00.000-08:00

Queen's University Events - Audio - Common Magic - 2008 - Lyric Poetry - Susan Glickman, Jan Conn and Marie di Michele - Recorded on March 8, 2008 by CFRC 101.9 FM.

http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Feed/queensu.ca.1310859223.01310730979

Read about my purse!

2008-11-09T09:52:00.000-08:00

http://capacioushold-all.blogspot.com/

Books filed by colour

2008-11-06T06:06:00.001-08:00

I'm stealing this image from Shawna Lemay's wonderful blog Capacious Holdall, because it's just so damn pretty. Now have a look at her blog! http://capacioushold-all.blogspot.com/

Smile

2008-11-05T14:10:00.000-08:00

from my brother-in-law Gordon, who is a constant source of weird Internet stuff.

Answers to student questions about being a writer

2008-11-05T10:17:00.000-08:00

At what point in your life did you decide to be a writer?

I always find this question impossible to answer, because it’s not as straightforward as it sounds! If you decide to become a veterinarian or a plumber or an astronaut or a fireman, you need to undergo a specialized post-secondary training and become certified to practice your trade. That’s not the way it works with writing. Everybody writes in school; those who “decide” to become writers, like me, are those who love it so much they never stop.

What this means is that you are not deciding to start doing something you’ve never done before, but to keep on doing something everybody else gives up; to get really good at something most people do poorly. To that extent, you are like an athlete or a musician, because the only way to get good is to practice, endlessly. Although there are lots of writing programs around, some even granting degrees, no one can actually teach you to write. They can only teach you how to revise and edit what you’ve already written. You still have to produce something from nothing on your own.

Also, writing is not really a profession in the ordinary sense: most writers have to earn money another way and keep working at their writing until they get published, and then keep publishing until they get lucky enough to make money, and even then, most writers still have to hold down another job to pay the bills. So “deciding to become a writer” doesn’t mean that you will earn a living at it; it means that you have made an internal commitment to the craft and will organize your life so that you always have time for it. And recognizing that you may have to give up other things in order to put the writing first.

What motivated you in that direction, and what are some experiences you had that eventually led you to this point?

I worked in publishing for a couple of years and then as a university professor for many more years and found myself obsessively editing everybody else’s work, and yearning for more time to work on my own stuff. I was never very interested in the business side of publishing, or the administrative side of academia; nor was I interested in literary theory for its own sake as so many of my colleagues were. I always wanted to take stories or plays or poems apart and see how they were made.

What do you enjoy about being a writer; what are the perks?

I love writing for two reasons. First and foremost I love making things with words; I love entering that state of intense mental excitement and working towards the best way of saying something. And secondly, writing is how I learn about the world. I find out what I know about things by writing about them, and writing forces me to learn new things all the time.

What do you dislike or wish to change about your occupation?

It can be lonely; you work in solitude all the time and rarely have people to share your work with. It can be frustrating: you send work out to be published and then wait for months and months for a response. It is very poorly paid. The tax laws are not geared towards writers, who may earn virtually nothing for several years and then get paid all at once, at which point they are taxed heavily. And being self-employed, writers have a hard time getting health and disability insurance, and therefore are doubly vulnerable financially.

Another problem is that other people think you are not really working because you’re at home, and they can’t see visible evidence of effort, so they don’t respect your time.

Do you find yourself writing more about personal experiences, or about imagined scenarios? Why?

In my poetry, I draw a lot on personal experiences, though I always see myself as an individual example of events that are universal. That is, I use my life as a repository of people, places, and things that I know about, through which I can explore subjects that interest me. So the “I” of my lyric poems is never straightforwardly me, myself, but the voice of that particular poem, which might or might not borrow something from Susan Glickman’s actual life.

In my fiction there are invented characters, so I have a lot more freedom to imagine experiences I haven’t actually had. Still, I have to draw on my own understanding of the world to be able to make convincing characters so to that extent I am limited by my own “self”, even when I don’t speak as myself.

What is the message you hope to put across to the general public through your writing?

No message; never any message!! Why? Because any message that literature could put across would be so vague and general as to be useless. War is Hell; Life is complicated ; Love one another or die: what use are messages like that?

Contrary to what most high school English teachers tell you, how literature works is not by sending out messages. Literature gives us the space and time to imaginatively inhabit another person’s life and empathize with his or her situation. In daily life we never get to enter anybody’s mind but our own, but literature gives us the opportunity to be lots of other people. This is really the moral dimension to literature: that it insists that we transcend our egos and be empathetic.

As Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in “A Defense of Poetry, "A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own."

When you write something you are creating a world for the reader to enter, building scenes for that reader to experience. Each individual work may grapple with certain themes that become a moral focus for the characters and therefore for readers as well, but this is not the same as being didactic and having a “message”.

National Novel Writing Month

2008-11-05T05:55:00.001-08:00

There's a huge group of people trying to write a 50,000 word novel in November. Here's the link:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/

My mind just won't go there...

OPEN LETTER TO THE “SMALL TREE MAINTENANCE PROGRAM”

2008-10-31T07:55:00.000-07:00

We are extremely unhappy with the damage inflicted on our beautiful Turkish hazelnut tree in the name of the City’s new program, and wish to address the justification given for this program as follows:

1. THE PROGRAM IS REQUIRED BECAUSE THE CITY HAS INSUFFICIENT MANPOWER TO DEAL WITH HOMEOWNERS’ REQUESTS FOR PRUNING.

This is illogical. The number of trees the City has planted and the rate at which they grow remains the same whether you prune all the trees on a schedule or on an as-needed basis. Currently you are pruning all trees planted between 1997-2005. If you waited to see which of those trees actually needed pruning, the likelihood is that you would not, in fact, have to prune as many as you are doing in according to your “proactive” policy.

2. PRUNING THE TREES WHILE THEY ARE YOUNG MAKES IT EASIER FOR THEM TO RECOVER FROM THEIR WOUNDS.

But do you have any evidence that recovering from one or two large wounds, which is all I see on mature trees around Toronto, is any worse than recovering from 20 smaller ones, which is what you inflicted on our tree by adhering to your policy of 8 feet of clearance? If you waited until the tree was taller to see which branches actually cause problems you might not have to prune any at all!

Following your logic, OHIP’s policy would be to take out your child’s appendix, gallbladder, wisdom teeth, adenoids, and tonsils, in one big operation while he’s small, with the justification that kids recover better from their wounds when they’re young than when they are older, and they don’t have the manpower to do surgery on an as-needed basis.

3. THE CITY IS REQUIRED TO KEEP SIDEWALKS AND WALKWAYS CLEAR.

Of course. But in the case of our tree, its lowest branches already cleared all sidewalks and walkways!!! And most of the branches that were removed were over our porch, providing us with privacy, shade, and greenery. They weren’t even over public space.

4. WE HAVE TO MAINTAIN THE TREE’S FORM.

But that’s exactly why we’re upset—you didn’t! A Turkish Hazelnut is meant to be rounded and taper to the top; it has many lateral branches. The arborist went to work with a chain saw and a mandate to clear 8 feet, and no concern whatsoever for the characteristic silhouette of the tree. You say you can’t rely on homeowners, but ANY homeowner would have done a better job than this professional. “The tree’s form” is ruined forever.

5. IT ALWAYS LOOKS BAD AFTER A HAIRCUT.

But haircuts are done for cosmetic reasons, and this was not.
And hair grows back, but these boughs can never grow back.

Tree

2008-10-30T07:26:00.000-07:00

I was working at home all day yesterday and around midday, heard the sounds of a chain saw outside. Thought nothing of it, as both houses across the street from me are being renovated; just closed the window, and kept on struggling with research for my novel, mainly legal stuff about the youth justice system and the differences between open and closed custody. In the middle of this research, I got a phone call from the vice principal of my son's high school asking for permission for him to be interviewed by the police about being mugged on the way to the school dance last Thursday--an event he never told me about, because he didn't want me to worry.

I spoke to my son, the Vice Principal, the police, and my husband, who came home as soon as he could to discuss further strategy. Naturally, I was surprised when he burst in the door calling "Have you seen the tree? What happened to the tree?"

We have (had) a beautiful spreading hazelnut tree in front of our house; in fact, to most people in the area, we were 'the house with the tree.' It provided a wonderful leafy haven; we loved nothing better to sit on our porch in the green shade, screened from the whole world. Hallowe'en being this week, we were just about to engage in our annual ritual of hanging little witch and ghost and skeleton dolls from its branches, to sway in the breeze and spookify things a little. Almost did it on Sunday; now I keep thinking "if only I had, if only I had..."

This is how the tree looks now:

The City of Toronto Department of Urban Forestry denies doing it. Toronto Hydro denies doing it. But who else goes around the city with a chain saw, and a truck to carry away the branches, blatantly trimming trees, without permission, without sending a notice to homeowners, in the middle of the day? And a neighbour saw a City truck parked on the street. And two other trees on my block were attacked as well, though neither as savagely.

This cannot have been for the health of the tree, for it was thriving. It was not in the way of wires, not a threat to pedestrians, and certainly not a threat to us. No one had complained.

And we have no recourse.

And the branches will not, will not, will not ever grow back.

I love A.L. Kennedy

2008-10-20T08:34:00.001-07:00

And if I keep posting these wonderful essays by people other than myself I might get a reputation for a wisdom I don't possess, just by association!

Interview with Scottish writer AL Kennedy in the online journal the Huffington Post, Posted October 23, 2005

SO, WHAT’S HAPPENING WITH THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF PUBLISHING?
Fewer publishing houses concentrated in conglomerate hands trying to produce more books of less quality. No full time readers, no full time copy editors and therefore missed newcomers and pisspoor final presentation of texts on the shelves, silly covers, greedy and simple-minded bookshop chains, lunatic bidding wars designed to crush the spirit of unknown newcomers, celebrity “tighten your buns and nurture your inner pot plant” hard backs and much related insanity. Go somewhere else if you can, there is nothing like watching people who care about books being destroyed by publishing to put a blight on your afternoon.

HOW DO I GET PUBLISHED?
Write as well as you possibly can. Markets won’t help you, networking might (Although it will probably also involve the removal of your soul and will only help a little if you can’t write). Sleeping with writers makes them very happy, but as the ability to type with any kind of skill is not contagious, it won’t actually help you. And then we get into sleeping with/ selling drugs to/ blackmailing editors, agents and so on – and if you have the knack of doing that, you don’t need my help.

NO REALLY, HOW DO I GET PUBLISHED?
Find someone you can trust to look at your work, get it into the best possible shape, ruthlessly. Take advice from The Writer’s and Artist’s Yearbook on agents and editors that might suit and then contact them, one at a time. You will probably need an agent to help you catch any editor’s eye, these days—no one really has the time to read any more. And you could try praying, or voodoo. The market is now probably beyond saving and access is ever-decreasing. If I were starting now, I'd be nowhere. Sorry.

WILL I MAKE MONEY OUT OF LITERARY FICTION?
No. Or not quickly, unless you are incredibly lucky. Fiction is not exactly fashionable right now and never really has been a big earner. Then again, if you are writing literary fiction, you probably do it fairly helplessly, because you love it. The fact that we do it for love is, sadly, well-known amongst publishers, editors and so forth and this means we will receive the bare minimum and still be quite happy in an odd kind of, blood-soaked way. Welcome to wonderful world of literary fiction.

WHO WILL MAKE THE MONEY?
Your agent will make a little. Your publisher will mess up making what they could.
And if they mess up too badly you’ll end up out of print. But who needs money?—be happy if you’re in print at all—you can sell your organs to foreign businessmen, you have possibilities, get on with it… And you could be a poet – they don’t make anything…

WHAT ABOUT THE GLAMOUROUS JET-SETTING LIFE OF THE NOVELIST, THEN?
Endless community halls and libraries, immensely tiring tours of places that might be interesting if you ever got to see them, food you can’t eat, or never get, not enough sleep, crushing isolation, little or no chance of a cup of tea on the road, endless working to subsidise the writing… oh yes, it’s all a breeze. Sometimes, you may get to meet the former Bishop of Edinburgh, that’s one of the few high points.

Sometimes it is nice. Sometimes it is immensely grisly. I would recommend tours of Germany, the Leukerbad Festival, The Edinburgh Book Festival, the Victoria Festival, the Vancouver Festival and a few others, but it’s not a roller coaster of unlimited fun out there. Then again, it's nowhere near as lousy as waking up in Fallujah, or being a coal miner—so the whining should be limited.

ISN’T ALL LANGUAGE ESSENTIALLY MEANINGLESS?
I’ve told you before—keep away from those academics.

Of course, when I say “table”, I don’t mean quite the “table” you do—but that’s a good thing. It means you help me to make my “table” mean more.

Language used carefully unites more than it divides, communicates more than it obscures, but it’s also like a gun—it can do as much damage as the person in control of it has the power to inflict. So it’s our duty to learn how to use and understand the words around us. Hint—rush into a room full of Wittgenstein fans and yell "Fire !"—check if they interrogate your meaning for a fortnight, or run for the exits.

WHAT IS THE KEY TO WRITING GOOD FICTION?
Years of practice and observation.

Which isn’t the answer you wanted. I could say “capturing point of view”—but that comes back to years of practice and observation. Or learning a lot about your soul—same problem, if not worse. Just try to be aware of how you work and how that could help you tell other human beings about human beings who don’t exist, but could. Help us to dream together—that’s something we like to do. Tell me a story, I like stories. Tell me as if I were someone you care for, someone you trust and respect, someone as bright as you are, who deserves the best.

BUT FICTION IS ALL JUST RECYCLED FACT AND SCRAPS YOU OVERHEARD ON BUSES, SURELY ?
You can rip off your life and other people’s stories if you like, but that’s more theft than fiction and it will leave you with precious few friends and very little life remaining. Practically speaking, things you make up (it’s called fiction, remember) will fit your story better and be more fun for all concerned. This is, at one level, a meditative flight from self –that’s surely rather better than rummaging round in other people’s leftovers

I WANT TO BE A WRITER, WHAT SHOULD I DO?
Give yourself a severe talking-to. But if you can’t persuade yourself otherwise (and probably you can’t) then what you have to do now, and ever after, is write to the best of your ability and then a little bit better than that.

Then better than that.

And read everything you can, always.

Arts gala!!

2008-10-10T08:54:00.001-07:00

Read about my desk, Friday October 3rd

2008-09-29T08:46:00.000-07:00

In Evie Christie's very entertaining blog:

http://desk-space.blogspot.com

It's scary how much this image evokes me as a child! Clearly Evie is psychic...

The Sorted Books Project

2008-09-17T06:22:00.000-07:00

wherein you make sentences out of titles, is too much of a time-waster even for me, but I appreciate what others have done. Especially this one!

from: http://www.ninakatchadourian.com/languagetranslation/sortedbooks.php

Three interviews about my poems on the Canadian Literature Website

2008-09-16T13:24:00.000-07:00

http://www.canlit.ca/poetry-canlitpoets.php?poemid=69
http://www.canlit.ca/poetry-canlitpoets.php?poemid=70
http://www.canlit.ca/poetry-canlitpoets.php?poemid=71

Bernadette full colour cover

2008-09-15T08:01:00.001-07:00

You have to admit it's pretty damn cute!

Before teaching my first class on Writing the Novel at Ryerson, I re-read these words...

2008-09-08T10:21:00.000-07:00

from “Behind the curtain”
an essay by Milan Kundera
published in The Guardian Saturday March 3, 2007

The Novel as Utopia of a World That Has No Forgetting in It

The perpetual activity of forgetting gives our every act a ghostly, unreal, hazy quality. What did we have for lunch the day before yesterday? What did my friend tell me yesterday? And even: What was I thinking about, three seconds ago? All of that is forgotten and (what's a thousand times worse!) it deserves no better. Against our real world, which, by its very nature, is fleeting and worthy of forgetting, works of art stand as a different world, a world that is ideal, solid, where every detail has its importance, its meaning, where everything in it - every word, every phrase - deserves to be unforgettable and was conceived to be such.

Still, the perception of art does not escape the force of forgetting either. Though it should be said that each art has a different relation to forgetting. From that standpoint, poetry is privileged. A person reading a Baudelaire sonnet cannot skip a single word. If he loves it he will read it several times and perhaps aloud. If he adores it, he will learn it by heart. Lyric poetry is a fortress of memory.

The novel, on the other hand, is a very poorly fortified castle. If I take an hour to read 20 pages, a novel of 400 pages will take me 20 hours, thus about a week. Rarely do we have a whole week free. It is more likely that, between sessions of reading, intervals of several days will occur, during which forgetting will immediately set up its worksite. But it is not only in the intervals that forgetting does its work; it participates in the reading continuously, with never a moment's lapse; turning the page, I already forget what I just read; I retain only a kind of summary indispensable for understanding what is to follow, but all the details, the small observations, the admirable phrasings are already gone. Erased. Someday, years later, I will start to talk about this novel to a friend, and we will find that our memories have retained only a few shreds of the text and have reconstructed very different books for each of us.

And yet the novelist writes his novel as if he were writing a sonnet. Look at him! He is amazed at the composition he sees taking shape before him: the least detail is important to him, he makes it into a motif and will bring it back in dozens of repetitions, variations, allusions, like a fugue. And so he is sure that the second half of his novel will be even finer, stronger, than the first; for the farther one progresses through the castle's halls, the more the echoes of phrases already pronounced, themes already set out, will multiply and, brought together into chords, they will resonate from all sides.

What should the novelist do in the face of that destructive forgetting? Snap his fingers at it and build his novel as an indestructible castle of the unforgettable, even though he knows that his reader will only ramble through it distractedly, rapidly, forgetfully, and never inhabit it.

new cartoon

2008-09-06T11:36:00.000-07:00

wonderful comic strip: "The Bookseller". Enjoy!

2008-09-05T08:11:00.000-07:00

http://community.livejournal.com/scans_daily/5408800.html

cartoon 14

2008-08-29T19:33:00.001-07:00

Red-Headed Bernadette

2008-08-29T07:55:00.000-07:00

The sketch you see below is not the completed cover; for some reason I was unable to copy and save the cover pdf in a way that I could transfer to this blog. But it gives you a good idea of artist Melanie Allard's delightful vision of Bernadette (in front) and her friends Annie, Keisha and Megan. Now, the latter three differ only slightly from the images I had of them in my head while writing. I had always imagined Megan MacDonald as a blond. But what this whole exercise of being illustrated has revealed to me is how important it is to guide the reader's perception of your characters! Something I had done much more consciously in The Violin Lover, since that was conceived from the start as a novel, than in Bernadette, which started off as a little picture book, which I thought I would work on in tandem with an illustrator.

But Bernadette's Experiment, the original story written seven years ago, grew, and grew, and grew, and now is an early novel for readers from the ages of 7-10. (I will blog another time about the long tortured road from picture book to novel.) And rather than having full colour illustrations on every page, it has just a handful of line drawings. Moreover these drawings were executed by Melanie without my input.

When I saw Melanie's first image of Bernadette as a girl with long tangled red curls I was shocked, since in my mind she had short dark hair. But of course NOWHERE in the book had I described her, since I had been writing from her point of view and the only thing about her appearance she commented on was how short she was! Nonetheless, it took all of a minute for me to totally accept Melanie's vision of Bernadette and fall in love with it. And now I've written those red curls right into the text, and can't see her as anything but a redhead.

Bernadette and the Lunch Bunch

2008-08-28T14:47:00.001-07:00

coming to a bookstore near you!

Cartoon number 13

2008-08-02T14:40:00.001-07:00

number 12

2008-07-14T13:47:00.000-07:00

Can it really be cartoon number 11?

2008-07-12T20:17:00.001-07:00

cartoon number 10

2008-07-12T20:04:00.001-07:00

new cartoon

2008-07-09T11:39:00.000-07:00

Incomprehensible Shi(r)t

2008-07-05T10:51:00.001-07:00

I Furiosi: Gorgeous video (and a break from my cartoons!)

2008-07-03T13:24:00.000-07:00

About the cartoons

2008-07-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

Yes, I am the "artist", although they aren't actually drawn, just assembled from online components. The name "Susan" was already in use on the site and since my friend Carrie, an Egyptologist, always calls me "Lotus", I adopted that as my nom de plume. (The name "Susan" comes from the Egyptian word for lotus flower, "she-she," which in Hebrew became "Shoshanah" and took on the meaning of rose.)

cartoon number 8

2008-07-02T19:23:00.000-07:00

cartoon number 7. Help! I can't stop!!

2008-07-01T21:27:00.001-07:00

cartoon number 6

2008-07-01T20:58:00.001-07:00

cartoon number 5

2008-07-01T20:46:00.001-07:00

cartoon number 4

2008-07-01T20:35:00.000-07:00

cartoon number 3

2008-07-01T20:29:00.001-07:00

cartoon number 2

2008-07-01T10:37:00.000-07:00

My first attempt at a comic...

2008-06-30T07:39:00.000-07:00