Freelance December 2013/January 2014 Volume 45 Number 1
In this issue: Seeding Grain in 1973‌ A Call to Create How Do They Do It?
Contents
Vol. 45 Number 1/December 2013 / January 2014
ISSN 0705-1379
© Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild, 2013 President’s Report................. ..............................................................................1 SWG Welcomes New Board Members............................................................2 Executive Director’s Report...............................................................................4 Access Copyright Update...................................................................................5 Seeding Grain in 1973…...................................................................................8 Grain: In the Beginning...................................................................................10 SWG Conference..............................................................................................12 In Search of a Sense of Place: Writing and the Environment.....................14 A Call to Create.................................................................................................22 How Do They Do It? .......................................................................................24 Poetry: Seven Calls...........................................................................................26 Avoiding Avoidance with Free Writing.........................................................28 Space-Time Continuum..................................................................................30 Member News..................................................................................................32 Books By Members..........................................................................................33 Calls of Interest.................................................................................................36 Professional Development...............................................................................37 SWG Conference Highlights...........................................................................40
Contributors to this Issue Ken Mitchell Shirley Byers Jessica Riess Kelly-Anne Riess Edward Willett Jeanne Alexander Gary Hyland Tim Wynne-Jones
On the Cover: Freeze Up Miriam KÖrner is a freelance writer/photographer and visual artist. In 2010 she spent freeze-up on a remote island in Northern Saskatchewan. She documented winter’s icy breath slowly changing the colourful fall landscape into striking black and white scenery. The result was a body of work Vanitas Vanitatum that reflects her quest to capture the magic of one of nature’s most fleeting moments: the birth of new formed ice.
The Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild gratefully acknowledges the support of SaskCulture, Saskatchewan Lotteries Trust Fund and the Saskatchewan Arts Board
Freelance is published six times per year for members of the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild. Submissions to Freelance are welcome for editorial review. If accepted, articles will be edited for clarity. The basic criteria to meet in submitting materials are readership interest, timeliness, and quality and following the standard submission format (see Guild website). Viewpoints expressed in contributed articles are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the SWG. We do not accept poetry or prose at this time. Copyright for articles, reports, photographs, and other visual materials or text remains with the creator and cannot be used or reprinted without permission. SWG pays for one time rights/use only. Payment for articles and reports is 10 cents a word. Photographs and other visuals are paid at a rate of $25 each. Cover art payment is $75. Deadline for the next issue of Freelance: January 5, 2014. SWG BOARD OF DIRECTORS Jeanne Alexander (President), Regina; Gina Rozon (Vice-President), Regina; Harriet Richards (Secretary), Saskatoon; Bevann Fox (Treasurer), Regina; Heather Getz, Regina; Tekeyla Friday, Swift Current; Marianna Topos, Regina; Brian Cobbledick, Regina. Design & Layout Jessica Riess
Contact Us SWG Regina Office Contact P: 306-757-6310 Toll Free: 1-800-667-6788 F: 306-565-8554 E: info@skwriter.com or communications@skwriter.com W: www.skwriter.com Mailing Address Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild Box 3986, Regina, SK S4P 3R9 Regina Courier or Drop-Off Address 1150 8th Avenue, Suite 100 Regina, SK S4R 1C9 SWG Saskatoon Office Contact P: 306-955-5513 F: 306-244-0255 E: saskatoon@skwriter.com Mailing Address Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild Bessborough Hotel Suite 719- 601 Spadina Cresent Saskatoon, S7K 3G8
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SWG President’s Report
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t is a privilege to be elected as President of the Board of the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild. As with any new position, there will be a learning curve but I am pleased to be associated with such a great staff, dedicated Board, and such a diverse and talented group of writers. The first Board meeting was held on November 30 for orientation and to set the year’s priorities. The Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild exists to serve its members. I would encourage you to contact our Executive Director, Judith Silverthorne should you have any considerations, concerns or questions. Compliments are also gratefully accepted. Congratulations to the staff and volunteers for a wellorganized annual conference. Attendees were pleased with the Travelodge South venue in Regina. "Rethink, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Writing and the Environment" was a fitting theme. A collaboration of the SWG and the Ânskohk Festival served to enrich the conference. Our collective thanks to presenters, staff, volunteers, and participants. It is to be noted that an Access 7 “Writing in Saskatchewan” crew and the University of Regina Press crew were present, recording proceedings and conducting interviews. Many members attend our annual conference looking for information, camaraderie, networking and inspiration. The calibre of presenters certainly paved the way for all those needs to be met. Tim Wynne-Jones, award winning author and Caroline Heath lecturer, shared his love of connections to words and to the picture of the place from which he gains inspiration, rural Ontario. During the daily workshops, participants were enthralled with readings by Gregory Scofield and Richard Van Camp. I'm planning to attend next year and I would encourage you to do the same.
Grain Magazine celebrated its 40th Anniversary. Ken Mitchell, the founder, was present. As a gift, those who attended the party were given copies of old editions of Grain. Grain is very much a part of the history of the developing writing scene in Saskatchewan. More specific information will follow in this issue of Freelance. We members owe a vote of thanks to all outgoing Board members. We wish them well. Many have expressed the desire to turn their focus to their own writing. We were reminded by Richard Van Camp that writers are truly fortunate in that no matter what befalls us we have our writing. I believe that the SWG assists writers to stay true to themselves and their art in a multiplicity of ways. As members I would hope that we avail ourselves of the opportunities open to us that are provided by the SWG. I describe myself as a prairie wildflower having been born in Saskatchewan and having lived my life in both rural and urban settings here. When I was asked to allow myself to be nominated I hesitated, thinking, what is it that I can bring to the association? Time, yes, with some adjustments, energy, yes, but for certain a strength of spirit and belief in the good that the SWG encompasses. I look forward to this opportunity and ask that we all work together to maintain what we have and to build upon our past. Here’s to building a bigger and better Saskatchewan Writing Community Respectfully submitted, Jeanne Alexander
The SWG says goodbye to outgoing board members Cathy Fenwick, Rod MacIntyre, Allison Kydd, Lisa Wilson, and Candace Savage. Photo Credit: SWG Staff.
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SWG Welcomes New Board Members
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JEANNE ALEXANDER – PRESIDENT
BEVANN FOX
Jeanne Alexander hosts and produces Writing in Saskatchewan on Access 7 TV. Recently she invited the SWG to partner with her on Words on Air on CJTR 91.3 FM to promote literary events in Saskatchewan. She is the President of the Canadian Club of Regina and she is on the editorial committee of the Saskatchewan Senior Citizens Mechanisms’ Grey Matters. She is currently the past president of the Regina Senior Citizens Centre as well as past president of Wascana Writers. She progressed through the offices of Toastmasters to become Public Relations Office for Alberta and Saskatchewan. She has been published in anthologies and newspapers. Jeanne hosts and produces other radio and TV programs and has a background in administration. She continues to be involved in many community organizations.
Bevann Fox is originally from Piapot First Nation, Treaty Four Territory, a mother of three and grandmother of four grandchildren: Sincere, Robbie, Nona and Nia. She is an author and artist of abstract paint & sculpture. Bevann graduated with an Arts and Culture Degree and Indian Art Minor from the University of Regina. She recently published her first novel Abstract Love to help young adults, schools, First Nations communities and non-First Nations to understand the impact of losing identity, life & relationships. She wrote Abstract Love as fiction based on true events, a searing novel that portrays one woman’s wounds and scars from the hands of colonialism and her reclaim to recover her voice. Bevann is also Co-host and Community Producer of Television Talk Show premiering January 2014. Bringing discussions of Indigenous people to table and promoting lifestyle and success.
BRIAN COBBLEDICK Born and raised in Regina, Brian was the third child of six (two brothers and three sisters). Technically inclined, he was the entrepreneur of the family. He married and also acquired his Black Belt in Judo the same year he graduated from college as an Electronics Technologist. Before becoming hooked on photography, he created charcoal drawings and business graphics, excelling at drafting. As a photographer he goes by the philosophy that there is beauty in everything around us – “the world around you will give up its secrets if you are ready, observant and patient. There’s beauty all around. You just have to open your eyes to it.” He has self-published a book of poems and short stories with accompanying photos to augment the feelings expressed. Brian is a PMP, Senior Project Management consultant with relationship management skills. He has proficiency gained through leading multi-skilled, cross-functional, client and technical teams over a 40-year career in Crown Corporations, Government and the private sector. His expertise is in recovering failed or failing projects. Brian has presented multiple whitepaper to his peers at the Project Management - Professional Development Conferences.
TEKEYLA FRIDAY Tekyela Friday works for the Swift Current Branch Library as the Children’s Coordinator for Children’s Programming across the Chinook Regional Library district. She writes puppet scripts and plans literacy-based programs for 0 to 5 year olds. In her spare time, she writes for R.E.A.L. Canadian Kids magazine while developing her skills as a young adult novelist. In the past she has been the president of the Prairie Quills Writers’ Group in Swift Current and has helped organized their anthologies. HEATHER GETZ (formerly Becker) When she was six years old she told people she wanted to be a poet when she grew up. That hasn’t happened. Although she has inflicted bad poetry and song parodies on people on special occasions, she prefers to encourage others’ talent in this area. She writes children’s fiction and creative non-fiction, and she has used, appreciated and referred others to the SWG manuscript evaluation service. She has been a member
SWG Freelance of the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild for many years. She is also a past member of CANSCAIP. She completed her degree in English and Religious Studies at the University of Regina. She has enjoyed a twenty-year career in Saskatchewan as a communications professional, working as a freelance corporate writer, sales coach, public relations and communications consultant. She is currently the Manager of Social Marketing at the Saskatchewan Workers’ Compensation Board with primary responsibility for promoting the WorkSafe Saskatchewan and Mission: Zero injury prevention initiatives. Heather is honoured to serve on the SWG Board. HARRIET RICHARDS Harriet Richards’ creative reality was as a visual artist until an obstinate painting insisted on becoming a short story. Since then, she has published three books of fiction. Her novel, The Lavender Child, won the 1998 Saskatchewan Book Award (SBA) Best First Book. Waiting for the Piano Tuner to Die (short fiction) was a finalist for the 2003 SBA Book of the Year. The Pious Robber (short fiction) was winner of the 2013 SBA Fiction Award and finalist for Book of the Year. She has edited many books of fiction and literary essays for writers across Canada, and mentored emerging writers through the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild. Her writing has been featured on CBC Radio and published in Canada and Wales, and her paintings have appeared on book covers in both countries.
December 2013 / January 2014
and strong organizational skills—the latter of which she uses as an employee with the Ministry of Social Services, Housing Division. Gina is eager to serve as a director on the Board of the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild. MARIANNA TOPOS Marianna Topos was born in Hungary but since 1985 she has resided in Saskatchewan. She now calls Regina home. She started writing at age 10, but as she describes, she was a closet writer. She was an active member, and for several years a coordinator, of the Survivors Writers Group. She was a previous board member of the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild from 2005-2007. She’s spent her 28 years in Canada volunteering for many good causes, mainly school and community related programs. Marianna was an influential and founding member of two nonprofit organizations dealing with social issues and youth programs. When not working on social concerns, she is busy trying to establish and coordinate an open writers group.
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GINA ROZON Gina Rozon presently lives and works in Regina, although she nurtured her writing career in La Ronge. Her humour column was syndicated in several rural Saskatchewan newspapers and broadcast on CBC Radio for two years. Her non-fiction and fiction also appeared in a variety of local, regional, national, and international publications. She was selected as part of the SWG mentorship program in 2005 and had a short story short-listed for Saskatchewan’s Short Literary Awards in the same year (she swears all these shorts are true and don’t just add up to one tall tale). Her mentor in the 2005 SWG mentorship program has yet to forgive her for allowing her novel to lapse into a coma when she moved to Regina. Gina brings with her a sharp wit, clear eye
Bob Currie and Byrna Barclay were awarded Honourary Lifetime Memberships to the SWG during the 2013 Conference. Photo Credit: SWG Staff.
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Executive Director’s Report Good ideas need landing gear as well as wings.
M
C. D. Jackson
any of the Guild’s programs have been flying along at a high altitude for years. Some are even soaring way above the anticipated results, while others are hovering a little, not yet strong enough to ascend on a steady course. Then there are those that are floating gently while being tested. Several new ideas are hanging in the air, while some are drifting and may not find a home base from which to skyrocket. Still others are sitting in the hangar waiting for repairs, maybe to be replaced or adjusted, or even discarded. All of them have their landing base in usage, relevance to Guild mandates, funding, and meeting the contemporary needs of the members on a variety of levels.
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One Guild program that continues to circle high is the SWG Writers/Artist Retreats. Although sometimes it needs a little review or repairs, it is an SWG program that continues to wheel and climb steadily as a priority
program. We’re really pleased in fact that even though accommodation and meal costs have risen once again at St. Peter’s, we are able to keep registration fees on a fairly even keel this year. Full costs this year per person attending the retreats, including overhead administration, and meals and accommodations, have reached an all time high of $765. However, these costs are still substantially lower than anywhere else is in the country. In addition, the Guild is providing considerable subsidies for Saskatchewan-based members and fees will only be $350 per person per week. Out of province members and non-members will still enjoy a discount as well, at $560 and $650 per week per person respectively. There may come a time, when subsidies and discounts are not possible, but until then, we’ll pass them along to participants as best as we can. Just a reminder too that the SWG Author Readings Program is still flying high with success and we have increased the number of readings each author can do in a fiscal year to seven. We encourage Aboriginal writers and communities to participate more fully too. If you’re a member, please make sure your profile is on the Guild webpage so hosts can find you. There are no deadlines for host applications. Readings can be booked year round. New programs will unfurl in 2014 to be more inclusive and equitable for our diverse writers, including those designated equity groups under the human rights code. This means the Guild will work towards being more inclusive for Aboriginal Peoples, People with Disabilities and those from Visible Minorities. Our main goal is that we are providing programming and services that are culturally sensitive and appropriate overall, and that we are being as inclusive and equitable to people from diverse backgrounds as we can be so that anyone who is interested in literary/writing pursuits feels welcome and we are serving their needs to the best of our abilities and the sanctions of our operations. Being multicultural in our approach is of importance in the province as well as across the country. New also is the 2013 -2014 SWG Board, which was acclaimed at the AGM in Regina on November 3. You’ll find an introducation to each of the members in this issue of Freelance. I look forward to working with them and all the exciting accomplishments we can achieve this coming year. Happy writing and all the best over this coming holiday season and in the New Year!
Bob Armstrong, TWUC Prairie Representative. Photo Credit: SWG Staff.
Judith Silverthorne Executive Director
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Access Copyright Update Dear Member Organizations & Affiliates, Following an important day of decision making at a Board meeting earlier this month, we have much to report. On behalf of the Access Copyright Board of Directors, we are pleased to provide you with an update on our organization’s progress toward transformation.
changing copyright landscape, through marketing and communications. 4. Be an organization that is innovative, nimble, entrepreneurial and responsive to copyright management and content needs of creators, publishers, and users.
As you are well aware, there is change afoot in the publishing industry in Canada. We are meeting that change head on. At The Next Chapter Summit 2013 in Toronto last spring, one hundred Access Copyright creator and publisher representatives convened to roll up their sleeves and work on shaping the need to change. Since then, our Board has endorsed this new transformation agenda and much progress has been made. New directors are inclusive of all those who create, produce, use and value content. As a renewed organization, Access Copyright will serve, connect and benefit both content and content users.
Business Strategy:
A productive few months:
Copyright clearance tools and services that integrate seamlessly with digital technologies and services will encourage the use of professionally produced content on digital platforms and services. Access Copyright would bring the content to where the educators, students and researchers are by integrating copyright clearance and content access tools with digital services.
Following the summit, the Access Copyright staff along with a number of working groups (whose members are your colleagues from across the country) were charged with exploring all possibilities for the future of the organization. We now have a firm foundation and forward-looking directions on three fronts. The board had approved: •
New business strategies
•
The need for a new governance to lead the organization through its transition and beyond
•
Improved communications to support the organization as it transforms
The next three years: Research on the changing marketplace; analysis of our customers’ behaviors and their attitudes toward copyright and the reuse of content; and discussions with creators and publishers have informed us and lead to the following four overarching goals: 1. Develop and implement services that provide seamless copyright clearance and content access in digital platforms. 2. Clarify scope of fair dealing and other exceptions. 3. Position Access Copyright as a thought leader in a
These business strategies look three years into the future, focus on the value and vitality of the organization, and seek to augment our current operations with new and innovative service offerings to meet the changing needs of content users. Access Copyright sees its future role as enabling the creation, discovery, and convenient use of high-quality content for researchers, students and educators, by seamlessly integrating copyright clearance with digital technologies and services.
There is much work to do to on these fronts, and in the months to come, we will be exploring the possibilities that come with partnerships in innovation.
Governance: In order to support transformation, the Board struck a special advisory committee. Made up of members and affiliates, this dedicated ad hoc working group examined key governance questions, including: "Is the current governance structure capable of recruiting the expertise needed to oversee the transformation mandated by the membership?" and "Would affiliates be better served by a strategic, purpose-built board with a fiduciary duty to rightsholders?" The committee has now proposed a new governance structure for consideration. It will be further studied by the Board; however, we have agreed that there is need for a new governance structure to lead the organization through its transition and beyond. We have more work to do on this front and will keep you informed of our
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progress. We thank those members and affiliates for their service.
Improved communications: New and improved communications will support and reflect the transition of the organization. In the coming months, these communications will take shape on the Access Copyright website, and through a series of communications to address key topics.
Litigation Update: In closing, we would like to provide you with an update on legal action. While it may seem counterintuitive as we work to serve those who read, teach and learn, we will continue to disagree with the education sector's broad interpretation of fair dealing. Their new copyright policies are arbitrary and unsupported and they encourage copying that is outside the law. The way forward must be sustainable for all. We must ensure creators and publishers are able to provide teachers and students with the materials and content they require going forward.
Please know that legal action is a last resort, and although we will stand strong as we look to the courts for clarity, we will not look to them to define our collective future. Our mandate as an organization aspires to more productive discussions surrounding collaboration and the creation, production and use of content. Amidst social, technological, legal and regulatory change, there is opportunity, as well as responsibility to ensure that in our country writers keep writing and publishers keep publishing. We take this responsibility seriously and are dedicated to forging a future for copyright in Canada that works for everyone. On behalf of the Board, as well as the staff at Access Copyright, thank you for your continued interest and support in this time of transition. We will keep you informed of our progress, but would welcome any thoughts you may have at editor@accesscopyright.ca.
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SWG Foundation for immediate priority programs and operating costs.
Faciliated Retreat Fund to support facilitated retreats for emerging writers
SWG Foundation Endowment Fund a long-term investment fund, the interest of which is to fund programs and the organization
Judy McCrosky Bursary Fund covers the registration fee for a slected participant to attend one week at the SWG Writers/Artists winter retreat
Legacy Project Fun the sole purpose is for procurement and maintenance of a building, which will become a permanent home for the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild
Caroline Heath Memorial Fund to sustain the Caroline Heath Memorial Lecture series, which features senior writers and publishers as guest lecturers at the SWG Fall Conference
Make Cheques or money orders payable to the SWG Foundation, PO Box 3986, Regina, SK, S4P 3R9. You can also donate via PayPal at www.skwriter.com/payments-and-donations
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Poet Laureate Announced The Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild is delighted to announce that Judith Krause of Regina is the new Poet Laureate of Saskatchewan. Judith's term will begin January 1, 2014 and will run until December 31, 2015. Judith Krause is a Regina poet, editor and educator whose publications include four books of poetry and a collaborative chapbook. A fifth collection tentatively entitled Homage to Happiness is slated for publication in the fall of 2014. Judith has studied writing in Canada, France, and the US where she completed an MFA in Creative Writing. She is a two-time winner of the City of Regina Writing Award and co-winner of the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Award. The Saskatchewan Arts Board, Saskatchewan Book Awards and the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild are partners in the program, which is under the patronage of the Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan, Her Honour the Honourable Vaughn Solomon Schofield. Judith Krause, new Poet Laureate. Photo Credit: Tom Bartlett.
City of Regina Writing Award 7 The Saskatchewan Writers' Guild is seeking applications for the 2014 City of Regina Writing Award, funded by the City of Regina. This competition is an award for literary merit in creative writing; it is open to writers in all genres. The $4,000 award is designed to enable one local writer to work on a specific solo writing project for a threemonth period. The award competition is juried by professional writers from outside Saskatchewan. You are eligible to apply for this award if you are 19 years and older and if you were a Regina resident as of January 1, 2013. Applicants may submit one entry to this competition per year. The recipient of the award must complete the three-month grant period by the end of February 2015. The decision of the jury will be final. Jurors may choose to not award the prize if they believe no submission merits it. Applications can be emailed to programs@skwriter.com by midnight Friday, January 31, 2014. If sent by regular mail, they must be postmarked by Friday, January 31, 2014 (see address below). If sending by courier, send to the courier address listed below, not the box number. Mailing Address
Courier or Drop-Off Address
City of Regina Writing Award Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild Box 3986 Regina, SK S4P 3R9
Submissions must arrive by 4:30 pm, Friday, Jan. 31, 2014 City of Regina Writing Award Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild #100-1150 8th Avenue Regina, SK S4R 1C9
For More Information Tracy Hamon, Program Manager Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild Phone: (306) 791-7743 Fax: (306) 565-8554 E-mail: programs@skwriter.com
This program is funded by a generous grant from the City of Regina Arts Commission.
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SEEDING GRAIN IN 1973… By Ken Mitchell
… was a highly significant moment in the history of the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild -- a moment of expectation and triumph in the Guild’s development as a literary community. The SWG was about three years old at that point and was coming to full development under the leadership of Geoffrey Ursell -- yes, another Moose Javian -- who had just returned to Saskatchewan from the University of Manitoba.
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The Guild was enthusiastic about establishing a prairiebased writers’ magazine, but it wasn’t my idea alone. I was teaching at the Summer School of the Arts at Fort Qu’Appelle in 1972, and inspired by a proposal of our writer-in-residence, Robert Kroetsch, at that time a guest from Binghamton, New York. He thought it was time for an original and non-academic literary quarterly to hit the newsstands, not only in Saskatchewan, but all of Canada. He said he would submit some of his “Old Man Stories” if I got such a magazine into production. I went to the SWG executive, and though they were a bit alarmed at the cost of printing, offered to apply to the Saskatchewan Arts Board. I.e., I needed startup help. That first issue of Grain -- June, 1973 -- spoke for itself. I won’t list the entire threshing crew of the first Grain harvest, but they included Kroetsch, John Hicks, Nancy Senior, Martha E. Crawford, Mark Abley, George Bowering, Douglas Barbour, and Stephen Scobie. My Associate Editors were Anne Szumigalski and Caroline Heath. The advisory board consisted of Margaret Atwood, Hugh Hood, and Rudy Wiebe. The first cover blazed with a ceramic portrait of “King” by Joe Fafard, then just beginning his own artistic career. But my first words of gratitude went to our first business manager, Bob Ivanochko; he worked at the Saskatchewan Provincial Library, and not only looked after Grain’s financial management – a volunteer role, like everybody else’s --, he shipped bushels of our new Grain crop to the major libraries of Canada and the U.S. Imagine! A free copy for every library, every one accompanied by a signup subscription form. In that first year, I believe we had a subscription list reaching nearly a thousand libraries. Most members of the Guild - a much smaller number than now. maybe 300 – signed up as well. It was an exhilarating time, full of hope and praise for the new Saskatchewan harvest. Following Western Producer, Prairie Books, Bob Currie’s Salt magazine, and The
Ken Mitchell celebrates the anniversary of Grain Magazine. Photo Credit: SWG Staff.
Wascana Review, the guild generated a rise in the literary grain market and exported it around the world. The Guild was proud of the accomplishment, and many remain so to this day. When I spoke at the Conference and AGM last month about my disappointment in the “celebration” of Grain’s 40th anniversary, it was out of my concern about the future of Grain, and our Guild’s role in it. There appears to be an antagonism between the magazine and the Guild in the current market - perhaps because we have lost the taste for Grain, or because digital communication has so eviscerated the language and our thinking that we want to escape from the printed page. But we might consider taking it online. Still, I was cheered to see the 40th anniversary celebration promoted by the Writers’ Guild. Many thanks to those who participated.
SWG Freelance Ken Mitchell is a Canadian poet, novelist, and playwright. Mitchell is a founding member of the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild and of Grain magazine. He is well known for his literary works depicting prairie culture.
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A Brief History of Grain By Ken Mitchell
G
rain magazine published its first issue in June 1973, a Gestetner edition with stapled, taped bindings, and with cover art on a card-stock cover by a then new artist Joe Fafard. The first edition, edited by Ken Mitchell, Anne Szumigalski, and Caroline Heath included writings by Robert Kroetsch, George Bowering, Robert Currie, and John V. Hicks, and cost $1.00. A subscription cost $2 a year, or $5 for three years. This was the first of a series of semiannual issues. In 1976, Grain began publishing three issues a year, and then in 1981, moved to its present quarterly - four issues a year - state.
First edition of Grain magazine, 1973.
Throughout all these years, Grain has published the best new writing from Canada and abroad, approximately 2000 pieces of writing and over 220 art images, many of them from Saskatchewan. Grain editors over the years have been: Ken Mitchell, Caroline Heath, E.F. Dyck, Brenda Riches, Mick Burrs, Geoffrey Ursell, J. Jill Robinson, Elizabeth Philips, Kent Bruyneel, Sylvia Legris and Rilla Friesen. Grain has grown up with a generation of literary magazines, and is proud to be alive and flourishing after nearly 30 years of life. This success is due to the readers, and contributors, but also to primary funding sponsors: Saskatchewan Writers Guild (publisher-in-chief), Sask Lotteries, Saskatchewan Arts Board, The Canada Council for the Arts and The Canada Magazine Fund. ~
Grain magazine, Volume 20 Number 4 - Winter 1992.
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Grain: In the Beginning By Edward Willett
I
t’s appropriate that Grain, the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild magazine celebrating its 40th year of presenting bumper crops of literary achievement, began with the planting of a single seed, courtesy of Robert Kroetsch.
“At the time we were running the Summer School of the Arts writing program, and asked him to come in as a guest teacher,” recalls Ken Mitchell, then serving on the Guild’s board of directors. “The initiative came from him. There was a great dearth of literary magazines, particularly in Western Canada, and he said we should take the opportunity to set one up. He said if we did he had some current work he was working on he would contribute.” That seed sprouted into a discussion among Mitchell, Robert Currie and Geoffrey Ursell about the feasibility
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of setting up a literary magazine “that would cater to Saskatchewan writers and get the work of Writers Guild members into libraries.” The sprout soon grew taller, and began to leaf out. Mitchell agreed to edit the first issue and began working on it. A business manager, Bob Ivanochko, who worked for the provincial library and had an interest in writing, was brought on board, and an application was sent to the Saskatchewan Arts Board for the initial funding. With Kroetsch’s pieces already in hand, and with the help of associate editors Anne Szumigalski and Caroline Heath, Mitchell recruited writers from all across the province to submit material. “Some were really well known and others had just started, but we had a good representation from all of Saskatchewan.” Among those with pieces in the first issue was Robert Currie, elected chairman of the Guild that same year. (Looking back on it now, Currie says his story “wasn’t very good.” He describes it as “a short-short about a student who was scratching a naked woman into his desk at school.”) Currie had previously published his own literary magazine, Salt, “a mimeographed thing out of his basement,” as Mitchell puts it. But then, that first issue of Grain was exactly up to current production standards. As the brief history of the magazine on Grain’s website (www. grainmagazine.ca) puts it, it was “a gestetner edition with stapled, taped bindings.” Setting a precedent that continues to this day, though, the fledgling magazine featured artwork on its card-stock cover, a photograph of a sculpture by a promising new artist named Joe Fafard. “We put together a pretty classy magazine,” Mitchell says. “We called it Grain because we wanted to get this kind of an idea that was what we were producing here, literary grain for Saskatchewan. It seemed like a good crop.” Although the first issue wasn’t filled exclusively with work by Saskatchewan writers, most of those authors it published (which besides Kroetsch and Currie included John V. Hicks and George Bowering) were from the West, and mostly from the prairie provinces. “We wanted it to focus on that.”
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Of course, it’s one thing to produce a magazine; it’s another to get it read. That’s where Ivanochko came in. “He thought he could do a lot to get this into circulation— and that was the major accomplishment,” Mitchell says. “He sent copies of that first publication to, I think, every library—certainly every university library—in Canada, and several to the United States, with an invitation for them to take a subscription. And that worked!” The magazine was priced at $1 an issue, or $2 for a subscription (there were two issues a year). The best bargain was the $5 three-year subscription. “We got a great subscription list happening through his initiative through the libraries. People really liked Grain, the Saskatchewan harvest of literary talent, and it took off at that point.” But almost as soon as Grain got off the ground, it lost its editor. “I had to go to Greece the following year to do some work there,” Mitchell explains. As Currie recalls, at the same meeting at which he was elected chair, while he was still “in a little bit of shock,” the Guild board decided to offer the editorship to Caroline Heath, one of the associate editors on the first issue. “I was camping out at Gordie Howe Park that weekend,” Currie remembers. “When I went back there after the Sunday part of the meeting, I phoned her on the park payphone and asked her to edit Grain.”
Katherine Lawrence brings reminisces from former contributors to the Grain celebrations. Photo Credit: SWG Staff.
She agreed, and Grain was off and running. In 1976 it moved to three issues a year, and in 1981 to its present quarterly schedule. Editors since Mitchell and Heath have been E.F. Dyck, Brenda Riches, Mick Burrs, Geoffrey Ursell, J. Jill Robinson, Elizabeth Philips, Kent Bruyneel, Sylvia Legris, and Rilla Freisen. Both Currie and Mitchell have had occasional pieces in Grain over its four decades of existence. “It’s always a thrill,” Currie says. “So many writers have had their work there, which meant it was read all around North America. It’s been a wonderful thing for this community.” As Saskatchewan people know better than most, great things happen when you plant the right seed. Edward Willett is a freelance writer and performer in Regina. He is the author of 50 books of some sort or another.
Bruce Rice at the Grain 40th Anniversary. Photo Credit: SWG Staff.
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SWG Conference: Celebrating Community By Kelly-Anne Riess
12 Some Ânskohk Aboriginal Literature Festival Board members and guests at the Ânskohk Learning Luncheon: Louise Halfe, Richard Van Camp, Elder Norma Walsh; Gregory Scofield, Rita Bouvier, Lisa Wilson, Deborah Lee, Kateri Akiwanzie-Damm, Andréa Ledding. Photo Credit: SWG Staff.
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hort story writer Chris Fisher grew up wanting to be an English professor; instead he grew up a computer geek. The Lumsden-based writer confessed this at the recent Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild conference, themed around writing and the environment. Chris’ parents were very practical and wanted to make sure he could have a job—so he pursued a career in computers, but he couldn’t suppress his love of books, and so he began writing them on top of his already busy day job. He published three short story collections—Third and Long, Voices in the Wilderness, and Sun Angel. Coteau Books released the short story The Road Less Travelled as an eBook in 2012. Chris’ humour column, “Views from the Mews,” has been published bi-weekly since 2005 in the Lumsden Water Front Press. Chris has taught writing workshops at the Banff Centre and, in addition to his day job in computers, he is currently working away at a novel. I think a lot of writers can relate to Chris’ story, including myself - my own parents encouraged me to pursue engineering, instead of writing. Most of us work day jobs or at contracts for money, so we can do the important business of writing. Chris’ message to us all is that we can fit our writing in. We can balance the practical—day jobs
for money; with the important work of writing that doesn’t always bring money. Relating our experiences and sharing our advice is an important part of the SWG conference. “Writers are isolated beasts. That’s why we come to conferences,” said Chris, while speaking on the panel, “Six Degrees of Seperation—the three C’s of Craft, Community and Challenges,” where he, Andréa Ledding, BD Miller, and I spoke about the pros and cons of having formal education in creative writing. I couldn’t agree more with Chris. Often, I’m toiling away in my home office with only the company of my cat. And so I look forward to social occasions with my fellow writers. It’s a primary reason I go to conferences, attend the Sage Hill Writing Experience, or pursue other formal creative writing education—it’s for the people. At events like the conference we can connect with our writer friends from all over Saskatchewan and across Canada. Attendees, this year, came from as far north as Creighton and La Ronge, from Winnipeg, and even Ontario, among other places. I go to the conference for the people. Learning and improving upon my knowledge
SWG Freelance of the craft is my secondary reason for attending the conference, although also important. At the conference, when I sat down at a table full of writers that included Mitch Spray, the Saskatoon author of the History of Naming Cows, and Anne McDonald, from Regina, who wrote To the Edge of the Sea, and asked: what’s the most valuable thing they take away from Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild conferences; they all said the same thing. “It’s the networking,” said Mitch, about what he enjoys most about the SWG conferences. “It’s the re-meeting of people you haven’t seen in awhile,” agreed Anne, who I first met at a writing retreat organized at the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild at St. Peter’s College.
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Kelly-Anne Riess: As a freelance journalist, Riess’ work has appeared in newspapers and magazines across Canada, including such publications as Canadian Geographic and the Globe and Mail. To End a Conversation is her first collection of poetry and was featured on CBC.
Mitch and I go back several years, having met before either of us had published books, as timid beginning writers who gained our confidence by attending the Sage Hill Writing Experience “Introduction to Poetry and Fiction” in 2006 under the instruction of Robert Currie and Jeanette Lynes. It was great to see Mitch again at the conference. It had been a few years. Bob, of course, was at this year’s conference too, to be recognized for his contributions to Saskatchewan’s writing community with a honorary lifetime membership, along with Byrna Barclay, Geoffrey Ursell, Pat Krause, Lynn Goldman and Margaret Durant. “How's that for good company? It was a wonderful surprise,” said Bob, who lives in Moose Jaw, about the honour. He said a highlight for him at this year’s conference was from Richard Van Camp when he said: "You write about what breaks your heart."
13 Gregory Scofield, guest speaker at Ânskohk Learning Luncheon. Photo Credit: SWG Staff.
“How true,” said Bob. Listening and learning from other writers at the SWG conference validates and inspires our own creative processes. The conference is also a celebration of our work. Not only was I thrilled for Bob’s lifetime membership, I was also pleased to learn Linda Biasotto, Lisa Guenther and Marlis Wesseler were the winners of the 2013 Saskatchewan Writers' Guild's John V. Hicks Manuscript Awards. For years, I have been in a writing group with Linda and read a lot of her early drafts as she worked her way through the manuscript Sweet Life, which not only won the Hicks, but will be published by Coteau in the spring of 2013. Marlis was my instructor at the Sage Hill Teen Writing Experience, so I was, of course, happy for her too. And I look forward to reading Lisa’s writing someday as well. Celebrating our community, reconnecting with friends, sharing experiences and words of wisdom is what the SWG conference is all about.
Richard Van Camp reading at the SWG 2013 Conference in Regina. Photo Credit: SWG Staff.
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In Search of a Sense of Place: Writing and the Environment By Tim Wynne-Jones The Caroline Heath Lecture, Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild Fall Conference Friday, November 1, 2013. A version of this lecture was also previously printed in The Lion and the Unicorn, Volume 35, No. 2, April 2011.
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am so honoured to be here and to have been asked to give the Caroline Heath Lecture. I gather Sylvia Tyson sung, last year, and so I am emboldened to do so tonight. The song is of some contextual reference. It’s about living somewhere and living nowhere, at the same time. He’s a Burger King on a shift-work team, Saving up for a ring for his Dairy Queen. There’s so many things that he’d liked to say, But for now all he says is “Have a nice day.”
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He’s the Lord of the Fries; she’s the Lady of the Shakes, If you shake her you can hear just how much money she makes. There’s so many things that she’d like to do, But for now all she does is one scoop or two. There’s school to be finished and money to be made, No time to be kids, but that’s a small price to pay. A small price. Or maybe they’ll go get some kids of their own; Imagine their surprise: Small Fries. Oh, God bless this marriage made in fast food heaven. Nothing’s gonna come between them ‘cept for old Highway Seven. No, nothing’s gonna come between them, you can see it in her eyes. She’s so in love with her Lord of the Fries. While the world today stretches out, seemingly endless, into the ether, we are bound by the places we live. A kid, today, can go anywhere on Google Earth. We can simulate walking down a street in Mumbai or Barcelona. The world is our oyster, or, at least our e-oyster. There’s nothing stopping a kid from Perth, Ontario or from Carrot River Saskatchewan, let’s say, from backpacking in Cappadocia, working for an NGO in Nairobi or walking the Camino in Spain. But there is a part of us that will always be from somewhere. A particular somewhere. The accident of our birth links us to place. Paradoxically, there are many of us who spend a lifetime searching for a sense of place. And that is the title of my talk tonight. In Search of a Sense of
Place: Writing and the Environment. But I might well give it another title: “Where is here anymore?” One bright October day, ten years ago, I went out into the woods behind my home with my wife’s camera in search of an alphabet. I recently uncovered some of those photographs while rummaging through the enormous clutter of my pre-digital life. I’m not sure if I snapped all 26 letters; all I could find were nine. But that was enough to spell out an interesting question. By shifting around strips of bark on a thickly carpeted bit forest floor, I made the letter “W.” By laying a nice, straight stick across a tractor’s trail, I got myself a nicely elongated capital “H.” And a perfect “Y” I found lying under a dead poplar tree. “Why?” Why search for an alphabet in the woods? Laurence Buell in his wonderful book, The Environmental Imagination, asks this question: “Must literature always lead us away from the physical world, never back to it?” Now, admittedly, an alphabet is not literature, but in truth I often go to the woods to find stories, if only in the sense that I find a kind of peace there that is conducive to wondering as I wander. On one occasion I found a beaver dam where there wasn’t one before and in figuring out how to empty this impromptu lake, which now separated my property roughly in two, I ended up finding the opening to a story I was having trouble starting. This is how The Boy in the Burning House began. I live on seventy-six acres of land in Eastern Ontario. Tellingly, I spoke of the “woods” behind my house, earlier, when in fact it is really just bush. No local would speak of this hardscrabble land as woods. I used the word in an entirely literary way, reflecting my British childhood and, more correctly, my early reading. One doesn’t go to the “bush” to find a story, at least I don’t. Trees in sufficient number to hide any man-made artifice will always be woods for me unless they stretch on forever in which case they become forest, like the boreal forest that surrounds the northern Ontario lake where we have a camp and spend some part of every summer there. The same lake, more or less, to which Burl Crow tracked down the elusive
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and solitary composer Nathaniel Gow in my novel The Maestro. Our camp at Lake Pogomasing – an Ojibwa word meaning “lake of many narrows” – cannot be reached by road but only by floatplane or by a train called the Budd Car, which will drop you off wherever you wish. The two-kilometer walk from the train track through this primordial forest is along a rough but man-made trail that has been there for 10,000 years. I’ll take you back to this place later in our talk. But for now, I want to wander about a little aimlessly in the much gentler woods. Woods, for me, are the Hundred-Acre preserve of Winnie the Pooh; woods are the semi-mystical landscape with a river running through it of Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows; woods are something only wild-ish – something contained within a literary sensibility. I own brush-land, which I choose to call woods, unless, of course, I’m hiring a local man to cut some of it down. Woods, for me, are, I suppose, a translation of nature into story. There is, in Japanese, an ideogram called “ma”, meaning “place”. It looks like a mask with shuttered eyes and a gaping mouth. But it is the pictorial sign for “gate; and the sign for “moon.” The word, according to Günter Nitschke, “depicts a delicate moment of moonlight streaming through a chink in the entranceway”. To Nitschke’s way of thinking, this juxtaposition of images “fully expresses the two simultaneous components of a sense of place: the objective, given aspect and the subjective, felt aspect”. Nitschke says, “this Japanese sense of ‘Ma’ is not something that is created by compositional elements; it is the thing that takes place in the imagination of the human who experiences these elements”. When I first encountered these notions, I was a star-struck, rather provincial, architecture student at the University of Waterloo. Günter Nitschke’s explorations of architectural anthropology had appeared a year earlier, in 1966, in a special edition of the British magazine Architectural Design. What I could grasp as a raw nineteen year-old, who had spent a great deal of his childhood being uprooted, was that in Japanese a child’s first word did not identify the source of nurture as we in the West have translated the utterance “Ma” but instead, this first word registered a child’s sense of place. So in Japanese the word “ma-dori” means “design”: literally a grasp of place, and the word “ma-nuke” means “simpleton”: literally, someone missing “ma”. That is, in a roundabout way, what I want to examine today: the potential loss of a sense of place brought about by the cyber conquest of real space. I’m not suggesting that virtual
Tim Wynne-Jones at the Caroline Heath Memorial Lecture at the 2013 SWG Conference. Photo Credit: SWG Staff.
reality will necessarily turn people into simpletons, but it seems likely that it will effect in some pervasive way that the world is viewed. I am worried about what Lawrence Buell has identified as “Nature Deficit Disorder”. I want to look at this notion as it applies to children, especially; and especially those children whose lives increasingly revolve around or are subsumed by virtual reality. I am musing here; I can bring to bear on this subject little in the way of expertise, little in the way of research. My biases will be immediately recognizable. My ruminations are a response to a comment Buell makes in the cumulative pages of the chapter called “Representing the Environment.” It is this chapter, in particular, that I want to consider. Let me quote him:: Nowhere in modern aesthetic reflection has the animus against nature’s givenness burst forth more spectacularly than in celebrations of the wonders of the most realistic of all media, cybernetically produced virtual reality (VR) . . . What thoughts does this prospect of hyperreality inspire? Not, of course, delight at having realized the world, but delight at mastery over it. That so-called mastery over the world strikes me as problematic. Especially if it entails giving up on the realizing of the world – that is, making it real, oneself. To me this imaginative process is an ongoing thing that
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involves some confluence of the real world with literature that portrays the real world, not merely as setting but as a vital element to narrative. In considering virtual reality, Lawrence Buell quotes Eric Gullichsen and Randal Walser from an article entitles “Cyberspace: Experimental Computing” from a book on virtual reality. To wit: In cyberspace, there is no need to move about in a body like the one you possess in physical reality. You may feel more comfortable at first, with a body like your “own” but as you conduct more of your life and affairs in cyberspace your conditioned notion of a unique and immutable body will give way to a far more liberated notion of “body” as something quite disposable and, generally, limiting.
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With this in mind, I have taken my disposable and generally limited body out to the woods to see what is there. And I have spent a bit of time contemplating what it is we do in books when we attempt to create a sense of place. I want to ask the question whether these imagined places created on paper (that was itself once part of some boreal forest) are worth saving, when someone can do the imagining for us with so much more allure. I believe every book is an intermediary between two worlds – the one that we live in and the one that the writer takes us to. Because no matter how exotic the book’s locale may be, it is imbued with the reader’s own locale. This is especially true for young readers. Not having seen much of the world, they cannot help reading into a story what they do know, what they have experienced, what they have seen. The writer creates with lively words only scaffolding upon which the reader hands the hills and valleys and skies of his or her own place. On the other hand, the world in which one’s avatar roams, plays, battles, and makes hot new friends is not imaginative at all in the sense I am using the word here. There is no making of images – the images are provided. The young cybernaut brings nothing to the building of this virtual world but his yearning to be distracted and titillated; all the world building is done for him in livid color and generally with a throbbing score to keep the activity level high, a score that inhibits anything like contemplation. That is true, at least, in the world of videogames. In the world of role-playing sims, there is no score, but the world, such as it is, is mapped out. In the world of literary fiction, the reader is a collaborator; in the cyberworld, the audience is a tourist.
An avatar, in the present usage of the word, is an electronic image that represents and is manipulated by a computer user, especially in the context of computer games or the kind of role-playing communities one finds on such sites as Second Life. In Second Life, once you’ve decided whether you want to be a princess or a pirate, let’s say, you can choose your avatar – your digital persona. Apparently, this process is “only limited by your imagination”. But that isn’t entirely true, as far as I could tell. There are models provided and, yes, you can tint the skin and there are options of eye shadow and costumes galore, but it’s pretty well Angelina Jolie all the way. Or do I mean Barbie doll? And the setting, the cyber environment, is no less limiting. I myself had trouble choosing between “The Nation of Victoriana” and “The Trojan Experience.” The former is described, thusly: “A community of fun, friendly citizens living in a 19th century theme estate”. The latter is equally inane: “[The Trojan Experience is a] combat role-play sim that uses the Homeric Legend of Troy as its backdrop and includes the celebrated wooden horse and gladiatorial combats in the arena”. Gladiators? Indeed. But if you’re not into combat, let me quote some good news: “To the north [of Troy], a verdant forest awaits those looking for a gentler experience”. Whatever disjuncture there may be between text and world in literature, it seems to me that an electronic world, realistic or fantastic, handed to the viewer on a platter, no matter how virtually stimulating it may appear to be, distances a viewer from the real world. The word “interactive” applied to videogames or sims is deceiving in that it only really seems to engage small motor skills, not any skills of imagining in the way a book does. One interacts with text far more intimately. Let me provide a pertinent personal anecdote. My novel The Maestro takes place in northern Ontario. Once, on a reading tour to the interior of British Columbia, I met a group of kids who had come by bus from the back of beyond – way up in the mountains, somewhere. They had come to see me because they were utterly convinced I had based the setting on their lake. “It’s exactly the same”, they said. “You must have been there.” Now, Sudbury, Ontario is a long way from Williams Lake, B.C. both in kilometers and in geography. The magical thing that had happened, as near as I can explain it, is that those kids had read right through my flora and fauna – not ignored it but transcended it – translated it into the language of the world they knew and loved. (Article continued on Page 18)
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They had made Ghost Lake their own: replaced the white pine with Douglas fir, the poplars with aspen, the low slung hills with mountains, the small-mouth bass with salmon. Their vicarious adventure in this other world, two thousand miles from their own, had reinforced their own sense of place within a quite different environment. When we read, we move from a state of otherness to a state of belonging in just this manner. And with every new place we meet in a book we gain, I feel, a stronger sense of place about where we live. I fear the idea of the world falling away from lack of attention. Basically, if a tree falls in the forest and you’re off busily destroying aliens, alongside the comely avatar Caterina Sforza, in The Battle of Forli, are you going to hear it? The tree, I mean.
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Let me back up a bit. I did learn a thing or two, those many years ago, before I was turfed out of architecture school for the perfectly good reason that were I to design buildings people would die. I learned about place, first of all. I learned of the idea of place as an event, what Günter Nitschke means when he says “all experience of space is a time-structured process.” Place predominates in my writing. It is never simply there to ground my characters, to give them a stage on which to perform. It is integral to their performance. This is a fundamental, if idealistic, tenet of architecture. And it was in architecture school that I first read Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space was probably the beginning of the end of my career as an architect. I loved that Bachelard talked of memory as something stored in rooms and cupboards and playing fields. One’s life was a series of rooms, of places to put things, or to curl up in, or to carry a candle to. He talked about nests and shells and corners. About the dialectic of inside and outside and the phenomenology of roundness. The significance of huts. I began to see the world as something constructed of worlds. I began to drift into a kind of fool’s architecture that had little to do with putting up actual walls. Well, hadn’t Nitschke said that place in its “Ma” sense was something that takes place in the imagination? All along I had liked most of those rooms one made down on the beach out of rock and driftwood and seaweed. Or the rooms one occasionally stumbled upon in the woods,
if one looked hard enough. Rooms constructed by a geometry of leaves and dead logs and light. Such “rooms” find their way into my writing to this day. Here is a quote from The Uninvited: Cramer Lee sat in his canoe in a stand of bulrushes so dense and high it was like being in a small, green room. A windowless room with a high blue ceiling and a browny-green shimmering carpet. A room laced together with the whirring of dragonflies. In this scene, Cramer has swiped a digital movie camera from the car of Mimi Shapiro. In watching her footage, he finds out something of who she is – gets a first tantalizing dose of her exotic life. She has arrived out of nowhere in his backwoods world from New York City and no better way occurred to me to represent this disparity than to have him view her alien world while he sits in his canoe in this secret “room” on the river. Further along in the book, Cramer makes his way back to his home though it is apparent, by now, that he lives on these streams and creeks and rivers far more easily than he does between the walls of his mother’s house. I’d like to read another short passage: Half a mile up stream from McAdam’s Snye, the mouth of Butchard’s Creek opened onto the Eden, But you had to know it was there to find the creek’s mouth. Passing by on the river you’d see nothing but swamp, dense with soft rushes, water lettuce and arum, arrowhead, loosestrife. Cramer knew where the seam of water ran deep. He had an eye for the creek’s current and a craft responsive to his every demand. To know this creek, this swamp, this entranceway, is to begin to know Cramer Lee. His physical appearance is not clear to us, as of yet. Not until he is seen by Mimi do we get much of a description of him, physically. However, he is defined in some detail by his landscape. In an article entitled “An Eye for Thresholds”m I have talked about the realization that, for me, the imagined thresholds one confronts and crosses in literature often prove to be as soundly constructed as anything made of wood or stone. The doors and bridges and borders one crosses figuratively – the woods one steps into – if they are of significance to the story must be carefully manufactures in lively detail to draw the reader’s attention to the moment of them, the event of them; consciously or otherwise: constructed
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soundly enough to say to the reader, here, take note, a crossing over is nigh. In Peter Dickinson’s novel Tulku, there is a tense scene when bandits catch up to young Theodore, the book’s protagonist, and his two companions backing them up against a deep gorge, over which a rope bridge leads from China to Tibet. The bridge is in use, blocked by a Lama and his party coming over into China. The Lama’s intervention scares off the bandits, but there can be no going back for Theodore and his party. Dickinson writes: The Yak-drivers they had met on their way to the valley had said that there was no real border. The Lama waved a vague hand eastward and explained that two whole provinces had been stolen by China a hundred years before, so Theodore’s party had really been travelling in Tibet for many days. But for Theodore the border lay, sharp as a shoreline, at the bridge. From then on the grammar of all things, large and small, changed.” Crossing the bridge, Theodore enters “the enormous sharp-seen distance”. He will never be the same again. The grammar of his life, the seemingly insignificant little events, the units of time, with which we measure off the diurnal cycle – all this had changed. He has crossed over a very real threshold.
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also the deep dark forest of fairytale. He takes off north by northwest, the direction of madness, according to Hamlet, but not complete madness, either, which was Hamlet’s point. He – Burl, that is – follows a helicopter’s path: a helicopter he saw carrying a grand piano. But this is not fantasy, so he cannot literally fly after the whirly bird. His route takes him overland, through a real landscape, though this other text, I hope, imbues the landscape with a sense of literary place. He spends the night in a trapper’s cabin where he finds and eats baked beans from a rusted can. This is the start of chapter 4: When you were hungry in a fairytale, and old hag would pass by with a magic bowl or magic beans. Well, Burl had eaten what beans he could find, and when he awoke cold and damp in the morning, sure enough, the can was full again, but only with brown rainwater. So he took a bite of the north wind for his breakfast and headed out, up a path that had once been a trap line, until it petered out and there was finally nothing before him but bush. The word “bush” should signal the end of any fantasy, but not yet. His childhood reading has made Burl an optimist:
There is much of threshold in the ideogram Ma. Think of it: “the delicate moment of moonlight streaming through a chink in the entranceway.” And for me the moonlight – the luminous – often tinges the real with the fantastic. Fairytale references haunt my own writing about real forests. While I am careful to learn in detail the flora and fauna of the real worlds my stories inhabit and to represent such research faithfully, I am also caught in the gravitational tug of these earliest kinder- und Hausmärchen narrative, of the rich associations they throw up, symbolically and psychologically. Nor do I see this as contradictory to meaningful representation. I take to the real forest this baggage of literary reference – of enchantment, shall we say. I have met, on more that one occasion a real bear in the words, and though I have no allusion that I will find his house and there will be porridge cooling on the table, I do not spurn the fantasy. When Burl Crow, the protagonist of The Maestro, runs off into the forest to escape his abusive father, it is very much the boreal forest of northern Ontario – the one Thoreau talks about “made out of chaos and Old Night”. But it is
Bill Klebeck, board member of the Saskatchewan Arts Board brings greetings at the Caroline Heath Memorial Lecture, 2013 SWG Conference. Photo Credit: SWG Staff.
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In a fairytale, the woods might be deep but the path led to a river where you could trick the boatman; to a castle where you could steal a golden goose; to a clearing in the forest where you could kiss a princess in a glass coffin. Fairytale trees towered darkly above lost children, but there was always a way. Having said that, I have to yank the fairy-tale carpet out from under Burl’s bleeding feet. He is plagued by mosquitoes and black flies and deer flies, sinks into the mud of a stream with a “loon-shit bottom”. He comes upon a wolf ’s scat full of red fur (a fox, not little red riding hood!), saplings draped with the velvet of moose antlers, a tree that some bear has used for a scratching pole. In the pelting rain he watches a fly enter the maw of a pitcher plant, try to climb from out of the bristles of the inner cavity only to fall into the small pool of water at the base of the pitcher to drown.
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The evocation here is of the real suffused with the allegorical; the hero’s journey, yes, but through a landscape, every aspect of which I have experienced and traversed and, I hope, represented with fidelity. Those children from the interior of British Columbia who knew Burl’s world as viscerally as their own had maybe traversed a landscape not dissimilar in the hardships it presented, the wetness of it: the intractable nature of a place where other creatures held sway and man was out of his element. Perhaps they recognized Burl’s plight more clearly than they did the specificity of the natural environment. Perhaps they recognized the allegory of the dark, low place you must go before you find the good, high place. I tend to approach the natural world looking for a nexus to humanity. My youngest son and I, when he was about four, found a pile of stones on the edge of the high meadow in the middle of my acreage, stones cleared by some farmer maybe a hundred years before. Lewis and I made thrones for ourselves, side by side. A casual passer-by would be unlikely to visually tease out from the rock pile these rearrangements of stones into human-contoured spaces, but they are still there though my son is now a university graduate. There are thrones in the woods. My representation of nature is, I think, nearly always as some kind of extension of mind into landscape. So a completely faithful mimesis of the object world might not be my sole aim but I am, nevertheless, far from indifferent to landscape. More often than not, landscape provides for me some kind of metaphorical of psychological buttress to the narrative. It is often there as objective correlative, as thematic underpinning.
SWG Board President Lisa Wilson opening the Caroline Heath Memorial Lecture at the 2013 SWG Conference. Photo Credit: SWG Staff.
In The Uninvited, there is a passage where Mimi is kayaking up a secret stream, called the snye by the locals. She is heading into the old house she is sharing for the summer with her newly discovered stepbrother, Jay. The house has been broken into but nothing stolen. Rather, the intruder has left behind a dead bluebird on the yellow kitchen table, a snakeskin coiled on a pillow, the sound of s cricket surreptitiously added to the computer recording of Jay’s latest musical composition. Mimi has come to realize that whoever had been invading Jay’s privacy before she arrived is now watching her as well. And the reader knows who this is, so there is a tension, as she crosses over the threshold into this watery inner sanctum. She passes through a veil of willows, which trail across her back, then into the shallow snye, encroached on either side by thick bush. Here is the passage: There was no wind back here, only a distant whisper of the weather out there in the real world. She had passed over into a dream of stillness, of filtered green light, glassy with a night’s rain. She rounded a bend and sniffed. There was a stench in the air. She remembered it from before,
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but it was worse this time, possibly because of the rain. . . . All along the shore were tangles thickets of carrion flower. Thorny, green stemmed, with heart-shaped leaves and beautiful blue berries. The stink attracted flies, apparently, which acted as pollinators. Just what perfume’s supposed to do, she thought. For me, the generic landscape serves no purpose. In the passage I have just read, real carrion flowers serve a literary purpose: the idea of sexual attraction and the potential perversity of it. We have been introduced to Mimi’s own perfume earlier, “Trouble” by Boucheron. Later, her stalker will break in again to the little house and dab the tail of his T-shirt with Trouble, to have something to take away with him. It is my intention that the landscape and human-scape interpenetrate one another in The Uninvited. Little poignant bits of dead or discarded or recorded nature find their way into the house on the snye. The outer landscape is meant to support the human narrative metaphorically and thematically. I am drawn to nature just this way. To make things from it: alphabets and rooms and thrones; to interpret it, to look for patterns, arrangements that resonate with and, hopefully, amplify the patterns and arrangements of the story I wish to tell. I project onto the landscape my interior thoughts. But I believe there is a to and fro in this act; that the landscape, altered by me, alters me as well. I think there is something of this in what Barry Lopez has to say in his beautiful book Crossing Open Ground: “I think of two landscapes - ,” he says, “one outside the self, the other within.” Lopez goes on to compare the relationships in the exterior landscape, the purpose and order, “however inscrutable”, to the “speculations, intuitions and formal ideas we refer to as ‘mind’”. He writes:
Tim Wynne-Jones reading at the 2013 SWG Conference. Photo Credit: SWG Staff.
well include the faux opulence of the virtual world. In a written narrative, what isn’t there must be supplied by the reader. The landscape must be reconstituted from the squiggles on the page – reconstituted and, essentially, invented by the engaged reader to the limits of his or her ability. This engagements, I would like to believe, is more truly interactive than much of what we now call interactive media. There is work involved, mental activity: imagining into existence a forest, a house, a boat in a green room with a blue ceiling.
The shape and character of these relationships in a person’s thinking, I believe, are deeply influenced by where on earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature . . . These thoughts are arranged further, according to the thread of one’s moral, intellectual, and spiritual development. The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes.
But there is another filter through which I sift the environment. A political one. It is exciting to read about some place you know. But this is something Canadian children are just getting used to. In my day, we grow up knowing a great deal more about the American plains and the moors of Yorkshire. My two favorite writers when I was young were a Brit and a Yank. I liked Enid Blyton’s adventure series: The Mountain of Adventure, The Island of Adventure, The Button Hole of Adventure – whatever; and I liked Walter R. Brooks’ laugh-out-loud “Freddy the Pig” books. Pretty well all of my reading was American or British, with the notable exceptions of Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle.
I attempt to bring a sense of place to my writing intended for a young reader whose other entertainments might
Canada may be the second biggest country in the world, but when I was a child, it did not exist in story, not as far
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as I knew. Like many other of my colleagues in Canadian children’s literature, I have been involved in what I think of as a psychic cartography, mapping out this vast domain, one small neighborhood or forest at a time. If a Canadian writer asks the question “where is here anymore,” there is always the sense of discovering places that scarcely exist in the world of literature, of putting a landscape on the map. Margaret Atwood talks about this in her seminal work, Survival: But in Canada . . . the answer to the question “Who am I?” is at least partly the same as the answer to another question: “Where is here?” “Who am I?” is a question appropriate in countries where the environment, the “here,” is already well-defined, so well defined in fact that it may threaten to overwhelm the individual. As a stranger in a strange land, because I am, after all, a Brit in this somewhat uncharted territory, there is an ongoing need to situate myself and to help in some small way to situate this country. Atwood goes on to say:
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“Where is here?” is a different question. It is what a man asks when he finds himself in unknown territory, and it implies several other questions. Where is this place in relation to other places? How do I find my way around in it? If the man is really lost he may also wonder how he got “here”
to begin with, hoping he may be able to find the right path of possibly the way out by retracing his steps. On some deep level, this description fits me to a tee. “Here” was for so much of my early life an evanescent thing. Home was a fleeting image. And I suppose that is why a sense of place matters so much to me, both in reality and in my writing. And having tried to address that concern, it is a simple step to then ask “Where is here now?” “Where is here anymore?” I’d like to believe that the young reader, especially, while drawn to the far flung worlds of computer generated fantasy is still in need of a place that is home. And in need of a literature that supports and articulates that landscape, which is paradoxically familiar and hardly known in as much as it has so little airplay, as it were. So there is this: a love of the landscape that draws me in, and, simultaneously, the desire to make fabulous that same landscape, to dip it in myth, to make it reflect the human world even as it alters that human world; to create in one’s reader the desire to look up and see his or her world in a new light. Let me end with another quote from Barry Lopez, this time from Arctic Dreams: The mind, full of curiosity and analysis, disassembles a landscape and then reassembles the pieces – the nod of a flower, the color of the night sky, the murmur of an animal – trying to fathom its geography. At the same time the mind is trying to find its place within the land, to discover a way to dispel its own sense of estrangement. A mind “trying to find its place . . . to discover a way of dispel[ling] its own sense of estrangement.” Nothing more clearly delineates my own quandary and my own intention in my representation of the environment. Here is where I live. It looks like this. But what it looks like is only the beginning. Thank you. Tim Wynne-Jones has written 32 books including novels for young and old, picture books and three short story anthologies. His collection Some of the Kinder Planets won the Governor General’s Award as well as the Boston Globe— Horn Book Award. His novel The Maestro won Tim his second G.G and was short-listed for the Guardian Prize in the U.K.
Andréa Ledding, a panel member of Six degrees of Separation session. Photo Credit: SWG Staff.
SWG Freelance
December 2013 / January 2014
A Call to Create:
Manifesto Workshop with Patrick Close By Jessica Riess
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels is considered as one of the world’s most influential political manuscripts, but there are many others like the Scum Manifesto: Society for Cutting up Men, The Working Mom Manifesto, and The Earth Manifesto. According to Patrick Close, a manifesto can be a variety of things:
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hroughout history manifestos have ignited groups to action, criticized social mores, inspired social and personal change, and poked fun at the everyday. Manifestos have been a staple in most movements of the modernist avant-garde and are still found today throughout the digital universe of the internet, the private writings in journals, as part of Nike and Lulu Lemon brand identities, and on the stall doors of public washrooms.
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A manifesto is a declaration of belief tied to action.
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A manifesto can address an individual, a group, a state of being, a vocation, a nation or all of humanity.
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A manifesto is always a call to action, whether personal, social or philosophical.
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A manifesto can be a tool for social, cultural, political or environmental change or for personal growth and development.
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A manifesto may take many forms... written, graphic, performance, and more.
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A manifesto has the capacity to be creative and/ or destructive.
Simply, manifestos usually consist of a number of statements that are declarative in nature, written in numbered or bulleted points that do not necessarily follow logically from one thought to the next. For the 2013 Culture Days, the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild partnered with the Saskatchewan Arts Alliance to present a Manifesto workshop as part of a Culture Days hub that included CARFAC SASK. This workshop gathered a small group of individuals of both writers and visual artists to explore examples from history, discuss the concepts of advocacy and intentionality, and to create and share their own manifesto.
Manifesto in the making - the ideas and thoughts of participants of the 2013 Manifesto workshop, 2013.
The workshop featured artist Patrick Close who is “known to ask many questions, but not to insist on answers, to draw attention to things neither seen nor heard, and to promote cognitive dissonance as an essential survival skill.”
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Participants were guided through a detailed presentation on manifestos from a variety of groups and in a variety of formats. Later, the floor was opened to participants to create a group manifesto. Ideas were thrown out, angry declarations were voiced and frustrations were vented. A myriad of topics surfaced regarding the destruction of the proverbial gatekeeper in a time of self-publishing, “cultural giraffes,” leapfrogging of useless jobs, bubblegum art, disdain vs. disbelief, arts literacy, and how “numbers oppress artists,” all of which were written down by Patrick himself. These ideas would later create Make Room (for Me) Manifesto, which can be found, along with each of the participants’ individual manifestos, in the soon to be published booklet Manifesto. The workshop continued long past the stated end time of 10 pm and each participant left with the intention to write their own manifesto. The night of September 27th was met with a wellspring of passionate people, great minds, and good food. If you weren’t there, it’s too bad you missed it.
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Donna Kriekle, Marnie Gladwell, Tracy Hamon, and Brenda Niskala at the Manifesto Workshop, 2013. Photo Credit: SAA Staff.
SWG Freelance
December 2013 / January 2014
How Do They Do It?
A Look At How Two Memoirists Define, Find And Write Truth By Shirley Byers
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In conversations about creative nonfiction, questions about truth can and often dominate the discourse: What is truth? How do you find it? And, how do you find the courage to tell it?
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ary-Ann Kirkby and Donna Caruso are Saskatchewan writers of creative nonfiction. Their memoirs, Kirkby’s I Am Hutterite and Caruso’s Journey Without a Map, Growing Up Italian: A Memoir won the 2007 Saskatchewan Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2008 Saskatchewan Book Award for Nonfiction respectively. While creating a window into life on a Hutterite colony, Kirkby’s memoir tells how and why her family left the Fairholme Hutterite colony in Manitoba when she was ten years old. “As a person who never wanted to be a writer but knew she had a really important story to tell, I focussed on telling the truth to the best of my knowledge,” she says. “I never really set out to write creative nonfiction. My personal interpretation of writing memoir was, stick as close to the truth as possible especially, as in my case, when there are people involved who I could hurt and certainly did hurt by telling the truth.” Caruso’s memoir is the story of a big Italian family, how they came to North America and about their lives since in the New World. It profiles various family members, weaving their stories around the author’s own story. “I never define anything,” says Caruso. “I just write and I wait for other people to define it. But if I were to put a definition on it, I think creative nonfiction is facts, marinated in feeling. There always has to be the point of view that is personal. There has to be some kind of stake in a creative nonfiction work and that I think [that] is the difference. … There is some kind of personal stake, some kind of feeling and I think that pervades the whole set of facts that you’re dealing with, setting, characterization, everything. It just does. You have to have that feeling.” Kirkby is a journalist and she approached her memoir,
as a journalist. She interviewed her parents separately and individually and she also interviewed people who were living at the colony when her family left. And, she included her own ten-year-old perspective. Though she may not have completely understood what was happening she could figure out much of what was going on. “I felt the energy and I was able to recreate that in my mind and on paper, after having spoken to all the different parties that were there,” she says. “It took me seven years because I tried to be very careful.” It wasn’t a pretty story and she knew there would be hurt feelings when she told it. That was difficult. “I hesitated to tell the truth,” she says. “ I thought to myself as many Hutterites have said to me, ‘Why didn’t you just leave that out?’ but you know when you set out to write a memoir, one of the most important questions people ask, is ‘Why did you leave the colony?’ You have to explain that. It’s just dishonest not to explain that.” Although leaving the colony is an important part of the story it isn’t the whole story. Kirkby asked her father what his defining moments were. He gave her three or four and she built the story around them, always acutely aware that in the hundred and forty-five year history of Hutterites in North America, the inside story of Hutterite life had never been written. “I really have the weight of an entire culture on my shoulders and that always weighed on me. I know this is the first impression people will have of my culture as a whole.” Truth is important to Caruso too but she realizes that as one of five siblings, there will be five truths. Each sibling might have the same experience but see it differently. “So I think that you have to know who you are, know your standpoint... And you have to pick the truth you’re going to focus on. I feel like you can get too carried away with telling the truth and the truth gets diluted and confused
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I could tell you individual things that messed everybody up but that wasn’t the real truth. That’s just facts. The overarching truth is that everyone belonged, everyone was happy and everyone celebrated the good life we had. That’s the overarching truth and that’s what I think you have to focus on. You can’t confuse your reader by throwing in too many things that don’t matter in the end. Just decide what your story is.” It’s one thing to write about other people, even your family. But sharing personal truth, writing from inside your own heart can be the most difficult. How do these two memoirists deal with that? Kirkby says she was lucky to work with an editor, who was also a friend. “We would have a glass of champagne and talk about it and she would say, ‘You’re withholding information. You have to write that.’ I would say, ‘Oh I can’t, I can’t possibly.’ She would say, ‘You have to.’ ”
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John V. Hicks Dinner 1st place winner Linda Biasotto. Photo Credit: SWG Staff.
Because she trusted her editor she was able to get to the essential truth, to her personal truth, and she says finding and writing that truth was therapeutic for her as well. Writing about the insecurity she felt after leaving the colony was what helped her to overcome those feelings. “What it did for me personally was the greatest gift because I suddenly could stand up and say, ‘I am a Hutterite woman and I’m very proud of it.’” Caruso’s book goes to some dark places too as she describes her confrontation with breast cancer and its aftermath. “You have to choose what you’re going to talk about and how you’re going to talk about it,” she says. “You don’t have to give every bloody detail. You just don’t. You can write gently, even about difficult things. If you have to include them, you have to be gentle. I think you always write from love. Even if it’s horrible, you have to write from love. If you don’t write from love, you limit your encounter with the truth. You have to be loving, even if it’s a hard thing to write about.” Donna Caruso has just finished a collection of fiction stories. Mary-Ann Kirkby has recently completed a follow up to her memoir. Secrets of a Hutterite Kitchen will be released in April, 2014. Shirley Byers: For a decade, Shirley Byers was a contributing editor for WITH, a U.S based teen magazine. She has also published works in publications such as Brio, Clubhouse, Listen, and Discover Trails.
Byrna Barclay brings greetings to the 2013 SWG Conference on behalf of the Saskatchewan Arts Board. Photo Credit: SWG Staff.
SWG Freelance
December 2013 / January 2014
Poetry: Seven Calls By Gerry Hill
To the Lyric Poet, What do you imagine poem to mean? Under the influence of high school English classes or certain senior, even junior, practitioners, you may see the poem as the lyric poem—well-wrought, a moment distilled, Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility”. You may have written such a poem yourself, later published dozens in your books. Well on the way to a pretty good career, you’ve managed to cause readers to memorize, anthologize, or otherwise talk about those lyric poems of yours. Yours are the poems most remembered, most taught (even taut). ()
To the Close Looker, You admire pelicans and see one idling about fifty feet out near the bridge, looking hungry. Naturally, you’ve hopped off your bike by now and sat down on a bench by the path. You note: two pelicans working together, how do they communicate? and from the usual posse of 8-9 pel’ why these two, now? Even if your poem takes a while to begin from such noticing, it promises sharp, wise versions of how the pel steals the scene and flies off, locking your poem to this moment, including light and your state of mind, what you’ve planned for supper (something with the 7-grain bread you bought at the market this morning) and what you’ve overheard the two lovers murmur a bench over, and memories of climbing that Dome beyond the lake—none of this said before, at least by you, at least so artfully, in 19 or so fine lines. ()
To You of the Lower-Case i, Finding lyric poem too precious, too confined, you refuse to accept, or go for in the first place, its voice of composure or de-composure, that “I”-authorized, museinfused report from the real world. Whenever you get the sense that “I” knows all, guarantees all, sees the only truth and knows how to sell it to the rest of us, you start again, ducking its centralizing essence. While you’re at it, you give up agency entirely (which you’re not sure any one of us can do, but never mind) and watch the chains slacken from the load hook, so to speak. You come to this: the inherent slipperiness of how and what we know cannot be anchored by the monumental “I”.
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Poet William Carlos Williams.
To the Reluctant Craftsperson, The first thing you have to get over is that craft is not a word you use. When you open the shed to haul it out, you see how long it’s been sitting there. Still, you admit, there’s no avoiding the matter of putting this word, and putting it here, no HERE. And how or why you decide. When laying down the shape of what you do as a poet, you do get crafty enough, but the most important point, with poetry as with passenger liners, is the approach, not the landing. (You don’t want to have to convince the passengers of that notion, but you stick with it.) ()
To the Disciple of W.C. Williams, If you want to think process and think craft, you start with line, via the famous Williams dictum you’ve always loved: “Keep the line (which has movement) from breaking down and becoming a hole into which we sink decoratively to rest.” Exploring Williams’ idea at the level of line (how else could you explore it) opens our practice, you would say.
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December 2013 / January 2014
To be specific, you point out the difference between, say, Take the last train to Clarksville and Take the last train to Clarksville Not much! But enough, you claim, if we keep working that line-end—that action at the edge of our line—every time we reach it. ()
To the Open-Form Enthusiast,
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Every poem you write seems like the one before and it is, only later. You call your project lifelong, and work it that long, which yields the overlooking of “poem” as thing unto itself, which pleases you. “Poem” is what our page is the moment we leave it, what a moment in wind is, you say. You’re writing the same poem because you are! The only poem you write is the one that won’t end. Try that, you say, and see what happens to our page. Gerry Hill reads as part of the SWG Conference open mic. Photo Credit: SWG Staff.
At a certain point in your practice, the “poem” or the “page” will have long ceased to contain what you try to do in writing. You prefer to say it this way: no poem but moment in the push-pull your writing makes with the world. ()
To the Reader,
Manuscript Evaluation Service Professional evaluation at a sensible fee The Manuscript Evaluation Service assists writers at all levels of development who would like a professional response to their unpublished work. The service is available to ALL Saskatchewan writers, and uses the talents of Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild (SWG) published members. The SWG offers this service with the generous partnership of the Saskatchewan Arts Board. Full details & fees at www.skwriter.com
How do you start, if you want to activate these ideas? How do you stop? Why do you try to write poems? I’m both sympathetic toward a newer writer, reading all this for the first time—imagining beautiful poem and wanting it—and impatient on behalf of other writers who would downplay the notion of a discrete poem. Nobody gets the right language at a time like this. In the end we repeat: pay attention write it down turn the next page. () Long-time SWG member Gerald Hill (www.geraldhill.ca) lives, writes, and grandparents in Regina.
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December 2013 / January 2014
Avoiding Avoidance with Free Writing By Gary Hyland (reprinted with permission)
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eware the phantom audience. Row on row they sit in the auditorium of your mind, arms crossed in censorious anticipation. There in the front are Mom and Dad who will never speak to you again (or deceased, will haunt you) if any parental figures in your work are less than nice or if you publish that short story about masochistic misery in marriage. There’s Aunt Tekla, childless and married to Helmut the broker, who will slice you from her will should her intemperate youthful escapades in Mexico enliven your pages. Across the aisle, ramrod stiff, sit squads of monitors in the uniforms of the many institutions of Political Correctness. Behind them, tiers of fellow citizens wait to lash you should the old hometown appear anything but sunny and prosperous in your poems. And the chronic pain in your stomach? That’s from your unconscious effort to hold back the truth about that shadowy wretch who has slipped into the back row, the one who looks uncomfortably like what you think is your public self. Write a convincing scene in which all these inhibiting figures perish. Then write what you have to write. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. Writers such as Tennessee Williams, Mordecai Richler, Arthur Miller, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Eugene O’Neil who have broken through the restraints others would impose have sometimes had to pay a high price. After all, even the fearless Byron refrained from publishing his memoirs until near death when he entrusted them to a friend, a mistake as it turned out because the friend sold them a principled man who reluctantly burned them when Lady Byron and Augusta Leigh, Byron’s half sister (in high anxiety about the incestuous relationship Byron depicted), threatened nasty repercussions. Many are those who would restrain writers. Spouses come to mind. One thinks of Isabel Burton, wife of linguist, explorer and diplomat Sir Richard Burton, translator of The Arabian Nights and author of several travel books. On her husband’s death, the devout woman promptly burned his 1,282-page manuscript of The Perfumed Garden because it revealed his repressed fascination with oriental sexual practices and beliefs. Had Burton outlived his wife, the manuscript would likely have been published, although it might have had to wait his demise and another 60 years before the world was ready. Sometimes overlooked in the assessment of late-blooming masterpieces is the liberating effect of the deaths of spouses, parents, relatives and
sundry other potential inhibitors. Mistakenly, critics, and sometimes the writers themselves, identify pride, selfconsciousness or shyness instead of fear as the inhibitors. Of concern here are not the various practices that annoy or infuriate some readers—profanity, satirical jabs, carnal patches, angry denunciations, snide innuendoes and the like. These are relatively superficial forms of frankness, when frank they are, and their degree of irritability is a matter of taste and tolerance. The writer uncomfortable with these modes need not bother with them. But those internalized barricades that prevent a writer from delving into the deeper and sometimes darker truths confine a writer’s soul. What can a writer do when confronting internalized impediments? One strategy is escape. One quits writing or one selects safer subjects. The trouble with this approach is that you may be severing yourself from your richest, most rewarding material. In choosing to respect the real or perceived sensibilities of others you may be damaging your own development both as a writer and a person. On the other hand, for some writers, escape may be the only option. They may discover that the inner route is too dangerous for their well-being, perhaps even for their survival. Except for his memoirs, Byron chose escape. He wanted to “withdraw myself from myself.” That he said was his “sole, my entire, my sincere motive” in writing. Kafka said he wrote “to escape the unrest, to shut out the voices around me and within me.” One can argue that fleeing the demons within only leads to encountering their external manifestations. If so, such encounters are also a form of exploration. Ultimately, the writer must choose the terms of engagement and be willing to suffer the consequences. Another strategy is disguise. Retell Aunt Tekla’s story as if it happened to a young man named Bodger in British Columbia today. Address your deepest terrors and concerns through a fictional character. There can be no doubt some of the world’s finest literature has been written employing this strategy. In one sense, the projection of self into other personalities in other places is the writer’s stock and trade. That some of these personalities are alter egos you can choose to reveal or not in that full-page interview in The New York Times or in your best-selling autobiography. The down side to disguise is that one can get too involved in the masquerades and lose the intensity, vitality and
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in the masquerades and lose the intensity, vitality and relevance of the original material. Aunt Tekla’s story may be most meaningful as a bold woman’s spiritual quest in a macho-ridden society; transporting it to contemporary British Columbia may eviscerate it. Worse, in disguising your material, you can fool yourself and thus thwart the opportunity of making an authentic connection with your inner truth. Another strategy is purchase a pile of notebooks and, starting with page one of notebook one, scribble with abandon every day. Pour it all forth madly. Push yourself to keep writing until your sense of decorum, your standards of performance, and your writerly control are diminished, then keep going. Don’t worry if the stuff is any good. Don’t try to please anyone. As soon as something forbidding looms, something that sets off your inner alarms, steer right for it at full speed. Tremble, sweat, cry but keep going. Follow Hemingway’s advice: “Write clear and hard about what hurts.” Writing after all, is not publishing. Somewhere in the reams of pages such writing can produce will be centres of energy, core materials that can be developed into publishable form.
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This free writing approach is not the same as keeping a personal journal. Both are means of writing in order to uncover what one should write. The fearless steering of free writing, however, is not normal. The journal, no matter how personal and private, is driven by conscious thought and much given to the examination of events. The journalist thinks and analyzes; the free writer abandons the steering wheel, lets thoughts and emotions emerge and records them. Of course, our inclination is to avoid the difficult, the unpleasant. Annie Dillard quotes sculptor Anne Truit who describes this approach as working “along the nerve of one’s most intimate sensitivity.” But to eliminate such persistent beasts as superficiality, rationalization, pedantry, artificiality, and insincerity from our writing, we have to shun evasion. We have to avoid avoidance and “dive below the surface, where life is cold and confusing and hard to see,” as Anne Lamott says. Try something truly paradoxical—visualize a voice. Imagine it deep within you struggling to be heard and try to allow its emergence. Jung called this inner voice “at once our greatest danger and an indispensable help.” Natalie Goldberg says, “There is a quiet place in us bellow our hip personality that is connected to our breath, our words, our death.” The free writing approach is a way of connecting with that “quiet place” where our best writing can originate. It requires loss of control. Forget structures beyond phrases and clauses. Forget spelling, grammar, unity, coherence,
paragraphing. Discard also your customary rhetorical patterns and familiar associations which carry with them automatic postures and expressions. Let fly. No crossing out, no planning, no restrictions on subject matter, no idea where you are going. Regardless of how liberated your writing is, part of you will still be apprehensively monitoring the process. If you wait for two or more weeks before returning to your free writing notebook, it is likely you will not be in the same frame of mind and therefore may be more inclined to accept what you have written and see potential there. Converting that potential into a work of art is another struggle. At that point, honesty, self-control, and a sense of purpose are necessary. You have to be willing to risk unpopularity. “When you get damned hurt, use it—don’t cheat with it,” advises Himingway. Still, the work that results from inner exploration, no matter how excruciating, need not be somber or ponderous. Much comedy is rooted in pain. As Andrea Dworkin points out, much good writing has a transformative power: “Pain is changed. Suffering may become song.” How necessary is this onerous process? Alistair Maclean, one of the 20th century’s top-selling authors, may never have confronted his demons. Asked why there was never any writing about male-female relationships in his hundreds of novels, he gruffly replied, “ No time for it. It gets in the way of the action.” Obviously, books that are great money-makers and books that are great are not always one and the same. No-holds-barred free writing is only for those writers who want to connect with something deeper than dollars. It is beneath the surface that the issues common to all humanity are rooted. What you find about yourself in these deep and dark places is not that you are a monster but that you are human. Of this you can be certain: your most profound preoccupations, fears, sorrows, turmoils, and woes are your links to the universality that is the hallmark of all great writing. By going into yourself you go beyond yourself. Our best writers are soldiers of the psyche. They go into the haunted places, the forbidden tombs, the dungeons, the caves of monsters. They return, sometimes wounded, invariably wiser. They speak of the unspeakable. This is not a romantic quest; this is their daily work. It isn’t easy. It is necessary. This article was originally published in the February 2000 issue of Freelance. It was the 30th in a series that considers the ways people become creative writers. Gary Hyland was an award-winning poet whose books included After Atlantis and White Crane Spreads Wings.
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December 2013 / January 2014
The Space-Time Continuum By Edward Willett
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ver the years I’ve participated in a number of science fiction and fantasy writing workshops, to great effect: two of my published novels (Marseguro and Terra Insegura) and a published short story (“Waterlilies”) arose directly out of the Writing With Style workshops instructed by Robert J. Sawyer at the Banff Centre a few years ago.
When the last reader has expressed his or her opinion, the writer at last is permitted to reply, ideally without throwing things or hurling insults. To quote Sterling again, “this harrowing process continues, with possible breaks for food, until all the stories are done, whereupon everyone tries to repair ruptured relationships in an orgy of drink and gossip.”
Workshops have a long, honorable history in science fiction. As noted SF writer Bruce Sterling puts it, “People often ask where science fiction writers get their ideas. They rarely ask where society gets its science fiction writers. In many cases the answer is science fiction workshops.”
Clearly you can follow this same procedure for a group focused on writing poetry, mysteries, biographies, or any other kind of fiction—although for some reason science fiction and fantasy seem to generate more wannabe writers than any other genre.
Workshops run the gamut from Clarion, a six-week boot camp for writers taught by professional SF writers at the University of California San Diego (http://clarion.ucsd. edu/), to local amateur workshops formed by groups of like-minded individuals to provide feedback and support to each other. (If I may quote Sterling again, because he’s very quotable, “Like a bad rock band, an SF-writer’s workshop can be set up in any vacant garage by any group of spotty enthusiasts with nothing better to occupy their time. No one has a copyright on talent, desire, or enthusiasm.”)
You’ve probably already recognized the potential pitfalls in the Milford system. First of all, the critiquing will only be as good as the writers in the group. Advice on writing from someone who has no particular knowledge or experience may be of limited value, or even detrimental. More troublesome, it can be very hard to maintain the proper detachment when your writing is under attack from a critique—and way too easy to decide to take revenge when it’s your turn to critique. These kinds of group dynamics can make a workshop go south in a hurry.
So suppose you wanted to organize your own science fiction and fantasy writing workshop. How do you run it?
So if you’re thinking of running a Milford-style workshop, you might also want to keep in mind Schrodinger’s Rules of Critiquing, developed by fantasy writer Holly Lisle for the Schrodinger’s Petshop writing group established in 1988, when she, too, was an aspiring writer. (You can find these and a list of excellent rules for choosing a writers’ group at http://hollylisle.com/the-good-the-bad-and-theugly-or-how-to-choose-a-writers-group/.)
Over the years, a very simple but effective critiquing system has been developed that is probably used by more SF/fantasy workshops than not. It’s called the “Milford system,” after the workshop where it was first developed. Here’s how it works: Each of those attending submits a short manuscript to all of the others in the group. If it’s really short, this can be done during the workshop time itself, but more typically the manuscript is provided ahead of time, either at a previous meeting or via email. Only those who submit a manuscript are eligible to comment on the other manuscripts. At the meeting, everyone sits in a circle and one manuscript is picked at random. The person to the right of the writer delivers his or her critique, and the critiques proceed in order clockwise around the circle, with a minimum of commentary or interruptions from everyone else—and none at all from the author him or herself, who is firmly enjoined to sit in silence and listen no matter how much he or she objects or inwardly squirms.
Read and heed: 1. Critique the writing, never the writer. Never say, “You are…” or “You should…” Instead say, “The writing is…” or “The story should…” 2. Find what is right in each piece as well as what is wrong. 3. Don’t say, “This is how I would write it;” how you would write it isn’t the point. 4. Remember that subject matter is personal. You don’t have to like a story to give it a fair critique.
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5. Remember what your biases are and critique around them. 6. Remember that real people wrote this stuff, and real people have real feelings. And therefore, among the things you may not say while critiquing: “That’s awful.” “That’s stupid.” “You couldn’t write your way out of a paper bag.” As for those being critiqued, there’s really only one rule: “Shut up and listen.” If you can find a group of like-minded people who will follow those rules while critiquing and being critiqued, then you have the makings of a successful writing group, whatever kind of writing you’re interested in. Go forth and workshop! Edward Willett is a freelance writer and performer in Regina. He is the author of 50 books of some sort or another.
Poetry workshop with Kateri Akiwanzie-Damm. Photo Credit: SWG Staff.
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Young adult workshop with Tim Wynne-Jones. Photo Credit: SWG Staff.
SWG Freelance
December 2013 / January 2014
Member News Saskatchewan Writer Wins International Award Dee Hobsbawn-Smith, a former chef, cooking educator and food advocate, has become the first Saskatchewan writer to win a prize at the High Plains Book Awards. Hobsbawn-Smith’s book Foodshed: An Edible Alberta Alphabet, won the culinary award at the High Plains Book Festival, which celebrates writing in various disciplines and genres from across the American northern plains states and Canada’s three Prairie provinces. The festival took place in Billings, Montana on Oct. 25-26. Foodshed, published in 2012 by Touchwood Editions of Victoria, is an intimate guide to Alberta's sustainable food scene; HobsbawnSmith profiles more than seventyfive of the province's growers and producers, arranged alphabetically from asparagus growers to zizania (wild rice) cultivators, and contains twenty-six original recipes, one for each type of produce. The book also examines a number of agricultural issues, including sustainability and the environment, animal welfare, and farm labour, and takes a critical look at government involvement.
short story category with her Western Taxidermy. The Anatomy of Edouard Beaupre, a novel based on the life of Saskatchewan’s famous Willow Bunch Giant, won in the first book category for Sarah Kathryn York of Toronto. It was published by Regina’s Coteau Books. Hobsbawn-Smith, also a poet and fiction writer, relocated to her family’s farm west of Saskatoon in 2010, after many years in Calgary, where she owned a restaurant and catering business, and was a freelance food writer; her widely read column, The Curious Cook, was a staple in the Calgary Herald for almost a decade. She’s the author of three popular cookbooks, including The Curious Cook at Home. Shop Talk, her definitive resource guide to food shopping in central Alberta, was a best-seller. She’s currently completing an MFA in creative writing at the University of Saskatchewan. “Foodshed is less cookbook — though it contains 26 recipes — and more treatise on the importance of knowing where our food comes
from and how it is grown and raised,” writes reviewer Christine Twito in the Billings Gazette. Patricia Robertson in The Globe and Mail wrote “Foodshed is a rich encyclopedia of facts, farmgate lore and original recipes. It’s also a politically engaging narrative… don't let the alphabet theme fool you. This is no tame nursery rhyme; it is a locavore call to arms."
SWG Welcomes New Members! Lyla Clarke Tracy Friesen Chantelle Huard Allycha Leuschen Taylor Lougheed Sheila Moorman Kathleen O’Reilly Amanda Reaves
Foodshed has already won a gold medal in the "Best Food Literature Book" (Canadian English-language) category of the 2013 Gourmand World Cookbooks Awards, and was a readers’ choice for the top Alberta entry in the CBC’s 2012 CrossCountry Cookbook Shelf poll. Three of the nine High Plains awards were won by Canadian writers this year, the first time in the event’s nine-year history that an award has gone to a writer from north of the 49th parallel. Barb Howard from Bragg Creek was a finalist in the
City of Regina Councillor Jerry Flegel speaks at the John V. Hicks Awards. Photo Credit: SWG Staff.
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Books by Members
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Black Fury Help Me, I’m Naked: Book One By Donna Miller Publisher: Your Nickle’s Worth ISBN: 978-1-894431-79-8 E-book by contacting Donna at donna.carolm@hotmail.com. Help Me, I’m Naked is a planned series. It is the story of my family over the generations; a true story about domestic violence and the code of silence, and how it has affected our psyche over the years from my mother on down to my grandchildren. It is a book of tears but triumph also as we struggle to overcome the lingering and debilitating effects of abuse. Donna Miller is the mother of six children, ten grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. At present she lives in a small trailer in the countryside near Asquith with her dog Tikka. Volume two- A home of Our Own will be released Dec.4/13.
Celebrating Our Planet: Blessed Blue By Carol Kavanagh Publisher: Fingerprint Press ISBN 978-0-9868103-1-2 The book is available at McNally Robinson in Saskatoon Celebrating Our Planet: Blessed Blue, is a book of poetry and photos of three of the classic elements: Water, Air and Earth. Clean water, air, and a productive Earth are timely environmental concerns but the book takes us beyond seeing these elements as objects needed for survival, to developing a relationship to these elements in which we begin to see the miracle of them. The last section of the book gives us the perspective of earth from outer space to truly see and understand what we have here. Kavanagh’s writing (poetry, short stories and non-fiction) has appeared in The Chelsea Journal, Grain, The Thirteenth Edition of the Canadian Writer’s Guide, Transition and Chicken Soup for the Soul. She taught high school, coordinated a religious education program, worked as a psychologist doing family and individual counseling and as a workshop facilitator presenting the Enneagram with her husband. She is retired and lives with her husband in Saskatoon.
Cherry Blossoms By Wes Funk Publisher: Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing ISBN: 978-1-894431-75-0 Disenchanted with her marriage and her life on the farm in rural Saskatchewan Cherry Markowsky grabs her dog and a few precious items and leaves for a fresh start in the city. But as she settles into a new home in Saskatoon, she finds that to be only the first of more hurdles to jump. Between dealing with a drifting son, a potential suitor, and a quirky secret about her twin brother, Cherry’s new world is overwhelming at times too. Wes Funk is a Saskatchewan-based writer who has dedicated his craft to telling stories which reflect his life. His first novel, Dead Rock Stars was shortlisted for a Sask Book Award and has been incorporated into both university and high school curricula. Funk’s second novel Baggage has been a pick for several book clubs across Canada. Besides being an author, the host of the Saskatchewan TV program Lit Happens. He lives with his partner in Saskatoon.
SWG Freelance
The Counting House By Sandra Ridley Publisher: BookThug ISBN: 9781927040843 Akin to a bookkeeper’s accounting of what’s given and taken in a fraught, uncertain exchange, The Counting House goes on to record the pageantry and pedantry of courtly affection gone awry. In forensic sequences of inquisition, scrutiny, and reckoning, Ridley reveals the maiden as muse as modern darling – unhoused and exacting – in “all of her violet forms.” Sandra Ridley’s first full-length collection of poetry, Fallout, won the 2010 Saskatchewan Book Award for publishing, the Alfred G. Bailey prize, and was a finalist for the Ottawa Book Award. Her second book, Post-Apothecary, was short-listed for the 2012 ReLit and Archibald Lampman Awards. Also in 2012, Ridley won the international festival Of Authors’ Battle of the Bards and was featured in The University of Toronto’s Influency Salon. Twice a finalist for the Robert Kroetsch Award for innovative poetry, Ridley is the author of two chapbooks, Rest Cure and Lift, for which she was co-recipient of the bpNichol Chapbook Award.
Dollybird By Anne Lazurko Publisher: Coteau Books ISBN 13: 9781550505634 Website: www.annelazurko.com Twenty-year-old Moira, banished to 1906 Saskatchewan because of her unwed pregnancy, must come to terms with her pioneer environment, and the volatile young homesteader who employs her as a “dollybird.” Housekeeper or covert whore? A dollybird can be either, or both, in the vocabulary of the times, leaving the community to draw its own conclusions about who and what Moira is in that settler’s soddy. Determined to find redemption in the midst of their derision, and to find joy despite uncertainty, Moira faces impossible choices with consequences beyond anything she ever imagined. Woven through with births, deaths and the potential violence of both man and the elements, Dollybird examines and celebrates the small mercies that come to mean more than they should, on a prairie peopled with characters who are struggling under that huge sky that seems to be waiting, not so quietly, for them to fail. Anne Lazurko has had her writing included in the anthology Fast Forward: New Saskatchewan Poets. She is a graduate of the Humber School of Writing in Toronto. Dollybird is her first book. Saskatchewan born and raised, Anne works as a freelance writer and farmer in Weyburn.
December 2013 / January 2014
Of Laughter, Tears and Beautiful Sunsets ISBN 0-9683411-1-X Published by Peggy Hayes Looby, and printed by Pasquia Publishing, Tisdale. I, Margaret Joan (Peggy) Hayes was born in Tisdale in September 1931 and joined my parents and three siblings on a farm near Bjorkdale. Here, I enjoyed the warmth of a loving family, the wildlife and the activities that go with country living. As I grew up I taught for a few years, married and raised a family of my own. It was then I began to understand and appreciate not only the sacrifices endured by my parents but their rich and fascinating background and the interesting lifestyle we led. So I gathered information and researched the Archives, Homestead and Military Records. I read their letters and my mother’s diaries which she had started in 1937 and compiled the story, Of Laughter, Tears and Beautiful Sunsets. My mother chose the first part of the title. The “beautiful sunsets” were my father’s only promise to my mother when he brought her here to Saskatchewan.
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Poet To Poet: Poems written to poets and the stories that inspired them Editors Julie Roorda + Elana Wolff Publisher: Guernica Editions, 2012 ISBN13: 9781550716450 ISBN10: 155071645X
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Poets find inspiration in all manner of human experience, from the comical to the sombre. The creative processes by which they grow their poems to fruition are as diverse, and often as quirky, as their subjects. But what all poets have in common is their captivation by the work and lives of other poets, living and dead. Poet to Poet is a unique anthology that honours, and probes, this peculiar enchantment. Featuring work by Canadian poets written to, about, or in the manner of other poets, each poem is accompanied by a backstory that provides a glimpse into the creative cauldron and the poetic communion of kindred spirits.
That Not Forgotten: anthology of poetry and short prose ed. Bruce Kauffman. Publisher: Hidden Brook, 2012. ISBN -978-1-897475-89-8
Woman of Substance By Annette Bower Publisher: Soul Mate Publishing ISBN: 978-1-61935-225-4 www.annettebower.com
That Not Forgotten, edited by Bruce Kauffman, The poetic voices in That Not Forgotten have rallied together to paint a deeply personal portrait hand-tipped with nostalgia. That Not Forgotten will easily be one of the most important Ontario anthologies for many years to come. The pulse of Lake Ontario’s north shore is felt on every page. Mimicking the historic and contemporary landscape, the pendulum swings from seasoned bards to the new literary voices.
“You will never understand what it means to be fat.” With those words, U of R grad student Robbie Smith begins the Fat-LikeMe project. In order to support her thesis, she dons a fat suit to discover first-hand how heavy women are treated by society.
Stay connected with Saskatchewan’s writers
and enjoy member discounts! Renew your Guild membership online at www.skwriter.com
Accused of embezzling funds, Professor Jake Proctor returns home to spend quality time with the only father he has ever known. When Robbie meets Jake while she’s in disguise, she deceives him for all the right reasons. But how long can she maintain the deception before Jake discovers that she is not who he believes her to be? Woman of Substance features realistic characters you might meet any day at the supermarket, cinema or dog park—prairie people just like you and me, struggling with loss and acceptance, celebrating love. It explores similar serious subjects, too: trust, identity, self-esteem, physical appearance, illusion and self-deception.
SWG Freelance
December 2013 / January 2014
Calls of Interest Radio Book Club on CFCR in Saskatoon Radio Book Club, formerly known as The Book Show, is looking for interview subjects. Whether you’re a writer with a book to promote, or have thoughts to share about storytelling on TV, film or other projects, we’d love to hear from you. Please contact Ann at annabelle.foster@gmail.com. Radio Book Club airs on Wednesday evenings at 7:00p.m. on CFCR 90.5 FM in Saskatoon and streaming at http://www.cfcr.ca. Past episodes are available online at http://elbookshow. podbean.com
Call for Submissions Submissions are ongoing, but please note: Deadline for Issue 4 is January 10.
Writer In Residence
Call for Submissions
Memorial University Department of English Language and Literaure Author Residency
Breaking Menonite: Living in the City Rhubarb - Submissions deadline: January 15, 2014 Publication Date: March 27, 2014
The Department of English invites applications for an Author Residency for Fall Semester 2014 or Winter Semester 2015, subject to the availability of matching funding from the Canada Council and Memorial University. Authors wishing to be considered for the position are asked to provide a letter of application and curriculum vitae no later than Friday, January 10, 2014. When an author has been selected, a joint application will be made to the Author Residency program of the Canada Council. Remuneration for the position, if funding is approved, will be approximately $20,000 (plus return air fare). Written or electronic applications should be addressed to:
Contact victor@rhubarbmag.com or submit@rhubarbmag.com before submitting your work. Snail mail submissions are also accepted at:
Plenitude Magazine aims to promote the growth and development of LGBTTQI literature through a biannual electronic (e-reader and tablet) publication of literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by both emerging and established LGBTTQI writers.
Prof. Donna Walsh, Head, Department of English Language and Literature Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland, A1C 5S7
We pay honorariums of $20 per poem, $70 per prose piece, and $50 per review/interview/article for web. Plenitude Magazine buys first serial rights; copyright remains with the author/creator. For more information, visit plenitudemagazine.ca. We are not interested in genre writing, political essays, or rants. We are only interested in literary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, graphic narrative and short film at this time. If you are interested in writing political essays, or other analyses, please contact us about contributing to our blog- we would love to hear from you. For submission requirements and further information visit plenitudemagazine.ca.
Call for Submissions
Email: donnaw@mun.ca Telephone: 709-737-8277 Fax: 709-737-4528
Journal: The Fieldstone Review Deadline: January 15, 2014 The online literary journal The Fieldstone Review is now accepting submissions of creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and reviews for its 2014 issue. Contributors may submit a maximum of one entry per category per submission period. For further details and submission guidelines, please see the journal’s website.
Rhubarb c/o MLS, 606-100 Arthur Street, Winnipeg, MB R3B 1H3. Do not send originals. No work is returned.
Call for Submissions – Anthology Do you have relationship with the south shore of Last Mountain Lake? Are you a writer who lives in or near the area served by the Last Mountain Lake Cultural Centre (LMLCC)? If so, you may be interested in contributing your work to an upcoming anthology to be edited by a writer-in-residence, Bernadette Wagner, and published by the Last Mountain Lake Cultural Centre in spring 2014. Deadline for submissions is midnight of January 31, 2014. For more information and to send your submissions go to lmlcc.wir@gmail.com Or by mail to: Bernadette Wagner, Writer-inResidence, Last Mountain Lake Cultural Centre Box 70, Regina Beach, SK S0G 4C0
Job: Writer-in-Residence Opportunity Calgary Distinguished Writers Program Seeks 2015-16 Canadian Writer-in-Residence The CDWP encourages submissions from promising Canadian writers for the position of Writer-in-Residence, a ten-month residency at the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Arts from August 15, 2015 to June 15, 2016. When: Deadline to apply for this position is January 31, 2014 http://calgarywritersprogram.com/ apply
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Professional Development Write for the Heart Do you enjoy playing with words and want to try writing poetry or short stories - but need a place to start? Have you ever thought about starting a journal? Join award-winning writer Marie Powell for some free writing exercises that will help you get started - and have some fun too! Write for the Heart is for adults. For more information about Marie visit www. mepowell.com. Registration required. Write for the Heart takes place on Wednesday and Thursday December 12 & 18 from 7:00 – 8:00 pm. Registration is required for these programs, please call 306.777.6085 or visit ReginaLibrary.ca to register.
ABORIGINAL STORYTELLING MONTH Come and Experience the Gift of Storytelling and Culture for Aboriginal Storytelling Month The Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild is preparing for Saskatchewan Aboriginal Storytelling Month 2014 during the month of February with events in Regina, Saskatoon, and Prince Albert. The Saskatoon celebration will be held at Wanuskewin Heritage Park on Saturday, February 8, from 1-4 p.m. The SWG has partnered with the Royal Saskatchewan Museum to welcome storytellers on Family Day, Monday, February 17, from 1-4 p.m. The John M. Cuelenaere Public Library in Prince Albert will be hosting storytellers on Saturday, February 22, from 1-4 p.m. You do not want to miss out on these wonderful events and the opportunity to listen, learn and laugh. The announcement of storytellers along with additional details will be updated on the SWG website at www.skwriter.com.
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Charity Registration #11914 0556 RT0001
SASKATCHEWAN WRITERS’ GUILD DONATIONS
Help us continue to serve Saskatchewan’s writing community swg General Donations for pressing or imminent needs in administrative, equipment and programming Writers/Artists Retreats to help provide a quiet refuge for uninterrupted writing uninterrupted writing time and thought-provoking exchange of ideas after working hours. Grain Magazine to assist in publishing SWG’s nationally and internationally recognized literary quarterly. Andrew Suknaski Writers Assistant Fund (WAF) to assist members in an urgent and immediate need Patricia Armstrong Fund to support educational programming for rural writers. Make cheque or money order payable to: Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild, Box 3986, Regina SK S4P 3R9 You can also donate via Paypal at: www.skwriter.com/payments-and-donations
SWG Freelance
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SWG Conference Highlights 4
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1. Judith Silverthorne, Lisa Guenther (second place winner), and Lisa Wilson at the John V. Hicks Dinner. 2. Third place winner Marlis Wesseler at the John V. Hicks Awards Dinner. 3. Six Degrees of Separation Panel: Chris Fisher, BD Miller, AndrĂŠa Ledding, Katherine Lawrence and Kelly-Anne Riess. 4. Kateri Akiwanzi-Damm facilitates a poetry workshop at the 2013 SWG Conference. 5. Attendees socialize at the 2013 SWG Conference in Regina. 6. Sarah Taggart and Danica Lorer celebrate 40 years of Grain magazine. 7. Kevin Wasaquate at the Ă‚nshkohk Luncheon.
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Backbone SWG Thanks Our Donors Andrew Suknaski Writers Assistance Fund Sandra Birdsell Rod MacIntyre Barbara Sapergia Glen Sorestad
Grain
Mona Bacon Cheryl Kloppenburg Rea Tarvydas
Patricia Armstrong Fund Shirley Byers Alison Lohans Sharon MacFarlane
Retreats
David Carpenter William Galbraith Frances Greenslade Verna Semotuk
SWG General Donation
Cathy Bendle Rita Bouvier Gail Bowen Robert Calder Brian Cobbledick Myrtle Conacher Robert Currie Felicia Daunt Jeanette Dean Todd Devonshire Adele Dueck Margaret Durant Ted Dyck Joanne Epp Jean Fahlman Elinor Florence Wesley Funk Glenda Goertzen Lyn Goldman Charitable Trust Gillian Harding-Russell Mary Harelkin Bishop Susan Harris
Betty Hegerat Doris Hillis Karen Klassen Robert Leech Bonnie Logan Alison Lohans Alex MacDonald Marilyn Matice Ken Mitchell Kathleen Morrell Helen Mourre Vincent Murphy David Poulsen Evelyn Rogers Edda Ryan Terry Toews Larry Warwaruk Dianne Young
Thanks To Our SWG Foundation Donors SWG Foundation Sharon Adam George Jeerakathil
Facilitated Retreat Susan Hogarth
Judy McCrosky Bursary Fund Judy McCrosky Allison Kydd
Legacy Project: Gloria Boerma Robert Currie Rodney Dickinson George Jeerakathil Alison Lohans Judith Silverthorne Cathy Fenwick
Caroline Heath Memorial Fund Candace Savage
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December 2013 / January 2014 Volume 45 Number 1
Publication Mail Agreement #40063014 Return Undeliverable Canadian Addresses to: Administration Centre Printing Services 111–2001 Cornwall Street Regina, SK S4P 3X9 Email: adminprint@sasktel.net
We gratefully acknowledge the support of SaskCulture, Saskatchewan Lotteries Trust Fund and the Saskatchewan Arts Board