Here are some dancing books courtesy of Type Books. Enjoy!
Toronto
Tonight’s PEN Canada Benefit marks the start of the 32nd annual International Festival of Authors at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto. Renowned designer and innovator Bruce Mau will be interviewed by the CBC’s Mary Hynes, and images of his work will be featured, as well.
Tickets are $50 ($20 for students) and all proceeds go to PEN Canada, an organization committed to defending the freedom of expression of writers, in Canada and internationally, who have been forced into silence for writing the truth as they see it.
I’ll be among the PEN Canada volunteers there, so drop by and say hello if you come out to join us. If you can’t make it to the benefit, you still have lots of chances to check out the festival as there are more than 50 readings and events between now and the end of October!
You can download a PDF schedule of all the readings and events here. This year’s lineup is as strong as ever, featuring a pantheon of excellent writers. You’re sure to find some of your favourites in the list of participants below. [click to continue…]
I read Francine Prose‘s Reading like a Writer last winter on my pre-dawn morning commutes. And ever since, it has been on my list of books to share with you here on the Word Blog. That post will come soon—next week, in fact—but today’s post is about her appearance last night at the Toronto Public Library as part of The Writer’s Room.
First of all, let me say that Prose’s body of work is impressively varied and that she’s prolific. I’ll be featuring her book on writing and close reading next week because this is, after all, a blog about words, but I encourage you to seek out her works of fiction, young adult fiction, children’s fiction and nonfiction, as well.
Ian Brown sat opposite Prose for last night’s interview and asked about many aspects of her work and her practice of writing. I was pleased to learn that in her classes, as in Reading Like a Writer, Prose teaches close reading of literature. She and her students ask “why this sentence, this turn of phrase, this word?” Courses that teach students to ask how these small elements affect and reflect the narrative as a whole—that ask students to slow down in their reading and really analyse the work for the multiple valences of the words within it—are rare. I had the good fortune to take a few literature courses that focused on this kind of close reading, and I’m grateful that I was taught not just how to write and argue, but how to read, as well.
Prose’s most recent book, Anne Frank, considers Anne Frank’s famous diary not just as a historical document but as a work of literature in its own right. Her description last night of Frank’s beautiful writing, deftly managed cast of characters and her precocious awareness and observance of her social and political environment as a very young woman has inspired me to read the diary again. And, naturally, once I’ve done that I’ll be checking out Prose’s Anne Frank.
I won’t go in to too much depth about Prose’s other titles here, except to say that she’s a New York Times bestselling author, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and has written about Caravaggio, muses, breasts, gluttony, and of course the lives of imaginary people. You’re sure to find something you’ll enjoy.
You can also hear an interview with Francine Prose that aired today on CBC’s Q by following this link. http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/qpodcast_20091119_23327.mp3 (the interview begins at 14:40).
And you’ll be able to watch a video recording of last night’s talk at the Toronto Public Library’s website soon. I’ll update this post with the link once the video is available.
Yesterday, while many logophiles had a lovely time schmoozing with authors and publishers at Word on the Street, I and my adventurous parents chose instead to head out on one of Heritage Toronto‘s historic walking tours. They were able to lure me away from Word on the Street because this particular tour was led by the charming and witty Maureen Jennings—author of, among other works, the Murdoch mysteries, which are set in Victorian Toronto.
The walk, Murdoch’s Toronto: Fact into Fiction, took us through Cabbagetown and Corktown and transported us to 1895. As in her books, Jennings shared with us the social relationships and economic realities of the working classes and the poor. Toronto society was moralistic and often condescending at the time: paupers were blamed for their own destitution, teachers who wore rational dress were labeled prostitutes, women doctors weren’t permitted to use the title before their names, and the poor stuck working in the house of industry weren’t allowed to speak…pretty much ever.
If you’re interested to know more about what the day-to-day life of regular Torontonians was like back then and you enjoy a good yarn, let me recommend that you give Jennings’s compelling Murdoch mysteries a try. The first title in the series is Except the Dying.
And here are a few more interesting things I learned about 1895 Toronto while on the tour:
- How to break up with your beau: Fold your card in half and send it to him in an envelope. He’ll get the message.
- How to effectively beat someone with a truncheon: I’m not sure I should tell you this…what if one of my entries annoys you?
- How to score cocaine: Summon the doctor to your home.
- How to annoy the chief of police: Be a scorcher (aka a cyclist). How is it that a century later we still haven’t found a sensible way to share the road?
- How to steal a purebred dog to ransom: Trail a bitch in heat past his yard and be patient.
- How to spend a free night in Toronto: Just ask the police to take you in. You needn’t commit a crime–they’re obliged to put you up and feed you!
- How to break up with a lady: This is not permitted. Either stick it out or risk a criminal charge of “seduction.”
To wrap up an informative tour on a gorgeous afternoon, we adjourned to the Dominion Pub, where we ordered pints and where Maureen Jennings was kind enough to sign my copy of Except the Dying: [click to continue…]
The end of August saw the end of an era for Toronto book lovers when Pages Books and Magazines closed its doors for the last time. There was never a time that I went into Pages and left without at least one book, and while I could say that of a few other bookstores, too, the books I left Pages with were always ones that endured in my mind and on my shelves.
I can still remember my first visit to the store in 1995, and I still have and reread the books I bought there that day: Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Iva Pekárková’s Truck Stop Rainbows, and Elie Wiesel’s The Trial of God.
To mark the end of Pages’ 30-year tradition of stocking the best books, employees, and clientele, I attended Afterword at the Gladstone Hotel last night. The ballroom was standing room only as the community that Pages forged gathered to mark the closing of one of Toronto’s best known bookstores. The event was described by some as a wake, by others as a celebration— but whatever we called it, it was a reminder of how precious and precarious cultural community spaces are in this city.
We were guided through the bookstore one last time by Jack Blum, the evening’s MC, and by some of Pages’ most illustrious friends. Lawrence Hill read from his book Some Great Thing and extolled Pages for being the champion of so many new authors. Eldon Garnet applauded the bookstore’s knack for mixing the best of local and international thought.
Monkey Toast raised our spirits with improv comedy, based on stories sent in by some of the store’s longtime fans. And Matthew Blackett described the integral role Pages played for him as a journalism student and a cofounder of the award-winning Spacing magazine. He also reminded us that the closing of Pages will have a serious effect on the vitality of many small publishers.
Greg Gatenby, author of Toronto: A Literary Guide, situated Pages’ impressive cultural influence in an impressively literary city. Barbara Klunder reminisced about seeing her first children’s book on the store’s shelves and her delight when browsing its first-rate children’s book section.
Rachel Glassman, the owner’s daughter, was likely responsible for many of the titles that Barbara was thinking of, and and she talked to us about weighing in on her favourite books as a child and growing up in the shelter of the store. She then introduced her father, the owner and curator of this book lover’s haven. Marc Glassman expressed his thankfulness for the 30 years’ worth of friends, culture, community, books and family that Pages has fostered for him as well as his grief at its closing. And we all celebrated and grieved with him.
And, though we’re grieving for the loss of Pages, we can continue to support one of the store’s greatest contributions to the community: TINARS (This Is Not a Reading Series) will continue to reveal the imaginations and inner workings of authors by inviting them to do everything but read from their books. You can find a listing of upcoming TINARS events here.
As part of my ongoing training I’ve been taking courses in Ryerson’s Publishing Program, which have often entailed work on manuscripts and other written documents. But this summer I took an excellent course on the fundamentals of book design and had a fantastic time learning how to design both interior page spreads and covers.
For the final project students were asked create a book of their choosing, imagining it from the ground up. Because I’m fond of walking in cemeteries and photographing the beauty I find in them, I proposed a book about the cultural history of several Toronto cemeteries. Here’s the front cover of my final project:
If you’re interested in seeing more, you can find the rest of my project at these links:
Please bear in mind that the contents of these pages are design examples only and contain placeholder text, not actual content. You can find out more about my Necropolitan Toronto design project below. [click to continue…]
Ever wondered what the dark, secret side of your city looks like? I do all the time and love to read mysteries set in Toronto like those written by Maureen Jennings, Vivian Meyers, and Pat Capponi. So when I saw that one of the Luminato events was called Gothic Toronto: Writing the City Macabre, I knew I had to attend.
While waiting outside for the doors to open, I picked up one of the chapbooks for sale at the event and was delighted to get my copy signed by each of the authors present.
The readings took place in the Music Gallery, a onetime church in the heart of downtown, and its glowing stained glass and small dimly lit nave set the mood for the readings. Let me share with you a small bit of each writer’s story and leave you some linky breadcrumbs to follow in case you want to read more of their work. [click to continue…]
I spent last weekend mingling with 200 or so other editors at the Editors’ Association of Canada’s 2009 conference. It’s very rare that you’d find so many of us in one place since editors on the whole tend toward being a retiring lot. Our solitary toiling over thick manuscripts and flickering computer screens doesn’t always help us to get out and about much, either. But for a few magic days downtown Toronto was inundated with delightfully persnickety logophiles.
I met many impressive people and attended many delightful talks last weekend, but in the interests of keeping a short story only medium long, I’m going to give you succinct overviews of my three favourite presentations:
- James Harbeck, the multitalented editor and linguist, asked and answered the question every spelling-bee contestant, ESL student, and frankly every speaker of the English language has asked at least once: “What’s up with English spelling?”
Seriously, as much as I foolishly love its baffling idiosyncracies, the English language really is an M.C. Escher stairwell of a language. If you’re at all curious about how Dutch scribes, the alphabet, Jonathan Swift, regional dialects, revolutions, dictionaries, great vowel shifts, and, of course, the French have monkeyed with English spelling, I recommend you head to James’s blog where you’ll find a complete transcript of his excellent presentation. (And while you’re there don’t miss his word tasting notes—they’ll make you want a heaping plate of words for dinner tonight.) - Andrea Zanin, freelance editor and professional sex geek, presented “Sexing the Language: Editing for Sexual Minorities” to help editors (1) engage respectfully and accurately with the continuously shifting vernacular used by diverse groups of sexual minorities and (2) recognize and eliminate biased and loaded expressions and assumptions about sexual minorities.
I can’t possibly summarize the breadth of information in her talk here, nor match her presentation’s energy, so instead I will repeat the 3 guiding rules she provided us: be respectful, be accurate, and, whenever you don’t know if the language you’re using is respectful and accurate, just ask for Pete’s sake.
Here’s a link to a great article by Andrea: “hello, sir—i mean, ma’am”: trans etiquette for dummies. Check it out! - Nora Young, host of CBC’s Spark and keynote speaker extraordinaire, spoke to us about ethics in the quickly changing landscape of communication technology. She compared the cultural shift occasioned by web 2.0 technology to the advent of direct-dial phone calls.
Just as pioneer phonecallers once had to give some serious thought about how they would announce themselves to the person answering their call—should I say hello or ahoy?—Nora argues that we as pioneering web 2.0 users are having to think hard about how we use and communicate information on the web.
While the internet signals the end of information scarcity (at least for those of us with access to it), she asks us, what is the quality of that information? How carefully do we evaluate it’s accuracy? And to what extent are we exposed to information that challenges our assumptions when we gravitate to the news and views we want to read? [click to continue…]
