Writers by the Dozen: Peter Wilkins’ Portraits

Posted: May 14, 2013 in Canada, Debra Martens, Letter from, London
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TARDIS at Canada House

Canada House behind that blue box. Some guy called Matt Smith…er…The Doctor.

Last night I was at Canada House to hear Angela Hewitt and Gerald Finley perform in an enchanted evening (that was the closing song). If you have never been to London, then you might not know that Canada House is a splendid building on Trafalgar Square, placing Canada right at the heart of things, which would be cool if it weren’t for the plethora of Canadian flags on the building that seem to announce a centennial or some other imperially important occasion, but do not. Before entering the large salon for the Canada Plus presentation, some people gathered in the reception room that also serves as an art gallery. A white room, very modern looking, quite unlike the grand old entrance that you see once you get past security. And on the walls of the room were people studying us. Not just any people, either, but Canadian writers. Almost as if they had been granted their wish to be the fly on the wall at a party. I’ve overheard varied reactions to the faces that move a little and to the writer suddenly standing up and leaving the chair. “What was she thinking? Look at the expression on her face.” And “Those eyes are giving me the creeps, like they are watching me, following me.”

Photo Peter Wilkins

Photo Peter Wilkins

The twelve kinetic portraits were created by Peter Wilkins, who held the writers in their contemplative positions for five minutes by getting them to think about their answers to questions he had already asked. I wanted to know what questions he asked them, and this is what he replied.

PW: There isn’t a set list of questions per se – each sitting is more like a conversation through which I try and find out enough information for me to get a sense of the sitter. Beyond the typical personal questions, which involve their upbringing, parents, siblings, university and home life – i.e. children/husband/wife, hobbies, pleasures and concerns – I would ask some questions specific to the writers. These questions were along the lines of when they first felt they were a writer, their feelings the first time they were published, and about the writing process.

Who is this guy Peter Wilkins? I love that feeling that something wonderful has been going on without my knowledge and this is the moment that I find out about it.

photographer

Peter Wilkins (head and photo credit)

Peter Wilkins is a multimedia artist who grew up in England. Artist- in-residence at Memorial University in St John’s, Newfoundland, in 2009, his portraits of prominent Newfoundlanders were exhibited that summer at the Confederation Centre for the Arts in Prince Edward Island. His 2011 exhibition at the Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival in Toronto was based on architecture and his work at The Rooms Provincial Gallery as part of Newtopia from Sept 2008 to January 2009 was based on the design of Gander International Airport. His most recent exhibition,  About Turn: Newfoundland in Venice, Will Gill & Peter Wilkins, is showing in Collateral Events at the 55th International Art Festival of the Venice Biennale.

I asked him questions by e-mail and here are his answers.

CWA: When I look at the Series page on your website, the two sets of portraits stand out from the more geometric or abstract series. What compelled you to do the portrait series?

PW: I had spent a long time wondering how portraiture could be updated with modern technology – to use a flat, moving screen as a canvas yet try, in some way, to acknowledge the history of portraiture. So I thought about the idea of the “perfect moment” in great photographic portraits that capture a single instant of the sitter, often reflecting or reacting to a key moment of a life – but that doesn’t always capture the overall picture of the sitter. So I started thinking how it could be done in video, which would have to be silent and framed, like a traditional portrait. The idea with these portraits is that they should be viewed like a painted portrait: the more you see it, the more you might get from it. It’s not about watching it in a linear fashion – it’s something the viewer should return to, and on each viewing something else might be revealed. These portraits are made up of approximately 9,000 still photos, which happen to move in real time so the viewer can get a true sense of the sitter.

The other point is that like the great painted portraits, with which you feel the sitter is there and a life is captured on canvas, the artist and sitter have spent time together, and this relationship and time is reflected in the portraits.

CWA: You did the Newfoundland portrait series in 2004. The eyes that seem to follow, the sitters who leave the sitting… after nine years, are you fed up with the Harry Potter jokes about moving portraits?

PW: Ha ha! No, I quite enjoy them. Funnily enough it helps some people grasp what I’m doing when I describe it, if they haven’t seen a portrait! But they’re not quite the same so I don’t worry at all!

Wilkins' exhibition Canada House

Peter Wilkins: Portraits of 12 Canadian Writers

CWA: What took you from London to Canada in 1991? What was it like to live in St John’s Newfoundland in 1998 after growing up in England and studying in London?

PW: I lived in Toronto for a year in 1991 for a work experience placement. It was fantastic in many ways – I had a wonderful year. In 1994 I went to live in Prague, where I met my wife. We lived there until we moved to London in 1995 and had children in 1996. By the time we had our second child my wife was very keen on moving back to Newfoundland and there wasn’t a great deal I could do! I thought the move was very exciting and we’ve had a superb time. We lived in St John’s for the first four years and then moved an hour outside the city to live right on the ocean. It’s all rather idyllic. And while I do miss the UK, I am able to get back quite regularly and enjoy catching up with everyone then – and seeing as much art as I can!

CWA: Could you tell us a bit about your other exhibition now on in London? Does the fascination with the colour of wine have anything to do with your role as co-host in Dom Joly’s Happy Hour for Sky TV?

PW: The colour of wine is based on a long-standing fascination with the endless differences of colour within wine and how the colour shifts, even in the same glass. So I’ve spent some time trying to devise a way that will accurately capture the different colours of wine – but also present that in a new and intriguing way. So I like to view the wine artworks as both documentary pieces, but upon initial viewing they are abstract artworks too, perhaps calling on the history of Colour Field Painting.

The other works in the show are what I would call my music pieces – or 33s. They are based on what I think are classic or great album covers – and the key colours are taken from the cover and recomposed in a circular fashion – mimicking the shape of a record. This way I hope the colours will commemorate the music within the record yet also appeal in an immediate, eye catching way. Quietly, these works were inspired thanks to my wife; when my vinyl collection finally arrived from the UK I wanted to put some of my favourite album covers on the wall. She would have nothing to do with it! So I had to think of a new way of celebrating the music and album artwork, without the student look.

CWA: Would you like to say something about your show in Venice, About Turn: Newfoundland in Venice, Will Gill & Peter Wilkins?

PW: It is a great honour that Will Gill and I are representing Newfoundland – the first time two NL-based artists have been officially invited to take part – at the Venice Biennale in a Collateral Event. It’s wonderful, very exciting to be there. We have a great gallery on the Grand Canal (Galleria Ca’ Rezzonico). The interest we’ve already received is much greater than we expected. Both of us have made work on a large scale.

Who are the twelve writers, you ask.Margaret Atwood, Roch Carrier, Austin Clarke, Douglas Coupland, Wayne Johnston, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Alistair MacLeod, Yann Martel, Anne Michaels, David Adams Richards, Jane Urquhart and M.G. Vassanji.

You can see 12 Writers’ Portraits at Canada House until May 31, 2013. Click here for the Venice Biennale.

Canada House (Peter Wilkins)

Canada House (Peter Wilkins)

Partisans and Books: Antanas Sileika in Lithuania

Posted: April 30, 2013 in Lithuania, Paris
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Antanas Sileika

Sileika at the Versus Aureus editorial office in Vilnius

Antanas Sileika is the author of the novels Underground (Thomas Allen and Son 2011), Woman in Bronze (Random House 2004), and Dinner at the End of the World (Mosaic 1994). His story collection, Buying on Time (Porcupine’s Quill 1997) was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Awards in 1998 and serialized on CBC Radio’s “Between the Covers.” Woman in Bronze was a Globe and Mail  Best Books selection. Sileika lives in Toronto, where he is the director for the Humber School for Writers. I was on the Humber site, clicking around while thinking, Should I sign up? Should I? when I came across his blog mentioning a recent trip to the capital of Lithuania, Vilnius (greater in population than Hamilton, smaller than Vancouver) and subsequently to the London Book Fair. He kindly agreed to answer a few questions about his trip.

While in Paris for two years, Sileika was part of the editorial collective of Paris Voices, run from the upstairs room of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore.

While in Paris for two years, Sileika was part of the editorial collective of Paris Voices, run from the upstairs room of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore.

1.  Why did you leave your desk?

Actually, as a restless writer, I leave my desk all too often, frequently to start a complicated batch of soup or to clean months-old smudges on the light switches. Research is the most engaging pursuit of all because I am away from my desk but I am “working” by reading books or visiting sites that are important to my historical novels, and since they are set in Europe, I must go there. Although travelling can be wearying, it is also dangerously fun because I can say I am “working” again, but I am not actually sitting at my desk and getting down a thousand words a day, which is my frequently unfulfilled ideal.

2.  When and where did you go?

I was in Vilnius, Lithuania, to participate in a book fair last February. I am often in Lithuania because I have the language and the place has a wealth of untapped dramatic stories unknown here. For example, one of Lithuania’s most prominent children’s writers in the fifties, Kostas Kubilinskas, was only allowed to publish his verses after ingratiating himself to the communist party. He did this by infiltrating the resistance and murdering one partisan and betraying four others who were blown up by grenades. Imagine a murderous Dr. Seuss and you get a picture of the kind we don’t see all that often in Canada. I have also climbed ancient hill forts, sat in underground bunkers, and interviewed old-timers in wooden country houses with homemade cheese and bread as well as beer and wine and home-distilled samagonas on the table in front of us.

The book fair was a revelation. In a country of just over two and a half million Lithuanian speakers, 60,000 people attended the event over four days. Families came with children in tow and spent much of the day there. I took part in several panel discussions. In one of them I helped present a book of aphorisms to a crowd of three hundred. I couldn’t pay thirty people to attend a presentation of aphorisms in Canada.

My own novel presentation (for Pogrindis, the Lithuanian title of Underground) had room for four hundred chairs, but it was standing room only with people milling at the doors to hear what I said. Newspapers, television, and magazines reported on the fair daily and I had hours and hours of interviews over six days. Books are news there. By contrast, the London Book Fair in April, which I also attended, was much, much different. That consisted of agents and publishers in short meetings, like speed dating, with hardly a fan or a book in sight. [In 2011, the total attendance of The London Book Fair was 24, 802.]

3.  What colour or odour did you notice/do you remember?

I also go to Paris from time to time and passed through there this time as well, and because I stay in old-fashioned hotels, the smell of mildew is prominent because those tiny rooms have tiny showers in them, and the steam has nowhere to go. The streets of Paris used to smell of Gauloises, but those days are gone. Now, one barely smells the reek of black tobacco at all – I miss it, actually.

As to sights and sounds, Vilnius is in a valley, and the clouds loom over the place dramatically. They seem much lower there than anywhere else, and because the history has been so troubled there, it often feels as if a malevolent god broods over the city, lifting his thunderheads from time to time to give the illusion of safety. The swallows also screech over the city at dusk, and I have thought of them as the souls of murdered, deported, or departed souls.

(Museum of Genocide Victims)

Members of the South Lithuania (Nemunas) regional underground press publishers

Partisans from the environs of Taujėnai (Museum of Genocide Victims)

Partisans from the environs of Taujėnai (Museum of Genocide Victims)

4.  Did you meet anyone?

I meet readers and writers, intellectuals and farmers, local eccentrics in small towns who provide me with the comfort of strangers. I talk to parish priests and look at the smiles of shy country children when I make jokes in the general stores of hamlets and villages. I also speak to the dead in the Jewish cemeteries, making useless apologies, and I speak to the departed in prison cells where they were tortured or shot. People come at me with their stories of what happened during the war and after it, of how their parents were deported, of how the chair of the communist party forbade visits to Israel but might permit a visit to the United States. The great advantage there is that I am not tied into my Canadian social milieu. I am a wanderer and a researcher, an archaeologist of old stories and a reporter of new ones. I seem to be some kind of magnet to people with stories in them, and I am grateful for this quality because my store of narratives to be re-imagined in literature shows no sign of getting smaller.

5.  What was the best and worst part of your sojourn?

I had the good fortune of presenting a popular book at the book fair, so the line-up for signatures was an hour long. One of the people at the end of the line said, “Getting a signature from you is like trying to get bread in the old Communist days. I used to wait in line for a long time, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted would be available when I got to the head of it.”  Luckily, signatures do not run out. As to the worst part, even the bad was good. I had to do a two-hour “walking” interview on the sidewalks of Vilnius. It was minus ten and we ambled slowly along the sidewalks with a cameraman who was walking backwards into traffic as I shivered both for the cold and for fear of his imminent demise.

6.  Is there anything else you would like to tell us?

Doris Lessing once said that writing was a way out of boredom. When I travel, I am not bored at all, and the writing suffers. Some writers are recluses, but I am not among them. I both need to be out in the world and need to be alone at my desk for certain periods of time. I’ll be travelling again this summer to the Curonian Spit, a strange long sandbar on the Baltic that has the sea on one side, and a lagoon on the other. It has sand dunes that cover ancient fishing villages that lost the battle against the sand. I’ll rent a house next door to the summer house Tomas Mann had before the war, and there I’ll try to finish off my next novel while my wife does her painting. That might be the place where I find some kind of balance between being away from my desk and being at it. I do know that at some point, I’ll go out in search of the smoked fish that villagers sell from windows in their homes, and maybe a frothy beer to go with it. And then it will be time to return to my desk in the house among the dunes.

boats near Preilan

boats by Curonian Lagoon (Daily Mail 2010)

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Canadian Buzz at the London Book Fair 2013

Posted: April 23, 2013 in Debra Martens, Letter from, London
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Livres Canadiens

Canadian publishers at London Book Fair 2013

There were over 20 Canadian publishers at the London Book Fair this year, as well as some agents. I asked a few of them if it was worth their while, given the size and the not inexpensive venue at Earls Court Exhibition Centre. For Linda Cameron, Director, The University of Alberta Press, “The London Book Fair provides an important opportunity for me to meet with our UK distributor and publishers from other countries to discuss rights and territorial sales.” She also goes for “the latest innovations in the publishing industry.” Alana Wilcox, Editorial Director of Coach House Press, admits that her primary goal of selling rights keeps her busy in meetings with agents and publishers. Wilcox emphasizes the importance of repeat visits to the Book Fair:  “It’s always valuable to spend time with colleagues from around the world — you can’t always measure it in dollars, but it’s important to talk with fellow publishers, especially when our industry is changing so quickly. Selling rights requires a very long view — it takes years to build up a good network. That’s the most important thing about the fair — the chance to meet up with everyone.”

I didn’t meet up with anyone, but I did go to a panel discussion in the airy and not crowded Thames Room, called “Gloves Off! How Are Writers, Editors and Readers Feeling About Digital?” It promised to “explore the creative and collaborative relationships that need to happen to move publishing forward in terms of the creation of innovative content and engaged communities.” Commissioning editor Katharine Reeve tried to get the gloves off over whether editors or marketers should make the decisions in the digital future of books (editorial vision vs. technological predictors) but in the end spoke up for cooperation between the two departments. Reeve is also Head of the Department of Creative Writing and Publishing at Bath Spa University, and she had some startling statistics to cite: Last year there were 32 million books with ISBNs, a huge increase from less than a million because of self-publishing – and that does not include writers who did not bother getting an ISBN. Some best-seller lists now include self-published books. Self-publishing and print-on-demand services are changing the book market dramatically. Reeve said, “Print alone is not going to save the industry. That’s just one platform.”

How on earth can writers draw attention to their work in this avalanche of words?

Hint: haven’t you read something about Bath Spa University recently?

Kate Pullinger (Canadian writer abroad!) and Donna Hancox both talked about the importance of making the most of digital technology for creative work. Pullinger is publishing her next novel with a digital supplement. They talked about the importance of trans-media fiction, of combining your chapters with perhaps a blog by a character and short films of people your characters meet, for example. Non-traditional media should add dimension to your written/printed work.

I can tell you, after a year and a half of running CWA, that there are a lot of blogs out there. A deluge, a swamp, a morass of blogs. Getting yourself an online presence might not happen with just a blog. So I sat up and took note when Hancox started talking about digital collaboration. She urged the writers in the audience to submit to online journals, or to create e-sites with other writers. She used the phrase “boutique niche journals.” Hey, wait a minute. That’s Canadian Writers Abroad!

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Translating Montreal: Where Blueberries Are Not Myrtilles by Neil Smith

Posted: April 17, 2013 in Canada, France
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Reblogged from QWF Writes:

Last time I was in Paris, two men travelling on my train got into a fight when one dared address the other using tu.

“Vous m’avez tutoyé, monsieur! Vous m’avez tutoyé!”

A face was slapped. A beret was knocked askew.

Their hullaballoo over tu reminded me of the time I was at my Montreal gym and asked a fellow if he’d finished with the bench press.

Read more… 497 more words

This blog is by translator and writer Neil Smith. His discussion of differences between French in France and Quebec was posted originally on the Quebec Writers' Federation blog.
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The Shoemaker and the Rooster: Rhonda Douglas in Thailand

Posted: April 10, 2013 in Canada, Thailand
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Rhonda Douglas

Rhonda Douglas

Rhonda Douglas is a poet and writer based (most of the time) in Ottawa, Canada. She published Some Days I Think I Know Things: The Cassandra Poems in 2008 with Signature Editions. She is currently completing a new poetry manuscript, For, and writing a set of essays about the work she does in her “other life” as Global Projects Director for Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO).

Canadian Writers Abroad: Mini-Interview with Rhonda Douglas

1. Why did you leave your desk?

I travel for work quite frequently, usually overseas to Asia or Africa. To get some writing done, I will sometimes add on a few days to a trip. In this case, I had meetings in Chiang Rai (northern Thailand) and then went down to Bangkok for a few days to do some research for a non-fiction project.

2. When and where did you go?

I was in Chiang Rai, Thailand, in early February 2013, and then spent a few days in the neighbourhood of Rom Klao, which is about five kilometres from Bangkok International Suvarnabhumi Airport. It’s quite a mixed neighbourhood – new condos going up across from home renovation centres and Honda dealerships, a lovely park with a man-made lake in its centre, juxtaposed with some very poor areas home to people relocated from slums in downtown Bangkok by the municipality several years ago. I was there to visit a sub-contracted shoemaker who glues together shoes for a local factory.

3. What colour or odour did you notice or remember?

The woman I was staying with (Sayan) was completing an order for 700 pairs of sandals. Before they are sewn, the sandal uppers are secured to the sole using industrial-strength glue. I was warned about the pungent scent by my host but since the lower floor of their house was open to the outside, I thought it would be fine. Within seconds of her opening the glue-pot, my eyes were stinging and watering, and within ten minutes I had a throbbing headache. I could manage to keep working for about another thirty minutes before I had to leave to get some fresh air and take some Tylenol. Yet Sayan works with this day in and day out, and has done so for thirty years. I asked her why she doesn’t wear a mask but she said she’s used to it, though she did tease her husband about him being addicted to the glue, claiming that’s why he works such long days. (Lek will often work until 2 or 3 in the morning. He starts work just after 8 a.m.)

Shoemaker's workshop

Rhonda glues shoes

4. Did you meet anyone?

I met Sayan and her husband, Lek, who were my hosts in Rom Klao. I was also there with my colleagues from HomeNet Thailand – Poonsap and Da, who shared translation duties and accompanied me in Rom Klao overnight. We met several other home-based workers primarily involved in shoemaking.

5. What was the best and worst part of your sojourn?

I enjoyed meeting Sayan very much. They have a lovely family and were very welcoming. The worst part would have to be the roosters kept outside in bamboo cages, which did not confine their loud crowing to dawn but instead seemed like they were screaming in my ear at regular intervals throughout the night as I tried to sleep. I have never hated an animal so much. Da took me to get fried chicken from a street vendor and I kept wishing we could just fry up that damn rooster and ensure the neighbourhood a good night’s sleep. Of course, everyone else is probably used to it.

caged rooster in Thailand

Rooster in a cage

6. Is there anything else you would like to tell us?

This visit was part of a non-fiction project highlighting the working lives of informal workers. If people are interested in reading more on that topic, they could visit www.wiego.org or www.inclusivecities.org for more information.

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A deluge of fat words

Posted: March 27, 2013 in Canada, China, Spain
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Spain 2013

White. White stones on the beach, white buildings, white stones in the paving of streets, white marble steps with flat red brick edging. Olive trees hiking up the hills, agriculture crammed onto the terraces. A ribbon of road squeezed between coast and hills. You’d think I’d write about the blue of the water beside our hotel near Nerja in Spain at the end of February. But I was struck by the white of things. Perhaps this had something to do with coming from the land of grey. When I lived in Kenya and India, I couldn’t understand why so many northern Europeans came for one week to such farflung places. After a year and a half under grey skies, I now understand the draw of the sun.

Over lunch one day, in either Málaga or Grenada, the hills and caves visible from the road got me to thinking about the Spanish Civil War and whether Norman Bethune had come this far south. Can it be that you don’t know who Norman Bethune is? He was a Canadian doctor who went to Spain in 1936 to join the International Brigade to fight the fascists, and who created the portable transfusion clinic. He also went to China, where he was welcomed for his innovative treatment of TB and for his hospital field work there too during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Much admired in China, he was brought to the attention of Canadians by the book The Scalpel, the Sword: the Story of Doctor Norman Bethune (1952), by Ted Allan and Sydney Gordon.Scalpel reissue

Given that several Canadian writers have been to Spain, this is not the place to write about my family vacation nor about a revolutionary doctor, even if he was Canadian – unless I can work in some literary connections. How many can I make?

One of the biographers, Ted Allan, wrote a novel about his time in Spain with the International Brigade, called This Time a Better Earth (1939). Never heard of it? Then perhaps you have heard of Love is a Long Shot (1984), which won the Stephen Leacock Award. Or his short story and screenplay, Lies My Father Told Me.

While The Scalpel, the Sword is inspiring, I was irritated by the present-tense scenes that read like a film script. My irritation is nothing compared to the criticism of others, from the Canadian Encyclopedia’s mention of lack of documentation to the Globe and Mail’s reviewer: “Though it moved many readers, the book was an unreliable hagiography stuffed with invented dialogue and lacking footnotes, an index or any other scholarly apparatus. More than half the book was set in China, where the two authors had not set foot. They drew liberally on a 1948 Chinese novel by Zhou Erfu, Doctor Norman Bethune, which they forgot to acknowledge.”  -Judy Stoffman, Globe and Mail, 19 May 2009.

The book Stoffman was reviewing was not The Scalpel, the Sword but a biography of Norman Bethune by Adrienne Clarkson, one of the Penguin Extraordinary Canadians series, titled, simply, Norman Bethune. The former Governor General has published, among her many works, the novel: A Lover More Condoling (1968), about a Canadian widow in France. There are now several works about Bethune’s life, including the 2011 Phoenix: The Life of Norman Bethune by Roderick and Sharon Stewart.

I wondered if the fighting in the Spanish Civil War had brought Bethune south.

English: Canadian Blood Transfusion Unit which...

English: Canadian Blood Transfusion Unit which operated during the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Norman Bethune is at the right. ca. 1936 – 1937 / Spain Italiano: Unità transfusionale canadese durante la Guerra civile spagnola. A destra il dott. Norman Bethune. ca. 1936 – 1938 / Spagna (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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Sibbald in Swaziland

Posted: March 12, 2013 in southern Africa
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Malolotja, (The Kingdom of Swaziland)

Malolotja (The Kingdom of Swaziland)

Barbara Sibbald is the first writer to take part in the CWA mini interview, a new series that looks at why writers leave their desk to travel. She earns her living as an award-winning investigative journalist and news editor at the Canadian Medical Association Journal, one of the world’s leading medical journals. Outside of work hours, she writes fiction. Regarding Wanda (Bunkhouse Press, 2006) was short-listed for the 2007 Ottawa Book Award.The Book of Love: Guidance in Affairs of the Heart (General Store Publishing House, 2011) melds self-help and fiction. Sibbald has also published short stories in literary magazines such as The New Quarterly and The Antigonish Review. She recently completed her third novel.

Canadian Writers Abroad Mini-Interview

1.         Why did you leave your desk?

After three years of medical editing, I felt an urge to return to my journalistic roots.

2.         When and where did you go?

In late September 2012, I went to Swaziland to research and write about their health woes: Swaziland has the highest per capita rate of HIV in the world: 34% of adults aged 15–49 are HIV positive.

3.         What colour or odour did you notice or remember?

After days of inhaling dust in the southern part of the country, I caught a whiff of an intoxicating barbecue. A nurse I was touring with took our gang of five to a “Butchery” where we chose our hunks of meat – I’m talking as big as your head! We bought three huge steaks, plus about three feet of coiled sausage, which were plopped unceremoniously on a plastic plate. My pal headed outside; beside the shop there was an open-sided shed with a barbecue pit inside. A couple of guys were turning steaks. I assumed they were minding the place, but no. My nurse friend coated the meat in salt, then slapped it on the rack, turning it regularly with a straightened coat hanger. A small woman fed wood into the fire as the men yakked and turned their meat in what was really communal barbecuing. When the meat was done, we headed back inside the Butchery, to some picnic tables in the back that I hadn’t noticed before. We were given two giant plastic bowls of pap (maizemeal porridge) and a knife to cut the meat.  I have to say, that was the best steak I’ve ever eaten.

4.         Did you meet anyone?

I interviewed 32 people in just eight days for my articles, but one woman definitely stands out: Sylvia Khuzwayo. Sylvia was one of the first expert clients for Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF)  in Swaziland. The country has a severe doctor and nurse shortage, so expert clients fill in the gaps by following up with HIV-positive clients and those with tuberculosis, to make sure they stay on their meds. Expert clients know what they’re talking about because they’re HIV-positive as well.IMG_2074 (3) Sylvia told me her story:

On Valentine’s Day in 1998, Sylvia’s husband died. Later, she found out he had AIDS and that she was HIV-positive with a CD4 count of 210, well below the threshold for starting antiretrovirals (ART). Her doctor wasn’t going to tell her because she didn’t have the money to buy drugs.

Sylvia was outraged. As a waitress with three children to support, she couldn’t afford ART, so she overcame her fears of stigma and discrimination and told her family and friends that she was HIV-positive and needed help. She lost some friends, who were afraid people would think they were positive as well (infected by association), but other friends came through with money. She began ART in 2001.

Sylvia’s initial outrage and subsequent decision to go public prompted her to launch a career as a counsellor. In November 2008, MSF hired her to recruit and train expert clients in Shiselweni, the hardest hit of Swaziland’s four regions.

Expert clients know first-hand what it is to be HIV-positive and to take ART.

“[We] are the key to reducing stigma because clients see someone who is positive and healthy then they believe than can also live a healthy life,” says Sylvia. “I’m still on first-line treatment after 11 years. Some have challenges with side-effects. I show them how I coped. They can hear it from the horses’ mouth which is a great thing.”

Today, 44-year-old Sylvia is the community psycho/social supervisor in one of three zones of the Shiselweni region, looking after 12 community expert clients. They work at the community level, conducting campaigns, meeting with chiefs and other leaders and working with patients living in remote areas, among other things.

Despite her managerial duties, Sylvia still sees clients.

“It’s here,” she says, tapping her chest. “As a long survivor I can show people you can live with treatment. Without treatment you die in 5 years. I am giving them hope.”

5.         What was the best and worst part of your sojourn?

The worst part was the suffering. I talked to a six-year-old girl who was co-infected with HIV and TB and had undergone a horrific drug regimen. She told me she wanted to be a soldier when she grew up, but I wondered if she’d have the chance to grow up. And even if she did, she wouldn’t have the chance of an education. Publically funded education ends at grade three and her mother was sick and unemployed; her father long gone. Her prospects seemed really dim.

The best part was getting to know my flat-mates at an MSF house in Manzini. There were three physicians and one nurse: all men, all expats (mostly African). They were so welcoming and entertaining. They cooked for me, told me their stories and shared their wine. We really had a fabulous time together.

Barbara Sibbald with flatmates in Manzini.

Barbara Sibbald with flatmates in Manzini.

6.         Is there anything else you would like to tell us?

I wrote eleven articles about Swaziland: seven for the CMAJ (where I’m an editor), one for the Ottawa Citizen, two for MSF publications and one for The Lancet (on new HIV-prevention pilots). I didn’t finish the last article until January, so it was quite the haul, but completely worth it.

Christmas on Toy

Posted: March 6, 2013 in Caribbean, Reviews
Tags: , , ,
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view of Bequia harbour

Bequia harbour (Photolibrary.com, Telegraph April 2011)

Island in the Clouds by Susan M. Toy, IslandCat Editions (2012), 183 pp.

Reviewed by Jane Christmas

There’s a body face down in a swimming pool and a motley cast of expats who may or may not have anything to do with it. Tongues start wagging, the rumour mill shudders into action, and in no time an island population that normally measures excitement by the number of tourists piling off the cruise ships begins to get edgy.

Island in the Clouds, Susan Toy’s first novel, is set on the tiny Caribbean island of Bequia, where the author lives part of the year. Lucky gal. She has honed a keen understanding of the distinctive personality of islanders, and captures well the tension that arises when foreigners who gravitate to such islands for the slower pace of life become impatient with that very characteristic. Especially when there’s a murder to solve.book cover

Toy plays up that well-known islander trait that no one is what he or she seems or pretends to be. You are never quite sure who is telling the truth. Even the amiable narrator, Geoff (not his real name as it turns out) is suspect. He has a sweet life, and a lovely partner, but when he confides to the reader that he was the scapegoat in a Bre-X type scam back in Canada, we are left wondering what else lurks in his background. As the novel unfolds we discover that everyone seems to have something stashed away—a past they would rather not discuss, a gun, a lifestyle. Between the palm fronds, island life is never as simple or as idyllic as it appears.

It’s a breezy mystery, and Toy has a gift of story-telling and pace, but her novel gets weighed down by a teacher-like insistence that we learn about Bequia. The six-page prologue, for example, does nothing to set up the story, and has all the warmth of a Lonely Planet listing. Facts about the island are sprinkled throughout the text, and are often not integrated into the story as seamlessly as they could be, interrupting the story’s flow.

Still, this is Toy’s first attempt. She has created distinctive, often endearing characters, as well as a plot with enough dips and detours to keep the reader engaged. You can almost imagine this as the first in a series of Geoff-led escapades. With tighter writing and the confidence to know that her readers don’t need everything explained to them, Toy has the potential to succeed. May she do so!

 Jane Christmas is the author of The Pelee Project, What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim, and Incontinent on the Continent. Her next book, And Then There Were Nuns, will be published in September.

Jane Christmas

Jane Christmas

Postcards

Posted: February 26, 2013 in Austria, Canada, Debra Martens, Paris
Tags: , , , , ,
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postcard of Leacock house

Stephen Leacock’s house in Orillia

You are on a trip somewhere. You spin the rack, buy some postcards, some stamps, go sit at a cafe and write a postcard to your lover, your parents, your child. Remember doing this, back when you knew their address because people didn’t move? Or when you actually filled in the addresses in the back of your agenda, when you carried an agenda? You sometimes thought your postcards were responsible for the survival of the post office. Now sending postcards should be easier; you should have the addresses on your portable device. But do you? And can you find post cards or post offices? Who writes postcards anymore? Are postcards now in the realm of nostalgia?

No, they are not gone, but their use may be morphing into a less personal and more public function. At the beginning of this century, when I lived in Vienna, I picked up free postcards left in cafes, which advertised events, plays, readings, causes. A cool picture on one side, and information on the other. Hey, my Viennese friends, are those postcards still being dropped in cafes? While postcards are sold to collectors at flea markets, they are also being used for such things as education, charitable endeavours and design contests, such as Nottingham , art, and local history.

www.architekturtage.at

Invitation to Austrian architecture

About the same time that postcards made their way into cafes as advertisements, the short story took a spin in a mini. Grain magazine was the first, I think, to run a postcard story contest. (Grain‘s was 500 words or less; I remember deleting them one by one for “The End of Things.”). The Writer’s Union of Canada joined in with an even shorter version (250 words). These stories were published, but not on postcards, which might have brought the authors more readers. Now Geist is running a contest that actually requires a postcard image to go with the uber short story. Here is CWA’s advice: print up a bunch of postcards with a photo of the magazine cover on one side and story with web link on the other, and distribute them around bookstores –  oh right, hardly any left – ok, then, cafes and libraries, for free. Promote those story winners.

UK author Angela Carter sent enough postcards to her friend (and now literary executor) that the friend has published a book based on them with Bloomsbury. My favourite librarian blogger has put up postcards from the archives of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea: click here. Not surprisingly, postcards have also made their way into popular culture, in song, such as “Postcard from Paris” and film, for example, “Postcards from the Edge.” What examples can you think of?

The postcard has been around since the nineteenth century. It might be called the precursor to the tweet: short and inexpensive message to loved ones that others can read. Information on its history takes us to Paris and England and the United States, according to this  Wikipedia history. I would love to know how many postcards were sent over the years in Canada, from loggers and tree planters, from cottagers, soldiers on duty, nurses on holiday, students leaving home for the first time, relocated workers, lovers in long-distance relationships, from families doing their cross-Canada car trip. And from writers abroad.

A quick random check shows six postcards in the Dorothy Livesay papers at the University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections from her trip to Bulgaria in 1977 for a writer’s conference. Would it be interesting to know how many postcards made it into the archives of other writers and whether there was a peak period of postcard posting?

These two postcards promote a cause — I couldn’t find any promoting literary causes, so these will have to do.

Niagara River

Maid of the Mist. A tourism postcard, but also a cause as the river Maid now competes with other boats for the Niagara Parks contract.

www.freesunday.at

Sonntag bleibt arbeitsfrei! (Aviva Taborsky) This was part of a campaign to not have Sunday shopping.

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Kate Pullinger

Posted: February 12, 2013 in Interviews, London
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She found London was a place she could sink deep into, sink everything, and yet not drown. -from The Last Time I Saw Jane

Professor Pullinger

Kate Pullinger (Bath Spa University)

Best known in Canada for winning the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2009 for The Mistress of Nothing, Kate Pullinger is also leading the way in digital fiction. In 2002 she worked with trAce Online Writing Centre. Her digital story, Inanimate Alice, won prizes in 2006 (four episodes of ten are available so far). The collaborative work combines her text with graphics, sound, and media games, and comes with material for teachers. In addition to her networked novel Flight Paths, she is working on the collaborative digital thriller Duel. Her novel in progress, Landing Gear, ties in with characters in Flight Paths. All very edgy.

Born in Cranbrook B.C., Pullinger left her Vancouver Island home for McGill University. Before finishing her degree, she travelled and then settled in London, where she lives with her family. She returned to university as a Reader in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University, where she completed a PhD by published works in 2007. She is now Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media in the School of Humanities and Cultural Industries at Bath Spa University. Debra Martens spoke with Kate Pullinger via Skype on December 7, 2012.

Q: When did you leave Canada and why?
Pullinger: I left in 1982 when I was 20. I left not so much because I wanted to leave Canada but because I wanted to come and live in London. I had been to London twice prior to coming to live here, but only for a week at a time. My idea about coming to live in London was tied up with my adolescent idea about where you needed to be in order to be a proper writer. That was also tied up with my interest in music, British music in particular. And also the cultural scene that I knew that I would find in London.
Q: British music 1982? That was punk?
Pullinger: I was too young for punk. Punk came to British Columbia about two years after it ended here. Just the general English pop scene really, punk, David Bowie, Joy Division, those kinds of bands that seemed really extraordinary to me at the time.
Q: That’s very brave of you to come just like that. You didn’t come straight from B.C., did you?
Pullinger: I went to McGill University when I was 17, which seems extremely young now, and I dropped out after a year and a half. Then I went to live in the Yukon for a year. My eldest sister was living in the Yukon, so I went to the Yukon and worked in a mine. My brother-in-law worked in a mine outside Whitehorse. I got a job crushing rocks. I made a ton of money; even by today’s standards it was extremely well paid. So I did that and then I travelled in Europe and North Africa for six months before coming to live in London.
Q: Were you already writing when you left?
Pullinger: Yes, it had always had been a … I guess I had started writing seriously … well when you’re a teenager these things all seem so serious … from the age of 12 or 13. It was what I knew I wanted to do. University sort of deviated from that and that’s partly why I left McGill. I had this clear idea of what I wanted to do. It’s not a thing I’ve ever regretted and of course bizarrely I’ve ended up working in academia, despite being a drop out.
Q: You earned it, I think. How did you come to be working in academia?
Pullinger: I’ve always done bits and pieces of teaching, writing. Just gradually through a series of opportunities, really, over the last decade. I’m now professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media at Bath Spa University. I’ve been there since the middle of September.
Q: Do you like teaching in Bath?
Pullinger: I’m really enjoying it. Really lovely. The physical environment at the university is absolutely beautiful. The two campuses I work on are fantastically beautiful, both of them. It’s very friendly, very open, an interesting set of colleagues and working environment so I’m really pleased.
Q: To go back to when you arrived in London – how did you earn a living? Read the rest of this entry »

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