I’m going to let you figure that out. Matthew (inspiration for Big Or Little?) was born in 1975 and Kelly (inspiration for Red Is Best and “Babysitting Helen“) was born in 1978.
This picture of my kids was taken at Matt’s wedding in 2001.
I also have two stepdaughters born in 1967 and 1968 and five grandchildren born in 1997, 1999, 2002, 2002, and 2003.
Renowned landscape architect Cornelia Oberlander is celebrating her 90th birthday this week, and is finally admitting to her true age. (Not quite true. She’s been far too busy this month for anything as trivial as a birthday, so the big party will not be held until August.)
There can’t be many nonagenarians practising their professions with as much passion and energy as she is. Love Every Leaf: the life of landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander does a great job of describing her career and what drives her to keep on working to bring nature into cities in Canada, the States, and abroad, but last month there was another wonderful tribute paid to her.
At the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver (a fine example of her work), a new film about Cornelia’s amazing career was premiered. It’s part of the Washington-based Cultural Landscape Foundation Oral History Project, which has documented six important “Pioneers of Landscape Design in North America”.
Whether you have read Love Every Leaf or haven’t yet managed to get around to it, you’ll want to see and hear Cornelia speak for herself about her background, early career, and environmentally responsible designs in her segment of the CLF’s Oral History Project.
Every writer knows the old saw about ‘killing your darlings’ – deleting favourite phrases, sentences, characters, scenes, etc., from a work as it evolves. I often reassure writers I work with that out-takes from one project can sometimes be used in another project down the road.
I hadn’t yet killed the ‘Hannah as a teen mom’ thread from my current novel-in-progress, when I was approached by someone looking for submissions to consider for a high school anthology of short stories or unpublished novel excerpts. But I must have known that the moment would come. I remember thinking when the excerpt from my novel was accepted, that having the story ‘out there’ in that form would soften the blow, if I did have to cut that thread from the story.
The main character in ‘Baby Love’, recently published in Reality Imagined: Stories of Identity and Change (McGraw-Hill Ryerson), is no longer Hannah. The novel-in-progress in which Hannah is still a character now ends a few years earlier than it used to, and how it ends now means that becoming a teen mom is no longer a likelihood in Hannah`s future. But it is Chelsea`s reality.
Click on the image to read an excerpt from Chelsea’s story:
As I near the completion of a draft of the original story in which Hannah appears – one that’s almost ready to submit to a publisher (she says optimistically) – I doubt that I’ll ever have what it takes to actually write Chelsea’s novel. (But of course I doubt it. I found it hard to contemplate having another baby while I was still in the delivery room, too!)
Whether I ever tell Chelsea`s full story or not, it`s nice to know that at least readers of Reality Imagined will know this “killed darling” of mine to some extent anyway.
You can purchase personally autographed copies of many of my titles directly from me.
Most titles are also available from Amazon.ca and Amazon.com.
You can also visit your local bookstore. If they’re out of stock, they’re usually happy to order what you’re after.
I’ve blogged before about different ways Canadians have honoured fallen soldiers. But this winter I learned of another, after a neighbour attending a woodworking show with her husband came upon a display of portraits of Canadian soldiers who have fallen in Afghanistan.
Stephen Gaebel describes the first time his paintings were exhibited publicly - on Remembrance Day in 2008:
What really struck me that morning was meeting members of the Canadian Armed Forces, individuals who had served with and personally knew some of the guys in the paintings. One of the most touching things that day was watching as these men and women silently filed past the row of portaits, paying tribute to a comrade and friend by removing the poppies they wore and placing them along the portraits.
Until that day, he hadn’t really thought about what he was going to do with the portraits he’d been painting, but when he met the mother of Trooper Mark Wilson, it became obvious. You can read about ‘A brilliant shining moment’ for Stephen on his blog.
“Looking into these faces,” says Stephen, “I’ve never felt more proud or more humble to be Canadian.” His love of his country comes through clearly in the landscapes he paints – landscapes he sells prints of in order to support The Fallen Canadian Soldier Project.
“A landscape or a portrait, they are one and the same. The fire and the fury, the north wind’s blast, the morning mist mirrored in the stillness of a lake – these things that shape the face of the landscape have also shaped us.”
My neighbour told Stephen about Highway of Heroes. He insisted on sending me a print, in recognition of my way of honouring our fallen, and I’ve sent him a copy of the book in return. I hope the students I met with in Scarborough last week, and those students who will read Highway of Heroes as part of the Hackmatack Award program in the coming school year will be inspired to give some thought to how they might pay tribute to those they consider heroes, whether they’re soldiers or otherwise.
April is National Poetry Month and as it happens, the book I’m reading at the CNIB right now is a novel written in poems, and so is the book I’ll be reading next. The stories in both are told from the points of view of different characters, so it’s been fun trying to match my voice to the different girls who were accusers during the Salem witch hunts, and I’m looking forward to capturing the voices of Natalie and Tricia and the English teacher and guidance counsellor at their high school. (A male narrator will be reading the Kyle and Miguel parts. It’s a bit like working on Ragged Company was in that way, but less complicated because we won’t be overlapping at the studio for any of the work this time.)
One of the reasons that the obvious appeal of Wicked Girls and Fishtailing interests me – both books have attracted great reviews and one a GG Award – is that I’ve written a little poetry myself, and in fact some of the pieces in 101 Ways to Dance were actually poems when the collection was accepted for publication. But the publisher practically pleaded with me to not insist on including the poems. Not that she didn’t like the poems, she did, but “Short stories can be a hard enough sell,” she said, ”without including poetry!”
Well, I wanted the book to sell, so I rewrote the poems as prose. Here’s how one of the poems started:
paint on our jeans and in our hair
me and the new guy from bc
the other painters have gone home
wet optical illusion
a vase or two faces
on the wall of the church basement
he’s tall dark
not handsome
too small a mouth
receding hairline
but something
marianne says he has a kid
in vancouver and got a letter last week
from regina dear bram you’re going to be a daddy
my mother would say
being alone with a boy like bram is
asking for it
ever played chicken bram asks
i don’t drive
i don’t mean in a car
oh like on railroad tracks
where you have to stay on while the train comes
and whoever jumps off first is chicken
he shakes his head
what then
facing each other cross-legged
his lips aren’t that small
put your finger
here
his forehead
i do
and pull away
no you leave it there
what if i’m too chicken
then the game’s over
what game
he puts my finger back on his forehead
and i let him explain
move your finger
down
as slowly as
you want
till somebody says
stop
they’re the chicken
what am i doing here
me no one suspects of having even
thoughts of
bram’s hands
those lips
where his jeans ride . . .
Maybe the story is actually better in prose, I don’t know. But I wonder: Told that four stories in 101 Ways to Dance were originally poems, would a reader be able to guess which are the four? If you’ve read the collection (which btw was shortlisted for the CLA YA Book of the Year and was listed as one of OLA’s Ten Best YA Books of 2006), I’d love it if you’d send me your guesses.
Hm. With that question I feel a little as if you’re asking me to say which of my children or grandchildren is my favourite, and of course there are different things that I like about each of them.
Books I haven’t yet begun to write are somehow always more perfect than all the others. Of course, there’s no such thing as a perfect book, but I love trying to write it anyway.
Ideas are everywhere and anyone can catch them if they practice watching and listening to what’s going on around them.
Sometimes ideas come to me from my own experiences, sometimes from other people’s. Sometimes they come to me when I’m reading a book someone else has written, sometimes when I’m in the middle of writing one of my own!
Did you see my recent post about Cornelia Oberlander on Red Room?
If you enjoyed my book Love Every Leaf, you will want to check out these articles about Cornelia Oberlander’s recent landscape architecture projects.
You’ll also find older articles, lectures, and galleries of a few of Cornelia’s favourite projects on her website.
If you haven’t read my biography of this remarkable professional yet, I hope the articles or a visit to Cornelia’s site will convince you it’s about time you did!
Is there a special someone on your shopping list this year who would like to receive a personally autographed book by Kathy Stinson? It’s only one month till Christmas, but there’s still time to get many of her titles signed and delivered before then. – including her newest: Highway of Heroes.
