The good news is: you may not have to just imagine. Peter Carver and I are offering our Seaside Writing Workshop/Retreat again this year – to six lucky writers dedicated to their craft. We welcome applications from novices and veterans alike.

Find out all you need to know about how to apply, where you’ll stay, the setting, and what former participants in the experience have to say about it. You can also read more and see more photos in other blog postings about the workshop/retreat.

Liberian illustrators are now bringing to life visually the next round of Liberian stories being published as part of the Reading Liberia program, referred to in last week’s post. A publisher in Ghana is working with the We Care Foundation in Liberia on the design of the books which it is hoped will be ready for the printer by the end of March. Stay tuned!

One of the manuscripts submitted for consideration for the Burt Award for YA Literature in Ghana (another CODE program) had been published in Canada. I had the pleasure of acting as the editor of Brave Music of a Distant Drum for Red Deer Press. Its author called me a tough taskmaster, but the Kirkus review suggests that his hard work paid off in a fine book.

Providing great inspiration to Liberian writers and illustrators and the teachers now introducing their books in Liberian classrooms – and to women and men all over Africa and beyond – is the country’s president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. You cannot read her acceptance of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Peace and fail to understand why she was a great choice to receive it. The last time I was in Liberia, I asked my driver if he liked his country’s president. His response: a heartfelt “I love her.”

I wish Ellen Johnson Sirleaf many years of leadership of this fine country I’ve had the privilege to visit and make a part of my life.

That’s an as yet untitled poem by Watchen Johnson Babalola, a Liberian writer who wrote three of the first Liberian children’s books to be published in her country – this year. Watchen is one of the two dozen or so Liberian writers I’ve had the privilege of working with, in Liberia, since 2009, as a volunteer with a program called Reading Liberia.

Certainly when I sat at my dining room table in 1981, writing what would become Red is Best and Big or Little?, having only once ever been outside my home province, I had no idea that I would eventually, not only meet with readers in every province and territory in my own country, but would also, one day, be presented with an opportunity to expand my world by travelling to Africa and working with writers there. To help writers in a country recovering from a long civil war to discover and develop their stories – it has been satisfying, enriching work.

Other members of CANSCAIP and/or IBBY-Canada have been working as volunteer editors for Reading Liberia, from within Canada: Anne Laurel Carter, Susan Hughes, Patricia O’Campo, and Rivka Cranley, to name just a few. Hadley Dyer, Ted Staunton, Sharon Jennings, Peter Carver, and Sarah Ellis have been involved as on-site volunteers with other CODE programs related to literature for young people – in Tanzania, Ghana, Kenya, and Ethiopia. (CODE is the Canadian Organization for Development through Education.)

CANSCAIP members with qualifications as editors and/or workshop leaders who are interested in lending their expertise to one of these programs – in Africa or from the comfort of Canada – should let IBBY-Canada know they’re interested in being considered. (IBBY-Canada’s president is Patricia O’Campo. )

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I hope that what I pull from my files will give you some sense of a sight that has given me pleasure – and I hope it will give you pleasure, too.

For this wintry month (albeit not as wintry as some Januarys), I chose a what I believe is a Michaelmas Daisy. I took this picture in a Nova Scotia meadow early one September morning in 2010.

Matilda Martin and Edna Bauman,
Mam and Lucinda and me –
my first time quilting with the women.

Noisy greetings as we settle in around the quilt frame,
then silence as each begins.
Only the pop of needles through sky-blue cotton,
the creak of the wooden frame,
horses clopping snow from their hooves
against the icy laneway outside.

And then it starts again,
the clatter and chatter of women, the laughter, the talk –
Lucinda cautioning me to keep my stitches even,
while hungry needles scoop up fabric
in tiny, equal bites.

That night, I crawl into bed beneath another quilt –
from another winter, other chatter –
wondering what stories this quilt has heard,
and who will be warmed by the one we’re making.

I press my cold feet against my sister’s legs;
she grumbles and rolls away.
Back to back, heavy with dreaming,
I tuck my toes beneath her legs,
and run my fingers over rows of stitches,
counting them to sleep.

That was “January: The Quilting Bee” – from Winterberries and Apple Blossoms: Reflections and Flavors of a Mennonite Year by Nan Forler. Just out, this season, it’s Nan’s second book, following a beautiful picture book about bullying called Bird Child, two years ago.

Nan Forler represents for me all the writing workshop participants I have worked with over the years, people who have inspired me with their perseverance in the face of apparent odds against their ever being published, or even finding time to write, and despite frequent crises of confidence. No matter where we are in our careers or our artistic development, we can become discouraged (Why did I ever think this was a good idea? Who am I kidding? I can’t write this story and even if I could, who’d want to read it anyway? What? Another publisher going under, I was just about to submit something there. Why can’t my husband / kids / boss / lover understand why I have to have quiet time, alone, to write?)

Nan first came to me in 1994, her satchel full of stories and ideas and optimism. As years rolled by, rejection letters piled up. Teaching elementary school and raising her own children took its toll on her energy. But she kept on smiling – her smile is genuine, infectious, (it’s radiant) – and she kept on writing. She kept meeting with other writers, when she could, and attending conferences and workshops. Because Nan Forler loves writing, and even though she was already good at it when I first met her, she also loves getting better at it, as she continues to write. So do Jenn Ryan and Kim O’Gorman and Rob Morphy and countless others I could name whose writing, though largely unpublished, is more powerful than much that sits on bookstore shelves.

Even with a body of published work behind me, I have often enough felt like giving up writing and going back to selling Tupperware or waiting tables at Steak & Burger, because no writing career is without its bumps, its setbacks. But then I think of Nan and her smile, and I think: if all  these writers without the validation that being published represents can keep at it, what is wrong with me? And back to my writing I go.

Lena Coakley is another writer whose perseverance I’ve witnessed and been inspired by over many years. She’s now had starred reviews from Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly on her first published novel, Witchlanders. And Cheryl Rainfield, after years of self-doubt and hard work, personally and artistically, had her book, Scars, nominated for a GG last year. Their examples should be heartening to all of us. But please don’t make the mistake of comparing where you are with your writing with where anyone else is. It may well lead to professional envy (I know), which is a terrible waste of time and emotional energy that can better be spent living with one’s characters and playing with words.

Want to catch up with parts of this talk you missed?

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4/4/11
Redo the outline in 2 columns – 1 for the D&H thread, 1 for the D&S thread. That may be the best way to see if the whole thing is hanging together (or to put it another way, if the 2 threads are coming together as a whole. They better be!) About 12 weeks left till “summer” when you hope to submit. Is submission by the fall a more realistic goal? Don’t give up on spring yet, look how much you got done last week in just a few days, and today. Now to sleep.) –> + maybe a 3^rd column for what H is doing in the background that D is unaware of, but which will influence what she brings to each scene where they overlap.
[The novel referred to here has since been completed and accepted for publication.]

Undated
John Irving – Until I Find You – Jack was 1^st person narrator, he changed it after it was all done.
[I haven’t actually read this book. I must have read an author interview somewhere.]

June 28/11
Words spoken by Frida Kahlo in The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver – “The most important thing about a person is the thing you don’t know.” A character also.

12.22.11
How to make it about appreciating beauty and about pursing excellence.
[I still don’t know if that’s a desirable goal, or not. It’s very early days for the project ‘it’ is referring to.]

Okay, so I left out some of the most revealing scribbles. I guess I’m still not over the feeling I expressed in one of my earliest blog posts.

Wishing all my blog readers lots of everything that makes life worthwhile in 2012.

Having access to only a few public computers, at the library, which isn’t always open?

And, when your chance to use one of the computers does arise, having your time on it limited because demand for its use is high?

Or maybe, when your turn comes, the generators go down and you have to wait till next week to continue your work?

That’s the situation for most Liberian writers I’ve had the privilege of working with for the past few years, as a volunteer for CODE (the Canadian Organization for Development through Education) and the We Care Foundation in Liberia.

Meanwhile, how many writers in Canada have laptop computers gathering dust in their closets, having upgraded to a newer model in recent months, or will soon have a laptop they don’t need because there’s an upgrade in their near future?

The contrast between dire need and likely availability led me to the idea of “Laptops for Liberia”. If I can find some not-too-old laptops that would be of value to writers in Liberia, CODE has agreed to pay the not-insubstantial cost of shipping them there, as a way of supporting the Reading Liberia program which is designed to create Liberian-authored books for Liberian children. We Care in Liberia is working out details of fair distribution of any laptops that are donated.

So I’m now reaching out to my Canadian friends and colleagues through my blog, CANSCAIP and IBBY-Canada (who originally arranged for my involvement in “Reading Liberia”), and possibly The Writers’ Union of Canada, too, in hopes that you’ll want to support this initiative.

Whether you write for children or adults, novels, short stories, poetry, non-fiction, or picture book texts, and whether you’ve upgraded your computer recently or expect to in the near future, I hope you’ll consider donating your used laptop to “Laptops for Liberia”.

You can email me to let me know of your interest in doing so at kathy@kathystinson.com. Please put Laptops for Liberia in the subject line.

Find out more about the Reading Liberia program, about the We Care Foundation, and about my involvement with Reading Liberia.