meadow4.ca

November 15th - Native Life, Aboriginal Ideas

Richard Wagamese’s memoir One Native Life tells a story of rediscovering Cree culture. John Ralston Saul alleges that Canada is a metis nation. James Harvey answers le Questionnaire.

(at 27 minutes)

Podcasts | CBC Radio.

Some of you have noticed that this story tends to talk about stories. It also talks about history. Talk about this here!

Urban Fiction Makes Its Way From Streets to Libraries - NYTimes.com.

As a teenager in Far Rockaway, Queens, where she still lives, Ms. Miller read gritty novels set in urban black neighborhoods of the 1960s and ’70s, by Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim. Then there was a dry spell. She made do with Jackie Collins until a new generation of urban fiction sprang up in the late 1990s.

“I read what I can relate to,” she said. “They’re writing about what I’ve experienced. It’s easier than reading about Beverly Hills and Rodeo Drive.”

Which is not to say Ms. Miller, a mother of four, has ever murdered anyone, worked as a prostitute or been draped in diamonds by a drug-dealing boyfriend. (Her husband of 19 years, an ex-Army man, is a garbage collector.) What she recognizes are the characters’ fashions and pleasures (door-knocker earrings, clubbing), their problems (few jobs, drug dealers offering your children fast cash, people you know getting shot or stabbed) and their aspirations (striving for a better life).

So she has made it her mission to bring more urban fiction into the Queens libraries, which she visits as many as five times a week, checking out books she reads on her subway rides to Manhattan to visit her son Tad, 17, who has been hospitalized for four years with brain damage from a near-drowning.

Her oldest, Raishon, 19, reads his favorite urban titles aloud to Tad. Some nurses blush at the profanity and sex; others ask to borrow the books.

“A lot of people ask me, ‘How can you let him read that?’ ” she said. “He lives it every day. This is cotton candy compared to what they hear out there. And it shows him there are consequences to living such a fast life.”

from Bookninja

October 24, 2008

Margaret Atwood as social warrior

Atwood was quite visible during this last election, and her work with PEN and other causes keeps her at the forefront of social justice issues. That said, her first duty is to her art—-but part of what makes art interesting is how it deals with societal ills.

Canadian author Margaret Atwood said Wednesday that while it was not her “mission” to highlight social problems, a fairy-tale world would be tedious for readers.

“There are aspects of my books that are there because they are present in real life. It’s not my mission to carry out this task or else I wouldn’t be a writer, I would be a leader of some movement or a propagandist,” she told a news conference in the northern Spanish town of Oviedo.

“It would bore us all to read something where everything is wonderful, where everything goes well, without any problems,” she added.

The catch? It’s not chick lit.

You can’t just prop a pair of shoes and a martini glass on any book written by and about a woman and call it chick lit. Yet regardless of what’s between the covers, publishers do: That’s the price of writing in the shadow of Bridget Jones and Carrie Bradshaw. It’s an epidemic. The marketing department rubs its hands together at the thought of more sales and liberally applies the Photoshop fuchsia.

read the rest of the article, or, for a lively discussion of the issue, listen to the Q episode here:

The Podcast Friday October 10, 2008

*The Dears perform live * What is the state of Diversity on TV?*Empty Orchestra, a new Karaoke-based art exhibition. *

Right click to Download Q: The Podcast Friday October 10, 2008

Recent Episodes - Q | CBC Radio.

Who’s stories are being told on TV? Listen to that section of the Q podast. Discuss!

Unfortunately, despite the description here, the Selvadurai interview is NOT included as part of the podcast. poo. However, the Atwood interview is really interesting, especially if you’re the kind of person who thnks about the economy a lot. And it’s interesting to consider the timeliness of the book. Think about how many more sales this book will get because it’s launching now, when we’re in the middle of the debt crisis, rather than if she’d published it a year or even two months ago. When did she start writing the book? How did she know?

Words at Large | CBC Radio.

from the podcast description:

Margaret Atwood is one of the world’s pre-eminent writers, having won the Booker Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Governor General’s Literary Award, among many other honours. The literary giant has earned the title Queen of CanLit.

Atwood has always had a strong political voice but during this election she’s made headlines, railing against the cuts to culture funding in Canada. Her new book of 2008 Massey Lectures, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (House of Anansi), goes further than ever in tackling politics head-on. She examines the broad social implications of debt and our attitude towards it. As she puts it in the book, “what we owe and how we pay is a feature of all human societies, and profoundly shapes our shared values and our cultures.”

In this feature interview from The Next Chapter, host Shelagh Rogers asks Margaret Atwood why now is the time to think about the debts we owe, in every sense of the word.

There’s more in the podcast of the show, including an interview with Shyam Selvadurai, author of Cinnamon Gardens (McClelland & Stewart), about how reading Margaret Atwood’s work changed his life.

Q is one of my favourite radio shows on CBC. They always have decent length interviews with a great variety of artists and thinkers. I mentioned the interview with Deepa Mehta about her new film in class the other day. Here is a link to that episode. Listen to the interview and think about the relationship between storying telling and community.