writes about war from a young person's view #bannedbyrussia
Thank you, Melanie, for this great interview!
Marsha Skrypuch and I have a history.
It makes sense because we both write and care about history–particularly stories where there has been injustice. I believe that we are humanitarians, who hope that our stories of the past will resonate with the present, bringing awareness about people who have for–one reason or another–been silenced. Continue reading “Melanie Fishbane’s Dance of the Banished interview”
What a thrill it was to see all the cars and buses pulling up to the theatre as I snuck inside unnoticed. Many kids were clutching copies of Making Bomb for Hitler, Stolen Child and Underground Soldier.
Here are Bairdmore students catching a few extra pages before heading up to the balcony!
The two young MCs were amazingly calm, cool and professional. I can’t imagine being so poised at their age!
When they announced me as this year’s winner, I got up from the audience and walked onto the stage. Here’s the awesome award:
I also got a cheque! I gave a short talk, reading, and kids asked questions…
… and then I was whisked away to the lobby to sign books. All of my books quickly sold out, and I found out later that one of the MCs did not get a copy because she was at the back of the line-up, so I gave one of the organizers my personal copy of Making Bombs for Hitler, signed to her.
Here are some of the students at the signing table:
On Thursday night, I had pre-signed 350 WWII trilogy bookmark as I had been told that there would be 315 kids in attendance. As it turned out, there were exactly 350 kids there. Eeek! The organizers made sure each student got exactly ONE signed bookmark. I also had some postcards for Dance of the Banished on hand and gave all of those out as well.
After all the buses left, the MYRCA committee treated me to a fabulous lunch at Chez Sophie on the bridge over top the river. Lovely view, great company and fantastic food!
After lunch, another kidcritter, Julie K, picked me up. We had coffee and a chat, and then Julie took me on a quick car tour of the city and dropped me off at the airport.
A whirlwind trip. I’m still on a high! Thank you Thin Air. Thank you, MYRCA!
Two more Thin Air presentations, this time without booming sounds. GREAT kids in the audience once again, with awesome questions.
Once the afternoon session finished up, Dave Jenkinson and his wife Rhea picked me up for a visit over sweets and coffee. Dave is the longtime editor of Canadian Materials Online. I also consider him a mentor. More than a dozen years ago, he convinced me to concentrate on historical novels, rather than the historical/contemporary novels that I had been writing up to that time. I took his advice and the very next book I wrote was Nobody’s Child. That was a huge turning point for me. All of my novels since then have been historical fiction. Thank you, Dave!
While waiting in the hotel lobby for Rhea and Dave to arrive, I watched a puzzling scene unfold. A woman approached a young couple who were relaxing on one of the sofas. She opened a large carryall bag and pulled out a short sundress. “There’s this one,” she said. “And this is for later,” she said, pulling out a second that looked pretty much like the first. Then she pulled out a padded bra, and yet another sundress, all the while chatting away with the couple as if this were the most normal thing to do in a hotel lobby. The female half of the couple seemed disinterested, but the male had comments on all the garments. Finally the female took a sundress and a few minutes later she returned, in the sundress, with a big floppy hat and sunglasses. Hmmm. At first I thought maybe the couple had lost their luggage and a friend was loaning them clothing, but I think these were film people and this was a costume. This suspicion was also borne out by the odd man outside, monopolizing the only the bench. He was smoking a cigarette and checking his email on his phone device — not unusual — but this guy had a mustache that was so perfectly manicured that it looked like it had been plucked or threaded to perfection. Ditto his hair. And he had really dorky sunglasses on (likely super-expensive).
There were also stretch limos pulling in and out of the valet parking area on an ongoing basis. Hmm.
Dave and Rhea confirmed my suspicions. Apparently lots of films are shot in Winnipeg.
That evening I was treated to dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory by Karen Boyd and the MYRCA Award committee. It was so very nice to meet these hard-working booklovers in person!!
The above pic is how I spent Wednesday morning. Here’s a write up about it. For this first session, I was given a Madonna-type headset with a microphone bud at my lips. I have no idea why it suddenly began to BOOM partway through the presentation. Quite disconcerting! That kink was smoothed over the rest of the week though, as I was given a lapel mike after that. Great groups of students with FABULOUS questions! Wonderful to interact with so many avid readers.
On Wednesday afternoon, I presented at Acadia School — again — so great to meet many avid readers and excited fans of my WWII trilogy. Teacher-librarian Jo-Anne Gibson emailed me afterwards: “My students are still talking about your presentation. I’ve had a lot of authors at Acadia and few have made such a lasting impact.”
From there I went to Winnipeg’s Children’s Literature Roundtable pizza party and author talk. Again, such a wonderful opportunity to meet many children, parents, educators and librarians who had read and loved Making Bombs for Hitler and other of my books. Truly, this is an author’s dream!
After the pizza party, I was whisked away to Holy Family Nursing Home for a presentation to the Alpha Omega Alumni Association. Interesting to present to students all day and finish with a presentation to adults, and not just any adults, but a group of people who had family connections to my trilogy. Many in the audience had personally lived through the times reflected in my books. Because of this, the questions were very interesting.
A couple of Alpha Omega members kept me company later in the evening as I had a very late dinner back at the hotel — Manitoba smoked goldeye is delish.
I flew in last Tuesday to Winnipeg for the Thin Air Literary Festival in Winnipeg. I was picked up from the airport by a Thin Air volunteer and had the most fascinating conversation about World War II on the way to the hotel.
Once I dumped my stuff in the room, I met up with Ian P, a very talented kidcrit member. I LOVE meeting kidcritters in person. It takes a special bond to share and constructively crit writing and that’s what we do amongst ourselves. We do have kidcrit litgets every year or so in Toronto, but Winnipeg has a LOT of kidcritters, former and current as well.
Here is the view from my Inn on the Forks hotel room:
Ironic, really, seeing as I had been misquoted all week in a Reuters news article about this very place. For the record, what I said is that a Canadian Human Rights museum has a mandate to concentrate on lesser-known Canadian human rights stories, rather than showcasing atrocities that are well known, and my examples of lesser-known injustices were Canada’s treatment of First Nations people and Canada’s internment of “enemy aliens” during the First World War.
this was originally posted on Brenda Kearns’ blog here.
Like a thousand novels or more. You’d be amazed at the number of people who want to be a novelist but hate reading. Being a voracious reader is the single most important attribute of successful novelists.
“When I retire, I’m going to be a novelist.” Just like you can’t suddenly run a marathon, you can’t suddenly write a novel. Muscles need to be trained for both activities and that’s where the ten minutes comes in. Give yourself ten minutes each day even if you have no idea what you’re going to write. Give yourself ten minutes a day even if those ten minutes are the commercial breaks for So You Think You Can Dance.
The first few days that you’re confronted with your ten minutes, you’ll probably stare at a blank screen (or page) and sweat. But after a while, you’ll develop writerly habits. You’ll eavesdrop on the next table at lunch, not for the gossip, but for the nuance of speech. When you read the paper, your mind will spin with story potential from the various little tidbits. Your mind will wander with story ideas on the way to work and you may even end up missing your stop. As this begins to happen, you’ll barely be able to contain yourself until you get to your precious ten minutes. Once you’ve been writing enthusiastically for about a month solid during your ten minutes a day, you’re ready to start on your novel.
This is the beginning of a novel. As an example, my WWII trilogy
Stolen Child/Making Bombs for Hitler/Underground Soldier
all started with this question: “What would happen if two sisters were kidnapped together by the Nazis in WWII yet both suffered completely different fates?”
Once you’re brainstormed your core story question, you need to brainstorm your characters. For each key character, sketch out this:
*What/whom does my character want? Love? Need? Be very specific.
*What quirks and habits does my character have?
*What could get in the way of them achieving their wants/loves/needs? Think of the interaction of characters and how if one person gets their goal, someone else won’t get theirs.
Not to eat—to grab a job application form. Make copies. Fill one out for each of your characters.
Begin at dawn. Be careful to note each action, and also the physical space, right down to what their sleeping area looks like and what they break their fast with. Depending on whether they’re in a space ship or medieval England it will all be very specific to your story. You’ll be amazed at how much you learn about your character by following them for 24 hours. And if you listen closely, you’ll find out what your story is really about.
Is there a scene vivid in your mind but you don’t know the before or after? Awesome! Write it. Keep on writing these scenes that are vivid. Once you have a critical mass of them, you’ll see that they practically self-organize, sort of like how raindrops form a puddle.
Once you’re plunged into your story, you’ll be writing far more than ten minutes a day, but stop writing before your brain is completely empty of story. Stop partway through a paragraph, even partway through a sentence, and go out and do something physical. Everyone has their own creativity limit. For me, it’s three hours. Anything written beyond the three hours a day is trash.
In other words, write what you can while in the heat of it, leaving blanks and XXXs for spots that you’ll fill in later. Do research as you need to after you’ve done your daily writing but don’t use research as an excuse not to write.
One of the best revision methods is to delete the first 25% of your first draft. Now that you know this, don’t angst over every word. You’re going to revise, delete rejig down the line, but right now you’ve got to get the story down in first draft.
This post was originally published on Brenda Kearns’ blog here.
Most people will say that fiction is fake and non-fiction is true, but have you ever had a news article written about yourself or a topic you’re very familiar with? Was it 100% accurate? Not likely!
Yet news articles are supposed to be non-fiction. Ditto for textbooks. They’re filled with facts and figures that are based on suppositions of the time but that doesn’t make them true. Continue reading “Fiction, Non-fiction and Narrative Non-fiction”
Erin Woods of Pajama Press came in early on the train so I picked her up and took her to the Blue Dog Cafe so she could fortify herself for the book launch and plaque unveiling. Here she is, about to fortify herself with carrot cake.
Erin snapped this of me, chugging down mint tea:
Erin Woods of Pajama Press and freelance publicist Kim Therriault were both on hand to help out with the book signing table. It was so nice to see many familiar faces, including Helen Kubiw, who had posted this fabulous review just hours earlier.
It was also wonderful to see Suleyman Guven, who helped me tremendously with cultural and historical details of Alevi Kurdish life from a century ago. He too had just published an interview that we had done. It is published in Turkish and English in Yeni Hayat, the Toronto Kurdish/Turkish newspaper, of which he is the editor. He brought me a paper copy of the newspaper as well and it is beautiful!
Lada and Olya, women I met on my first trip to Ukraine back in 2001 drove in from Toronto together, and CANSCAIPers Lynne Kositsky (and husband Michael) and Judy Robinson also came out, as well as a mother-daughter avid reader blogging team.
I was especially honoured to see so many people from the Armenian Canadian community. One young man who towered over me said he’d heard me speak about my first novel, The Hunger, when he was in elementary school. How nifty is that?!
And Joan Mailing, I am glad that you did get postcards and bookmarks this time!
