One of my sci-fi short stories, Alicorn 2108, is competing in an online indie authors competition this month. While the rules state that I can’t encourage people to vote directly for my story, I can encourage you to read the stories and vote.
A big thank you to the Ontario Arts Council and to Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company for supporting my work on my full-length play Seven Dragon Happy-Go-Lucky Golden Garden House of Foo(d), the story of a Jewish family running a Chinese restaurant.
This grant will enable me to host a private reading of the play, with professional actors, in order to polish and finalize it for submission to a theatre company.
I am planning the reading for mid-May, to concentrate the final rewrite in June (report to OAC due in July).
I’ll keep you posted as to the play’s progress. Hopefully on stage soon!
Bilingual theatre company Productions Nemesis, in collaboration with Les Improbables de Toronto, is presenting Effeuilletage, improvised theatre inspired by the National Theatre of the World‘s Script Tease project. Effeuilletage will present one-time-only theatre, during which seasoned improvisors will take on three-minute play openings and carry on in improv for another half-hour.
The playwrights offering parameters to the improvisors are Barbara-Audrey Bergeron, Pierre Beaudin, Michel Ouellette and myself.
Effeuilletage is being staged on April 12th and 19th at Toronto’s Tranzac Club (292 Brunswick Avenue). Doors open at 7 p.m. and the show begins shortly after. Tickets are $15 at the door and online.
It’s February 2013, and CanadaWrites issued this challenge to the Twitterverse: « We’ve been looking at the art of self-promotion this month, and thought we would have some fun with a tongue-in-cheek look at how fabulous we are. »
Tweeps were invited to « Tweet Your Own Horn » and fake (or not) brag about ourselves.
CanadaWrites counted over 1,000 tweets in response to the challenge, with a selection of all-stars here, of which I humbly number, with the following:
Wonder if I should send my favourite writer and one-time mentor, Twitterbrags judge Terry Fallis, some sort of literary bribe in order to win this one?
Following my Salon du livre de Toronto gig in December 2012, I was invited by public servant colleagues at the government of Ontario to host a reading and discussion next week, on Valentine’s Day.
I will read my short stories Secrets and Nelles, both from literary magazine Virages, to an audience of people who know me more as a policy advisor than as a writer.
Too often, public servants are painted as lazy, boring paper-pushers. While there may be a handful of those, most of us are dynamic workers, eager to serve our fellow citizens. We are especially, people who care. We are family people, volunteers and leaders in our communities. And some of us are even artists.
A discussion about the place of writing in my life, stuffed here and there around work and family responsibilities, will be interesting. When one has a passion, it’s a privilege to share it with others.
Ten days to the deadline for the first draft of a ten-minute play for this year’s Inspirato Festival (at the Alumnae Theatre in Toronto, May 30-June 8, 2013).
Below, the fellow Inspirato playwrights in the same predicament. Half of us have to write a play related to « tunnel » and the other half of us on « rope ». (Then, we work with a dramaturge to polish the play in time for production.)
InspiraTO’s Playwrights’ Mentoring Project participants: Standing (L to R): Jenny Alexander, Lindsay Cochrane, Brett Haynes, Ayesha Mansur, A.M. Matte, Kevin Craig, Jordan Mechano, Christopher Duthie. Kneeling (L to R): Ashley Park, Rachel Ganz, Madeleine Jullian, Mirella Christou.
So far, I’ve written about two women attempting to rob a club owner, a mother eager to see her child off to college and a violin maker in love with a musician. None of those plays have what it takes to make it to the festival’s mentors.
However, I’m fairly confident about my latest attempt, in which two crooks get swindled. I now just have to figure out if anyone gets shot at the end. Thoughts?
A few weeks ago, my mother, who coordinates a programme for seniors in Ottawa called Creative Connections, held a reading of my work for the programme’s participants.
– My short story Nelles (in French) will be published in the literary magazine Virages in March. (an excerpt can be found here)
– I will have a ten-minute play produced in this year’s Inspirato Festival, for which I must write a play from scratch.
As part of Inspirato Festival’s Playwrights’ Mentoring Project, I attended a day-long workshop during which I met my fellow playwrights and did short writing exercises before being assigned the subject matter of the play I am to write for the festival in June 2013.
One of the exercises included building a small sculpture and writing a free flow/stream of consciousness monologue from its point of view. The result:
We voyaged across the sea, but remain perched in precarious existence. If we photosynthesized, we’d be leaning toward the sun. As it is, we merely lean gravity-ward, which annoys us as we yearn to achieve more. We are both practical and whimsical; our career as a children’s entertainer didn’t last long. If we had the means, we’d bask in the collective glow of of super troupers and admiration. Sadly, the reflection of mere trinkets in the mirror remind us that inanimate life cannot hope, as Pinocchio did, to become real. And even if we fulfilled our dream of a grander, more productive life, it might be at the cost of a separation too painful to fathom. A diminutive pedestal therefore must suffice; hope of a melody at our centre remaining merely the lullaby of slumber, which, even that, escapes us.
A trinket from Croatia, a set of skeleton keys and a foam clown nose get me writing.
It’s unlikely that this text makes it anywhere into the short play I need to write by next month, but it was fun playing with words and getting something down, pencil to paper. Now to write about rope…
In 2012, I participated in a local writing contest, held by Good News Toronto, called the True Story Contest. The challenge was to write about A Good Neighbour in 450 words or less.
I wrote about an unknown neighbour of mine who watered (and saved) my toddler’s bean plant this summer and about my parents’ neighbour, Colette, who does the same for my father’s tomato plants. My piece won second place in the contest and was published online this month.
An excerpt from Sunborrowers and Watering Cans:
Armed with a watering can, Colette makes her way across her neighbours’ lawn and down a small hill to the vegetable patch. She carefully removes the mesh wire fence, which ineffectively keeps rabbits out, and steps in to water the thirsty plants and their cherry-red fruit. Once that job is done, she fills the watering can with the bite-sized tomatoes, ensuring none goes to waste. There are always more when my parents return, as long as Colette waters them.
Later, Colette drags a lawn chair onto my parents’ property for a well-deserved rest. Papa jokes that it’s only fair: in the afternoon, Colette’s place is in shadow, “so we let her borrow our sun!” A little water for a little sun; it’s a pleasant, reciprocal relationship.
Colette blushed when I read her the story, right before it was published online. I could tell she was surprised, yet pleased, about her role in this story. Now, my task is to figure out which of my 600+ neighbours helped along our ‘garden’ this summer and offer my thanks in person.
