On Tour Blog
April 22, 2009
In Trail we spoke at JL Webster Elementary to a group of mostly grade 7 students, with some grade 5 and 6 students. Grade sevens were knowledgeable about poetry terms (persona, alliteration), and didn’t ask to know the name of the cat. The teachers attending were enthusiastic writers as well, and contributed greatly to the event.
We had the afternoon between readings to explore Trail, and I spent some time on the river walk, enjoying the mallards and Barrows goldeneye on the Columbia River, and the swallows above it. The temperature was 30 degrees. (But one swallow - or even a small flock - does not a summer make; the forecast is for snow Thursday…)
At the really wonderful Cornerstone Cafe in Warfield for a reading in the evening; a local writing group came. It sounds like the West Kootenays has a flourishing literary community.
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April 22, 2009
Stephen and I talked to a group of grade 4-6 children at Pinewood Elementary, These kids had lots of good questions, and participated enthusiastically in poetry exercises. All wanted to know the name of the cat in the poem “Skewed” At the public library reading, a chic German woman told me that she enjoyed my reading, but couldn’t get her head around poems that don’t rhyme. I gave her the usual explanations about English not being rich in rhyming words (as compared for eg to German) and about the rise of Modernism in the first part of the 20th century. She agreed that the world had “come apart” during WW I, and said she could see how the social and political disintegration could change the form of poetry. I hope that Ursula will find a century of new poetry opening up for her now!
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April 21, 2009
We’ve been on tour for a few days, but we’ve been getting get back to the hotel so late that I’ve been too tired to write until now.
I’m so glad I was able to join the BC Book Prizes author tour. My fellow authors Karen, Rex and Andreas, and our intrepid guide Bryan, have been so interesting and entertaining that hours of driving have just melted away and I feel like I’m at an extended dinner party with intelligent and witty companions.The beautiful scenery doesn’t hurt either. I’m familiar with the Kootenays, I love being here, and yet giving our tour talks has added a new dimension to my appreciation for the region. We’ve enjoyed fantastic meals in Nelson and Trail and chatted with interesting and curious people at the events. Sure is hard work! Actually its tiring being on the road for so many hours each day.
I have to admit that talking at the schools for me has been eye-opening and very rewarding. I’ve never visited schools before to give talks because my books are written for adults. My own two kids, Andrew aged 6 and Clara aged 5 (in a few days) are too young to have any real interest in what I write about. But these students, some of whom I believe are studying explorers and George Vancouver in grade five or six, are very attentive and ask the greatest questions. A student at Pinewood Elementary in Cranbrook asked me how exactly we know what illness Vancouver suffered from since he’s dead. Great question! We don’t know anything in history absolutely, of course, but just asking the question is the first step to finding out as much of the truth as we can.
In Trail this afternoon, at J.L. Webster Elementary, a student wanted to know, when I mentioned that Vancouver sailed from London to Pacific America, what was the route by which he sailed around the world. After the talk the students clustered around Karen and I for autographs - I never knew I was so famous ! 
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April 19, 2009
Time is such a trickster, I thought, rather forlornly, a couple of days ago. It blurs memory, trashes landmarks, changes townscapes.
On Friday we were back in Terrace after visiting Prince George. Back in my former hometown, I again felt lost, adrift. As I had done when we first arrived in Terrace a few days earlier, I wasted time looking for things long gone.
But that evening in the library, I was thrown a lifeline between past and present, and time came sharply back into focus. Many of the people there had known me as a child, or in high school, and their warm welcome to all of us, their interest, their support and enthusiasm combined to create a wonderful evening. I was so grateful to them all for coming. The tricks of time suddenly didn’t matter, after all.
In the Terrace Library, as on numerous other occasions, the subject arose of family letters, diaries and photographs. So many people have attics, shoeboxes, files full of old papers, and often we just don’t know how to handle them. What should we do with them? Do they have any historic value? Are they even remotely important?
At one of the high schools we visited on this tour, after hearing about some of the people in my book, one of the girls in the class asked “What’s so important about those people anyhow? Why should they be in a book if they’re not famous?” My answer to her was “Are you important? Am I? Is anyone in this room?”
I believe we are all important. We matter. Our stories contribute to the mosaics of our families and communities and our province. We need somehow to remember these stories, to record them – of ourselves, our parents and grandparents, of our surroundings. We can tell tales at the kitchen table to our children, write poems or books or plays – but we need to pass on our stories. If we don’t, the stories will be completely obscured, perhaps entirely lost when we die.
In Prince Rupert on Saturday day, we found ourselves doing readings at the museum, a beautiful structure set against mountains and harbour, filled with light. This was my kind of place, a repository of community and regional artefacts and documents and photographs. Talking to the curator Susan Marsden, I was struck all over again by what hard work it is to establish and maintain this kind of facility, and how immensely, incalculably valuable it is, in more ways than one could possibly imagine.
Time tricked me again, in Prince Rupert, though. Strange and unbidden, a long-forgotten childhood image surfaced in my mind from visits here. The original Prince Rupert museum was a dark, small, poky place. A burning question arose in my mind about that original museum, but I hesitated to ask. I wasn’t even sure if it was based on a real memory.
“Whatever happened to the pickled seal?” I blurted out.
Susan burst out laughing. Everyone asks about the pickled seal, apparently, even many years after it quietly sprung a leak and had to be cast aside. It sat in a corner of the old museum, in a large jar, an unearthly whitish green creature, weirdly floating in opaque liquid. My sister and I found it grotesque and fascinating.
I was relieved to know that the memory was reliable. Pity about the seal, but there are far, far better items on view in the museum in Prince Rupert, after all!
Our tour has now ended, and we are awaiting our plane home. Only six days ago we clambered into the van, four writers and Bryan, our tour leader, who did all the organisation, entertainment and driving, exuding good humour and patience all along. Thank you, Bryan.
We had no idea what this tour would bring. We had no idea of the stories we would hear, or create or gather on this trip – we did not even know, really, what stories we would end up sharing with the people who we met. I was continually surprised, continually impressed and I know I have learned a great deal, probably more than I realise.
It may take a while before I can put it all into focus.
Time will help. Tricks aside, it usually does.
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April 19, 2009
We had our last presentation at the Museum of Northern BC in Prince Rupert last night. What a magnificent finale! First, we travelled completely absorbed by the nature scenery between Terrace and Prince Rupert; we had a really sophisticated lunch in a small restaurant by the water; finally, the reading took place in one of the exhibition rooms with the view to the marina. We had a full house (including the local newspapers) and the audience responded brilliantly. We left Prince Rupert bursting with energy and inspiration. However, this is the end of the tour.
This morning we’ll be home again and Bryan will be driving South. Bryan has been our guide, driver (“Is he your agent?”- one of the elementary school students asked when Bryan came to pick us after the reading) and friend in the past six days and I think that he is just perfect in what he does! Thank you, Bryan.
Getting to know Bryan and my other three pal-authors and having the opportunity to travel North BC and talk to people - was the most precious experience and I will treasure it in the years to come!
We had done so many readings and talks together and heard each others so many times that we almost “knew it all by heart” (we joked one evening in the car while driving to another reading that we could easily switch around and do each other’s presentations). Writers have a reputation of being egocentric and antisocial. In some ways, we really are.We usually have an internal focus: it is what happens in our mind that matters the most. The book tour changed that.We spent days and evenings together and our little tour became a team work. Being so different and having different approaches to writing we all wanted to make those presentations successful and to reach to the people.
For me, this trip was also about nurturing an author within myself. ” I have to write”, that’s what my internal voice yells to me all the time. I perceive myself as a writer first but, like many authors, I don’t live on writing. I have a full time job and a family and my writer’s role “performs” mostly early in the morning or late at night. Being on a book tour, I have been only an author. All my other roles had been temporarily diminished.
Finally (but most importantly) the tour gave me an opportunity to meet hundreds of primary school students and to talk about my book. I can’t imagine a more powerful experience for the children’s author.
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April 18, 2009
Friday April 17
This morning Margaret and I went off to Prince George Secondary, to meet several English classes and a writing class all gathered in the school library. Margaret was able to show a Power Point presentation full of photographs of Clayoquot figures, boats, and sites – the portly storekeeper; steamers; First Nations girls snacking on herring roe; Tofino’s inaugural hotel (modest); and a sequence she calls “Nuns Having Fun,” including a quartet in habits looking somewhat at a loss while paddling a canoe. Several students approached us after our presentations to describe projects they were working on.
We’ve all agreed that one of the high points of the tour is talking to students who are interested in writing.
Bryan also photographed a cheque ceremony with representatives from one of the sponsors, Integris Credit Union. I’m very glad to know that many of the sponsors for the tour are donating money to the libraries of the schools we are visiting. We’re also grateful to the librarians at every place on our route (such as Valerie Kilbey at PGSS) who have shown us such hospitality, and who obviously play such an important role in encouraging students to keep reading.
On the way back to Terrace, Bryan kept the van humming as always with his excellent sense of humor and with a playlist that ranged from Joni Mitchell to Jamie Cullum to the Magnetic Fields (the last full of inventive rhymes Bryan hoped we would enjoy. We did!). Once again Bryan knew where to let us out to forage or roam – first, at a café in Baker Lake with memorable organic fare, and second at Seeley Provincial Park, where photographs were taken, including of a science experiment underwritten by Bryan and courageously performed by Robin. Apparently if you immerse fizzy mints in a bottle of pop and toss the bottle into the air, it will ascend like a rocket. Robin inquired if any of the authors present would care to ingest a mint chased by pop – we wondered if we could shoot ourselves to Pluto, or at least be lofted to a better view of the nearest mountain – but, mindful of our evening engagement, we declined.
We docked back in our Terrace Coast Hotel to discover that Margaret had made the front page of the local paper, with a feature article about this Terrace-born-and-raised author inside. The reading that night at the Terrace Public Library was attended by, among others, many of Margaret’s childhood friends. Once again we were warmly welcomed by a librarian, Melanie Wilke, with fruit, juice, and homemade cookies. Katarina gave a marvelously dramatic reading of her children’s book The King Has Goat Ears; I hope she’ll consider making a recording. Robin read a different section of her novel A Thousand Shades of Blue, and afterward a parent and children’s author, Brenda Silsbe (whom Margaret has known since Grade Three), said that it seemed to “say it all” about parent-teenager conflict.
Once again today, comparing notes, we concluded that just meeting eager readers of all stripes from this region—students, teachers, librarians and other writers—was very inspiring.
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April 18, 2009
Time Flies…
Posted by Robin Stevenson
...when you’re having fun. Apparently this is true: I can’t believe we are already on the last day of our tour. We are in Terrace this morning and will be heading up to Prince George in a couple of hours, to read at the museum (which I have heard wonderful things about and am very much looking forward to seeing). Yesterday we visited Prince George elementary and secondary schools, drove the seven hours to Terrace, and arrived just in time for our 7pm reading at the Terrace Public Library. We had a fabulous crowd show up to listen and chat with us afterwards. Melanie, the youth librarian, was a great host and I very much enjoyed talking with her about teen books, teens and libraries, and ways of keeping kids engaged in books and reading. The young people of Terrace are lucky to have someone so passionate about books and so committed to providing a space that is welcoming to kids and teens.
In fact, everywhere we have been we have met people who are passionate about reading and literacy and education in all their various forms. From the kids and teens, to the booksellers, librarians,teachers, and to the local writers and poets that have come to our readings, talking with people who love books has been one of the highlights of this tour.
I am too buzzy from all the excitement to actually feel tired, but I think I am. I have a million scattered thoughts this morning but don’t feel like I can put a coherent paragraph together. So instead I will just share half a dozen random thoughts about this tour:
1. I have been very envious of my fellow authors on this tour… because they can ALL read and write in the van. Me, I can just barely glance at my watch without getting carsick. However…. all that time to think has been a surprising bonus. A new character has started to come together in my mind and I am so looking forward to getting some of her story down on paper.
2.Bryan is an awesome road trip disc jockey (as well as driver, tour guide, restuarant critic and entertainer). Whether we need music to match the breathtaking scenery, music to lull us to sleep,or music to pep us up before a reading, Bryan nails it every time. I’m still laughing over Moxy Fruvous singing My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors. And I have jotted down the names of several new-to-me artists. Thanks Bryan!
3.I am so lucky to have toured with such a great group of authors and to have had the opportunity for so many good conversations. The four of us write very different stuff—poetry, regional history, picture books, teen novels. And yet, as Margaret expressed far more eloquently at last night’s reading, we all share a love for telling stories. We are all fascinated by the written word and by the way that little marks on a piece of paper can create, open up and communicate whole other worlds. What a magical thing that is.
4. I’ve said this before but maybe not (hopefully not) here. Librarians, teacher-librarians, all you book people—you save kids’ lives. Seriously.
5. Northern BC is gorgeous. I’ll be back.
6. Everyone likes winning prizes… but I think all of us feel that no matter what the announcements at the BC Book Prizes Gala have to say, we’ve all won a pretty incredible prize already in having the opportunity to do this tour. I feel very lucky. Many many thanks to everyone who made this trip happen and to everyone who has made it such a pleasure to take part in it.
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April 17, 2009
“Happy Spring” declared a chalkboard outside a restaurant in Smithers. The sunshine was pale and clear behind the Hudsons Bay Mountain, and a small girl, beaming, walked past with a huge ice cream cone. Smiling because of the ice cream? Because of spring? Perhaps because she was wearing only a T shirt and jeans and sandals, and because the sun was shining.
Skiing season has just ended in Smithers, marked by the annual Schnai day, and the more intrepid mountain bikers are out and about on the trails around the town. A couple of blocks away from the main street an older man turned the earth of his vegetable patch, the rich dark soil almost glowed in the morning light.
At Smithers Secondary School, the Grade Eleven Social Studies class also glowed; a highly motivated and interested group, genuinely interested in the stories of people in my book, stories of real west coast people, revealed in letters and diaries they left behind. For the first time on this tour, I brought out the Powerpoint presentation, showing pictures from the book – unusually I had only one technical glitch, readily solved by a boy in the class.
The students were surprised to learn that all of my research had been with real documents, that none of the letters or diaries on which my book is based are available on-line. Did I manage to convince them, even in the slightest degree, that real documents can communicate so much more than digitized ones? That holding, smelling, turning old pages – onionskin, or frail lined notepaper, or foxed newsprint – can be so real that you sense the fingerprints of the writers on the page.. hear the voices of the writers as if they are in the same room with you? That the sharply jabbed penstrokes or the faintly pencilled words can speak volumes? We spoke of old technologies and their infinite strangeness: of letterwriting, of treadle sewing machines, of the days of sail and steam, of the darkness of homes and villages in the wilderness, without electricity, of pen and ink, of photographs on glass slides.
Then off to Prince George, past lakes still frozen solid, still imprinted with vehicle tracks from winter days on the ice, past many towns and settlements: Burns Lake, Fraser Lake and Endako, which features an old taxidermy shop in an even older false fronted building alongside the highway. Past hawks perched watchfully on telephone lines, and stands of pine trees, orangey-red and dying, past countless young birch trees still bowed over, bent in half, burdened with the memory of last winter’s snow load. This is an exceptionally late spring, everyone says. It has been a long, long winter.
At the Prince George bookstore later that day, three local poets gathered, with others, to hear us all talk of our books. My friend, the slam poet Darcy Ingram, was amongst them. For the poets, the highlight of the evening was talking to Elise about poetry, hers and theirs. On this tour I have repeatedly been struck by the powerful bonds forged by poetry. I knew nothing of the poetry community within the province, and I have seen how the slender strands of poems, meticulously worded, reach out to form intense links between people.
Later, chatting to Darcy, I learned about her rhododendron. She has not been long in Prince George, and coming from the greener gardening climes of Vancouver Island, she knows perfectly well that Prince George is not rhodo country. But she has one in her garden here - logic and horticultural advice be damned. Darcy is a fighter, a determined survivor. Like Elise she has come through cancer and chemotherapy, and defied medical odds. So her rhodo has received its instructions. It must come through the winter.
Last autumn, she carefully wrapped it in layers of burlap, and bolstered it to withstand the snows and the cold of winter. How is it doing now that April is here? It is still hidden from sight, buried under three feet of snow.
So Darcy is watching and waiting. The snow will melt and the rhododendron will emerge. I hope it has survived. Meanwhile, as the long winter draws to a close, Darcy has finally put away her winter coats and boots, and – best of all—she has just submitted a manuscript of her poems to a publisher.
I wonder if she has written anything about the rhododendron.
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April 17, 2009
....asked one of the K students at Muheim Elementary Schoool in Smithers. All the other children got involved in that discussion. What do writers use to write their stories: pencils, pens, crayons, markers? I laughed. However, when you do the school presentations with primary students you never know where the reading is going to land. What do I usually write with.? It is not always the computer. I write on the bus, in the park, at the coffee shop.
Talking to various groups of children in our touring readings is not only about us, authors, “giving” the word out to the audience. It is very much about making us think about our work through the reflections of the children and adults who listen to us: when did I really start writing? how long did it take me to finish this book? what is my “most favourite book in the whole world which I would take with me to a deserted island?”
When we do school presentations, book launches, talks and readings at home, everything happens as a blink in our everyday life. We experience that brilliant moment of connection with readers and then we sink back to ordinary. On a tour like this it never stops. We have that intense experience for days. We think about it, we talk about it, we write about it.
I am in the van somewhere between Smithers and Prince George. At Prince George we are having another talk this night and who knows what questions will pop up there.
Ok, yes. I am on this tour because my book has been nominated for the BC Book prize… but really..what did I use to start writing it?
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April 16, 2009
Today we left Terrace early, afloat on Bach played by Glenn Gould, and barreled (comfortably, in our rental car) toward Smithers. Many snowy mountain peaks later, we piled out at this charming town, where several tour members revived themselves immediately at a toasty cafe called Java (Bryan has discovered many good spots to stop on these tours—he particularly recommends the pie here). Katarina and Robin did a sequence of presentations at the elementary school, all enthusiastically received, and Margaret Horsfield and I went off to Smithers Secondary, where we discovered we each had our own class to speak to. Margaret was able to project pictures from her book to a grade-11 social-studies group, while I visited Jack Law’s English class. Jack Law had shown me the terrific list of poems he’d recently discussed with his students, work ranging from John Donne to Robert Hayden and beyond. I had a wonderful time talking to the class about what they were reading and what they liked to read, whether they’d tried writing verse themselves, whether they wrote songs; they asked me questions in return, all stimulating and thoughtful. I only wish I had had even more time there, including a chance to see how they’d carried out a recent poetry assignment. Many thanks to Jack Law for letting me borrow his class for the day, and to librarian Teresa Monkman for helping arrange a very happy visit.
The indefatigable Bryan then drove us through tawny rolling hills all the way to Prince George. Shortly after we debarked at the Coast Hotel here, we segued, through a pair of purple doors, to the large and well-stocked Books and Company bookstore. There we all read briefly; afterward we had a lively discussion with several audience members, including Gillian Wigmore, who was on the BC Book Prizes tour last year; a performance poet; and a student of both poetry and forestry at UNBC.
All in all, another exciting day with this sympathetic group, still turning to each other after each school visit to talk about how much we’re enjoying what we’re doing on this tour.
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