Lack of Self-Awareness

From an ad for the OneXone foundation in the Globe and Mail, July 31, 2008:
Join Academy® Award-winner Matt Damon, Grammy® Award-winner Wyclef Jean and friends at historic Maple Leaf Gardens®, to honour the message that life belongs to everyone.
The Academy®, The Grammies®, and the Gardens® are apparently, then, not part of life?

William Mayne’s Winter Quarters

Mayne, William.  Winter Quarters.  London: Jonathan Cape, 1982.
The novel alternates between two children, a boy and a girl, as presented through an adult narrator telling about them in the third person (and often offering comments on and interpretations of them despite the focalization through them).  Both are children of travelling folk (carnival people–possibly gypsies, although [...]

The Proof that The Proof that Ghosts Exist Exists

Here’s a trailer for the first book of The Ghosthunters trilogy, The Proof that Ghosts Exist, written by me and my friend Carol Matas.

Louise Erdrich’s Tracks

Erdrich, Louise.  Tracks.  1988.  New York: HarperCollins Perennial, 1989.
I’m including some adult fiction in the books I read for my alternating narratives project, in order to see if this sort of storytelling is used similarly or differently in work for a different audience.  I’m working with the idea that when writers for children do this, [...]

Laura Amy Schlitz’s Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village

Schlitz, Laura Amy.  Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village.
Cambridge: Candlewick, 2007.
The author explains that she had seventeen children to work with in putting on a theatre piece and wanted them all to have big parts in the play: “It really isn’t possible to write a play with seventeen equally important characters in [...]

The Aethernomicon

We interrupt this blog for a commercial announcement.  My son Asa, marionette impresario and expert intricator, has a play on in the Winnpeg Fringe Festival.  It’s the terrifying Aethernomoicon, baed on the work of H.P. Lovecraft, with 13 terrifying marionettes and .live electronic music by the Audient Void. You can find out more about it [...]

N.M. Browne’s Shadow Web

Browne. N.M.  Shadow Web.  London: Bloomsbury, 2008.
I read this because I have a number of other novels by N.M. Browne in my “alternating narratives” project, and I think I might want to look at them as a group–why might one writer turn so often to the idea of telling the stories of different characters in [...]