Old School Inspiration at Bookmark 7 Launch

What a pleasure to stand behind Mississauga Valleys Public School on a sunny fall morning to witness poet Jeff Latosik unveil Bookmark 7: “Song for the Field Behind Mississauga Valley Public School.”

Valleys Senior Public School Principal Diana Fowlie and poet Jeff Latosik with Bookmark 7: "Song for the Field Behind Mississauga Valley Public School"

I loved it. I love that you wouldn’t normally look at this well-kept stretch of grass and say, “this is a spot to inspire poetry.” I love that Jeff told us that this was the beginning and end of his journey from and to school for many years and that this place stayed with him. I love that Jeff said, as a beginning poet, he wondered if Mississauga was a place that could be written about, until he realized one night, sitting with a bunch of poet friends in Toronto, that all of them at the table had grown up in Mississauga. I love that the collection that featured this poem went on to win the Trillium Book Award for poetry. I love that now, a kid passing by this spot will think “Yes, poetry lives here,” and might be inspired to ask himself or herself: “What’s my story? How will I tell it?”

And I love that Diana Fowlie, the current principal of Valleys Senior Public School was right there, eagerly taping the event and asking if Jeff could come talk to the students.

Yes, Jeff said, of course. I love that most of all.

New Bookmarks Meet Their Hosts

Greetings from Little Lake Park in Midland, where my colleague Kate Burgess and I have just delivered The Queen of Unforgetting Bookmark to its new home. It’s a gorgeous day — perfect for checking out the Bookmark’s future location: looking out on Little Lake, just steps from the park store where the novel’s “World’s Best Fries” are sold. Sadly, it’s closed for the season, but I look forward to coming back in the summer and trying them. In the meantime, I will have to settle for author Sylvia Maultash Warsh’s recommendation.

It’s been a great few days while we played courier, taking the Bookmarks to each locale and showing them for the first time to our community hosts. It’s wonderful to walk the sites with our supporters from each city and to imagine these stories being set into the soil here. It’s also great to see people’s faces light up when they see each Bookmark for the first time.

So now Kate and I will get back in the car and head for head office in Hamilton where we have a few more days of media outreach and planning to do before the launches begin — on Friday in Mississauga with Jeff Latosik’s “Song for the Field Behind Mississauga Valley Public School.”

Cross your fingers for sun and I hope to see you there!

 

 

 

The Bookmarks are Here!

The Bookmark plaques are here! And when I say “here” I mean, right here at my house.

The Project Bookmark Canada office is my home office, which has its advantages, but also its disadvantages. For example, it’s not so great when the business meeting you are conducting at your dining room table is interrupted by delivery of new dishwasher (to replace the one that broke over a year ago), but it’s wonderful to receive all four Bookmark plaques and posts for this fall’s installations and to know that they are safe inside your house.

Last year, we had some nailbiting moments as Bookmarks that were en route to the works offices in each of our host communities were held up at the border for days and days at a time, or making their way to strange in-between depots where the shipping companies would change trucks, as the dates for unveilings drew ever nearer. On one, too memorable, occasion the Bookmark arrived just as the town hall in Owen Sound was closing — the night before the unveiling ceremony!

So this time, I opted to use my home office as a home warehouse and had the Bookmarks shipped directly here. Yesterday (after the dishwasher delivery) all four arrived at my door. In the next few days I’ll be ferrying them to our host communities — most likely in the family van. Glamorous? No. Convenient? Somewhat. Reassuring? Absolutely.

It’s September 14 and we know where our Bookmarks are: Toronto, Owen Sound, Kingston, Ottawa — and my house.

Four New Bookmarks!

Today’s the day! We’re announcing four new Bookmarks to be unveiled in Ontario this fall! Featured locations are: Midland, Hamilton, Port Colborne and Mississauga. Featured authors are Sylvia Maultash Warsh, John Terpstra, Sheree-Lee Olson and Jeff Latosik.

Of course, THIS is the day that my email program tells me that I have a limit of mailouts an hour (argh, technical glitches), but I’m proud to let you in on the main details here: projectbookmarkcanada.ca.

Last week, I got to take a trip up Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula to visit icebergs and archeological sites. It was a breathtaking experience for all sorts of reasons, but it was also exciting to see the wide array of Newfoundland literature on display in craft shops, museums and National Park gift shops, all along the way.

Brilliant! Before I ever got to visit Newfoundland, I was falling in love with it through its words  — spoken and written. How many other visitors are coming here because they want to encounter for themselves the places they’ve travelled and the people they’ve met through poems and stories? Or who, inspired by the scenery and the history, might be drawn deeper into the experience through the writing that’s set here?

It seems to me that those people responsible for showcasing Newfoundland and drawing visitors here have realized this better than their counterparts in many other parts of the country. Project Bookmark Canada hopes to join them in highlighting the connection between our country’s stories and its places, marketing the literature of a place, in that place.

Why shouldn’t gift stores at hotels, galleries and coffee shops all over Canada promote the literature of their respective locales? Whether you read it on site — as you can with a Bookmarked passage — or back at home, perhaps many thousands of miles away, reading the fiction and poetry of a place is one of the most gratifying, lasting and intense ways to connect with it.

As the wonderful novelist Steven Galloway (who makes his home on the West Coast of Canada) said of Michael Crummey’s fantastic and fantastical Newfoundland novel, Galore, “…the Newfoundland that exists in my imagination – the one that may not be real and if it ever was real likely doesn’t exist today – smells and tastes and sounds like Galore.”

Crummey made for me the Newfoundland I experience today, even when I am actually here. So did Lisa Moore, and Wayne Johnston and Jessica Grant and Michael and Kathleen Winter. And that place is constantly morphing and changing, the more books and writers I read, the more stories I hear.

 

 

Summer Reading

Greetings from Woody Point, Newfoundland! I’m spending the summer here, writing, walking and — of course — reading. The fall’s installations are already chosen and on their way to production (more about that next time), but the stack of books I’ve brought from Hamilton to read, for Bookmark and for myself, is huge. Multiply this by four, for my husband and two of my kids, and it probably drastically affected my gas consumption on the four-day drive.

But I figure I’ll be OK, even if I manage to steam through the collection I brought from home, because the Woody Point community is filled with books. This is the home of Writers at Woody Point, the literary and music festival that takes place at the end of each August, and in the summer and year-round too, it’s a place filled with readers. Lending books is part of the fun, and already we’ve been talking with some other residents about sharing libraries. The house I am staying in has its own share of books, too and sometimes those new books look even more tempting then the ones I’ve brought along.

Lately people have told me that running out of books on vacation has opened up their reading tastes, and brought them to books they might never have picked up on their own.

So, here’s my question: What’s your favourite book that you ever discovered on vacation? Send in your selection and your story about how you came to it, and if we publish it here on the blog, you can win a Bookmark t-shirt. Even better, send us a picture of yourself reading the book too and, if my technical skills evolve a little, I’ll include it here.

Happy reading.