kyomaclear

October 11, 2012
WordFest
9:30AM. “First Calgary Financial Book Rapport (Gr.1-3).”
Children’s event with Mélanie Watt.
(John Dutton Theatre, Calgary Public Library.)

October 11, 2012
WordFest
1:00PM. Visit to Douglasdale School.

October 12, 2012
WordFest
9:00AM. Visit to East Grey Elementary.

October 13, 2012
WordFest
11:00AM. “Family Reading Circle.”
Children’s event with Jeremy Tankard.
(Fish Creek Library, Calgary.)

October 13, 2012
WordFest
3:30PM. “Exile and Exodus.”
Reading and discussion with Vaddey Ratner and Kim Scott.
(Vertigo Theatre Centre, Studio, Calgary.)

October 14, 2012
WordFest
11:00AM. “The Ties that Bind.”
Reading and discussion with Shree Ghatage, Simonetta Agnello Hornby, Vincent Lam, and J. Jill Robinson.
(The Banff Centre, The Kinnear Centre -KC 203, Banff.)

October 15, 2012
Vancouver International Writers Festival
6PM. Annual Literati Gala.
(Fairmont Waterfront.)

October 16, 2012
Vancouver International Writers Festival
8:00PM. “Grand Openings: The Alma Lee Opening Night Event.”
Reading with Rawi Hage, Marie Darrieussecq, Junot Díaz, Nuruddin Farah, Simonetta Agnello Hornby and Gail Jones.
(Performance Works, 1218 Cartwright Street.)

October 18, 2012
Vancouver International Writers Festival
10:00PM. “High and Low and All Around.”
Children’s event with Sheree Fitch.
(Improv Centre, Vancouver.)

October 27, 2012
International Festival of Authors
2:00PM. Reading with Bill Gaston, Rawi Hage, and Tanis Rideout
(Lakeside Terrace, Harbourfront.)

October 28, 2012
International Festival of Authors
2:00PM. Roundtable (Reading Like a Writer) with James Clarke, Christine Pountney and Susan Swan. Antanas Sileika hosts and moderates.
(Lakeside Terrace, Harbourfront.)

November 8, 2012
Brampton Public Library and the Peel Art Gallery, Museum and Archives (PAMA).
7:00 PM. Public talk.

November 16-18, 2012.
Salon du Livre de Montréal.
More details to come.

February 7, 2013.
The Eighth Annual Book Lover’s Ball.
(The Fairmont Royal York, Toronto.)

March 19, 2013
Heliconian Club Literary Lecture Series.
7:30PM. Public talk.
(Toronto Heliconian Club, 35 Hazelton Avenue.)

March 27, 2013
The Kama Reading Series. (Fundraiser for World Literacy Canada.)
6:30PM. Reading with Safia Fazlul, Eva Stachniak, and Richard B. Wright.
(The Park Hyatt Toronto.)

I’ve had a few Cage moments this year—riding the subway in New York City, standing at a busy Toronto intersection, staying on a beach in Halfmoon Bay. In each case, I’ve been swept up by aural happenstance. Strange music in the urban unquiet, accidental symphonies in the wild open air. From bicycle bells to persistent cicadas, I was suddenly hearing all the things I don’t hear because I’m too busy.

The other day I saw a friend who works in the social services sector. “All my life I’ve felt that I need to talk and dole out advice,” she said. “This summer I decided to do something different. I decided to just stop and listen.”

What does it take to listen without conducting or interfering? The writer in me often wants to speak her piece. But lately I’ve also been heeding the counter-voice that says “Shhhh.” You know, the wise voice that says: “Listen. Receive. Don’t be so quick to declare, to offer, to prefer, to make, to fix, to do. Let go of your small mind.” (Yeah, that voice.)

All of which to say: What better way to celebrate John Cage‘s 100th birthday today than in silence, for four minutes, thirty-three seconds?

What better way to remember than to be part of that Cage-ian gesture of listening, stretching across time, holding a space for other living and breathing (and coughing and snorting) beings? As the anarchic genius himself once advised: “Why do you not do as I do? Letting go of your thoughts as though they were the cold ashes of a long dead fire.”

(Photo: David Tudor and John Cage in Japan, 1962. Photographer unknown.)

See you in September.

(Photo: Virginia Woolf and Clive Bell on the beach at Studland Bay, Dorset.)

As many others this morning, I was saddened to learn of the passing of Chris Marker. He was such a notoriously private man, so playfully elusive, he loomed so large in my mind, that I was shocked to see a photograph of him in the newspaper. Could it be that Chris Marker was a mere mortal? In all the years that I had followed his work (from Sans Soleil to The Koumiko Mystery and beyond), how could I have gathered so little biographical information about him? (What I “knew” before today: He worked with Alain Resnais on Night and Fog. He named himself after a magic marker.) Now I have a bit more data (thanks to the obituaries) but none of it changes the essentials: Marker was a brilliant shapeshifter, an artistic visionary, a true anticolonial globalist. Throughout my twenties, he was very important to me. I rushed to see his films whenever they were screened (too seldomly) at Cinemateque. I even used his work as a litmus test for potential boyfriends. I will forever hold him in my pantheon of inspirations and mavericks. Chris Marker may have been a mere mortal but he was one that aggrandized my notions of what it means to be a creative and empathetic person.

“Things that Quicken the Heart” (for Chris Marker):

1. Art that is ostensibly about one thing (i.e. African art) but really about another (i.e. French colonialism). See—Statues Also Die.

2. Any filmmaker who bravely wears his/her heart and politics on his/her sleeve. (“Trying to give the floor to people who haven’t got it, and, when possible, to help them to find their means of expression.”)

3. The Narita Airport protest scene in Sans Soleil. (A man I knew appears for a brief moment.)

4. Any artist who knows that digression and free association are not simply formal strategies but are ultimately ways of reaching beyond the known and sanctified to the mysterious and marginalized.

5. The moment in The Koumiko Mystery when Chris Marker (in Tokyo for the ’64 Olympics) settles his camera on a face in the stadium crowd, that of a young Japanese woman named Koumiko.

6. Any artist who loves cats enough to use one as his surrogate. (See—Agnès Varda’s The Beaches of Agnes.)

7. Any filmmaker who is admiring and grateful enough to create paeans to peer filmmakers. See—A.K.: Akira Kurosawa and One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevitch: Andrei Tarkovsky.

8.

(Photos: Still from La Jetée; portrait of Chris Marker.)

I love collaboration. Collaboration is a window flung open to the skies. It’s a bulwark against stasis, a kind surrender to the unexpected. No matter how much I may enjoy working alone (toiling away in my dingy garret), collaboration reminds me to keep the windows open and let the light and air through. No one thrives in solitary confinement. My creative introverted brain is always replenished by outside visitors.

As a picture book writer, I have come to await that moment when I must relinquish my story. I have come to await it not as someone anticipating the end of something but as someone rushing towards the beginning.

Here is something I have discovered. A good collaborator will decorate your ideas and prettify your pages. A great collaborator will take your unfinished notions and put them through a process of enhancement and enchantment so astonishing that, by the end, they’ll have whisked you off to an even-better invented world.

I count my lucky stars that I have been blessed with great collaborators. Both Isabelle Arsenault and Matte Stephens make art that balances sophistication with playfulness, and cleverness with heart. Matte’s particular approach is to take familiar objects and people, and re-arrange them in surreal and delightful ways that are not obvious at all. Isabelle, widely celebrated for her beautiful depth of detail, has a terrific knack for using white space, a lot of white space, active white space. She has taught me that the best illustrations give room for, rather than confine, the imagination of the reader.

Isabelle and I have done two books together. In both instances, I have watched her move from initial sketches and mood boards to finished art. I have seen her go and live inside a story, exploring the emotional intricacies of a scene with a focus that might make some wonder if she was applying the Stanislavsky Method to illustration. Her intuition astounds me. She often seems more attentive to the inner workings of my stories than I am.

Here’s an example. There is a revelatory moment at the end of Virginia Wolf where Virginia is transformed from a wolf back into a girl. Isabelle used a clever visual trick involving silhouetted wolf ears and a large bow. Let me just say that I did not write or foresee this transition at all. Isabelle found it inside the story and, happily for everyone, it has become the crowning touch of the whole book.

This is the kind of out-of-the-blue magic that happens when you collaborate: you hand your collaborator a cube and they give you a dodecahedron in return. When you loosen your hold on a work, a communal form of talent takes over. There is room for anything to happen.

Reprinted from Uppercase Magazine, issue 14. Order it now to get a heartful serving of work and words by über-illustrators Matte Stephens, Isabelle Arsenault, Agata Dudek, Jon Klassen, Oliver Jeffers and more!

(Photos: Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss; Jeanne-Claude and Christo in the early days.)

Isabelle and I received nice news today from La Pastèque. Fourchon (the French translation of Spork) is a finalist for the Prix Jeunesse des Libraires du Québec. The award will be announced on September 22, 2012.