Authors Electric

A surreal memoir in Catamaran I get melancholy on Halloween. I love its makebelieve and mockery of darkness and death. In my parental days I loved taking the kids trick-or-treating, earnest in their costumes, carried on by my grandchildren and great grandchildren today, carried on when my eldest daughter Alicia Sammons builds her family altar and does herself up for La Dia de Los Muertos, November 2.  At the same time, I relive sad memories of the real thing - my mother dying in a San Francisco hospital the morning before Halloween some thirty years ago.  I remember taking a granddaughter and my youngest daughter, both age 7, trick-or-treating, giggling in their costumes the following evening as if nothing had happened, as my mother - a perpetual prankster - would have insisted.  The experience culminated months of watching my mother slip away. It cut deep. She had raised me in fiercely loving, but inconsistent ways. She hadn't been perfect, but done her damn best. ...

                                                                                           A Look at the Booker Prize for Literature     I recently noted that Anne Michaels had been shortlisted for this year’s Booker prize for her novel  Held (2023). I had read her earlier novel,  Fugitive Pieces  (1996), about the displacement of children during World War Two, some years ago and I had included discussion of it in a course I was teaching about Canadian Literature for The Workers’ Educational Association (WEA).  Held , published many years later and which I received as a Christmas present, is a very different book: it is an account of the development of the generations within a family, who are dealing with events from the early twe...

My youngest daughter, Zoë, came into this world in May, 1990, less than a year after the Berlin Wall came down. And by 1991, the Soviet Union had dissolved, ending the Cold War. "How lucky for you, my wee one," I said to her between spoonfuls of apple sauce. "You and your sisters will live free from the threat of nuclear annihilation that your mama and papa have known since they were babes!" What soaring potentials would thus be freed for their millennial generation, I thought! Little Zoë must have been the wiser right off the bat. One sign: my post-Cold-War child had no trouble getting the dark humour of Dr. Strangelove when she saw it as a pre-adolescent. I maintain, however, that I wasn't wrong about our millennials' potential. They have continued to amaze me with their accomplishments and character through these years. But how wrong I was about the threat, as we now see more clearly than ever on this first week and the second month of 2022. perhaps our ...

  Rod Kamitsuka, back when . To paraphrase Samuel Johnson: The prospect of death (by Coronavirus) can "concentrate the mind wonderfully."  We've been living with that prospect for more than a year now, awaiting the vaccine cavalry while the threat escalated from miniscule to monstrous. It matters not that the odds are in favour of survival except among the elderly and health-impaired. It's still a threat, with nasty side effects. Covid and the solitude of lockdown have made death more present to us all. Our capacity for denial wilts as the toll doubles and redoubles on TV. Death, however, can be a writer's friend. It motivates characters. It propels our narratives, themes, plot points, and symbols. Plus, dying can be a good career move for some writers, boosting book sales, prestige and popularity. No one ever heard of Stieg Larrson until he died, and we all know how The Great Gatsby flopped in 1925 and didn't catch on until after F. Scott Fitzgerald 's ...

At the start of December 2019, I gave myself a gift of learning. I'd seen numerous ads for MasterClass while searching for interesting gifts for the holiday season.  If you're unfamiliar with MasterClass, it's a streaming platform of online courses that started in 2015 with a simple pitch: Famous people teach you about the thing that made them famous. At the time, the courses that interested me most were from writers: Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, Malcolm Gladwell, Joyce Carol Oates, just to name a few. MasterClass, however, includes instructors from all walks of life—from Dr. Jane Goodall who teaches Conservation to Helen Mirren who teaches Acting to Annie Leibovitz who teaches Photography.  You can either purchase a specific course along with its instructional videos and workbooks, or buy an annual membership which gives you unlimited access to all the classes, including new ones that are added during the year.  I decided to pick up an annual subscription and a second ...

Yogi Berra's 1998 book. "When you come to a fork in the road, take it," my favourite among the many koan-like paradoxical malapropisms for which the legendary New York Yankee catcher Yogi Berra is famous. Here we are today, November 3, 2020 at such a paradoxical fork, which we have no choice but to take. It just happens to be my turn in the rotation of esteemed, Authors Electric members to post my blog on the third of each month, this time, falling on U.S. Presidential election day. We won't know its fateful results as of this posting, not until very late in this day, perhaps not for days, weeks, even months to follow. But a mighty fork it is! This is one of those days in which the cliche that "nothing will be the same after this" is for real. Today marks one of those divides whose gravity you just can't exaggerate: The end of the American republic? Possibly. Like the day Julius Caesar declared himself dictator of the 500-year-old Roman Republic? The the...

For my first blog with the esteemed writers of Authors Electric, I’d like to share something about myself as a writer. I won’t bore you with my personal history, my likes and dislikes, shoe size, etc. Almost anything you want to know about me is on my website if you’re curious enough (except maybe the shoe size). I’ll address something that is not always evident about most writers, and that is … are they plotters or pantsers? Let me explain the difference. A plotter researches a book before writing it, laying out an overview with major plot points. Plotters know what will happen at the beginning, middle, and end of the book. Character sketches are usually part of the outline. R.L. Stine:   “If you do enough planning before you start to write, there's no way you can have writer's block. I do a complete chapter by chapter outline.” John Grisham:   “I've learned that the more time I spend on the outline the easier the book is to write. And if I cheat on ...