MiF is looking to do a story on what works, and what doesn’t, attracting bees into our yards and gardens. If you’ve got information to share, please contact Editor Craig Spence. we’d like to know:
How you can attract bees to your garden?
What kind of homes bees like?
What not to do that will either be harmful to bees or keep them away?
What the benefits of bees are to gardeners and to our environment?
Why people are afraid of bees, and what can be done to limit any risks attracting bees might pose?
What it takes to be a bee-keeper?
And any other question you think we should be asking.
The Federation of B.C. Writers held its annual Spring Writes conference and AGM in Nanaimo May 2 to 5, and writers from all over the province converged on the Vancouver Island Convention Centre for four days of workshops, presentations, blue pencil sessions and hobnobbing.
Presentations and workshops included everything from the art and craft of writing, to strategies for pitching your manuscript to publishers, to 21st Century promotional tools writers can use to get their work into the hands and minds of readers, to discussions about the relevance of literature in an era of digital entertainment.
As a novelist, Fed member, and MiF reporter, yours truly took in as much of the action as was humanely possible on the conference Saturday, and – as much as I learned sitting in on the workshops and panels – I had to admit I missed out on much more than I took in. Kudos to the Fed, and to the Nanaimo area members in particular, for pulling together such a rich program of events.
My observer’s day started at 8 a.m., with a Morning Write, facilitated by Keith Liggett. The day before participants had been assigned a 200 word ‘show, not tell’ writing assignment, which they were to read to the group during the Saturday session. The stories were good, many would have earned a high grade in any course or contest… but Liggett could always find something to offer to improve the pieces, or at least for the writer to consider.
“It’s about habits, and it’s about opening creativity and opening doors, and being forced to do things that you wouldn’t do on your own, if you were just sitting in your closet and writing,” he said.
A raison d’être of the FBCW is to get writers out of solitary, bring them together, and help them engage, though collaborative learning and sharing, the realities of writing as an art and a discipline. Inspiration is a spark that ignites the creative naphtha; then the work of putting all the pieces together into a superbly crafted story begins.
Poet and Author Betsy Warland, during a panel on the whys and hows of publishing, said the vital role of creative writing in the 21st Century has not been diminished by the deluge of new media bringing entertainment and information to audiences.
Literature takes us places no other media can, places we need to go. “There’s so much that’s still missing in our collective narrative – that is forbidden, stereotyped,” she said. “We need to have these narratives present in our collective brain and understanding. So that’s why I think it’s important to publish a book.”
The sources of inspiration and information may be different, but youth are still drawn to creating and reading literature. Said Adam, to a gathering of youth at Literacy Central Vancouver Island, “Really, if you want to get to know a character, and get to know a world, reading is the best way to do it.” And bringing those kinds of penetrating experiences to readers is what drives him to write. “What’s closer to magic than being able to do that for someone else?” he said.
You can find out more about the Federation of BC Writers on their web site. For writers and poets who want resources and camaraderie along the way, it’s an organization that’s there for you.
Eleven years ago, Antonia Olak was walking in the trails near her home in Qualicum, when she encountered a couple of equestrians, one riding Gypsy, the horse that would inspire a series of paintings capturing the spirit of its kind: freedom, speed and surging power.
It was a eureka moment. “That whole experience will never leave me, I was just so excited,” she said, recalling the instant. “I was doing horse profiles before then, but this is the one where everything clicked, and I realized what I was doing.”
Olak wanted to capture the essence of the animals in abstract representations. More than that, she wanted to separate the equine qualities from any background noise, and place her likenesses on absolutely still canvases.
“I feel that extra space gives it a bit of weight, it’s a very quiet image, not quite vulnerable, but just calm,” she said. There’s a felt-tension between the abstract representations of the horses, and the limitless background – the works capture her subjects’ essence, without limiting their vital energy.
In Machusla, a ‘roly-poly’ somewhat clumsy animal she had actually ridden herself, Olak saw qualities many would not have detected. “As a painter, you understand, once you get going, that a painting has a life of its own, and it takes off and you just go with the flow, right?” she remembered.
“Well I realize what I did, was I got Machusla’s spirit, but it doesn’t look like Machusla at all,” Olak said. “She was always so willing to please, and so excited to be ridden, and she had this wonderful spirit.”
The negative space in Olak’s works is often linen instead of canvas, with the horses rendered in charcoal and acrylic. The works aren’t behind glass, so she has finished them with a polymer medium and varnish to fix and protect the actual image.
In some of the paintings Olak has included calligraphic elements. “A lot of my abstracts are like writing,” she said. “My mentor when I was young was Jack Wise.” An artist known for his eastern philosophy, mandalas and calligraphy.
Olak is the featured artist at Rainforest Arts in Chemainus for the months of May and June. She will have an Artist’s Demonstration at the gallery, 9781 Willow Street in Chemainus, May 11 from 1 to 3 pm. Go to RainforestArts.cafor more info.
Nicole Potvin & Adult First Prize winner Katy Weicker
Adult Second Place winner Jonathan Sean Lyster
Adult Third Place winner Dawn Stofer
Junior First Place winner Thunya Dudley
Youth First Place winner Charlotte Taylor
Full-house at the Island Short Story Contest awards
The 2019 awards ceremony for the Islands Short Fiction Contest opened to a full-house April 27 at the Nanaimo Harbourfront branch of the Vancouver Island Regional Library.
The crowd was there to meet the winning authors and hear some of the 127 entries in this year’s literary showcase, co-sponsored by the Nanaimo Arts Council, Vancouver Island Regional Library, and Vancouver Island University’s Department of Creative Writing and Journalism. In the running were: Adult writers (19 and over), Youth (13 to 18), and Junior (12 and under).
Victoria’s Katy Weicker took First Prize in the adult category for her story Tender Embers, which judge Stephen Guppy described as an ‘anti-heroine’, ‘anti-romance’ take on the morning after an on-line dating, one-night stand. “The author has taken the formula of romance and turned it on its head,” he said. “The use of social media for involving the narrator with an offstage character functions as a foil which is particularly effective.”
Weicker, joining the audience via digital video link, watched as her story was read by Nanaimo actress Nicole Potvin. The story begins with the narrator in bed nursing a blinding hangover, and gets more complicated from there, as she tries to disentangle herself from the jaded romantic recollections of the night before.
The morning light is an aggressive slash of orange, Potvin read. It burns with a brightness that makes me squint my already closed eyes even tighter to try and block it… My breath is hot. It reverberates off the underbelly of the comforter and onto my face in moist waves of sick. My stomach contents slip up into the back of my throat. I swallow the burning chunks and cough, they surge again. I toss the blanket, roll across the mattress towards the edge of the bed, and stare at the dingy, beige carpet, waiting for a tsunami of vomit to decimate the unfamiliar loafers haphazardly discarded below me…
Thoughts and emotions get more jumbled from there, as the narrator and her best friend text each other with brief snippets of chat, accentuated with suggestive emojis, all exchanged as a ‘jackhammer’ dawn unfolds.
Nine prizes were awarded, three in each of the categories. Jonathan Sean Lyster took second prize in the Adult category for his story, Target Market; Dawn Stopher took third for Identities Reclaimed. In the Youth category, judged by VIRL’s Lee Losell: Charlotte Taylor took first for Calm Before the Storm; Yinan Cao, second; and Jocelyn Diemer third. In the Junior Category, judged by VIRL’s Nathan McKay: Thunya Dudley took first prize; Esemé Iverson, second; Carolynn Warden, third.
Students at Penelakut Elementary School celebrated months of hard work, and powerful learning, with the opening of the Spaal’i’Skwitth’uts’Shelh (Raven and Stellar’s Jay Trail) April 24.
It’s a 1.5 kilometre path winding through the island’s coniferous forests, but more than that, it connects the community’s past and future. Penelakut Elementary School Principal Len Merriman described his walk along the trail, with stops at a couple of the gathering places along the way.
Elders were teaching students the traditional ways of their people. A deer hide was flanced, students also discussed the song they would dance-to, celebrating the opening of the trail – including one specifically composed for the occasion.
“The trail is getting our students out onto the land,” he said. “We’ve had deer skinning, and duck plucking, oyster shucking.” It’s not only a journey through the Penelakut First Nations territory, he said, its stations are places where students and elders will gather to share cultural awareness about themselves and the place they live.
Riley McIntosh, the contractor who helped plan and construct the trail (a project he has done with other First Nations communities), said the eight month project brought people together in a positive way. “It’s been incredibly positive and tons of kids are learning teamwork, overcoming challenges and connecting to their territory,” he told the Chemainus Valley Courier in an April 18 article.
Penelakut Elementary students Nicholas, who named the trail, and Student Council President Arthur, unknotted the cedar rope under the entranceway to Spaal’i’Skwitth’uts’Shelh, officially opening the trail. Then hundreds of students, teachers, elders and guests walked into the traditional lands of the Penelakut people.
Doug Griffiths, CEO and ‘community therapist’, presented his ideas on rural community development to an appreciative audience at Lake Shawnigan School April 4, as part of the Cowichan Valley Regional District’s Placemaking Vancouver Island Speaker Series
Sometimes, as a journalist, you put up your pen, close your notebook, and start listening in a different way. You find yourself asking, “Who is this guy?” instead of trying to take down what he’s saying, because things aren’t adding up.
That moment came for me when 13 Ways CEO Doug Griffith said towns shouldn’t place the word ‘sustainability’ too prominently on their literature, because it doesn’t have the gusto and glitter of other words. Communities need to portray themselves as innovative, aggressive, focused, not lumped in with the NOPE (Never On Planet Earth) crowd of naysayers.
The audience laughed, and I heard a few people sitting near me making appreciative comments. Being of a martian green hue, I cringed. I mean, really, in the 21st Century, not to think of sustainability as something progressive, exciting, fraught with wonderful possibilities? How could people not see the flies in this man’s ointment?
He’d prefaced his NOPE declaration with an avowal of himself as a ‘staunch’ environmentalist, but then went on to humorously depict sustainability–types as people who want to wrench the spigots closed tomorrow, depriving the world of its hydrocarbon fix overnight… None of the staunch environmentalists I know think remotely like that, so which martians has Griffith been talking to, in which coffee shop, and on what Planet B?
Trying to make sense of his comments, I remembered it had been mentioned in his introduction that he’d graduated university as an honours student of philosophy, and taught high school, amongst other things. Any freshman PHIL 101 student would have seen right away that Griffith had pulled the ‘straw man fallacy’ on his appreciative audience – one of the favourite strategies of the most accomplished and insincere politicians.
As a demolition tool the straw man is pretty effective. All you have to do is recast the intentions and policies of your opponent – and the straw man is only used against an opponent – as ridiculous and outrageous for a receptive audience, then tear that effigy apart to the cheers of the crowd. Never mind that the straw man is a gross misrepresentation; the object isn’t a slavish adherence to accuracy or truth, it’s winning. As a former Progressive Conservative MLA and cabinet minister from the other side of the Rockies, as well as a philosophy grad, Griffith would no-doubt be well versed in the straw man tactic, and he deployed it skilfully.
The premise of his schtick was what you might call a thought inversion, one he’d first practised on his high school students. Instead of encouraging them to make the best of their lives, Griffith challenged them to think how they could ruin their chances, and what their degraded futures might look like if they made all the bad choices open to them.
Brilliant idea! But in the classroom he listened to his students and wrote their ruinous ruminations on the blackboard for them to reflect on; at Shawnigan Lake School he told everybody what the ruinous 13 mindsets in town are, then berated some unnamed characters who had dared think that way, dragging their communities into the abyss with them. Griffith cited numerous instances when he rode into town – he’s a rancher by heritage, and rightfully proud of it – and offered up his ideas as to what the locals needed to do to fix things, then left them to it, only to return and find they hadn’t acted on his advice and were wallowing deeper into the mire of mediocrity and decline.
As a philosophy grad, former Alberta cabinet minister, and pretty good comedian, I’m sure Griffith is aware that ‘causality’ hasn’t been established just because two variables on a graph happen to change at the same time. For instance, if I gather together a crowd near sunset and predict vehemently that, if they don’t do something, the sun will drop out of the sky; and if the crowd neglects to do what I’ve suggested and, indeed, the sun does set; that doesn’t mean my saying so and them not heeding my advice was the reason; it might have had something to do with the rotation of the earth!
Griffith wound up his presentation by urging people to take responsibility. Personal responsibility. The cumulative effect of not doing so was the most important point on his list of 13 don’ts that will doom a community. And he’s bang on there. But I found myself asking on my way to the parking lot: How could I take responsibility for the future of my town based on the other things he’d said before that?
Answer: Put on a blue blazer and go volunteer for the Conservative party nearest you. Tout the inviolable efficacy of competition, while lauding the wonderful benefits of cooperation; make sure ‘sustainability’ doesn’t become an inconvenience; snap my fingers in a way the appeals to youth and seniors in the same time and place; et voila, I’ll have done well. And if I don’t achieve the complex goals he’s set for me, and my town goes down for the big swirl as a result, I can always invite Doug Griffith back to say: “I told you so,” just for a laugh.
American philosopher and naturist Ralph Waldo Emerson eulogized weeds as plants ‘whose virtues have not been discovered.
It’s in that spirit that Artist Diana Durrand portrays the common dandelion (Taraxacum Officinale), using bold paintings, delicate drawings and elegant sculptures, all intended to override our entrenched suburban bias against this much maligned species.
Her tribute, 100 Sleeping Dandelions, will be on display at Rainforest Arts, Chemainus, B.C. where Diana Durrand will be Featured Artist for the months of March and April.
“From root to flower the dandelion is an edible, useful plant, its medicinal properties common knowledge among herbalists the world over,” Durrand says.
Yet, universally categorized as a noxious weed by homeowners and gardeners, the dandelion is mown down, poisoned and uprooted whenever it pops up on North American lawns, its hardy, prolific and incredibly adaptable nature the only things keeping the species from eradication.
“With this eclectic body of work my goal is to represent the many aspects of the dandelion I have experienced, from my earliest delights as a child, to the nihilistic adult attitude that has been cultivated by the home & garden industry,” Durrand says.
“I’m hoping viewers can tap into some of their own childhood memories of picking, smelling, tasting and exchanging dandelions.”
Is the dandelion an ‘invasive species’, introduced to North America and the rest of the world by the planet’s most pervasive invader, European Homo Sapiens; or is it a hardy, totally edible plant that has adapted to its new environments and flourished against all odds, to the benefit of human kind?
100 Sleeping Dandelions will shed some golden light on that question. You can preview the works at DianaDurrand.com
We’ll be sitting down to various versions of Thanksgiving Dinner Oct. 8, but no matter what traditions are followed in your home, one theme runs through the day for most everyone: We’re giving thanks for the bounty of the land we live on.
In one way or another, that translates into thanks to the people who harvest the bounty of that land, people who are too often not recognized or understood in our increasingly urbanized world.
No matter how far removed we are from the land, though, we remain wholly dependent on it for survival. So the conversations around our dinner tables might revolve around how the food on our plates gets from the farm, to the market, and into our baskets.
That’s a discussion of especial importance to this region, where farming is integral to the economy. At Mid-Island Focus we wish you a joyful Thanksgiving, and invite you to continue the conversations about the land and how it’s bounty is harvested throughout the coming year.
If you have a story idea about agriculture, it’s importance to our communities, and how it is evolving in the 21st Century, contact MIF. We’d love to hear from you.
For artist Bryan Wilson there’s a direct line between his love of the outdoors, and his passion to create art, and it shows up on his canvases. “I fish lots, I love my boating,” he said. “Any time I go out and do the things I love, I’m always thinking about my art.” And gathering inspiration in notebooks, video clips and photos.
But his experiences as an avid angler, who has trekked into BC’s wilderness and travelled to tropical climes in pursuit of a catch, aren’t depicted representationally. Wilson meticulously renders his images in pen and ink drawings, and if you look closely, you will almost always find there’s white space between the thousands of elements that come together in his works like an unimaginably complex puzzle. Continue reading “Artist Bryan Wilson’s Fine Line”
