Canadian comics and graphica award

The 7th Doug Wright Awards (for Canadian comics and graphic novels) were recently given out in Toronto. Congratulations to Pascal Girard, who won Best Book for Bigfoot!

"Those were my salad days..."

I love, love, love this idea:

"Scott Griffin has launched a new competition designed to revive the art of poetry recital among high school students."

(More info. here and here)

One of the best things my high school English teacher, Mrs. Tynan, made us do was memorise poetry and drama: either monologues from Shakespeare or something similar. Of course, years later, Dr. Lecker (twice in one day, talking about Lecker!) had us identify Canadian poetry quotes for our Canlit final exam.

I cannot think of a more appropriate statement about poetry than Griffin's: "Poetry is not just for the elite — it is a language that should be spoken in the cafés, the streets and especially the classrooms of the nation."

Hear, hear!

*"My salad days, / When I was green in judgment, cold in blood." Cleopatra in Antony & Cleopatra.

Canlit class + OPL blogging

Yoked together by violence*, and Michael Turner.

Thanks, Dr. Lecker.

*to quote Samuel Johnson's criticism of Donne.

Weekend update

(now with less Seth Myers!)

I had a pretty busy week. Last Sunday, I found out I am going to NELI, which is really exciting .... and really scary! I am very pleased, and honoured to be chosen. I think it will be a great opportunity. So one thing I did this week was make some other arrangements for my absence in early December (re-arrange my course outline for ILLs, arrange hotels, etc.)

Our big thing this week was author visits: we had two at Rideau, on the same day, even! Children's author Sylvie Massicotte visited Rideau Branch to talk to a class on Tuesday afternoon; Claire Rothman visited on Tuesday evening. My colleague mostly handled Sylvie's actual visit, because my brain was full of other stuff that day for Claire's visit; I had also done a lot of the prep, including chasing down a class to attend the visit. You'd think this wouldn't be so hard! ... and yet. Here's the deal.

The opportunity for this visit comes as part of our branch's participation in the Livromagie club from Communication Jeunesse; in other words, the author visit is for the children participating in this club. I had some issues finding groups and/or classes to join this club, and basically, finally, after lots of work, we got a grade 1-2 class willing to participate in the club, and they came to see Sylvie on Tuesday afternoon. What was especially interesting about the event was that it took the kids about 15 minutes to completely understand that Sylvie, the woman in front of them, was actually the author of the books they had been reading in class. This was definitely the first time any of them had met a published writer, and I think they were a bit in awe. What a rewarding experience ... in the end.

What was I talking about? Sorry.

Oh, right, Tuesday. Author visit #1 - check. Author visit #2 - Claire - check. We had 15 people at Rideau for her reading, which was both awesome (I would have been happy with anything over, say, 5; author visits at libraries are generally not well attended, which I frankly have a few theories about, but that rant will have to wait for another day....) and kind of depressing (considering the amount of marketing I did!) I was cheered that one person had found out about the event because of a flyer I put up at Loblaws, one heard through one of our book clubs, and two attended from another local book club (not held at Rideau) of McGill alumni, who I had invited specially.

On Wednesday, Claire spoke to a group of senior school girls from Elmwood in Rockcliffe Park, and I accompanied her there as well. Honestly, I was able to better concentrate on her talk the second time around, since I sort of felt like I had Author Reading Brain for the first two days of this week (like Mommy Brain!).

It was great to get to spend some time with Claire. I must confess that we weren't particularly close when I was a student in her class at Marianopolis; she was closer to my best friend at the time, Kaya. Both Kaya and I were writers, but it was Kaya who shared much of her work with Claire. That time in my life was when most of my energy was devoted to exploring my new-found independence, bonding with my rez girls, feeling anxiety about money (and working three jobs) and navigating my first relationship. I was probably not the most respectful or studious girl in Claire's class. Claire and I floated in and out of each other's lives since then, seeing one another at Kaya's concerts or in Westmount circles. I'm so glad that we are still in touch, and I'm so glad that now, 13 years later, I have been given the opportunity to get to know her better. Turns out we're both dancers, and runners, and we both love long walks; we have similar warm memories of a particular nun at the College who I lived with; we're both ardent feminists, and so on. Honestly, it was lovely to see her.

A couple of quick things I learned from her talk, besides the obvious about Dr. Maude Abbot:

• The history of the Holmes Heart
• What she was reading when she developed the idea for The Heart Specialist: excellent Canadian historical fiction, including Helen Humphrey's Afterimage (about amazing Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, who I totally had a girl crush on anyway) and Michael Crummey's The River Thieves (which I sort of knew was about the Beothuk, but had sort of also forgotten; must pick it up)
• She loved Dorothy in Middlemarch!
  
• My favourite quote of the talk: Claire, speaking about her main character's expertise with the physical heart, and ineptitude with her own emotional heart, says "We can be the smartest people but we are just falling all over ourselves in love."
  

At the last minute, I realised that Claire's talk would be a great time to promote Winter 2011 programs at Rideau, even though they aren't totally finalised yet (the new issue of Preview is just being drafted now, and I am currently inputting programs into our online database). I made up a quick draft flyer to put on the table for the reading.

In case you are wondering, we have some of the usual suspects: our bilingual Family Storytime, our two Frontier College partner programs (the Reading circle and the Homework club), our three book clubs (Morning, Evening, and Mille-Feuilles), our writing workshop group, and March break programs, of course!

Our new and exciting initiatives include two more sessions of "Coffee with a police officer," two partner programs with the Ottawa Art Gallery: "Talk about Art with the Ottawa Art Gallery," and "Meet the Firestones with the Ottawa Art Gallery," and 6 free legal aid clinics (in partnership with three local legal aid organisations), focusing on Tenants’ rights / Droits des locataires, Workers’ rights, Income maintenance for the elderly, Successions & testaments and Human rights.

(Just for fun, remember that not only do I organise all this, but I get to make the posters for each event, too! Which I really enjoy, actually, it's just a lot of work).

I did one other incredibly rewarding thing this week (in addition to welcoming Claire, that is, not in addition to program submission and poster design - both of which are more equal parts rewarding and tedious): I went on outreach to the Stepping Stones program at the Ottawa Mission. I met with a group of about eight men who are in this program (along with their teacher, who has been incredibly welcoming and enthusiastic about meeting with me about partnerships). I introduced myself, talked about Rideau Branch, explained library membership and services (computer use, databases for homework help, language learning and hobbies), and brought some free paperbacks to give away. The men were interested, respectful, and they laughed at my jokes, which is always good. At one point, I logged into my library account to show them how to check their accounts and renew books, and they loved that I had overdues! I was very impressed by the group.

Instead of grading assignments on Friday, I decided to give myself a break and hung out with friends, which was kind of unusual (at least for the me that exists since I moved to Ottawa) but a lot of fun. Meanwhile, back at Rideau, my colleague received a group visit from a local refugee centre for a tour of the library.

On the weekend I prepared next week's lecture (on copyright! Horrors!) Oh, and I worked Saturday, when it was so cold inside the library (weatherstripping issues - don't ask) that my nose was frozen and I kept my legwarmers on all day, and, in other news, I explored the fine line between "Is this patron sleeping on the heating vent in the parking lot?" and "Is this patron passed out?" Sigh. I believe only emergency response teams can answer that one for me. But hey, I helped a guy with MLA format. Wheeee.

Then I slept for 12 hours.

Unjustly dusty: the works of Gwethalyn Graham

I am on a (too-short!) one week vacation this week, and I've brought home 5 books for the 9 days I am off... Do you think that will be enough? With side trips to Montreal and Toronto, I think it will be!

The first book on the pile is Barbara Meadowcroft's 2008 biography, Gwethalyn Graham: A Liberated Woman in a Conventional Age. It's at the top of the list because it's an ILL from TPL, and it's due this week. I find the designation of this series as "Women who rock" deeply trivialising, but luckily I am spared looking at this text as it is covered on my copy by the TPL barcode.

I first learned of Gwethalyn Graham in August 2005, when a friend and former professor of mine wrote a review of Graham's Swiss Sonata, brought back into print 67 years after its first publication. Although Claire Rothman admitted that Swiss Sonata "makes the mistake of putting politics before storytelling," she recommended it "for historical reasons," as a book remarkable at the time: written by a woman, with all-female characters; written not about romance, but rather world politics. Set in a model U.N. (or rather, League of Nations)-style Swiss finishing school in 1935, the novel uses the backdrop of European tensions to explore relationships and betrayals among a group of international students, and was blacklisted by the Nazis (a fact of which Graham was quite proud).

Who was this woman? The review also mentioned that both her novels, Swiss Sonata (1938) and Earth and High Heaven, (1944) had won the Governor General's Award. An almost unknown double GG winner (and a Montrealer, to boot) whose works had been out of print for over 60 years? I had to find out more about her.

Personal interest soon dovetailed with professional investigations, as I began extensive work in the fall of 2005 for an event at work celebrating Westmount's authors on the occasion of Montréal, capitale mondiale du livre. Along the way, Gwethalyn Graham's name popped up again: she had lived at 4129 Dorchester W. after fleeing her first disastrous marriage; she later bought a house on Argyle Ave., and was living at the time of her death at 4652 Sherbrooke W., just across Lansdowne from the park. I unearthed many articles from the Westmount Examiner about local authors that autumn, toiling away for often 12 hours a day, with Ann and Joan as company, executing elaborate maneouvers to get the giant Examiner archives face-down onto the photocopier. I came across many articles by and about Graham; she was often on my mind. I walked by her place on Sherbrooke frequently, wondering about her cozy, grey apartment; I read her novels while waiting for my then-fiancé while shopping in the Bay.

Her early interest in being a writer appealed to me, as I wanted to be a writer, too, up until late into university. Her self-consciousness also reminded me of myself: the fact that she took "great pains over her appearance" but that this "was not vanity; it was a necessary prop to her self-esteem" sounded familiar to me. Her choice of an unsuitable lover distressed me, but her courage as a young single mother living alone in Montreal moved me. I saw her ghost often in that last year I spent in Montreal; that time in my life was as tumultuous as her time in Montreal was comforting. I had always been drawn to tragic stories of thwarted gifts; Gwethalyn's story of great success and eloquent passion coupled with deep loneliness and alienation came at a time in my life when I perhaps felt her losses - idealism not the least among them - more keenly.

At an event in the library that fall (it could have been the Montréal, capitale mondiale du livre event or something else; memory fails me) I ran into Barbara Meadowcroft, who took me aside to tell me she was writing Graham's biography. I could not have been more pleased. It was five years later when I sat down, in another city, in another life, to read the biography, and I found myself deeply engrossed again in the life of someone I believe to have been a kind of kindred spirit of mine. I read Meadowcroft's book in one sitting, pausing when upset to get a drink or check e-mail, needing to put some distance between myself and the words on the page.

I will try to be concise about the facts of Graham's life: the daughter of a lawyer and a Classicist, she had a privileged upbringing in Toronto's Rosedale. An early marriage to John McNaught (known perhaps to CBC geeks as James Bannerman) ended in divorce not long after the birth of their son and McNaught's affair, and it was at this point that Gwethalyn fled to Montreal for the first time. Reading Meadowcroft and coming across the photograph at left, my heart aches to see her so young. She received critical recognition for her first novel, Swiss Sonata, but broke through to real fame after the publication of Earth and High Heaven in 1944. She was active in the Canadian Authors's Association (drafting an amendment to the Income Tax Act for artists and writers that would lay groundwork for forward averaging), and counted High McLennan and Constance Beresford-Howe as close friends. She wrote prolifically about anti-Semitism, immigration, and social injustice at a time when few women were political activists, and few North Americans were paying attention to the Holocaust; raised in a family that sheltered Jewish refugees, she urged Canada to pay attention before it was too late to atrocities abroad. Earth and High Heaven, a novel about an interfaith romance between a Protestant Westmount girl and a small-town Ontario Jew, came precisely at the moment when North American began to awaken to the realities of European anti-Semitism, and would have been made into a Metro Goldwyn film with Gregory Peck had A Gentleman's Agreement not gotten in the way. Graham's second marriage, which brought her to Virginia during desegregation, ended in betrayal and divorce a second time, causing her to return to Montreal. Never idle, but often short of cash, Graham turned to writing for TV (she presciently observed that "TV is or ought to be" considered art in 1959) and non-fiction, publishing her correspondence with Solage Chaput-Rolland, which examined the prejudices of English and French Canadians, under the title Dear enemies. Graham was consumed with self-doubt in later years, unable to finish another novel, and drank heavily after her second divorce. Observing her erratic behaviour and uneven gait, and concerned that she was an alcoholic, her son convinced her to admit herself to a treatment centre for alcoholism; within hours, she was transferred to the Neuro, where doctors discovered a tumur "the size of a fist." She died within weeks, at 52.

Reading her biography, I was struck again by the characteristics that had initially drawn me to Graham: her steadfast loyalty to her two husbands and her large circle of friends, her commitment to internationalism and insistence that Earth and High Heaven was not a love story but was "a plea for the individual, that he or she may be regarded and respected as such, and not judged arbitrarily according to a category," her "clear, straightforward prose," as Meadowcroft calls it, and her supportive family, including her father (who mailed her cheques during the early days writing Swiss Sonata alone with a baby in Montreal) and her sister, Isabel LeBourdais (whose book, The Trial of Stephen Truscott, she did not live to see published).

There are certainly things not to admire about Graham: she is not terribly charitable to a lesbian character in Swiss Sonata, although it is unclear if the views expressed in the book are her own, and her frequent abandonment of her son, Tony, to travel or write, was undoubtedly a difficult choice that had a deep impact on him. Overall, however, she showed remarkable talent and bravery for a woman with a complicated life in a troubled time in history.

I do think her novels have their dated - as well as their truly honest and vivid - moments. Meadowcroft calls them "as fresh and readable today as they day they were published;" Rothman counters that Swiss Sonata was "worth reading, if not for its literary artistry, then for its interest as a snapshot of womanhood and the Western World on the brink of transformation." I am somewhere in the middle: both novels have moments of lyric beauty, as well as cuttingly accurate dialogue, and both are also plagued with occasional moments of narrative clunkiness, for want of a better term.

I still unabashedly recommend Graham every chance I get; she was one of the first books I shelf-talked, and she has appeared in several of my readers' advisory lists. Although she came several years before Munro and Atwood began publishing, and she was not really one to make friends with other Canlit women, she paved the way for them, churning out solid, even, intelligent writing for many years, assembling frequent salons in her living room (mixing all types of Montreal characters, writers and lawyers, Jews and Gentiles) and throwing herself head-first into the révolution tranquille with the publication of Dear enemies. Canada should be more proud of her, or rather, they should be proud of her in the first place, since it seems they never really have been.

Cormorant's own Marc Cote has been a personal champion of Graham's work, mentioning her in a 2009 article in the Globe & Mail, in which he talks about the inclusion of mostly American texts in Canadian schools, and the slavish devotion of Canadian media to American writers and novels. Describing how book-buying tastes, and "knowledge" of Canadian content and literary awards, are cultivated in readers' early school years, he uses Graham's career, and her dismissal by a Canadian journalist as a second-rate novelist who has never won the Pulitzer, to illustrate our lack of awareness of our own writers, and our own awards. Samuel Goldwyn called Earth and High Heaven "the most beautiful love story he had ever read," (Meadowcroft cites this book as a reference). Why, even with allowances made for the dated nature of some of her writing, has Graham fallen so far by the wayside, out of print for so long, and so briefly fêted upon her return into print? She was a passionate, complex woman who lived in an awkward time, and she survived to re-invent herself numerous times, as a writer, a wife and a mother.

One of my two copies of Earth and High Heaven, this one the 2nd American printing from 1944, discarded from the Westmount Public Library's collection.

Happy Canada Day!

"And So We Have Arrived"
by Louis Dudek
From: Europe. The Porcupine's Quill Press, 1991

And so we have arrived.
It narrows into the thin St. Lawrence.
Yet a river with a city inside it,
with a thousand islands,
as Cartier found it,
as Cabot discovered (I saw his face
in the Ducal Palace in Venice).
We have our physical heroes,
and are also a nation
built in the middle of water.
Somehow a bigger place than we left it:
a country with certain resources,
and a mind of its own, if lacking hunger.
The mountains of Gaspé doze, reclining,
in the air vacant as morning.
At home, there will be faces full of this light,
blank maybe, but beautiful.
Getting started is never easy.
We have work to do.
Europe is behind us.
America before us

RA in a day: Genre Talks: Narrative Nonfiction Readers' Advisory

The second, and last session I attended at RA in a day was one in which I participated, “Genre Talks: Narrative Non-Fiction with members of the RA Committee.” The description for the session was that we would “blitz the room covering a variety of non-fiction genres, focusing on the appeal of each for the reader and book-talking a few examples;” I like to think of it as speed-dating your non-fiction collection. Members of the committee really did move from table to table, giving an intro to a specific nonfic genre and 5 core Canadian titles in that genre. Here are some notes…

Traditionally, we have viewed our role as readers' advisers to include mostly fiction recommendations. If we did recommend non-fiction, it was strictly by subject headings. Our booklists were fiction only, or, if they were non-fiction, they were called bibliographies and offered nothing in the way of annotations or evaluative reviews; God forbid we should mix the two and have a booklist with both fiction and non-fiction recommendations on it! Popular professional opinion tended towards thinking that there was no fertile ground for RA in non-fiction – patrons could simply search using the catalogue’s headings, and find what they wanted, and the concept of appeal factors being applied to non-fiction was unthinkable.

Then there was a shift! Now we’re talking about abolishing Dewey in some public library non-fiction collection, books have been published, and NoveList is including non-fiction in NoveList Plus! More recent developments that include non-fiction within RA include the development of reading maps, and OPLA’s Readers’ Advisory Core Competencies including non-fiction in its definitions of collection knowledge (defined as an “understanding of, and familiarity with, the depth and breadth of materials and resources in the branch and/or system, including material in all formats and media, both fiction and non-fiction”).

We began to realize that subject headings weren’t always adequate: they did nothing to characterize non-fiction using appeal factors or account for the power of narrative, they were often so specific as to be utterly useless in making connections to other texts, they sometimes didn’t link titles in a non-fiction series, and they sometimes didn’t list nonfiction award-winning books.

We also began to realize that authors aren’t as prolific in nonfiction, and they often write about completely different topics, making for bad read-alikes! Non-fiction reading, much more than fiction, lends itself to dipping in and out of texts; as librarians, it can sometimes be difficult for us to embrace the idea that not everything needs to be read cover to cover. We also began to differentiate between mediums or types (graphica, essay, humour, letters, memoir) and genres.

In other words, in our profession, there are various barriers to nonfiction RA service: our own reading limitations, our collections and the way they are arranged, and even our patrons (they know to come to us for subject search and fiction recommendations, but not necessarily recreational non-fiction reading suggestions).

With respect to appeal factors for narrative non-fiction, there are overlaps with fiction appeal factors, but many appeal factors for nonfiction are unique. Kenneth Shearer (in Burgin) makes the point that nonfiction and fiction exist on a continuum, a “textual terrain” – are all nonfiction books completely true + factual? (Think: Frey!) Many advance a point of view, or offer a comforting perspective. Neal Wyatt adds to the traditional appeal factors these, for narrative nonfiction: detail, learning/experiencing, language, setting and tone. Why do people read nonfiction? Vickie Novak (in Burgin) lists some reasons: to indulge our curiosity, for the suspense of real-life stories, to bring meaning to our own experiences, because of a personal/emotional connection with a particular subject, to be inspired, to make history come to life, to learn something, to be transported, to live vicariously!

Now, here’s the giant stumbling point for librarians: we often recommend nonfiction based on subject, not appeal!

Here are some suggestions to market nonfiction in your library:

• Have nonfiction stickers like fiction stickers for specific genres
• Use shelf talkers
• Create displays
• Promote nonfiction reading lists on your library's website, and in reading guides and reading maps
• Practice whole collection RA!

And now, here are the various titles we promoted during our speed-dating sessions:

Genre #1: Travel, five core Canadian titles:

1. Never shoot a Stampede Queen: a rookie reporter in the Cariboo by Mark Leiren-Young
2. What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim: A Midlife Misadventure on Spain’s Camino de Santiago de Compostela by Jane Christmas
3. Fantasy in Florence: Leaving Home and Loving it by Rod McQueen
4. Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw: Travels in Search of Canada by Will Ferguson
5. Solo: Writers on Pilgrimage, edited by Katherine Govier
6. Upcoming title: Burmese Lessons by Karen Connelly; Toronto: Random House, 2009.

Genre #2: Sports, five core Canadian titles:

1. Searching for Bobby Orr by Stephen Brunt
2. Tropic of Hockey by Dave Bidini
3. 100 Greatest Canadian Sports Moments by James Bisson
4. Inside the Olympics by Dick Pound
5. Inside Out: Straight Talk from a Gay Jock, by Mark Tewksbury

Genre #3: History, five core Canadian titles:

1. More Than an Island: A history of the Toronto Island by Sally Gibson
2. Tip of the Spear: An Intimate Account of 1 Canadian Parachute Battalion, 1942-1945, A Pictorial History By Lieutenant-Colonel Bernd Horn and Michel Wyczynski
3. Holding Juno: Canada’s Heroic Defence of the D-Day Beaches: June 7-12, 1944. By Mark Zuehlke.
4. The Battle of the St. Lawrence: The Second World War in Canada, by Nathan M. Greenfield.
5. Battle of the Atlantic. By Marc Milner.
   

Genre #4: Adventure, five core Canadian titles:

1. Beyond the sky and the Earth: a journey into Bhutan by Jamie Zeppa
   
2. Fatal Passage: the untold story of John Rae, the Arctic Adventurer who discovered the fate of Franklin by Ken McGoogan
   
3. The Riverbones: stumbling after Eden in the jungles of Suriname by Andrew Westoll.
4. Rowboat in a hurricane: my amazing journey across a changing Atlantic by Julie Angus.
   
5. Starting out in the afternoon: a mid-life journey into wild land by Jill Frayne.

Genre #5: Current affairs, five core Canadian titles (this one's my category, so send your complaints to.....! Also, I am aware of the fact that I went totally left-wing with that. I suggested to my audience that you do a left/right display ... depends on how you feel about library fistfights, I guess... We also had a really interesting conversation about RA for this genre that goes against, um, your own political leanings!):

1. Blue covenant: the global water crisis and the coming battle for the right to water by Maude Barlow
2. The Trouble with Islam Today: A Wake-up Call for Honesty and Change by Irshad Manji
3. Future: tense: the coming world order by Gwynne Dyer
4. No logo: no space, no choice, no jobs: taking aim at the brand bullies by Naomi Klein
5. Race against time by Stephen Lewis

Genre #6: The arts, five core Canadian titles:

1. Crean, Susan. The Laughing One: a journey to Emily Carr.
2. Friedrich, Otto. Glenn Gould: a life and variations.
3. McMichael, Robert. One Man’s Obsession.
4. Nadel, Ira B. Various Positions: a life of Leonard Cohen.
5. Sullivan, Rosemary. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood starting out.
6. Two more “Can’t Miss” titles: David Gilmore's The Film Club: a true story of a father and son, and Carol Shields' Jane Austen.
   

Genre #7: Cooking and food, five core Canadian titles:

1. The 100-mile diet: a year of local eating by Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon
2. Apples to Oysters: a food lover’s tour of Canadian farms by Margaret Webb
3. Anita Stewart’s Canada by Anita Stewart
4. The complete Canadian living cookbook
5. Fat: an appreciation of a misunderstood ingredient, with recipes by Jennifer McLagan
   

Genre #8: Health, five core Canadian titles:

1. Lives in the Balance: nurses’ stories from the ICU edited by Tilda Shalof
2. The Man Who Forgot How to Read by Howard Engel
3. The Doctor Will Not See You Now: the autobiography of a blind physician by Jane Poulson
4. Cockeyed, by Ryan Knighton
5. Scurvy: how a surgeon, a mariner, and a gentleman solved the greatest medical miracle of the age of sail by Stephen R. Bown
   

Genre #9: Memoirs, five core Canadian titles:

1. The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro
2. A Journey of Days: relearning life’s lessons on the Camino de Santiago by Guy Thatcher
3. Small Beneath the Sky: a prairie memoir by Lorna Crozier
4. Not Yet by Wayson Choy
5. Pathologies: a life in essays by Susan Olding
   

Genre #10: Science, five core Canadian titles:

1. First Principles: the crazy business of doing serious science by Howard Burton
2. Slow Death by Rubber Duck: how the toxic chemistry of everyday life affects our health by Rick Smith, Bruce Lourie and Sarah Dopp
3. In Bad Taste: a quest for the world’s most exotic foods by Massimo Marcone
4. World In Six Songs by Daniel Levitin
5. Bonk: the curious coupling of science and sex by Mary Roach
   

Genre #11: True crime, five core Canadian titles:

1. Schroeder, Andreas. Fakes, Frauds and Flimflammery; even more of the world’s most outrageous scams.
2. Vallee, Brian, Torso murder: the untold story of Evelyn Dick.
3. Vallee, Brian. Edwin Alonzo Boyd: the story of the notorious Boyd gang.
4. Miller, Orlo. The Donnellys Must Die.
5. Siggins, Maggie. A Canadian tragedy: JoAnn & Colin Thatcher: a story of love and hate.
   

(Man. When I look at this, it amazes me how much work we did. I have excluded here our intros to each subgenre and our annotations - if you really want them, e-mail me. Meanwhile, YAY team!)

Selected resources:

• Baker, Sharon L. and Karen L. Wallace. The Responsive Public Library: How to Develop and Market a Winning Collection.
• Burgin, Robert (ed.) Nonfiction readers’ advisory.
  
• Sarah Statz Cords. The Real Story: A Guide to Nonfiction Reading Interests
• Wyatt, Neal. “Working with nonfiction enriches readers' advisory and offers your readers more.” LJ Series "Redefining RA": Exploring Nonfiction. Library Journal, 2/15/2007. http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6413459.html

Random news + madness!

Hey kids, I'll be in and out over the next few weeks, and may be limited to short posts comme celui-ci.

I'm dropping in today to say:

• I secretly confess I watched the show (yeah, that's the girl from Dr. Who) that was based on (breaking news) this woman's life. Also, pretty courageous to come out with the fact that you were a call girl when your current job is, you know, "a respected specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology in a hospital research group in Bristol."
• I'm glad I'm not the only one feeling overwhelmed. Thanks to kindred spirit of the week, Girl About O-Town, for notifying me that Ottawa is getting its own Spacing blog!! Have you checked out the other ones (Montreal, Toronto, and more) ? They're great....
• We've reached max. capacity (60-ish) for the room for this event next week that I'm organising. Which is fabulous, but I'm having recurring daymares that we won't have enough chairs.
• What is American literature? What is Canadian literature? I'll pencil in my existential crisis, for, oh, say, sometime in late December. Sorry, folks, fully booked until then.
• File under: feel my pain. The next few weeks will include: prep a lecture for library school students at Western (1 week away), write intro for the lovely Laura speaking at this, write up notes about RA in a day (for my boss, and also to post here!), spend $1000 before Dec 3o on author visits, finish buying teen zone furniture, plan Jan - May programming schedule, plan my Acquisitions course at Algonquin for Jan, pack for England, and attend a baby shower and a goodbye party. Oh, gee, I think that's it. There are big-picture items, too, but I'll spare you.

Over and out.......

Life of Pi: the movie

Variety says director Ang Lee is "considering" working on the proposed film adaptation of Canadian writer Yann Martel's Life of Pi. The movie will use "a mixture of live action and computer generated imagery."