Dangerous Acts at the Kingston Writers Festival

This week I am at the Kingston Writer’s Festival, interviewing three Young Adult authors for a panel entitled Dangerous Acts: every act has a consequence. The festival was correct to label the panel dangerous. In each of the three novels the characters take on courageous acts, some borne out of necessity and others out of misguided or adolescent angst. I’m looking forward to a stimulating and engaging conversations with three amazing authors: Deborah Ellis, Maggie Devries and Nancy Lee. There are things I want to ask each of them about their books, their writing and about the dangerous lives of girls and women. 

Deborah Ellis is an internationally-acclaimed, award-winning author, feminist and peace activist. Her many books explore themes of social justice and courage, such as her Breadwinner series, which details the lives of Afghan girls and women. She has also written numerous nonfiction books of interviews with Iraqi, Israeli and Palestinian children. More recently she has written interviews with Indigenous children throughout the US and Canada.

Ellis’ most recent book is Moon at Nine, the story of a teenage girl, Farrin, who falls in love with another girl during the 1980’s in Tehran. The Shaw has been overthrown and the country is run by a deeply religious government, where revolutionary guards monitor every aspect of life.  When Farrin meets Sadira, a new girl at her school their friendship quickly becomes a romance. It is against the law to be gay in Iran and the punishment is death.

This novel had me griped all the way through especially since it was based on real life events.

Nancy Lee says she is not the kind of writers who worries about keeping her characters safe. This is true. Instead she sends her characters out into the wilds to see how they fare.  

Lee’s first book, the collection of short stories, Dead Girls, was a darkly carnal collection that dealt with the complexities and sadness of desire. It was named a best book of 2002 by The Vancouver Sun, The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail and others.

Nancy Lee’s latest book, The Age, tells the story of Gerry Cross, a teenage misft, who is estranged from her father, at odds with her mother and adrift in the teenagehood of 1984.  Gerry’s anxiety about the threat of nuclear annihilation leads her to be involved with a group of activists planning to detonate a bomb at a downtown peace rally.

Lee is a master writer, and her descriptions had me immersed in the eighties. 

Maggie de Vries is the author of ten award-winning books for children and teens, and the memoir for adults Missing Sarah: A memoir of loss. This book is about de Vries’ adopted sister Sarah who disappeared from the streets of downtown Vancouver and whose DNA was found on serial killer Robert Picton’s farm. We do not know the names of almost any of the sex-workers who were victims of Picton, but in this memoir, de Vries introduces us to her charismatic sister Sarah, giving her a voice, and a name. Missing Sarah was a Governor General’s award nominee and won the Vancouver book Award, among others. 

In her new YA novel, Rabbit Ears, de Vries imagines an alternative fate for her sister Sarah. Devries says, “I wanted to tell a story about a girl that went through what my sister went through, but survived.” Told from the point of view of two sisters, Beth and Kaya, the two girls struggle as Kaya begins hanging out in the notoriously dangerous streets of Vancouver’s East Side, and turns to prostitution and drug use.

I read Rabbit Ears with fear and trepidation, but despite its strong subject matter, de Vries writes so beautifully that I thoroughly enjoyed the book.

Ethan Hawke

Last week my stars aligned when Jian Ghomeshi interviewed Ethan Hawke on Q. For those of you not in Canada, or not in the CBC loop, Q is an arts and entertainment show on CBC radio weekday mornings. My day is not complete unless I get in my car to drive to work and listen to Jian’s Letter of The Day. Sometimes I’m late, I miss the introduction, and then spend my drive trying to figure out who Jian is talking to.

So Ethan Hawke, I’m a little worried that if I ever meet him, which I know is unlikely, I’ll only be able to giggle and gawk.  I’m usually not much of a Hollywood fan, but I love the Before Sunset trilogy. I’m just a bit younger than Hawke and I saw the first film Before Sunrise when I was travelling in Eastern Europe in my twenties in 1995. Two young people, Jessie and Celine, meet on a train and decide to spend the day together in Vienna. There they wander, talk and fall in love. It’s very romantic.

I had almost forgotten about Jesse and Celine when Before Sunset came out in 2004. It was such a treat to see those characters a few years older and more mature. It was of course also thrilling to think they were still interested in each other. In the film, Jesse has written a book about the day he spent with Celine years before. Celine comes to his reading, this time in Paris, and they spend the day talking  and walking in Paris.



Before Midnight, the third and most recent film, was  again an unanticipated surprise.  Set in Greece, Jesse and Celine are now married with twins and living in Paris, but their lives are not smooth. Jesse has a son from his first marriage he would like to spend more time with in the US which Celine sees as a threat.

Richard Linklater’s films are such a treat because of how he shows mature adult relationships, along with all their messiness on film. Jessie and Celine grapple with difficult ex-wives, growing children, job angst as well as marital pains. Despite the fact that Celine is extremely crazy in this movie, “the Mayor of Crazy Town” as Jesse calls her, I couldn’t help feeling how refreshing it was to see a woman in her forties struggle with work, motherhood, and marriage. Hollywood take note, this is real life for women, and it makes excellent film.

Hawke said something similar on Q yesterday. He said, “I’m so hungry to see a real woman on stage, someone who works and has relationships and is a good parent and a bad parent.” He was talking about Patricia Arquette’s character in Boyhood, Linklater’s other amazing film that came out this year. Shot over twelve years, it chronicles the life of a boy, Mason from six years old to his first day of college. Boyhood is not a plot-driven movie, nor does it have a soaring climax. It’s episodic, the way life is, yet it still tells a story of one boy’s life. Hawke says Linklater told him it was the chance to use time as clay to build a character. I love that line.

For as much as Mason changes through the stages of childhood, I was more interested in the development of the parents. Ethan Hawke’s father character changes from a kind of dopey carefree, mostly absent parent, to a person who has attained some gravitas. Similarly, Arquette’s character, whose has a tougher love life finds herself more at a loss as she faces life alone when her children leave for college. I found myself thinking about this film the way I think about people I know for days after I saw the film.

In case Hawke hasn’t done enough this year, he also has two other films: a documentary on Seymour Bernstein called Seymour, an Introduction. Bernstein is a piano prodigy turned music teacher who decided to stop playing at age fifty because of ongoing problems with nerves and self-doubt, something Hawke says he also struggles with.

Hawke also stars in Good Kill, about a former fighter pilot who flies unmanned drones from Nevada. Hawke’s character grapples with the moral implications of killing people in such an emotionless way.

I can’t wait to see both films.    

Dance Memories

 

Today in the mail a whole box of my next book, Off Pointe arrived. It was a little box because this is a little book, for a slightly younger reader. Off Pointe is part of Orca’s performing arts series, a line of books for 11-14 years olds who are interested in art, music, dance and drama. My book is about a dancer named Meg, a fourteen year old girl who loves ballet. She dances all the time, and when she isn’t dancing she’s thinking and dreaming about ballet. Meg is devastated when her summer ballet program is cancelled and her ballet teacher suggests she attend dance camp to work on her lack of stage presence and to connect more with her audience. 

While I never attended dance camp, I did go to a Jewish camp in the Okanagan valley of British Columbia for many summers, and I did do a lot of dancing there. I used the beautiful setting of Lake Kalamalka for Meg’s camp and it was fun for me to think back to those sun-drenched hills and the lake, both of which are so different from the city of Vancouver where I grew up, and from Kingston, ON where I now live now. Writing the book also made me think about the many years I spent dancing as a child, both at my local community centre, and then as a teenager with a group called Body Electric. (I don’t currently have any plans to write another dance book, but if I did, it would have to be called Body Electric.)

Lake Kalamalka

Recently my mother was given an old photograph of the Body Electric Dancers. I was surprised I could remember so many of the girls I danced with. This was partly because many our names were very similar (Leanne, Dianne, Reanne, Rachel, Rachelle, Michelle etc). Sometimes I have a reoccurring nightmare that I’m with the Body Electric dancers and we are in the wings of the stage about to go. I’m wearing the right costume, but I haven’t attended the rehearsals and I don’t know the dance at all. I don’t remember having those anxieties as a dancer. I only remember the thrill of performing and the many happy hours spent rehearsing.

  
For many years I danced with another girl I knew, Debra Karby. She was in my childhood classes and then we danced together in high school. We weren’t really friends by the time we were teenagers, still we took the bus together in grade eight and nine because we were going to the same place, and our parents took turns picking us up. We used to eat french fries at Church’s Chicken before class which was disgusting, but we didn’t know better. I also went to camp with Debra and our parents were friends. We were part of the same community. When we were older I would sometimes run into her when I visited Vancouver and I was always happy to see her, to hear what she was doing. When my first son was a toddler she had a toddler too, and once we had a playdate my mother organized.

Debra passed away two years ago from liver cancer, shortly before her thirty-eighth birthday. Off Pointe is dedicated in Debra’s memory because when I think of dancing, I think of her.

Debra Karby