Notes from Blue Metropolis

The last few days have been a bit of a whirlwind. Many thanks to those of you who turned up for the launch of 121 Express on Wednesday afternoon. It meant a lot to me that many of my friends and students turned up to celebrate. Now if only I could post those pictures!! (I SOLEMNLY PROMISE TO LEARN HOW -- but you'll have to wait until I get through the mountain of term papers that arrives nextweek!)

Since we last "spoke," I've worked with two more groups of students at Blue Met -- doing educational workshops. And we also launched this year's Quebec Roots: The Place Where I Live!

Yesterday morning, I worked with students from Massey-Vanier High School in Cowansville. They got up at 5 a.m. to make it to the Delta hotel in time for our workshop! Here comes a sample of a description that Julie, one of the students from Massey-Vanier, produced (and they only had about five minutes to do the exercise) -- she's describing the pleats on the tablecloth in front of her: "the pleats line up like the strokes of a contemporary painting.... More elbows, more drinks, more bleach." I know I left a bit out of what Julie wrote, but you can tell how she manages to capture that tablecloth, its pleats, not to mention the elbows it sees!

Today, I worked with students from Royal West Academy and Bonaventure Polyvalent -- you may remember that I visited Bonaventure Polyvalent when I was in the Gaspe last week. Quite a nice coincidence to run into those students again, as well as their teacher, Lewis Evans. More coincidences: it turns out I'm quite friendly with Mr. Evans's parents -- who just so happen to be amazing educators! Because there were only seven students today, we managed to do quite a lot of "workshopping" -- meaning the students got to hear each other's work. Like all of the students I worked with this week, these young people have LOADS of talent. My advice to them is to go out and soak up stories and WRITE! WRITE! WRITE! 

Also, I thought I'd share some of the wise things the students at St. Willibrord School had to say about writing (and taking photographs) yesterday. (They were on hand for the launch of the Quebec Roots book.) Joey says: "You have to keep working at something to accomplish it." Meagan explained how she had to go back three times to get a proper photograph of the woman in her neighbourhood who feeds the geese: "I needed to get a cleaner background," she said. That's how it goes with writing, too -- you've got to keep going back to get a sharper image, you've got to keep polishing up your work until it SHINES!

A couple of final notes. I heard celebrated writer Nancy Huston  speak at Blue Met yesterday and guess what? She said she sometimes gets ideas for her stories in the SHOWER!! (I've told you that too, right?) And today, I was having the most wonderful chat with Sarah Harvey, one of my editors at Orca, who is also an author. We were saying how there are so so many stories out there. Sarah said, "To find a story all you have to do is read one newspaper." So, if you happen to be in the mood to start writing a book today and you're looking for a story, check out today's paper! More from me next week, though I'll probably be too busy marking to write long entries. One final bits of news: my photographer friend Monique Dykstra will be shooting images for the cover of What World Is Left -- she's doing the shoot at my house on Monday. I just might have to tell you about all that in a blog entry!!