BWS 13.09.17: Drew Hayden Taylor

Drew Hayden Taylor is an award winning playwright, novelist, filmmaker and journalist. Born and raised on the Curve Lake First Nation in Central Ontario, he has done practically everything, from performing Stand Up comedy at the Kennedy Centre in Washington, D.C. to being Artistic Director of Canada’s premiere Native theatre company, Native Earth Performing Arts. Recently, he has celebrated the launch of his 30th book, and is currently directing/editing a documentary about the German preoccupation with North American Indigenous cultures.

Back in Canada just in time for our September 13 event, Drew visits the blog with
the guest post below!

Indian-thusiasm

In the last 25 years I have toured and lectured in various parts of Germany at least 16 times. I have travelled from along the Baltic coast, down to the Swiss border, east to Trier and west to Berlin, and most places in between. Frankly, if the place has a university, chances are I have eaten schnitzel and drunk beer in that town. I have seen more of that lovely country than most Germans. As a result, I have learned to say ‘Ich ben ein Ojibway’.

During those visits, I would lecture predominantly on Native theatre, literature, culture, humour, sexuality, with a few other topics mixed in. You have to understand, many German universities have a Canadian/American studies program and jump at the chance to bring in an author or reputable source on something specific to Canadian culture. And there are few things more Canadian than its First Nations. And there lies the conflict… if it can be called a conflict.

Crossing many different generations, there is a palpable and persistent interest in North American Native culture in Germany, albeit an inaccurate one. Germans have held and treasured a romanticized view of Aboriginal people for a hundred and forty years or so. It all goes back to a writer from the tail end of the 19^th century. A man named Karl May made a name and fortune for himself writing highly romanticized stories about the Orient, Arabia, and more interestingly, the American West.

In a series of highly popular novels later adapted into movies and plays, he created what has become an iconic character in German pop literature – an Apache warrior named Winnetou – noble, brave and mighty. All men want to be him. All women want to be with him. Pure pulp, his novels set the stage for entire generations of Germans to embrace and idolize the Aboriginal mystique, though oddly enough, the writer himself had never been to America until several decades after writing his books. And never to the American southwest.

The character of Winnetou and what you could call the spirit of Winnetou has popped up repeatedly in German culture and in observations of German culture. In the movie Inglourious Basterds, a group of German soldiers are playing, ironically a form of Indian poker. They all have cards on their foreheads with a literary character written on each individual card, including the name ‘Winnetou’. The one with that card asks the others something to the effect of, “Am I an American savage?”

There is also a popular cultural saying inspired by the novels: “Always remember, an Indian knows no pain.” Actually they do. I can attest to that.

Admirers of Karl May’s writing include Adolf Hitler, Albert Schweitzer, and Albert Einstein, to name just a few. That’s one hell of a book club meeting.

As a result of this infatuation, many interesting and enthusiastic offshoots have arisen, demonstrating the devotion to a fictional Indian character. Tourism to Canada (and America) has increased with amazing numbers of German tourists flying across the ocean to participate in what they think is the Native experience. During the summer there is a non-stop flight from Frankfurt to Whitehorse every weekend bringing hundreds of Germans to experience the north and its Native people. Indigenous arts and crafts stores across Canada are usually the first stops for these visitors.

In German towns like Bad Segeburg, plays based on May’s work are produced every year with casts of dozens, including horses and eagles, and special effects that make the most experienced Indigenous theatre professionals weep. Frequently, they get between 200,000 and 300,000 patrons a year, to see Germans dressed up as Apache warriors, frequently living in teepees complete with totem poles, for the most part culturally incorrect. But what the hell… most older Germans want the dream, not the reality.

And of course there are what are called hobbyists – individuals who are so enraptured by the image of our culture, they dress up in outfits they made themselves, learn traditional dances, make amazingly authentic crafts, and even hold pow wows. Additionally, there are clubs that go out into the forest, attempting to live as 19^th century Native people supposedly did – trying to live off the German land, and frequently raiding each other. Because, I suppose, that’s what we used to do. I must remember that.

The mania is so persuasive, they often have issues with actual First Nation individuals who want to attend or visit these camps, usually out of curiosity. Some refer to us as Coca-Cola Indians, i.e., we have been corrupted by the 20^th and 21^st century and cannot claim to live authentic Indigenous lives. Like them.

So frequently, my appearances at the universities, looking more German than Ojibway I’m told, can be perplexing.  Luckily today’s younger generation is more interested in the real world of Native people. Thus the purpose and interest in my various lecture tours. Up there, in front of a good chunk of German youth, I have tried to dispel the persistent image of all Canada’s Native people living in teepees, riding horses, hunting buffalo. I do not believe I have done any of these.

Just a few weeks ago, I went with a documentary crew and spent 10 days filming this fascination. It has been a dream of mine for a long time. It’s so interesting, so bizarre. I wrote a play about it – Berlin Blues – but felt the actuality of it had to be seen, not just dramatized.

Germany – a leading economic and political powerhouse in Europe. Also, a wacky place.

Drew Hayden Taylor visits Brockton Writers Series on Wednesday, September 13, 2017 in our new home, Glad Day Bookshop, 499 Church St., Toronto, at 6:30pm (PWYC) alongside Fathima Cader, Nancy Kay Clark, Saidah Vassel and a special guest talk, “From Blog to Book: A Work in Process”, by Kerry Clare!

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BWS 13.09.17: Fathima Cader

Fathima Cader‘s recent publications include creative non-fiction in Hazlitt and Warscapes, poetry in Apogee Journal and Canadian Woman Studies: les cahiers de la femme, and criticism in The New Inquiry and The Funambulist. She is interested in all manner of borders and in the migrations of war and state violence.

Fathima sent forward a small sample of her work for the blog, ahead of her Sept. 13 appearance!

Two Excerpts

As a union-side labour lawyer, my work centres on the collectivizing of social justice movements. Analogously, as a writer, my work focuses on the subtle ways that oppressions and resistances are often interlinked across ostensibly dissonant contexts. In the two excerpts below (edited for length), I use the seemingly dissonant genres of poetry and essay to explore the common threads of war and work, and how they link worshippers and labourers across Canada, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, and the US.

“The Vulture is A Patient Bird”
Apogee Journal, August 2014

This is the week of voices feathering,
this is the week of days I count like prayer beads,
knuckle past twisted knuckle,
this the week whose map will mark the five days ago from yesterday
that you die in a Chicago hospital room,
resettled there by roommates
who found you and your pneumonia
communing in your bedroom.

These are the days whose skins hang loose,
gathering in pleats around my father’s eyes,
as you die Thursday and are buried Friday,
your two decades of backroom labour,
a silenced work acceptable to the nation,
pooling emptiness around the hospital bedposts,
your blankness of paper,
undocumented –
but for the phone bills that document
in reams how you called my parents
with more diligence than I.

This is time’s greyness, and its pixelation,
its harking to the thirty years ago that you
attended my parents’ wedding,
your presence a reminder of how the country remains a continent,
amalgam of absences, each heartbreak and each loneliness a nation,
each fear an army;
you arriving in my father’s birthplace as emissary
of the island’s so close too far aways,
other relatives too distant to note the redness of my mother’s sari,
too late to smooth out the stiffness of its folds, before its golden thread
unspools under my fingertips twenty odd years later;
you, uncle per the genealogy of friendship,
entitled to the conveyance of your news,
the aftermath dreaming of you the route
my father’s transnational return home takes,
so that when he calls his sister, his niece asks after
those linkages that death, striding across intervening
years and oceans, would appear fast to be dissolving:
Does this mean you are never coming to Sri Lanka?
Are you permanently settling there?
That unresolved question, the lifelong confusion
regarding there’s coordinates,
dogging my father’s every migration,
commencing at his first leave-taking
aged ten, half one hundred years ago,
from that small town, flanked by ocean dunes
and jungle thickness, blinding of light
spilling between my shoulder blades,
solar plexus of my histories.

*

Still that week, still that eternal week,
how it slices into words grown slack and shapeless:
people die in various ways here,
not always performances of the country’s war,
sometimes just endings come unto themselves,
shown by one relative that week,
his gentle passing marked with qurbani and khatam-al-quran
food for the living, prayers for the dead,
funeral of honour,
crashed by government soldiers,
who, camouflage-garbed, moonlight as event planners,
generous with suggestions for these proceedings.

They propose, cradling guns in lieu of tasbih,
that two mourners of their choosing – uncles,
per genealogies of age – march
through the town’s centre
(where the streets are wider, less green
than the paths that run past
the palm tree leaf fences
of my cousins’ homes,
more crowded),
sacrificial meat on their heads,
adornment of flesh,
a so gentle stroll to the police station.

Why? (The phone collects my mystification
in its mouthpiece, turns it tinny,
a mirror pivoting hope’s kneejerk on itself.)

A small story, and telescoped
by its backdrop: those other, those countless
humiliations of ranging scope,
all the ways that people can be removed from their homes and their skins,
the quietness of murder and the neatness of mass displacement,
this one part of the substance of the everyday,
how battlelines boast the patience of vultures,
how they root, headless, scornful,
in the soil, made muddy with blood,
yoked here by birth,
home before I knew the word.

allah hummaghfir li hayyina wa mayyitina,
wa shahidina wa ghaaibina,
wa saghirina wa kabirina,
wa dhakirina wa unthanaa.

ya rahim, heed this rollcall of those
who would seek your mercy:
women and men,
elderly and young,
present and absent,
the dead, the living.

—
“Labor of Faith: Migrant Work and Exploitation in Makkah”
The Funambulist, Volume 9: Islands, January-Feb 2017.

On average, Saudi Arabia deported 2,000 people every day for five months in 2015. It targeted Yemeni workers, while simultaneously leading a military campaign against Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world. Using internationally-banned cluster munitions, it attacked hospitals and schools, killing over 2,100 people between March and July 2015 alone.

I returned to Makkah during this period. Born in Sri Lanka, I’d grown up in Saudi Arabia. My childhood had been filled weekends in Makkah, cowed by the poverty that so thickly ringed its lush central mosque. Now, the beggars were gone, but I had not forgotten how the street cleaners, gaunt inside their uniforms, had also used to beg for food, money, water. I returned to a city whose streets overflowed with construction workers, their backs wizened under the weight of Makkah’s explosive gentrification.

And no one was begging. I wondered how the state had managed to disappear all the city’s most indigent residents. Pilgrims gave the silent workers money anyway, their burnt eyes and leathering skin speaking loudly enough about their working conditions. The workers would receive the paper bills with little comment, as though knowing they, like the city’s swelling broods of pigeons, were the rightful recipients of the worshippers’ charity, quietly accepting the pilgrims’ unspoken prayer that these small charities, smilingly given and in passing, might compensate for the monstrosity of the city’s extreme contradictions.

Much of this exploitation is established in law: foreign workers are permitted to reside in Saudi Arabia only when sponsored by a Saudi employer. Workers cannot change their jobs or leave the country without written approval from their employers. Otherwise, they can be imprisoned, fined, or deported. This, the kafala system, is not unique. Countries with similar programs include Qatar, where mass workplace deaths led to global outcry over FIFA’s decision to host the 2022 World Cup there. Western analogues include Canada, with its controversial Temporary Foreign Worker Program, a “North-South” parallel that remains under-studied.

In these labor systems, it is easy for employers to confiscate passports, withhold wages, and force work. Workers globally have described this as indentured labor, replete with food deprivation, sexual abuse, torture, and death. With this labor, Islam’s most sacred mosque, Al-Masjid al-Haram, has mushroomed, while its surrounding neighborhoods have thickened with skyscraper hotels and designer malls, looking like a crescent-topped homage to that other famous neon desert city, Las Vegas. Construction rages around the mosque, debris and flotsam afloat in the air, caught in our lungs, trailing our robes.

Fathima Cader visits Brockton Writers Series on Wednesday, September 13, 2017 in our new home, Glad Day Bookshop, 499 Church St., Toronto, at 6:30pm (PWYC) alongside Nancy Kay Clark, Drew Hayden Taylor, Saidah Vassel and a special guest talk, “From Blog to Book: A Work in Process”, by Kerry Clare!

BWS 13.09.17: Nancy Kay Clark

After many years as a magazine writer and editor, Nancy Kay Clark began to write fiction, but couldn’t settle on what kind—literary, children’s, sci fi or speculative (so she writes all four). Her short fiction has been featured in Neo Opsis magazine. She is a diehard do-it-yourselfer: she launched her own online literary magazine, CommuterLit.com, seven years ago (it’s still going strong); creates chapbooks to sell, and later this year will self-publish a middle-grade novel, Gus the Fuss, and, with a group of like-minded writers, an anthology of short stories, Our Plan to Save the World. You can find her stories on CommuterLit, and on Wattpad.

Nancy drops by the blog this week to tell us why she self-publishes!

Why I’ve decided to self-publish

Yes, I know the majority of self-published novels languish among thousands on Amazon, selling a mere handful to friends and family, before disappearing completely into the great bargain bin in the cloud.

And no, I’m not a marketing magician; I do not possess a potion for success that will ensure my titles will stand out from the crowd. Nor am I delusional in thinking that self-publishing is an easy ticket to fame and fortune.

But I’m going to do it anyway and these are my reasons:

1. As a newcomer, being picked up by a traditional publisher (large or small) does not guarantee huge sales. I’d be doing the bulk of the publicity and social media marketing myself anyway.
2. An inability to get picked up by a traditional publisher or literary agent does not necessarily indicate a lesser quality of work. It may have more to do with budgets and bottom lines. It may be I’m not on trend, and therefore considered not marketable. My manuscript might not be to some editors’ tastes, or if it is, there may be room to publish only two first novels and mine was judged number three or four, or maybe five, but definitely not six.
3. No matter how many times I try to convince myself of what I just stated above, rejections still eat at me. I’m tired of letting them do so.
4. Self-publishing does not preclude submitting other work to traditional publishers.
5. In fact, self-publishing might lead to a publishing contract. It has happened — usually to self-publishers who have worked their asses off. Nobody knows where the next hot trending book will come from and writers who have built up their sales and fan bases grab the attention of traditional publishers.
6. I’m middle aged and thus have less writing years in me than many out there. And I’m impatient to get on with it. I do not wish to wait for my lucky break.
7. Actually, I don’t believe in lucky breaks. I believe you have to make your own opportunities in life.
8. It’s fun having complete creative control over the entire publishing venture.
9. Technology has made it feasible for me to self-publish and at a reasonable cost.
10. I want to turn rejection into acceptance. Right here, right now, I’d rather have 10 people who buy and enjoy my self-published books, than 10 rejections from publishers and agents. That to me would feel like a win.
11. If traditional publishers offer first timers itsy-bitsy advances, and most titles won’t sell out those advances, and the publicity and marketing will mostly be up to the writer anyway, what exactly do these intermediaries offer us? Editing expertise? Yes, fair point. A good proofreader? Arguable. Necessary judgment of literary merit? I dare you to go into any large bookstore, read a few back cover blurbs from books in various genres and tell me with a straight face about their literary merit. Mostly I think traditional publishers and literary agents offer third-party validation that all those years we’ve spent writing weren’t a colossal waste of time. The gatekeepers give you a pass to that exclusive authors club. They give you status. They give you the ability to take “wanna be” from in front of “writer” on your resumé. They give you respect from your fellow writers. So…
12. I’ve decided to give up my all-consuming craving for third-party validation—well, from the traditional publishing industry, anyway. I’m going to go directly to readers, and see what they think. Now, I just have to work my ass off to find those readers.

Nancy Kay Clark visits Brockton Writers Series on Wednesday, September 13, 2017 in our new home, Glad Day Bookshop, 499 Church St., Toronto, at 6:30pm (PWYC) alongside Fathima Cader, Drew Hayden Taylor, Saidah Vassel and a special guest talk, “From Blog to Book: A Work in Process”, by Kerry Clare!

Brockton Writers Series 13.09.17

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017 – 6:30pm

Brockton Writers Series presents readings by:

Fathima Cader
Nancy Kay Clark
Saidah Vassell
Drew Hayden Taylor

and special guest speaker

Kerry Clare

AT

Glad Day Bookshop

499 Church St., Toronto

The reading is PWYC (suggested $3-$5) and features a Q&A with the writers afterward. Books and refreshments are available for sale.

ACCESSIBILITY INFO
The venue, including its bathroom, is fully accessible. Please refrain from wearing scents.

Many thanks to the Ontario Arts Council for their support.

And to the Canada Council for the Arts for travel funding!

—

GUEST SPEAKER

 From Blog to Book: A Work in Process

Kerry Clare‘s debut novel, Mitzi Bytes, was published in March. A
blogger since 2000, she writes about books and reading at
PickleMeThis.com.

 —

READERS

 

Fathima Cader‘s recent publications include creative non-fiction in Hazlitt and Warscapes, poetry in Apogee Journal and Canadian Woman Studies: les cahiers de la femme, and criticism in The New Inquiry and The Funambulist. She is interested in all manner of borders and in the migrations of war and state violence.

 

After many years as a magazine writer and editor, Nancy Kay Clark began to write fiction, but couldn’t settle on what kind—literary, children’s, sci fi or speculative (so she writes all four). Her short fiction has been featured in Neo Opsis magazine. She is a diehard do-it-yourselfer: she launched her own on-line literary magazine, CommuterLit.com, seven years ago (it’s still going strong); creates chapbooks to sell, and later this year will self-publish a middle-grade novel, Gus the Fuss, and, with a group of like-minded writers, an anthology of short stories, Our Plan to Save the World. You can find her stories on CommuterLit, and on Wattpad.

Saidah Vassell has loved stories since before she could write. As a child, she often spent her time creating entire worlds for her dolls. Eventually, she and her cousin began writing them down and that is all it took to spark a passion within her for writing.

Drew Hayden Taylor is an award winning playwright, novelist, filmmaker and journalist. Born and raised on the Curve Lake First Nation in Central Ontario, he has done practically everything, from performing Stand Up comedy at the Kennedy Centre in Washington, D.C. to being Artistic Director of Canada’s premiere Native theatre company, Native Earth Performing Arts. Recently, he has celebrated the launch of his 30th book, and is currently directing/editing a documentary about the German preoccupation with North American Indigenous cultures.

BWS 12.07.17 report: Five Things You Should Know Before You Do Anything About Your Children’s Book Idea, with S. Bear Bergman

Award-winning writer, educator and storyteller S. Bear Bergman stopped by the Brockton Writers Series’ July event to share his experience as founder of Flamingo Rampant, a children’s press focused on feminist, LGBTQ-positive, racially-diverse children’s books, and to offer advice to those writers wishing to get into the children’s market and publish books for a diverse audience.

“Though the earning potential of the market has grown — many publishers are making their rent on children’s books — it’s still a very conservative industry,” he said. He quoted a University of Wisconsin survey that cited representation in U.S. children’s books as 93% white people; 72% boys and men; and 98% heterosexual two-parent families.

If you have a first draft or idea for a children’s book, Bergman offered this advice:

1. Play test your book with kids. “They will tell you if they are bored with the story, and it’s better to know early in the processs than later.”
2. Read your manuscript out loud to yourself. “Children like books that are lyrical, have interesting metres and rhymes, and that have interesting things happening in the language.”
3. Have fun with language. Be playful.
4. You don’t need to have the book illustrated before you submit it to a publisher or agent. Just send the text.
5. When representing diversity in your story, be careful not to produce a “very special episode” book (i.e., Jimmy asks his parents why his friend Susie has two mothers, but no dad). Instead of making diversity the major plot line, make it present and normal in the characters and setting.

Bergman finished his talk by commenting on the feedback his publishing house Flamingo Rampant receives: “Lots of people thank us for our books and say it’s the first time they had seen people like themselves reflected in a children’s book.” Flamingo Rampant’s goal, Bergman said, “is to make books that love you back.” — Nancy Kay Clark

Check back in September for more tips from our next Brockton Writers Series guest speaker — and until then, watch this space for features on all four writers appearing at our next event, which takes place September 13, 2017, 6:30pm, at Glad Day Bookshop, 499 Church St., Toronto!