November 2006

South Africa & MFA

Currently reading: Freedom Rising: Life Under Apartheid Through the Eyes of an American on a Four-Year Clandestine Journey Through Southern Africa, James North Living Under Apartheid, David M. Smith ed. The Portable MFA in Creative Writing, The New York Writers Workshop I doubt I will be reviewing these books. I’m researching the Black Sash movement

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Alumni Theatre — New Ideas & Why I love Rabelais

I answered a call for directors for the New Ideas Festival at the Alumni Theatre in Toronto. There are three weeks of one-act plays plus longer “Saturday Experiments.” The process is intense. Playwrights send their plays or works-in-progress to the Alum. Once the best are chosen, the theatre holds a ‘meet and greet,’ where playwrights

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Tim Flannery — Making waves about weather

Canada’s investigative journalism magazine, W5, did a recent expose on Canadian climate change skeptics. Of these, many are paid by the oil and gas industry, many have not published recently in peer-reviewed scientific journals and some are linked to the same American publicity firm that tobacco companies hired to question evidence linking smoking with health

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Rabindranath Maharaj – A Perfect Pledge

Rabindranath Maharaj’s, A Perfect Pledge, was short listed for a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the 2006 Rogers Fiction Prize. Many post-colonial works have been written in fashionable, magic realistic styles. This novel avoids postmodern cliche. The story is by turns realistic, sensitive and satirical. In the 1960’s, life is hard in rural Trinidad. The novel

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