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Text of the page (random words):
mber 2007 january 2008 february 2008 march 2008 april 2008 may 2008 june 2008 july 2008 august 2008 september 2008 october 2008 november 2008 december 2008 january 2009 february 2009 march 2009 april 2009 the cwc is anne chudobiak tricia dower steven gajadhar tamara j lee antonios maltezos andrew tibbetts our guest bloggers find our work in these canlit publications more to come the danforth review the fiddlehead grain magazine grimm magazine journey prize stories maisonneuve the malahat review matrix the new quarterly prairie fire prism queen street quarterly room of one s own the shore ezine the shore print this magazine cwc alumni thea atkinson denis taillefer craig terlson ania vesenny patricia parkinson j a mcdougall melissa bell resources for canadian writers places for writers online guide to writing in canada magazines canada quill and quire lp wordsolutions thursday april 23 2009 so long farewell auf wiedersehen goodbye like the von trapp family exiting the stage the members of the canadian writers collective bid farewell to our readers three years and nearly 700 posts after we began we ve given you book reviews interviews recipes rants and laments humourous pieces and poignant ones we ve run four writing contests and posted the winning entries played host to a number of guest bloggers of the 11 cwcers who started only five of us remain it s tough to produce a weekly post year after year while also finding and losing jobs falling in and out of love having anxiety attacks changing diapers remembering to put out the garbage washing floors laundering clothes taking the car in for servicing feeding the dog schlepping the cat to the vet getting your hair cut buying the kids a hamster defrosting something for dinner planting a garden remembering to water the garden you planted baking cakes and barbecuing steaks trudging to the dentist getting enough sleep and exercise attending graduations weddings and funerals all while penning a future giller award winning work of prose thank you all for reading and commenting since april 23 2006 you can keep up with us individually on our separate blogger pages and from time to time any one of us may decide to pop in here and mouth off about something you just never know but for now it s goodbye goodbye goodbye posted by tricia dower 12 13 am 22 comments wednesday april 22 2009 whimper whimper bang bang article removed for revision and publication wish the author luck posted by tricia dower 1 57 pm 5 comments thursday april 16 2009 courage in the streets by tricia dower something wonderful happened yesterday three hundred women in afghanistan marched to protest a new law for shiites that appears to endorse marital rape and restrict married women s movements outside the home i say appears because president harmid karzai claims the west has misinterpreted the intention of the law something lost in translation and that the rights of women enshrined under the afghani constitution have not been abolished however condemnation from other countries misinterpretation notwithstanding has pressured him to promise he ll review the legislation for any violation of women s rights we ll see the following articles provide background on the law and the protest times on line new york times opinion and new york time asia report for me the big news is that those several hundred women had the courage to take to the streets and proclaim their disapproval of the new law the courage to persevere as people called them whores and pelted them with stones i m not that brave in the 70s i led a group of female employees who lobbied for equal opportunity in our company i got flak from a human resources employee a woman who reminded me she d helped me get my job and therefore was disappointed in me but nobody called me names or assaulted me with hard objects i didn t lose my job in fact the ceo called me to his office to ask me to help him take the affirmative action temperature of the company i was lucky in another country i might have been executed in the us eventually i was promoted when i was a kid i loved those biblical epics in which the christians would hang tough against lions crucifixions and other horrors i would have been one of them i was sure one of the faithful braving all manner of indignity and suffering for what i believed to be true i recall being caught up in the conviction of my imagined nobility at a screening of the robe i attended with my grandmother a stranger a boy in the seat to my right threatened my pre prepubescent thigh with a cocked rubber band you don t want to do that i told him implying the irredeemable loss of his immortal soul he didn t i was filled with a sense of power i had stood up to evil the blessed life of a martyr was mine for the taking i m ancient now and more realistic about what i can and cannot achieve by force of will and by my all too convenient cowardice i applaud those afghani women and say that until each of us is prepared to suffer for our convictions we have no chance of earning a just world posted by tricia dower 12 01 am 6 comments monday april 13 2009 tightrope it s a bit of a struggle balancing all the obligations one has with all the projects one wants to pursue i ve always marvelled at those who can pull it all off raising kids holding down a job writing daily word minimums reading a book a week keeping fit right now year end bookkeeping and grant writing are about all i can handle add to that a few dreamy forays into mentally rewriting the novella doing a bit of reading socializing for sanity s sake but i suspect whether we do it all or just do what we can we all have felt that distinct stomach drop thrill of the balancing act and the anticipation of the relief or rest that awaits image courtesy of hdc posted by tjl 11 33 am 4 comments thursday april 09 2009 and you thought we abolished slavery by tricia dower your intrepid reporter here bringing you the latest from google alerts google sends me an e mail when something appears online about the cheery topics i touch on in silent girl such as domestic violence sex trafficking bride kidnapping racism global warming and incest i get so many notifications every day i shove them into a file to get them off my read page until i can find time to review them yesterday i took a look at a few about sex trafficking a topic that falls within the broader issue of slavery which according to some sources is the third largest criminal enterprise in the world after drugs and guns one source estimates that 27 million people are slaves of one sort or another officially abolished worldwide at the 1927 slavery convention slavery continues to thrive with billions of dollars in annual profits approximately 80 of the commodities traded are women and children and 80 of the services they re enslaved to provide are sexual as a writer i try to imagine the individual stories behind the statistics i wrote one of them the title story in the collection about a seven year old girl who after losing her mother in the 2004 tsunami is kidnapped and sold to a brothel researching the story was painful i was appalled at what i learned and felt helpless to do anything except write about it luckily others have felt empowered to do more google alerts called my attention to several organizations working in various ways to abolish modern day slavery and provide aid for victims organizations like the american anti slavery group aasg polaris project free the slaves and change org boston based aasg promotes awareness engages in advocacy and activism and provides direct aid for victims polaris project was named after the north star that guided us slaves towards freedom along the underground railroad it operates in the us and japan seeking out victims and providing them with social services and transitional housing it also operates a human trafficking hotline headquartered in washington dc free the slaves goes right to the frontlines they say to liberate people according to their site they also enlist businesses to clean slavery out of their product chains and empower consumers to stop buying into slavery work with governments to produce effective anti slavery laws then hold them to their commitments and research what works and what doesn t change org takes on human trafficking as one of a number of its causes it profiles cases and provides a forum for activists an intriguing headline compliments of google claimed that cannibalism and sex tourism were criminalized under a bill passed by uganda s parliament last week actually the bill is broader than the headline implies and offers a laundry list of what might constitute slavery today it provides that any person who recruits hires or maintains confines transports transfers harbours or receives a person through force for purposes of engaging that person in prostitution pornography sexual exploitation forced labour forced or arranged marriage is liable to 15 years imprisonment also any person who commits an offence in trafficking in children uses a child in any armed conflict removes any part organ or tissues from the body of a child taken alive uses a child in a commission of crime or uses a child or part of a child in witchcraft or related practices commits the offence of aggravated trafficking in children and is liable to life imprisonment and finally yesterday the united nations today launched a manual called combating trafficking in persons a handbook for parliamentarians a compilation of international laws and good practices developed to combat human trafficking all good news i guess but organ or tissues from the body of a child taken alive i could not write that story image from the video trailer for silent girl posted by tricia dower 12 03 am 4 comments tuesday april 07 2009 what i m not reading yet by andrew tibbetts i ve been waiting a long time for anne michael s second novel it s been thirteen years since fug iti ve pieces can you believe it there are only a few novels that i felt myself growing emotionally as i read them the scarlet letter and great expectations and this wonderful book is one of them it s also supremely beautiful again only a few novels the autobiography of red manage to marry the sublime music of lyric poetry to the forward momentum of vital narrative drive and this doubly wonderful book is one of them so the winter vault is out it s available in bookstores right now i could get up from my computer and walk a few blocks west and a few blocks south to the world s biggest bookstore and pick up a copy so what s stopping me i m terrified it will disappoint i remember being so excited for tom wait s follow up to bone machine for season two of six feet under for park chan wook s follow up to sympathy for lady vengeance and for david s mitchell s follow up to cloud atlas and what did i get mule variations season two of six feet under i m a cyborg but that s okay and black swan green perfectly acceptable artistic creations all but marred in my perception by the almost fatal pressure i put on them to save my life can the winter vault possibly be as good as i need it to be or better yet can i knock my expectations down to normal size like the buddhists say its expectation that creates disappointment and those buddhists know their emotional causality the placid devils it s only fair to a work of art to come to it empty to give it all the room in the world to be itself stay tuned as i try to buy a copy sometime over the next month posted by tricia dower 1 19 pm 2 comments thursday april 02 2009 my take on privilege by tricia dower nobody i myself the fifth story in my collection silent girl is narrated by a white woman married to a black man in the us in 1966 young and idealistic she struggles with the conflict between her empathy for blacks because of the injustice they suffer and her nascent belief that they share at least a part of the blame for their situation growing up in the states at that time i was deeply moved by that injustice and both hopeful and despairing about the country s ability to effect lasting change later as a woman trying to make it in the business world i empathized even more with blacks females were held back for reasons of gender as blacks were for reasons of race it wasn t fair and i was all about fairness those days despite my father having told me if i led you to believe life was fair i m sorry since then much has improved for blacks and women but as a society we still grapple with how to provide equity for all including blacks and other visible minorities aboriginals women the disabled gays lesbians and the transgendered who have i forgotten some say we ve gone too far to accommodate anyone who feels different and or mistreated that we re encouraging too many folks to feel entitled to preferential treatment some are tired of what they see as attempts to make them feel guilty for not being among the disenfranchised as a bonafide libra i tend to see everyone s point and find it difficult to take a firm stand is there a support group for librans because of my fence sitting proclivities i was attracted to this article by wendi thomas about the 10th annual white privilege conference going on right now in memphis tennessee under discussion at the conference is the question of how much difference it makes to your success in life to be part of the dominant group in this case whites as thomas writes the conference is not about blaming white people but raising awareness about privilege wherever it lies and that privilege is not just about race you can be privileged because of gender sexual orientation able bodiedness is that a word beauty wealth etc i like this extension of the definition because it encourages us to look at ourselves in a fuller way not as simply us or them i may be disadvantaged due to being female old and hard of hearing but i m privileged in other ways because i m white heterosexual able bodied except for the old and hard of hearing parts literate and so many other things if i were black i d still have literacy going for me and according to a friend i m more privileged than she because i have someone as that someone is colin i have to agree by no means does this broader view take away from the reality that blacks for example are twice as like to be unemployed three times more likely to live in poverty and more than six times as likely to be imprisoned compared with whites according to this chicago tribune article we can find similar statistics highlighting the cost of being a woman disabled homosexual or a member of another non dominant group what it does say to me is that each of us can appreciate the abilities we have admire those of others and use whatever privilege we enjoy to create a society where the development of those abilities is not limited by dominant views of who is entitled to accomplish what it doesn t say that all will end up the same or that no one will suffer dad was right image from the video trailer for silent girl...