CBC Hockey Anthem Challenge
Tonight I was interviewed by Bill Van Asperen, a videographer with CBC Charlottetown, who is doing a story on all the contest entrants from PEI. It was a very interesting interview because Bill asked me questions I hadn't thought about before. Essentially, I entered this contest after listening to some of the entries on the CBC web site. It's not that I thought i could necessarily do better than any of those (I quite liked most of the ones I listened to), but I knew I had this piece of music and I thought to myself: why not? I have the technology and I stand as much chance of winning as anyone else.
In fact, I'm not even sure it's about winning as much as it's about just being in the game (how's that for a sports analogy from a non-sports kind of guy!). Bill asked me how I thought technology was impacting the contest because there were over 1200 entries and I told him I thought that he had just answered his own question. I don't think we would have seen this many entries ten or fifteen years ago because the average person just didn't have the necessary technology to create music. In a way it reminds me of the punk movement of the late 70s and early 80s, where anyone could just pick up a guitar, spit out a few lyrics and start a band. As always the cream rose to the top (The Clash, The Jam, Joy Division) and I think the same will now happen with home recording and online music publishing. Those of us who think we are musicians just because we can make music by dragging a few loops into a virtual recording studio are fair game for those truly talented and inspired folks who can take this technology to a whole new level. I don't mind being pushed aside by the competition. I might even learn something.
The other interesting question Bill asked was whether I thought the winning composition could ever be as iconic as the HNIC theme music we all know and love. That theme had become a second Canadian anthem, but it was only written in the late 60s and before then there were other hockey theme songs which were equally iconic for their own time. I remember reading that Dolores Claman, the HNIC theme's composer, had an image of gladiators on skates in her mind while she wrote it. There's something very courageous and romantic - even mythical - about that image, but hockey (nor any other organised sport, for that matter) isn't like that anymore. We know too much about the players' private lives, their salaries, professional disputes, etc. because we live at a time where we have a myriad of facts at our fingertips and keyboards. I think the next theme music for our national game is going to somehow reflect the times we live in. Now I wish I had called my entry something like "He Googles, He Scores!"
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Great Blue Heron Workshop
05/07/08 15:03 Filed in: Workshops
In the first year (2005) I took a poetry workshop with poet/novelist Anne Simpson, who is one of the workshop's organizers (along with Gina Sampson for the first 3 years and Brenda Riley this year). In 2006 I did a screenplay workshop with Sheldon Currie. Last year it was my privilege to be part of a fiction workshop with Alistair MacLeod. And this year I was back in poetry, but this time with Anne Compton.
Why do I keep on coming back to this workshop? For one thing, it is one of the more affordable workshops around. It runs 5 days. This year I paid $660, which included the workshop tuition, accommodations and meals (4 breakfasts, 4 lunches and one dinner). The array of accomplished writers the GBH attracts as instructors, aside from those mentioned above, has included Sue Goyette, Lisa Moore, Madeleine Thien, Daniel MacIvor and Michael Crummey.
But most of all, it is the commitment to encourage writers of all levels to meet, mingle, share their work and test themselves in a nurturing and stimulating environment. No matter what genre of writing I came to work on, I always left either having taken the pieces I brought with me to the next level or, at the very least, with a better sense of who I am as a writer and where I want to go.
A good example of the former was my experience with Anne Simpson. I left her workshop with two useable poems: "Let Us Improvise Motifs", which later was published in Aquapolis, and "Gathering", which grew out of a writing exercise Anne gave the group and later was published in Mobius Poetry Magazine.
Being primarily a writer of fiction, I am often struggling to find my identity as a poet. This is what led me to take poetry with Anne Compton this year. Writing poetry well requires the ability to use language sparingly for maximum effect. I am always hoping that kind of poetic precision will somehow spill over into my prose. Unfortunately, quite often the opposite is true and much of my poetry becomes a bit too prosaic. Even so, I am grateful to Anne Compton, not only for pointing out the poetic strengths in the work I brought to her, but also for her painstaking effort in showing me how to rectify my weaknesses. Her passion and commitment were infectious to all of us who were fortunate enough to work with her.
One of the great things about the GBH is how it encourages all the participants to read their work in front of their fellow writers. To that end, public readings are organized throughout the week. It is a great way to get to know each other and inspiring to listen to the diverse voices that come to the GBH.
Will I go next year? I honestly don't know. Most likely it will depend on whether I have any writing I want to workshop at the time. But I will be checking their web site come early 2009 to see which amazing writers will be leading the workshops.