Hello all! I have finally added descriptions of my school talk subjects – if you go to the menu above and hit Teaching and Workshops all will be revealed! (Or click here.)
I can speak to all ages, really. From kindergarten kids (making up stories, reading books, different kinds of stories and characters) to middle and high school students (animation topics, writing careers, writing a novel, etc) and beyond (the writer’s life, writing television and books for children). It’s all here.
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Filed under Author Info/Biographical, the Writing Life
The Seattle Public Library sets a world record for longest book domino chain. Why are these so satisfying to watch?
p.s. Nice looking library!
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Filed under Miscellaneous Fun-ness
Here we are again with your weekly dose of eldritch – something rather vaguely creepy. I say vaguely creepy because I’m not so interested in gross-out, over-the-top stuff, which can easily be found all over the internet. (Oorg.) I’m more interested in those little things that are just unsettling, that geek you out and you don’t even know why.
Today… it’s foreheads.
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Filed under Eldritch
You know how I asked in the post about pink fluorescent slugs and cannibal snails, “What would the most logical 3rd neighbour to the slugs and snails be?”
Well the same people who told us about the slugs and snails (Treehugger.com) have also given me my answer: Glowing Millipedes! (Only they live in the US… on Alcatraz! This just gets better and better.)
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Filed under Miscellaneous Weirdness
Among my NFB animation favourites are two crazy funny shorts by Winnipeg filmmaker Richard Condie.
Getting Started (1979) is the sad tale of someone trying to sit down to piano practice. All musicians (and procrastinators) will find this painfully familiar.
Getting Started (1979) by Richard Condie, National Film Board of Canada
The Big Snit launched a good half-dozen catchphrases that I still find myself saying over twenty years later…*
The Big Snit (1985) by Richard Condie, National Film Board of Canada
*and when I write out my grocery list I always include “carrost”
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Filed under Animation
I’d almost forgotten about these! Last spring I wrote two picture books for Caillou, and I just received some copies in the mail now that they’re finally out.
They recruited me to write these because I’d story edited the tv series Caillou for a season, and wrote a pile of scripts for the show. These titles are part of their Ecology Club series:
Caillou Learns to Recycle – in which Caillou’s daycare teacher tells the kids about what happens to the things we recycle, and what new products can be made from them.
Caillou – Fresh from the Farm – in which Caillou’s family visits a farmer’s market, and Caillou learns about local and seasonal foods.. and tries a new recipe.
This style of writing is certainly worlds away from fantasy fiction, but I can put on the Preschool Writing Hat when I need to! Which probably looks something like this…
p.s. Dang! I said it as a joke, but now I really want a Preschool Writing Hat!
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Filed under the Writing Life
What creepy little gem do I have for you today? Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, no less, or at least the film version made in 1988 by Czech animator Jan Svankmajer*. Titled simply Alice, this film gives the old story a stunningly bizarre industrial-age twist.
Carroll’s tale was already a bit nightmarish, and Svankmajer has certainly taken that element and run with it. You know how it starts, with Alice in a lovely forest following the white rabbit? Here’s how Svankmajer reimagines it:
Check out that rabbit! Yikes!
Here’s another, truly eldritch scene:
It’s about time that taxidermy played a larger role in children’s entertainment, don’t you think?
Svankmajer is quoted here talking about the film:
So far all adaptations of Alice (including the latest by Tim Burton) present it as a fairy tale, but Carroll wrote it as a dream. And between a dream and a fairy tale there is a fundamental difference. While a fairy tale has got an educational aspect, it works with the moral of the lifted forefinger (good overcomes evil), dream, as an expression of our unconscious, uncompromisingly pursues the realisation of our most secret wishes without considering rational and moral inhibitions, because it is driven by the principle of pleasure. My Alice is a realised dream. (interview, Electric Sheep Magazine, June 2011)
* Jan Svankmajer was a tremendous influence on the Brothers Quay, whose animation I posted in a previous Weekly Eldritch
Related:
Anyone out there who is sitting down to write today but can’t think of anything to write about, here’s a juicy tidbit for ya: giant fluorescent pink slugs on an Australian mountaintop. I kid you not!
And in case that isn’t enough inspiration for you, that particular mountain also boasts cannibal snails! I mean, come on! Cannibal snails!!
Possible writing prompts, if you still need a push:
1. Describe the kind of location where you would fully expect giant fluorescent pink slugs to live.
2. What would the most logical 3rd neighbour to the slugs and snails be? Hmm?
3. What happens when pink slug meets cannibal snail?
If you come up with anything you’d like to share, please put it in the comments!
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Filed under Get Writing!, Miscellaneous Weirdness
One of the best parts of talking to kids:
(from my daughter’s Gr. 1/2 class, if you hadn’t guessed it already)
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Filed under the Writing Life
Hi everyone!
One of the topics in my recent school talks was Animation, which I absolutely love, in all its forms. I just thought I should provide a few links here for anyone who wants to learn more about ‘toons. (I’ll group posts on animation under the category… ‘Animation’, natch.
For starters, in my talk I mentioned the great, great Canadian animator Norman McLaren, who did some really amazing work at the NFB – the National Film Board of Canada – from the 1940s right up into the 1980s.
If you’d like to see some really alternative forms of animation, browse around the NFB website for McLaren’s films. One of the methods he used was to draw or scratch images right on the celluloid film, thus skipping the camera altogether. See: Begone Dull Care, which as a bonus has a gorgeous Oscar Peterson jazz soundtrack.
He also made stop-motion or pixillation films, his most famous of these being Neighbours, the film which won McLaren an Oscar in 1952. I remember seeing this film when I was a kid and being utterly astonished, not just at how cool it looked but also at how shocking it was. (There is violence – probably not suitable for the very young.)
I’ll just bet Norman McLaren’s films will make you want to dive in and start making animations yourself.
P.S. Once you are at the NFB site, keep looking around! Besides McLaren’s work, there are masses of great animated shorts to watch, from the truly experimental to more mainstream kids’ stuff and comic masterpieces. I’ll give you a list of some of my favourites in a future post… soon, I promise!
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Filed under Animation
