This is What 400ppm Looks Like: CO2 Levels Highest in More Than 800,000 Years.

On Friday, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at the University of California, San Diego, recorded CO2 levels higher than the world has seen in over 800,000 years.

From atop the Mauna Loa volcano on the big island of Hawaii—the oldest continuous carbon dioxide measurement station in the world—a reading of just over 400 parts per million (ppm) was recorded this Friday. A similar measurement was made at the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) station, also in Hawaii. This reading pushes us well past the 350 ppm target scientists say we should stay below if a global temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius is to be avoided.

Check out my first post on Desmog: “This is What 400ppm Looks Like: CO2 Levels Highest in More Than 800,000 Years.” http://ow.ly/l6tPi

Some artists find creative fortitude in depression.

It’s important to be where you are and to appreciate being alive enough to feel big feelings and then to use those insights to open your mind to better empathize with our collective human experience.

I wish I was one of those people, brave enough to dance with my own demons, but I’m often not. I thrive on momentum and inspiration. And though I know that the down and dark parts have to be experienced, that they won’t go without a fight, I am not prone to embracing them. I try to avoid them.

I saw it coming a mile away, probably in September when I last blogged, that I was steering into a storm. September meant the last year of my Creative Writing Program and the completion of my thesis was imminent. While there is still more work to be done on any piece of writing, knowing that it’s original purpose has been fulfilled, that now I am supposed to run off and find a way to be a writer in the real world, is terribly depressing.

Artists have never had it very good when it comes to being embraced by the world–I mean look at all the painters. Writers have had it better, but slightly. Most of us have had to wait until we retire to write because, until then, we are too busy being teachers and lawyers and people working in offices to do any writing. Either that or, we kick around in poverty waiting for something good to happen to us, which almost never does because we don’t send anything out to be considered. Or we are really good business people who get grants and artist in residence gigs, but end up writing stuff that other people want us to write for our whole lives.

So, I tried to avoid the inevitable and find a side passion that would carry me through my life or something. Since September, I have been a Mental Health Worker, a Teaching Assistant, a Reading and Writing Instructor, a Research Assistant, a Web Developer, a Copy Writer, a Receptionist and I was thinking of going to BCIT and taking up a trade. I am not exaggerating.

It was the Receptionist thing that broke the camel’s back (what a gross expression).  I had never been a receptionist before. I thought it looked neat and it was not. I learned as a receptionist that I have two pet peeves in the world: slow walkers and people who find it compelling to tell you things that you already know – things that everybody knows. I quit yesterday to be a freelance writer.

Now I’m back! And I realize now that I was dealing with the darkness and the fear. Turning into a job-ninja was my way of understanding the problem. I needed to really see and understand my choices. I have dedicated my life to language and imagination. That isn’t the problem. The problem is, that life is hard and anything that you want to do is going to be challenging because you are going to want to be the best at it. I can deal with hard stuff. I’m not an infant.

So, I would like to dedicate this blog post to the people who hired me. I’m sorry. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Remember when film cameras were being replaced with digital cameras?

That sickening bout of nostalgia was quickly relieved, however, as cameras got better rapidly and the making and sharing of photography became practically free. I can’t imagine that there are any practically minded people out there that are still mourning the reign of the film camera.

***Remember: there will always be purists and nothing is ever really gone forever.

Many things have gone this way and it was hard for us because our relationships with these things are romantic. Think of the writer at his typewriter on that dark and stormy night, the handsome father in the great suit filming his family with a 8mm camera, writing a letter and getting a letter in the mail, or leaving the house and not being contactable until you came back (oh, god – if only!).

Or, you could consider this: learning how to actually type and fix mistakes on a typewriter, how much money it cost that well-dressed father to develop and screen those home movies, standing in line at the post office, not being able to get directions, research things on the fly, get email, texts, calls, Skype, facetime, access calendars, calculators, magazines – consider a life without a device that allows you to leave your desk, house or country and still be connected if you must be (and, yes, some people must be – people who have jobs – I wouldn’t know first hand, but I am trying to be compassionate).

Time marches on and often it marches right over your romantic sensibilities.

The thing about books is, they are beautiful. Books, in all of their forms: hardcover, paper back, old, new, written in, or clean are a treasure. Books smell good and feel nice. Every time I pick up a book I get feelings of infinite possibility and hope. When I was twelve I went into a minor depression when I realized that I would never be able to read all the books in the world and that I would have to choose carefully. I didn’t read for a month for all the pressure I felt to really make it count.

In short: I love books. I do. And that is why I am so smitten by my classy little e-reader. Because, for all that I adore about books, they are expensive, heavy, many (to say the least), don’t travel well and they aren’t the best format for some genres.

The thing I feared most about my move to an e-reader was the loss of that satisfaction of seeing a book and completing it – holding it in your hands afterwards and recalling what the journey was like. However, the e-reader totally held up in the face of this fear. What happened was, the e-reader started to feel like my way into the books – my doorway or portal. The physical form of the reader doesn’t change with the books and so, instead of feeling nostalgia for the old book format, I’ve grown creepy close to my KOBO.

It stores all the books I have read, and the notes I made about them. It has a built-in dictionary, page zoom, a page counter and a percentage reader. It even has a feature that congratulates you for reading. It searches for books that I might like (this feature actually sort-of sucks), and you can reach into the Internet at anytime and grab a book for half as many dollars as you would pay for a physical copy. And these are still the early stages of e-reading. It can only go up from here.

There are actually things about the e-readers that I think are so much better than books, I feel like someone ought to mention them on the internet. For one thing, my eyes don’t get tired when I am reading anymore because I have control over the font size. I can carry thousands of books with me at anytime. Plus, I can still share and lend with friends like a regular book.

Until the e-reader, short stories were sort of an enthusiast sport to me. I figure people who write short stories, read them – maybe along with people in doctor’s office waiting rooms (maybe some other people, I don’t know), but now short stories are flying all over the internet. I, for one, have downloaded and read an unprecedented amount of short fiction from online Lit mags since the purchase of my e-reader.

Another thing is the Graphic Novel. While it requires a more sophisticated e-reader or tablet, Graphic novels have been seriously limited by print. Print versions of graphic work are huge, expensive and too consumable to be sustainable. If you read print Graphica (I may have made this word up or am using it incorrectly), that is all you can afford to read.

E-readers bridge that gap and allow authors/artists to produce more and people to access more of it. I have always wanted to read more Graphica and now I will.

So, I know some of you are cringing in response to the highly unromantic idea of an e-reader — I suggest you read Diamond Age to help with your conceptual issues and get on board. Seriously, the future is neat.

Artist is a nebulous term that I don’t have a definition for exactly, but so far as I understand, here are some of the symptoms:

1 – Interested in everything, generally, and nothing specifically.
2 – Feel like you might die in a 9-5.
3 – homework?
4 – can only commit fully to your own projects.
5 – mostly only interested in your own ideas.
6 – have a burning unyielding desire to make stuff constantly – it doesn’t even matter what.
7 – an inability to find work day tasks important.
8 – A weird mental misfire that prevents the brain from associating survival with a paycheck.

I know some people who self define as “non-creative” – which completely blows my mind, btw – and I find myself wishing I was more like them. These people are doing such awesome things in business and science. They know real things and are doing real stuff. They have RRSP‘s, vacation pay, savings, a car, are getting married, and having really cute squishy babies. I know that many people become artists because they are afraid of these things, but that’s just it, for some people, it’s a choice. When I go to sleep at night I imagine myself as a scientist, a business mogul, or a coffee shop owner. When I wake up in the morning, I’m still an artist.

I’ve complained a lot lately about job hunting and bills and why the hell one would ever require such a thing as a Dental Office Assistant Certificate to answer phones at a dentist’s office. Everyone, it seems, wants impossible combinations and amounts of experience for jobs that anyone could do at anytime with any amount of preparation. It’s really made me angry and bitter about the whole thing. I feel entitled, for some shiza reason, to get any job I want simply because I need one and I am capable.

This realization lead me to discover that I feel entitled to a great many things:

1 – sidewalk superiority as I am a fast walker.
2 – gluten-free everything.
3 – people who forget my name after two introductions should be disallowed from going to the same parties as me.
4 – size 10 shoes in vintage stores.
5 – the authority to tell the bus driver that he/she needs to be a more aggressive driver if I am going to get anywhere on time.
6 – a book deal without having finished my book.
7 – understanding and acceptance from everyone, despite my disinterest in explaining myself.

In short, I was quickly transforming into a pile of garbage and, if that isn’t bad enough, I was amusing myself with my witty/angry/smart-ass inner dialogue. Then, while out to coffee with my good friends, Marlaina, Chris, and Steve, I found myself scolding my fellow writing friend for his Debbie Downer POV. He claimed — just as I have — that sometimes, things don’t work out. Sometimes, you write a book — as he has — (Who Killed Mom), and everyone loves it — as I did — and still you sing for your supper. He said that was reality. He’s angry about it and I suppose he has a right to be. It’s hardly fair. But, I guess one has to expect these things if you were unfortunate enough to be born an artist. He has had the success in life to be a professional writer and radio/tv personality and that is a huge deal. We are all proud of him and I know that isn’t enough, but I really wish it was.

Mostly, this conversation brought my recently acquired bad attitude to light. I realized that I have been turning my nose up at the world and the way it works. Some people really want to be dental office receptionists, grocery store clerks and servers. They should get those jobs. I want to write my book and here I am, in school with a thesis to write, on all of the student loans, and unemployed. As my dad would say, boo frickin’ hoo. So what if most artists don’t have money and we can rarely hold down a job and our future is a great big question mark? I guess we just have to accept it. You can only be what you are. If you are lucky enough to have figured out that much, you are already very successful.

What’s more, I love writing and dreaming and creating so much I could cry on the spot. So I give up – I’m here to stay – no more complaining. Sorry and thank you all for entertaining my inner Negative Nancy.

Reluctantly yours,

The Artist

Don’t make friends with writers

My friends are nice friends. They love me and tell me that I am talented and they go to my readings and proofread my atrocious grammar and spelling. They are there for me when I need to quit my job, again and again. They validate my unjustifiable laziness and unsuccessfulness. They do this for me because I encourage it and I am entertainingly embarrassing at parties.

Little do they know that I’m a whining, way less than prolific, self-righteous, know-it-all with a Goddess-complex (maybe they do know this and wonder why I keep coming around).

The truth is, writers are jerks.  You shouldn’t hang out with us and here’s why:

We are seriously dedicating our lives to the proposition that another person would want to listen to us go on about something for hundreds and hundreds of pages. Once, we have written said pages, we expect that the world will finally, finally, be handed to us on a silver platter.

It’s impossible to get a word in edgewise with a writer and even when you do, you’re faced with the opinion of a person who thinks they know everything and they will let you know that in the most condescending way possible.

Writers will exploit your personal tragedies for their own monetary gains. Remember that breakup you had? That’s scene three of my Radio Drama.

We will stop listening to you and discount everything you’ve ever said or ever will say based on conflicting literary preferences.

It’s super annoying to be consistently psychoanalyzed by someone who is not a psychiatrist – a person who just spends a lot of time jumping to conclusions about things that he/she has decided are truths based on internal, self-serving, logic.

We always need a job.

But mostly, because we need you a whole lot more than you need us.

My advice to you is to un-friend all of your writers. They probably deserve it. Plus, maybe then they’ll have a real cross to bear and will use the emotional momentum to actually put pen to paper instead of blogging all the time.

No one likes to think about these things, but it’s true. Sometimes, the thing you love doesn’t love you back. Just like a girlfriend who doesn’t love you back, it so happens that, a person can follow his “bliss” (just as Joseph Campbell tells him to), and nothing comes of it. Sometimes people get hit by Mack trucks. It’s not personal, it’s physics.

So, in the mean time (the space between being a raging success and the Mack truck), you’ll probably need to get a job. You’ll want a job for the moneys that keep writers in mac laptops, gluten-free muffins and five-dollar lattes. But, what should a writer do? Isn’t a job selling out?

There is nothing more existential, for me, than job-hunting. Hunting for something that will “fund” my real work. Desperately seeking for that which won’t put me on antidepressants, something to keep me alive without killing me at the same time.

It’s a funny thing, getting a job that isn’t your “bliss”. What exactly is your bliss? “Writing” is a pretty big category. How many other blisses does it take to make a career?

Some lucky people have exactly two forms of bliss.

Useful examples of this are:

Computers and writing

Engineering and writing

Resources management and writing

Medicine and writing

More common examples are:

Dancing and writing

Singing and writing

Reading and writing

Drinking and writing

However, a more common problem, when it comes to narrowing down a day job for a writer, is a list of bliss that looks like this:

Writing, reading, dancing, singing, drawing, travelling, yoga, running, politics, food resource management, cooking, organic farming, horticulture, physics, genetics, sociology, ecology, social work, medicine, computers, the internet, editing, philosophy, spirituality, research, psychology and teaching.

A person is often a writer because she is interested in absolutely everything and to focus on one thing, just to keep herself in e-readers and Iphones, is torturous. Sure a person can do any one thing, but what to choose? Which bliss is the best bliss? Which bliss will make the most use of your talents? Which one won’t make you wonder why you ever got out of bed this morning only to auction off the precious moments of your only life to the highest bidder?

I don’t know. But, I believe a symbiotic relationship exists.

The thing about the day-job hunt is, it seems like giving up. My adult brain knows better than to think that, but I am not 100% adult yet. I still have a hope for my stories. I still imagine that someone will see value in them and that will make them valuable enough that I could denounce my day job – even if I like it.

But, then I think about it this way: maybe the lack of the struggle, that the day job provides, is giving up. To survive is the human experience; it’s humbling and real. It puts you in direct connection with the collective consciousness of the world. We are all in it together — working to create this place to live, striving for more, learning to accept less, and creating things with whatever we’ve got.

People get depressed and disconnected when they don’t have a job. We like to work hard to make things happen. We like to make money and take care of ourselves. We despise worrying about bills and debts. We want to experience the world on the world’s level. We are not just observers; we are active participants. We don’t actually want things handed to us on a silver platter. We want to earn everything we get. Our ability and inclination to work is a gift not a grievance.

We need to adjust the equation: Work = experience+ challenge/perspective X hope and inspiration to write = Bliss.

In light of this new equation, the goal shifts. The goal should be, in my opinion, the bliss of  writing the best stories, not to write yourself out of a job.

Cliché Conclusions (It is impossible not to bookend your post with clichés when you opened up with dying artists. Sorry): 

If you’d never had a job, I can’t imagine that anyone would want to listen to you talk or write about life because, what the frack would you know? You can learn so much from any kind of job. Just think of all the questions you have for those construction workers dangling from the rail, eating their bologna sandwiches. Don’t you kind of wish you’d had that experience? Think of what you could do with that POV.

You can’t take it with you when you go, successful writer or not. The thing that counts in the end is, maybe nothing, but probably what you learned while you were here. They say it is better to have loved and lost than to not have loved at all and since you are going to lose something sometime, you might as well believe it.

Science Fiction is my favorite genre of fiction, movies and peer-reviewed research. Not the drug store paper back kind or the teenage nerd in space adventure (I do like these kinds, they’re just not my favorite), but the kind of science fiction that changes your perspective and, sometimes, the world.

Everyone loves to hate sci-fi and they’ve got every right, really. Science is awesome. It’s so interesting on it’s own that it seems impossible that science fiction, which is supposed to build upon and speculate about known science, could be bad. But, it can be so super bad sometimes.

Sci-fi can go wrong in so many ways:

Sometimes the science is just too stupid, and that, to me, is the worst kind. If the science is so bad that I, an English literature/ Art History major with a C+ in her mandatory science class, can see right through it, then what’s the point? What is the point? You might as well write about magic at least then someone could get into the arbitrariness of it.

A lot of times People hate sci-fi because of the drama. Often, writers think that, because they are writing something that would be so big, frightening and awe-inspiring if it actually went down, they should compose that way. And they’re wrong. No one wants to read that. It’s not real. Even in the darkest of moments or the most monumental, people are just gross old people. They like being regular, joking, drinking, farting, laughing, fighting folks. This is not to say that a bit of melodrama isn’t effective – it is. They key is to just add a bit and that is, evidently, really hard.

No one likes to read dialogue that translates as: this is so important that your puny little minds will never comprehend its significance.

Most of the time, the hate is for both the bad science and melodrama. Plus, everyone is half-naked and doing some thing gross with slime and gore, which is kind of fun in it’s own way – like Prometheus. It’s the kind that the 14-year-old geeks and I, unfortunately, like. Sorry for ruining your lives.

The thing about Sci-fi is, it comes attached to a bunch of high falutin questions that need to be dealt with in a conservative and discreet way. Take, for example, the common scenario of the end of the world:

How did it happen?
Is it our fault or God’s?
Aliens attack: why?, Because we’re bad?, Or because they’re God?
Meteors hit: Why us?
Who is greater, the Universe or humanity’s will to live?

There is no escaping the scale of these implications and sometimes that makes for hilarity, sometimes it’s embarrassing, and sometimes, it’s totally awesome – a completely religious experience for me.

When sci-fi gets it right, it is so right. More right than anything else. Contact the book and the movie changed my life. Carl Sagan and Anne Druyan, alone, might be the reasons that I write. Contact was elegant and undeniably honest and it asked questions in just the right way.

I believe that is what science fiction is meant to do. It’s supposed to ask the questions: what do you think, really? How far do you think we could go? What do you think is possible? How do you think we will make it? Why?

And sometimes it answers them. Here are some of the answers: Space shuttles to the moon, space stations, Mars One, X prize, Ipods, Cell phones, nano technology, GPS, GIS, and so on.

These are the questions and answers that inspire me to do anything. Sometimes I can only fall asleep when I imagine myself floating in zero-g, just chilling in space.  And I believe that will be possible for me some day because of good old SF.

So, Thank you, Science Fiction. 

(It was difficult to write this without turning this blog post into a reading/watching list. Ender’s Game (up to and including, The Shadow of the Hegemon), The Dark Tower Series, Stranger in a Strange Land, Diamond Age, Handmaids Tale, Oryx and Crake, The year of the Flood, The Matrix, Star Wars, Star Trek, Contact, More Than Human, Dune, Fahrenheit 451 (I thought “David” in Prometheus was a throwback to this), Slaughterhouse Five, Brave New World, 2001, A Wrinkle in Time, Another Earth, Melancholia, 2010, Fire in the Sky, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, Aliens, The Abyss, Terminator1&2… Ok, I’m having too much fun with this.)

Much to the horror of some of my colleagues, I have been known to say that I don’t believe in Non-Fiction. And even though, all of my super serious, seriously funny, and extremely adventurous NF writer friends have already written me off, I have to say, I love Non-Fiction genre books. I do. Does that sound like a contradiction? No, I guess it doesn’t. It sounds like a semantics argument. It’s always about semantics, isn’t it?

I just don’t think that it’s particularly helpful or even descriptive to label a book Non-Fiction. Why is that even a thing? It’s a book that’s trying to tell a story that will, admittedly, leave out and add in whatever it takes to tell said story.

All stories are Non-Fiction then. Is it a percentage thing? Is it how gritty the subject is? Is it how attached the author is to being in the book? Or, is it a way of affirming that, yes indeed, strange things happen and people are total weirdos?

I haven’t given this particular argument any real fire since A Complicated Kindness. And now that my KOBO says that I have read 37% of Jeanette Walls, The Glass Castle, I am compelled to do it again. Here are a few of my beefs with the harsh NF label.

Do you see what I see?

This is kind of a boring argument. We all know, within a reasonable range, different people experiencing an event simultaneously will describe it differently. For the most part, people understand and accept the value of perspective in a NF memoir or personal essay.

The thing is, when people are reflecting on their childhood or traumatic life events — they aren’t just witnesses at a fender bender — their identity is wrapped up in the story.

Take this For example,

When I was a little girl in a red-dirt town in the South, I had two pets, a flea-bitten Siamese cat and a snapping turtle that my step-dad found in the swamp. One day, that snapping turtle was missing from the blue-plastic kiddie pool we kept him in on the front lawn. My mom said that the hillbillies in the trailer next door had fried him up. She said that hillbillies love to eat turtles. All I had to remember him by was the slimy green ring that he left in the pool.

A couple of months later, the cat went missing. His name was Wang Chung. My mom named him that. I remember the day he went missing. When I came home from school, my mom was making hamburger helper and getting ready for work. She said, “Wang Chung got eaten by an Alligator. I saw it myself.”I was surprised that wasn’t even sad about it. The idea just totally blew my mind. Wang Chung was eaten by an alligator? Whoa.

This is within the reasonable realms of NF. This is what my experience was and how I reflect on my life.

Did that town really have red-dirt? Does it matter?

Now that I’m an adult and I realize that those hillbillies probably didn’t eat that turtle and who knows if my mom actually saw Wang Chung get snapped up by a gator (Under what kind of circumstances would a person actually catch sight of something like that?). I think those inconsistencies are present in the way the story is told and the reader is likely able to sense that those might be tall tales, which makes it acceptable.

BUT, I can’t totally remember everything. I think I was five when that turtle disappeared (and did she really call them hillbillies?). As for the cat, that was actually years later and he was so old and mean at that point that he probably just ran away and died somewhere. His name was actually Wang Chung though, which is story worthy on its own.

As far as my personal reactions or the honesty of the character experiencing this goes, I don’t feel connected with her. Surely, the real “me” spent much of her childhood blown-minded and embarrassingly non-sentimental, but this character is not so much me as a conduit for my experiences. It’s not safe to be “me” in this context. It’s not interesting either.

No one wants to hear about my life-long reactions to these things. They want to hear the story. What happened then? Not, how do these unfortunate experiences with pets affect you? Turns out, I can’t have pets. They make me feel irrationally guilty.

You want real characters? 

If you want honesty in character and relationships, I think you have to go to fiction. It’s only here that a writer can fully develop the true nature of people without fear of themselves or of being made to apologize on Oprah for telling one of the most accurate stories of what it’s like to be in rehab to date (ugh that kills me, it’s so stupid). And, I know. I work in a rehab.

There is truth and fiction (and truth in fiction) everywhere. In the realm of creative writing (read: not journalism or court reporting), I think it’s too limiting to create such distinct categories – especially if the story is at stake. If you must clarify, adding, “based on a true story”, is acceptable.  Also, being honest and saying, this is a mostly true story with party true people in it, is good. Or, this is a completely made up story with perfectly true people in it.

Maybe try: None of this ever happened to anyone and these people are impossible. So it is, therefore, a more honest representation of the world and the people in it than is possible by any other means.

Reblogged from PRISM international:

By Elizabeth Hand

Unraveling Isobel is Eileen Cook’s fifth work of young-adult fiction to date, and if my reading the entire novel in one sitting is any indication of her aptitude for it, I’d say she’s got it. She is a talented writer with a clear and steady style. She is enticing and subtle. Her female characters are realistic, strong, and manage to avoid the usual pitfalls of teen protagonists by being totally honest.

Read more… 1,286 more words

I figured we’d talk about the state of the publishing industry or the fate of the Creative Writing Program in Canada. There would definitely be lots of talk about the frontiers of poetry. Believe me, no one really wants to hear about the theoretical frontiers of poetry (even poetry lovers, like me), but people love to tell you about them.

Here’s how it went:

DAY 1 – Thursday, May 10^th

The conference was held at Humber College, which is only technically in Toronto. I think people who live in TO might refer to the locale as Mississauga. I was staying with family on the west side so I had to take a streetcar. The commute is about an hour if the traffic is good. It wasn’t.

I left at 3:30 and go there at 5pm. Then I found out that absolutely nothing would be happening until 7pm. So, like the high school drop out that I am, I went to a friend’s house for a dinner party instead. Consequently, the first day of a writer’s conference is till a mystery to me.

Dinner was delicious.

DAY 2 – Friday, May 11

Got up at 7am and made it to the conference on time. It was scary; scary like the first day of high school. There were all of these people I didn’t know, so I automatically assumed that they were wildly successful and friends with each other.  I immediately regretted my wardrobe choice – you know the drill. This would be the first time in over a decade that I would be in lectures for two whole days. I already felt like calling my high-school best friend and skipping.

Breakfast – I was allergic to everything they served for breakfast. But, I had much coffee and mingled.

Panel 1 – Was on the advantages and disadvantages of a multi-genre Creative Writing program. I attend a multi-genre program. I went to this one because I knew the people giving the talk. Conclusions: there are advantages and disadvantages to a multi genre program.

Panel 2 – Was on culture meshing literary genres or “Writers Without Borders”. Again, I attended this one because I knew one of the panelists. Conclusions: Some people are super interested in cultures other than their own and how those cultures contrast their own experience. Traditional forms of poetry benefit from translation into a modern language and context in order to preserve the form. Some people don’t like the idea of labeling anything, ever – usually poets.

Lunch – I was allergic to everything they served for lunch. I met a cool couple from Prince George.

Panel 3 – was about how to write sex scenes well. I went to this one because it had sex in the title. Conclusion: Sex scenes are often funny. No duh. Nothing was learned about how to write a good sex scene.

Panel 4 – I zoned out.

Panel 5 – Went for a walk.

I skipped the evening get-together and went out on the town with my radical Toronto friends.

Got lost on my way home because cab drivers in Toronto have no idea where anything is. Was in bed by 4 am.

DAY 3 – Saturday, May 12

I was two hours late. I missed breakfast and the first panel, which worked out because the discussions had pedagogy in the title. My friend and I pre-decided to avoid discussions with pedagogy in the title.

Panel 2 – was given by that cool couple from Prince George. It was on the intermingling of creative writing and theory to create a self-conscious piece of creative writing. Sounds terrible. Conclusions: Some people are so honest and creative that they can make anything good. These are two of those people.

Lunch – I ate the egg out of a Quiche. I met a woman with my dream life. She teaches writing retreats to businessmen and emerging writers. She gets to see and help people interpret early stages of creative development. So awesome.

Panel 3 -- Best panel of the entire conference! It was on how technology comes into play in teaching creative writing and writing for new medias. I want to be both of the people who gave this panel. Conclusions: The Internet is going to change everything, people should learn to write for it, and get excited about it!

I was so inspired after this panel, I skipped the rest and went back into town and ate oysters with my high-school best friend. She and I have a long history of skipping.

Conference Stats:

Things learned: 10
Hours spent in transit: 7
Awesome people met: 8
Meals enjoyed: 0
Inspirations: 12
Level of Enthusiasm Gained: 75
Percentage of People who secretly loved being called, Dude: 100%
How much like high school it was: Totally.