Dirty Laundry: Prattlings

Live From The Festival of Trees

I’ll be TWEETING like a madman tomorrow (May 11th) live from the Festival of Trees in Toronto.

Want to know if I make it there in time?

Want to know if my lost sunglasses get returned to me?

Want to know if SWIM THE FLY wins The White Pine Award?

If you can’t make it down for whatever reason, follow me and you can find out all this and more!

Posted by Don Calame on 5.10.11 at 02:30 pm in Prattlings. (0) Comments

The World Needs More Ontario!

Before I forget, I’m on Twitter now, so you can follow me and my merry adventures. I promise to have a Twitter button soon but until then I’m just going to remind everyone on my blogs.

And now, onto the good stuff….

I’ve been having such an amazing time visiting schools and bookstores here in Ontario this past week. Regular readers of this blog have already been treated to my Ontario-stravaganza. But that was only part one of the story. Part two began on Thursday with visits to three incredible schools in Brantford.

Yes, THAT Brantford. Childhood home of Wayne Gretzky. To say they’re proud of that fact would be an understatement.

And it’s just the kind of sweet town you’d expect a person like The Great One to come from. Of course, I didn’t have time to stop in and visit Walter (Wayne’s dad for those of you living under a log) so that he could show me all the famed trophies and jerseys. I had more important business to attend to.

Like visiting Brantford Collegiate Institute and Bobbie Henley’s White Pine Club kids. Bobbie, the unbelievably kind Head of Library, was responsible for arranging my visits to Brantford Collegiate as well as organizing my visits to Pauline Johnson Collegiate (in conjunction with the wonderful and wonderfully boisterous Theano Tice) and North Park Collegiate (with the incredibly dedicated teacher-librarian Pam Wilson-McCormick).

I can’t say enough about the students and faculty that I met at these schools. Sometimes you just get a run of inspiring school visits where everything just goes well. With a lot of laughter, and great questions, and real interest from everyone. I seem to be getting a lot of these lately and I count myself incredibly lucky.

There were tons of highlights which included: being presented with a golden “Oscar” bunny at Brantford Collegiate for winning the White Pine “Oscar” at the school, the gifts of mugs and pens and coffee travel cups, the well-thought out student introductions at each of the presentations, the pizza and cheesecake cups, the autograph sessions which included requests to sign books, papers, napkins, shirts, cellphone cases, and a few Nintendo DS game systems.

Here are some pictures of me and the students.

Brantford Collegiate White Pine Club! (This group has great taste in books, I must say).

More students from Brantford Collegiate.

Here are some of the fab students at Pauline Johnson Collegiate.

And finally, my two biggest fans from North Park.

On Friday I was whisked around to a ton of great Indigo/Chapters stores as well as Mabel’s Fables, one of the very coolest children’s bookstores I have ever been to. If you are ever in Toronto be sure to visit Eleanor LeFave, Melissa Bourdon-King and Natalie Kertes (as well as Mabel, the sweetest cat I think I have ever seen). I was asked to sign their Wall of Authors which, I have to say, was a huge honor if a bit intimidating. You’d think, as a writer, I’d have marvelous phrases flowing from my fingertips, but no, I had to really think about what to write on their wall.

Last but not least, don’t forget to come on down to Festival of Trees at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto on May 11th. I will be doing an autograph session from 10am to 11am at the Market Tents and then I will be doing a reading and talk with author Alyxandra Harvey at 11:30 at the Studio Theatre. Hope to see you there!

Posted by Don Calame on 5.8.11 at 12:53 pm in Prattlings. (0) Comments

The Inside Scoop

Kelly Miller, the wonder-teacher from Platte City Middle School, writes about her students’ reaction to SWIM THE FLY on the School Library Journal E-Newsletter.

Give it a read if you have a moment. It made me feel warm and fuzzy all over again!

Out and about signing books at a bunch of stores in the Toronto area today with Nicola, Jennifer, and Anne from Random House Canada. Had a great lunch with some super-fun booksellers from Indigo/Chapters and Kobo as well. Thanks, Melanie, Jennifer, Brenda, Anne, and Eva for a wonderful time!

Lots of school and book store visits to write about, which I will get to this weekend, I promise. Many pictures will be posted.

Also, thanks to the encouragement of my new Indigo/Chapters/Kobo friends I’ve started Tweeting. You can follow me @doncalame

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Posted by Don Calame on 5.6.11 at 01:53 pm in Prattlings. (0) Comments

Ontario-stravaganza!

Add “-stravaganza” and an exclamation point to anything and you can give that “anything” a real sense of spectacle.

Or, maybe not.

I guess a lot of times people just use the “-stravaganza” suffix indiscriminately. Slapping it on willy-nilly. Pizza-stravaganza! Music-stravaganza! Ham-stravaganza!

Still, in this particular case, I think it fits the bill because my travels across the province of Ontario have been full of adventure and excitement. I’ve been tooling all over the last few days visiting some really great schools and meeting some wonderful students.

We’re staying in downtown Toronto and I’ve rented a car to drive myself to all the readings. Some are close while others are hours away. If you’ve never driven in Toronto (which I never had until now) it can be an interesting experience. Especially when you have the UFC in town and sixty-thousand people milling about who want to attend. I don’t think I’ve experienced traffic like that since my days in New York.

On Monday I got to drive out to Oshawa where I met Tiffany Pahman, a super-nice Teen Services Librarian from the Oshawa Public Libraries. Tiffany organized two readings for the day. One at Eastdale and the other at O’Neill. Both sessions went well with some great writerly questions from the teens. I talked myself hoarse—which I tend to do at these things—discussing everything from first drafts, to screenplays, to book covers.

Today - Tuesday - I got to speak with three more sets of students. Two at East York and one at Marc Garneau. Jane Waters, the librarian at East York, arranged for two readings at her school along with a raffle for a copy of SWIM THE FLY and BEAT THE BAND. She was incredibly sweet and kind and wouldn’t let me leave until she was sure I had perfect directions to the next school I was attending.

At Marc Garneau, Sara-Jane Figliano, had a pizza lunch all ready for me because she knew I was running around from school to school today. She invited several classes of students including her White Pine Book Club. It was a great group who laughed quite a bit with a few keen writers who had some intriguing authorly questions.

Speaking of the White Pine Award, guess what’s just around the corner? If you guessed the announcement of the White Pine Award at the Festival of Trees right here in Toronto on May 11th, well, then, you were paying attention to the beginning of this paragraph. I’ve got all my fingers and toes crossed - which can prove painful at times and inconvenient at others - that I win the award. I’d like to say that I’m just happy to be nominated - and I AM just happy to be nominated, of course - but let’s not kid ourselves here. I’d love to win even more.

But the votes are already in, so I can’t sway anyone at this point. Most of the nominees will be at the ceremony so it should be a fun time. It’s an eclectic mix of books on the list and so, it’s anyone’s guess who the teens voted for. But the reason I’m most grateful for having been nominated is that it’s given me the opportunity to come out to Ontario and to visit all these great schools and to participate in the Festival of Trees.

Tomorrow is a rare day off and then it’s more readings on Thursday, which I will report back to you on over the weekend.

And now, it’s time to get ready for the Canucks/Predators Playoff game. These damn Canucks seem to want to give me a heart attack or something. I sincerely hope we’re not headed to another game seven situation here again. I don’t know if I could take it.

Oh, and hey, it looks like the THOR movie has gotten some great reviews. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to see this one (though I am a sucker for superhero movies). Now, though, it looks like I’ll have to get out to the theatres this weekend. Let me know if you get to see it and what you thought.

And last but not least, here are the promised pictures from my readings from Gretna, Nebraska. Kari Bulgrin sent them to me (TWICE! - the first set having gotten lost somewhere in cyberspace), so thank you, Kari.

Posted by Don Calame on 5.3.11 at 11:32 am in Prattlings. (1) Comments