Dirty Laundry

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