Actually two books are being launched at Radha Yoga (728 Main St.) tonight...The Inner Life of Asanas by Swami Lalitananda; the best of hidden language hatha yoga from ascent magazine and The Glass Seed; the fragile beauty of heart, mind and memory by Eileen Delehanty Pearkes. Free admission. appetizers, and live music tonight (Nov. 28) at 7 p. m.
For anyone who'd like to know more about the issues, here's a link to a good editorial piece that is relatively evenhanded (imo)...the author chastizes both sides but ultimately comes out in favour of the writers here
Radha Yoga and Eatery is a gorgeous venue and quite unexpected. It's on the border of one of the tougher parts of town and located on 2nd floor of a building that's been there since 1907, a very old building for Vancouver. It doesn't seem all that promising as you're going up the two flights of stairs but once you arrive, there's a long,old fashioned wooden bar, old brick walls, ceiling fans, lots of tables and chairs, and a very warm environment.
Before the proceedings started, we had a Thai Butternut Squash soup with home made crackers for the panelists and the partners who got there a little early. Attendees started arriving pretty quickly, even before the doors officially opened. We sold 35 advance tickets and we probably had about 10 people get tickets at the door.
The moderator, kc dyer, had a demanding task given how the panel's eclecticism and it turned out well. I always think that if people are saying the evening should have been longer (which they did) then you've had a successful event.
Here's what I remember of the content...anybody who cares to dispute or contradict, please do...
Ian Verchere started the night with a discussion of games and some of the frustrations of dealing with people who don't understand the technology. He recounted a story about having to apply a colour to some object in a game where the 'bosses' wanted to choose a pantone colour for it when all he had available were 16 screen colours (one of which was transparent and not a colour at all). He also gave us his latest idea for a game story. It's an alternate history. "What if a Chinese explorer come to North America first and it had been colonized from west to east?" It's one of those moments when the audience gets silent and you can feel the excitement.
Shari Ulrich talked about writing songs for performance and film as well as scoring films. She pulled together some of the conversational threads on copyright, owning ideas, and the demands on writers that popped up throughout the evening. Ulrich provided some reality-based answers to questions about preventing people from stealing your work. The consensus between her and the other panelists is that your idea matters less than getting it produced, published, written, distributed, etc. Sidebar: I had the most pushback about including a songwriter on the panel. Ironically, it was the songwriter who drew the most questions from the audience.
Sue Thomas, our guest from the UK and a new media expert, made a big impact when she told us about how her students worked with Penguin Books last year to create a wiki novel. The idea was that Penguin Books would get readers from around the world to sign up and collectively write a novel using a wiki. As I recall, about 1000 people participated and wrote over 80,000 words with a lot of thrills and chills for the students trying to manage the project along with the Penguin editors. Thomas also discussed her work in transliteracy and some her latest writing on cyberspace and nature.
Mira Sundara Rajan was our expert on intellectual property law. She talked about copyright in general and something I'd never heard of before, moral rights. Apparently, as writers (and other creative folks too) we have a moral right to our work. It's recognized in all countries except the US. Sundara Rajan also recounted a story about an Indian poet who was exiled from British India and later lauded for his work. Eventually his copyright was nationalized and given as a gift to the people of India. The good thing about the story is that everyone has access to his work. The dark side of this gift is that people change his work, fail to attribute his work, and sometimes misattibute work with the consequence that it can be difficult to figure what he actually wrote. Luckily, his family has an oral tradition where his work has been passed on from one generation to the next.
Kaare Andrews talked about the realities associated with working on comic books where the property has been created and developed by someone else and you're brought it on contract to write the next issue. It sounded like technical writing except Andrews had worked on the Matrix comics, Amazing Spiderman, Ultimate X-Men and other high profile properties. He' also commented about having worked in film and the contrast between that and working on a tv pilot. Writers are treated very differently in those various sectors.
There was more and if I have a chance I'll see about writing it up.
Writing.wise is done...we had a seamlessly fabulous panel...there was a diverse crowd of interested writers that included technical writers, song writers, a poet, a medical writer, an editor and those are just the ones I recognized....we had about 45 people in the audience and there was ample opportunity to talk to the panelists individually...the moderator, kc dyer, kept the proceedings at a lively pace...I'll get back with more details about what went on but that will come after I've caught up....
That's it, advance registration is closed. We do have tickets at the door and I hope to see you there.
Logistics
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Radha Yoga and Eatery (728 Main St., yoga on the edge and
above the Brickhouse Bar)…
Door opens at 6:30 pm, and the event starts at 7 pm.
Tickets are $15/$20
I keep forgetting to mention that there is a cutoff for getting tickets and it's tonight...tickets can be purchased here Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the Register Now button.
It's possible Writing.wise will sell out...we have about 40 tickets left...if you're hoping to get tickets at the door, you might want to reconsider..tickets here
I've been getting some interesting questions; here are some answers:
- yes, the panelists will be there live...this is not a video presentation....
- Radha is more than a yoga studio...
- they have a liquor licence and offer wine and beer...plus there will be light food available to order...
- there is parking near the building...
- 728 Main St. is between Georgia and Union Streets on the east side of Main...it's very close to the Georgia St. viaduct exits from downtown...
- the building dates from 1907 and Radha is on the 2nd floor....
When/Where
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Radha Yoga and Eatery (728 Main St., yoga on the edge and
above the Brickhouse Bar)…
Door opens at 6:30 pm, and the event starts at 7 pm.
Tickets are $15/$20
Right this minute (Thurs., Nov. 8 at 1:48 pm) we're slightly over 30% sold and as anyone who's ever organized something in Vancouver knows, most of your tickets are sold in the last few days. So, we're on target. Writing.wise has been listed in the Georgia Straight as a Literary Event on p. 72 and in the West Ender under the Words category on p, 29 Here's the latest information about the event and about how to purchase tickets:
Writing.wise—an evening event for writers of every stripe on Tuesday, November 13, 2007.
Anybody engaged in the craft of writing today whether a novelist, technical writer, song writer, screenwriter, copywriter, playwright, publisher, medical writer, short story writer, comic book writer, editor, academic writer, marketing communications writer, science writer or otherwise is taking part in a revolution, whether they like it or not.
Panelists such as
· Kaare Andrews (writer of the Incredible Hulk, Amazing Spider-Man, and other comics),
· Sue Thomas (a UK expert on new media who has the inside story on the Penguin wiki novel project and is in Vancouver for one night only),
· Shari Ulrich (a songwriter and musician who’s in the BC Entertainment Hall of Fame)
· Ian Verchere (a founder of Radical Entertainment, and developer of over 30 games)
· Mira Sundara Rajan (an expert on Intellectual Property Law and author of Creativity and Copyright)
· with moderator, kc dyer (author of four contemporary and historical young adult novels)
will look at today’s writing scene where books seem old
fashioned, new media doesn’t pay (e.g. tv and movie writer’s strike in the US),
copyright is up for grabs, and writers who used to produce text only are now
expected to include visuals, animate them, and/or figure out how to use
techniques suitable for graphic novels, wikis, games, machinima, 2nd
Life, and more.
Logistics
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Radha Yoga and Eatery (728 Main St., yoga on the edge and above the Brickhouse Bar)…
Door opens at 6:30 pm, and the event starts at 7 pm.
Tickets are $15/$20 and available here
The link is good but the Register Now button for the Writing.wise event is on the far right of the screen...if you have a monitor like mine, you'll have to scroll horizontally...I'm checking to see if we can change that...meanwhile, scroll to the right if you want to register for Writing.wise now
Heather Haley is a poet who explores tough (a lot of the time) ideas in poetry that's both traditional and nontraditional. She's experimented with video poetry, recorded spoken word CDs, integrated music (she's also a musician) into her work, had he poetry books published, and, now, she's offering poetry workshops for children and adults.
With "Word Games," Heather gets children to play with language. Getting them to vocalize sounds and words and mash up text so writing a poem seems like fun, not work. "Sideways; Alternatives to print" is her workshop for adults. She's offering a tour of the various means of getting your poetry out there today. In the first session, she contextualizes the current environment with examples from her own work and in the subsequent session coaches you on how to adapt your poetry to performance (with or without music), audio, video, and/or Flash treatments.
Full Disclosure: I've known Heather for years. We met when I was on the board for Edgewise Electrolit Centre, an organization she founded to promote poetry in various media outside traditional publishing means.
Some of her latest poetry is featured here: Habitat on About.com and her website is here:Heather Haley
