Encouraging Prisoners to Communicate

The SIWC, the Surrey International Writers' Conference, is one of the best in the world. Rising from humble beginnings at a local high school, it now packs the Sheraton Guildford, Surrey's largest hotel.

It was writer Ed Griffin, a former Catholic priest, who established this conference. He also started the Surrey Creative Writing Diploma Program. A priest of writing rather than the church, Ed loves encouraging other writers. He still teaches writing classes, and continues as the valued founding member of the Rainwriters.

Ed also goes regularly to Matsqui Institution to encourage prisoners to communicate their stories through the written word. Before that, he worked with prisoner writers in Wisconsin. His dedication has made a positive difference for many incarcerated men.

Ed gets a lot of satisfaction from empowering writers to record their stories. Men in jail who rise to his challenge and learn to write inspire him too: after Ed's prison visits, he recently told an interviewer for Spotlight on the Arts, he goes home and "writes up a storm."

Several local writers have joined Ed on his prison teaching visits to Matsqui. World-renowned novelist Diana Gabaldon, a regular at the SIWC, now accompanies Ed on a prison visit each October while she is in town for the conference.

Ed has just completed yet another writer-friendly initiative. He's established an education bursary for prisoners through the John Howard Society. Education, he says, is a proven way out of crime. This bursary fund is still accepting donations. For more information about The Ed Griffin Educational Bursary, check this link.

Remembering Dad's New Technologies

Photo, left: Kerosene lantern (commons.wikimedia.org)


I was in my late thirties when I sat beside my dying father. As he lay in his hospital bed, he looked back and thought about things he remembered. Listening to him reminisce about the changes he'd seen in his long life was something I found familiar and comforting.

"As a child," he told me, "I walked barefoot behind the plough and oxen. "Now," (there was awe in his voice though the news was more than twenty years old at the time), "we've put men on the moon."An immigrant farmer from Sweden, my grandfather was a technology enthusiast who kept his radio tuned to CBC.

When I was a teen, Dad was the one with the transistor. His tiny radio sat on his bedside table when he lay on his bed, as he often did, reading about the ancients. His radio too was tuned to the CBC; to my annoyance, he never failed to listen to the newscasts.

In 1969, we watched the moonwalk with our neighbours; we had no TV at homw. But we did have electricity and running water. Until I was eight we lived on a prairie farm. Our heat came from wood and coal-burning stoves, and we carried water.

Our light came from a variety of kerosene lamps. Dad came home one day with a noisy sputtering gas lamp; we oohed and aahed when we saw how dim it made the light thrown by our biggest kerosene lamp.

I came home for Christmas one year to find that Dad had acquired new radiant kerosene heater. Taking it into my room at night, I reveled in the heat thrown by the red-hot dome-shaped element. On the down side, when heater kicked in and the element glowed against the silver reflector panels, the room was nearly as bright as day.

Oh, the joy of going to bed without the necessity of pushing my feet down into the icy reaches of the sheets, the luxury of not trying to sleep in the same position so no body part would have to touch bedding that I had not already shivered into warmth.

Best of all, to rise in the morning to a room already warm was extraordinary luxury. Yet, though the climate here is much warmer than there, and though now we use a toasty down-filled duvet in winter, I still sleep best in a cold bedroom.

Double Bluff

Double Bluff Park,
Whidbey Island,
Washington
October 2010



Double Bluff. It's also something you do in a card game. And it's a lovely name for a story.

The day I visited was cold and windy. I spoke to a young surfer in a wetsuit. He smelled like marijuana. I asked him for directions to the Cottages at Hedgebrook, but he was from Tacoma; he didn't know the island very well. He said he had come to meet his friend and surf.

"I brought this bad weather," he said. "I feel guilty. The surfing conditions were perfect till I arrived."

Long thin line of houses along the coast. Tsunami evacuation route signs along the road. Wind and waves. There has to be a story here.

Probably that was what Agatha Christie was thinking when she published The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930.

Aceepted by the Writer's Studio at SFU

It's a thrill and an honour, and I'm really excited. I've been accepted into the Writer's Studio at SFU and I couldn't be more pleased.

On the other hand, I now have to finish my manuscript, and that's scary. What if I can't finish it? What if it's not good enough?

What if I do manage to finish it, and publish it, and then everyone hates it?

In a similar vein, the inner voices chorus away, trying to intimidate me. Well, it won't work. Not this time.

This time I'm fighting back. Quiet, editor! I have to finish a manuscript before it needs to be edited. That's when I'll call on you, and not before.

Quiet, Inner Critic! You can't criticize what hasn't been written yet. That comes later. Lie down, now. Go back to sleep.

"Get over it," says another part. "Writers write and people read what they write. After all, isn't the whole purpose of getting published so that people can read what you write?"

But then, fear isn't a rational thing. Still, it can be faced up to. I intend to conquer it.

Changing the Story

"You should write a mystery," my daughter advised, "you read so many of them." But somehow, I got started on a fantasy. And bogged down.

Then yesterday I got a new lease on story, found myself writing about two real and present characters that came out of the woodwork. I thought they would be peripheral to my story -- spear carriers, so to speak.

But I'm beginning to realize that one of these may, in fact, turn out to be the main protagonist.

Follow the story, follow where it leads. In the end, I may have a mystery and the fantasy part may just get cut.

But that's all okay. The only rule is to finish the 50,000 words in the time allocated, the month of November.

I'm catching up, too. I think I've survived week two. Nearly a quarter of the way through the 50,000 word count, and I have two weeks to go. I'll just have to do the rest in double time.

The real meaning of a plugged nickel

It's not worth a plugged nickel. So went a saying that has now fallen out of use. Apparently my idea of a plugged nickel as one with a hole though it (and my brother had the same idea) was wrong.

According the The Phrase Finder, there was a time when people made holes in coins and filled them with cheaper metals.

Sounds like a labour-intensive kind of counterfeiting, especially when it must have been obvious that a coin had been plugged...

Each era brings its own scams, I guess.

Thanks to other Nanowrimists on the path

One of the most liberating things about doing Nanowrimo so far is finding out that other writers -- even published ones -- have the same challenges as I do.

In Victoria, local writers are meeting at The Black Stilt Coffee Lounge to scribble away together. I like that place -- my daughter took me there when she was studying at UVic. Folksingers then, like in the sixties. Now I imagine a bunch of writers hunched over netbooks not notebooks, coffee within easy reach. Times and technologies change, but the writing process -- not so much.

I loved reading about the Folly files of John Green. Knowing about them gives me permission to carry on with the story I'm writing, even knowing already that it's destined for my own Folly file. Even so, I feel chuffed to think that this opus can count as one of those early novels that most writers have written. Early novels in drawers I mean, the ones that never see the light of day. So thanks, John, for your part in liberating my words.

Another writer whose pep talk I really appreciated was Lindsey Grant of Oakland. Now there's a scribbler who sees inside the minds of fellow writers, to where the temptation to quit looms large in Week Two. I definitely had a case of the Week Twos, but just as definitely, I'm going to make it to week three, and then week four and the triumphant end. Thanks, Lindsey!

Through the slogging, blogging about Nanowrimo is another lash to keep me going. If I've promised to finish, I must and will deliver; the eyes of the blog watchers are watching me!