Assaulted Women's Helpline. Gala Fundraiser. April 15, 2011

Someone else will have a better photograph of me at the fundraiser for the Assaulted Women's Helpline last night, but I couldn't resist experimenting. Mirror image with Flash!

It was a fantastic evening! Well attended with good  speeches, entertainment, food and an interesting silent auction as well as an exciting live auction. It was gratifying to know that this necessary service will continue with the help of all its donors and friends.

Sandra Diaz read a very moving poem with three words...'someone you know'...that repeated throughout the poem poignantly created images of women who experience abuse as our friends, neighbours, colleagues, etc.  Too true and a reminder this 24 hour crisis line for assaulted women is an essential service.Sandra Diaz, Rebecca Ng and the women who organized this event are to be congratulated. As is Huong Pham who is the Executive Director of the AWHL.

SPRING DAY. TORONTO

It's beginning to feel like spring!

Out and About in Toronto.

The escalator at the Lawrence Station was working in both directions on Sunday.It must be the longest one in the TTC system and it is often being repaired in one direction for what seems like weeks at a time.

Outside the AGO, a piece of Henry Moore sculpture.

Artists enjoying the Art Gallery of Ontario. April, 2011.

This afternoon, I went to the Paterson Ewen exhibition at the AGO with my niece, who is an artist, and one of her friends who is also in the aets, One can't take photographs within the gallery, except for this magnificent area,

ILE D'OR. A Review.

Reviewed by Eric McMillan in Town Crier newspapers, Toronto, Sept. 2010

http://www.editoreric.com/torontoreads/TR201007.html

Ile D’Or

Mary Lou Dickinson

Novel, 2010

Inanna Publications, trade paperback $22.95

Old-fashioned (in a good way) Canadian story Simple story. Two 40-something Quebec natives who have been living in Toronto separately return to their northern hometown of Ile D’Or. In the mining town they meet former friends and remnants of families. They talk a lot, try a few tentative flings, eventually leave. Complex story. Emotionally. Especially as they hook up romantically with two others of their generation who never left town. All four have pasts — ghosts of dead ex-lovers, marriages on the rocks, family mysteries, and professional doubts — which twist together during the visit.


The most important character though may be Ile D’Or itself, a grasping town built on the greed for gold, on a rough-hewn individualist morality, and on the division between the English and French. Our protagonists were born in the hard-scrabble 1930s, raised into the narrow-minded 1950s and are returning to their roots in 1980, shortly after the first Quebec referendum, which rejected the separatist option. In many ways Ile D’Or is a far different world now from the one they grew up in, but many of the problems that drove away the young people remain and now in approaching middle age they have to face them.


Toronto writer May Lou Dickinson, herself a former Quebec northerner, somehow keeps all these emotional, social and political threads straight to weave an involving story of ordinary people figuring each other out. There’s something very Canadian in the content with its characters’ experiences in snow-driven cabins, with horses stuck in swamps, and on frozen lakes — the northern survival theme should please our literary theorists. But the unadorned, earnest style is also very much of this country’s past. The writing is quite direct and accomplished, especially given that this is the first novel for the 70-something author. Perhaps it’s a little old-fashioned — but old-fashioned in the way readers like, telling a complicated story simply and effectively.

And every now and then Dickinson’s characters throw in an explicit but honest sexual reference (to throw off anyone who’s dwelling too much on the author’s age). If I have any disappointment with the novel, it’s that the story doesn’t come to any great climax. Certain revelations are made. Some relationships are resolved. Conclusions are reached. But life goes on in the town and the protagonists continue to muddle through their messy lives. But that too may be very Canadian. Nothing overly dramatic, nothing bigger than life. Our modest lives as they are.

Farzana Doctor. Six Metres of Pavement.

Six Metres of Pavement . Published by Dundurn. Spring 2011.

I have just finished reading Farzana Doctor's second novel and highly recommend it. Follow Ismail and Celia gradually getting to know each other, crossing the boundaries of their own losses and tragedies to sharing with each other. Moving on into new mysteries. Fatima, a young bisexual woman, whom ismail meets at a writing group, becomes central also as she deals with her parents rejection, where Ismail finds himself somehow involved with this situation in helping her. Set in downtown neighbourhoods of Toronto, the city, as well as the characters, spring to life on the pages of this intriguing and moving novel.

NICOLE GOMBAY'S new book on an Inuit community's economy

The following is a book published recently by my friend, Nicole Gombay. You may purchase it through the publisher or order it at your favourite bookstore.

Gombay, Nicole. Making a Living: Place, Food, and Economy in an Inuit Community. Saskatoon, Purich Publishing Ltd., Dec. 15, 2010.
www.purichpublishing.com

Although food is vital to our daily lives, we tend to be unaware of the particulars of where it came from and how it was produced. We simply go to the market and buy what we need in neatly packaged containers. But what was required to get that food there in the first place? In some societies obtaining food is not merely a matter of going to market. Instead it involves the active participation of community members in its harvesting, distributing, and sharing so that ideally no one goes without. Such is the case of many Indigenous communities, including Puvirnituq, the Inuit settlement in Northern Quebec that is the setting for this book.

Until recently, most residents of this Arctic village made their living off the land. Successful hunting, fishing, trapping and gathering, so vital to people's survival, were underpinned by the expectation that food should be shared. As the Inuit were in some cases drawn and in others forced to move into settlements, they have had to confront how to accommodate their belief in sharing to the demands of a market economy. Rooted in phenomenological engagements with place, and using the commoditization of country foods harvested from the local environment as a vehicle, the author documents the experiences of an Inuit community as it strives to retain the values rooted in life on the land while adjusting to the realities of life in settlements.

In this thoughtful and well-researched book, the author documents her experiences and personal reactions while living in Puvirnituq. Quoting local residents and drawing upon academic literature, she explores how some Inuit are experiencing the inclusion of the market into their economy of sharing. While the subject of the study is the Inuit community of Puvirnituq, the issues the author addresses are equally applicable to many Indigenous communities as they wrestle with how to incorporate the workings of a monetized economy into their own notions of how to operate as a society. In the process, they are forging new ways of making a living even as they endeavor to maintain long-standing practices. This book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the struggles of maintaining local values in the face of market forces.

Educated in Canada, Nicole Gombay teaches Geography at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

$33.00, 232 pages, 2 maps, 17 photos, index, bibliography, paper, 6 x 9, winter 2010 ISBN 978-1895830-590