Mimi Power and Magnifico: an author's blog

An Unnatural Choice by Mary Hodder Ross "Adoption is two sides of a single coin. One side is the gift. The other is sacrifice."  -- from An Unnatural Choice by Mary Hodder Ross What we believe we are meant to be is not always what we become. Some lives turn course on a dime  into a defining story that begins with a single, heartrending decision. For Mary Hodder Ross that turn was an unplanned pregnancy at the age of 21.  Born and raised in a small town in Newfoundland, Ross was "child number five" of six. She would be the first in her family to go to university.  It was in her final semester before graduating as an English honours student from Memorial University that Ross learned she was pregnant. She crossed the stage at convocation without the sense of elation and possibility of those around her, but silently grateful for the gown that hid her growing secret. For the first 22 weeks of her pregnancy, Ross "...led a double-life, th...

“The game of life has been enjoyable and rewarding, and I have competed to the best of my ability.”—from The Game of Life by Rosalys Buckles Thorndyke Wilson A long life, as Rosalys “Rosie” Buckles Thorndike Wilson looks back upon it, is like a basketball game. It’s played in four quarters (a sport she learned growing up in rural Indiana, where all you needed was a was a hoop on a wall and a ball that had some bounce) with a little time-out in between. Rosie’s first quarter started out on a small, 20-acre farm near Etna, Indiana. Baths were taken once-a-week in a galvanized tub in front of the kitchen wood stove. There were the requisite chores including chasing down dinner (which, on a fried chicken night, involved catching and decapitating a hen before dipping it quickly in boiling water and then plucking off all its feathers). There was a pony named “Beauty”; “Fluffy” the long-haired cat; “Spot” the rat terrier; “Fuzzy” the baby raccoon and “Duke” a horse retired by the U.S...

“What I want now is to trust God to bring me through the fire and know that what doesn’t kill me makes me mad, and what makes me mad keeps me moving, and if I’m moving, I’m going to do so with purpose and effectiveness…” from  Something is Always on Fire: My Life so Far by Measha Brueggergosman (c. 2017) A world-class soprano’s highs are very high indeed. Singing for The Queen. Performing the prayer hymn at the 2010 Olympics. Her breathtaking voice and charismatic personality have made Measha Brueggergosman a star many times over. But then there are the lows that should be out of register, except that they are not. The end of her marriage. Stillborn twins. Open-heart surgery. And the middle range, that is, daily life. Struggling to fasten the car seat buckles of her two young sons. Never ending bills to pay. The daily exhaustion of balancing family and career. The sandwich that “doesn’t make itself while you binge-watch Scandal. ” “Yes, I may create the illusion that...

If life and career proceeded in a steady upwards trajectory, fuelled by energy alone, leading oneself first would be little more than putting one foot after the other. But they are not in tandem, and as we advance in our careers, so too do our parents advance in years, our families grow and change and our life choices resolve to possibly take us far from home and into new, uncharted territory. As an internationally recognized motivational speaker, Michelle Ray has been telling stories and sharing the wisdom of a career that’s had its share of ups and downs, but has rarely been without forward momentum for long. She graduated from university in a recession—when jobs were thin on the ground. Some thirty years on, Ray has collected her thoughts in Lead Yourself First: Indispensable Lessons in Business and in Life. Self-motivated, self-employed and self-driven to help others, she challenges her readers and listeners to apply leadership where it matters most—their own lives. W...

Of English literature’s romantic heroes, it's hard to find one more disconsolate than Edward Fairfax Rochester. In Sarah Shoemaker’s re-imagining of Mr. Rochester , we can better see why. Edward’s mother dies giving birth to him, his older brother is a menacing tyrant, his father a manipulating merchant with little feeling for his second son. Edward’s ties to home are severed at an early age, his closest friendships end in tragedy, his torturous marriage in Jamaica is the result of a business scheme concocted by his father when Edward was but a boy. And we thought Jane Eyre had a grim youth. How bitterness takes root and drives a good man to grievous wrongs is meticulously unravelled in Mr. Rochester. In this comes a soul-searching empathy for the depths of Edward’s feelings for Jane (herself hardly a ray of sunshine amongst literature’s most enduring heroines).  There are two sides to every couple’s story . At long last, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre has a worthy...

Happiness is a funny thing. If you’re comedienne Paula Poundstone, searching for it is even funnier. In the The Totally Unscientific Study of the Search for Human Happiness, Poundstone cleans out the junk drawer; learns how to email and taekwondoes herself down a dress size. She picks up a nifty nickname—“Sugar Push”—by  taking swing dancing lessons, hugs every audience member after a live taping of NPR’s “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!”; talks to lizards while backpacking with her oldest daughter in the Angeles National Forest; spends a day petting her 16 cats and another watching mostly horrible movies with her three kids. In the “get positive” experiment, Poundstone sticks motivational sayings in eye-catching places, but only the ones she can’t argue. Fear of scraping off the underside of the Lamborghini she rents for a day puts a damper on its happiness-effect. Volunteering at a senior’s home is “balou-ful”, but bittersweet. In the meantime, her kids grow, laugh and talk ...

One afternoon a few years ago, two friends and I sat on my porch and mourned the gradual loss, over the years, of our nicer selves. “Where has she gone?” we each wondered. Reluctantly, we came to the conclusion that our “niceness”—our mercy—had simply worn down—an inevitable by-product of aging. We are not the only ones lamenting our winnowing of mercy. Anne Lamott does, too. Enough to write a book about it. There is hope, yet. We are not so far gone, my friends and I, that we have become the dogs in the famous New Yorker cartoon Lamott recalls in Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy : “It’s not enough that we succeed. Cats must also fail.” What if we are just out of practice? And, age aside, what if we, as a society, are all a little rusty on the mercy front? “Mercy, grace, forgiveness and compassion are synonyms” writes Lamott.  “And when we practise mercy, it is restored to us." And what if mercy is not a constant of character, some have it, some don’t, but retriev...

In the diminishing light of a winter evening thick with frost, a dark-coated stranger arrives in an Irish town. His business card presents him as Dr. Vladimir Dragan, Healer and Sex Therapist. No one checks his references. “Dr. Vlad” claims “his part of the world” to be Montenegro. He does not say Bosnia. He does not say Sarajevo. If he had, the good people of Cloonaila might have been more alert. More inclined to inquire. “Tis an honour to have you Sir,” says Dara, from behind the bar in the town pub. In this, he is mistaken. The doctor is careful; the village hospitable. Before long, he has established a place for himself. He will wait until they come to him. And they do. For Fidelma McBride, who comes too close, entwining herself in an affair where few questions are asked, the consequences will be harrowing when the doctor’s true history is revealed. Estranged from her husband, self-exiled from Cloonaila, Fidelma becomes one of the people she only read of in the pap...

To volunteer without being asked; to discriminate only for character, never for colour; to be truthful when the answer will cause hurt…such are the everyday braveries familiar to Mary North when war is declared on the third of September, 1939. And they are more than enough to propel her into action, service, love and tragedy in Chris Cleave’s Everyone Brave is Forgiven . To be brave, it helps very much to have brave friends watching over you. In this, Mary and Alistair Heath, separated by an ocean, are equally fortunate. For Mary, there is Hilda to jostle her into the ambulance corps: “Why wander through your thoughts,” says Hilda, “when you could drive through them quite recklessly, with sirens? The worst that could happen is that we might help someone.” For Alistair, requisitioned to the “unpromising rock” of Malta, there is Simonson, a fellow captain (and a character inspired by Cleave’s grandfather who served on Malta in the Second World War). Half-starved and under siege,...

Let me set this up for you. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck does not mean you don’t give a f*ck about anything (what would be the point of that?), it means you have to choose what to give a f*ck about. “The point,” says author Mark Manson, isn’t to get away from all the sh*t. The point is to find the sh*t that you enjoy dealing with.” Think of Manson as that foul-mouthed friend who tells you to get your sh*t together, by telling you to get your sh*t together. Literally. The logic behind this "counterintuitive approach to living a good life"  is an endless series of decisions as to “which problem is better.” Choosing well, based on your values, is a kind of trading up of problems, where deciding what to care about, and taking action, high-grades your situation for the better. Problems in life are inevitable, but your quality of life, says Manson, “is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.” That means losing the sense of entitlement, and taking re...

As the “Amazing Grace” sets sail for a voyage to the South Seas, Torre DeRoche looks down and contemplates one of her toenails. It bears a remnant fleck of nail polish, a last shred of her former life as a two-feet-firmly-on-terra-firma graphic artist from Australia about to embark upon a life at sea. Until this point, DeRoche’s greatest adventure has been to leave her big, boisterous family in Australia for what was meant to be a three hour tour—whoops-year—in San Francisco. But when Torre meets Ivan, an Argentinean IT project manager with an unwavering dream of sailing the South Pacific, her best laid plans go through the proverbial porthole. Soon enough, DeRoche takes the plunge, with anxiety, humour and a darn-good putty-knife. Some days are better than others en route to French Polynesia. Postcard sunsets and unspoiled tropical islands are interspersed by knocking about in squalls, seasickness so severe it has Torre bunk-ridden for days or bailing a bilge that fills fas...

“Look, only a few people get to die peacefully in their sleep after a wonderful life. So that’s like not making the football team. There’s lots of things you don’t get to have. That’s probably one of them. Thank God, I consider myself lucky that I live after anesthetic. Can you imagine those days? ‘Sit down. Tuesday, we’re taking off your arm.’” --Albert Brooks in Judd Apatow's Sick in the Head Let’s be smart about this. You could spend the next year reading through the bestseller list on anger management, business, collaboration, creativity, living for the moment, marriage, mentorship, parenting, perseverance, rejection, self-help and the spiritual feeling that comes from writing. Or, you could find all that and more in Judd Apatow’s Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy . First released in 2015, this collection of conversations had its origins in the early 80s, when 15-year-old Apatow, a self-described “comedy geek”,  was interviewing up-and-coming c...

“Look, only a few people get to die peacefully in their sleep after a wonderful life. So that’s like not making the football team. There’s lots of things you don’t get to have. That’s probably one of them. Thank God, I consider myself lucky that I live after anesthetic. Can you imagine those days? ‘Sit down. Tuesday, we’re taking off your arm.’” --Albert Brooks in Judd Apatow's Sick in the Head Let’s be smart about this. You could spend the next year reading through the bestseller list on anger management, business, collaboration, creativity, living for the moment, marriage, mentorship, parenting, perseverance, rejection, self-help and the spiritual feeling that comes from writing. Or, you could find all that and more in Judd Apatow’s Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy . First released in 2015, this collection of conversations had its origins in the early 80s, when 15-year-old Apatow, a self-described “comedy geek”,  was interviewing up-and-coming co...

"I have the American dream — I had a dream of becoming a writer! I was little — not rich, or not anything really, but I did have this hope and faith and it kind of has come true for me. So I wouldn't say the American dream is all hokum. Not in my case, at least." —John Updike* “Writer’s and Company” recently aired a n encore presentation of Eleanor Wachtel’s 1996 interview with John Updike . Feeling remiss in never having read even one of Updike’s 60 books — two of them Pulitzer Prize-winners — I went in search of Rabbit, Run . I found Terrorist instead. Inside 18-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mully, something terrible is churning. On the surface, he is a high school senior. A solid student. He runs track every spring. And wears a crisp, white, buttoned up shirt every day that does nothing to conceal the contempt he feels for his classmates at Central High School in New Prospect, New Jersey. Through the lens of detachment, Ahmad observes—and is offended at...

“‘When my great-grandparents die, one right after the other, I’m little and can’t figure it out. Where did people go? ‘How can they just disappear?’ I asked my mother. ‘They don’t,’ she said. ‘They’re in you. Every generation that precedes you. Sometimes in ways you don’t even know. It could be anything, darling. A turn of phrase. Not liking nutmeg. People don’t disappear.   Look how you hold your pinky.’ I looked down. ‘It’s just like Poppy!’ ‘Exactly.’”   —from Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me by Patricia Volk Once upon a time in Manhattan, a daughter is born to an “outrageously” beautiful mother. When she is 10 years old, the daughter, Patricia Volk, discovers a book so compelling she feigns a sore throat to stay home from school and finish reading it. But really, there is no rush. She will come back to it, time and again, to understand that it is possible to be someone other than the ideal of Audrey, her beloved, complex and beautiful mo...

“‘Follow me,’ he said and I trailed him down the main hallway, past a row of dark offices. As on the day before I longed to linger over the books lining the walls. My eye caught some thrillingly familiar names, like Pearl Buck and Langston Hughes, and some intriguingly foreign ones, like Ngaio Marsh, and my stomach began to flutter in the way it had on childhood trips to our local library: so many books, each enticing in its own specific way, and all mine for the taking. ‘Wow,’ I said, almost involuntarily. James stopped and turned. “I know,” he said with a real smile. ‘I’ve been here six years and I still feel that way.’  —from My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff Everywhere else in the world, it is 1996. But in “The Agency”, a pseudonym for New York’s “oldest and most storied” literary agency, at least a couple of decades seem to have gone by unnoticed. Books line wood-panelled walls, reading lamps spotlight desktops (the flat, wooden kind upon which you put stuff othe...

Merry Christmas everyone! My gift to you and your family is A Power Christmas Special (6-10 year-olds especially), illustrated by Marc Mongeau--where Mimi and her family find all the chaos the season has to offer. Broken gingerbread, the TV log fireplace, a Wise Man behind the wheel, elves with their own trading cards and a very hungry Santa Claus... It's free to download from the iBooks store right here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/a-power-christmas-special/id940288695?mt=11 If you don't have an iPad, you can link to the PDF version from here.  Go ahead, give it a try! I hope you enjoy it. It was fun to write. I think I figured out about half the story standing in a two-hour line-up to get a balloon poodle made at a Santa's Breakfast two years ago. Anyway, you can let me know what you think anytime at victorianunuk "at" telus "dot" net or on twitter @victorianunuk Merry Christmas, and remember, "It's not what Santa can...

If you've ever wondered why "Native people just can't get over it" or what the fuss is about faux headdresses at folk festivals, well, allow Darrell Dennis to explain. Dennis is an original--and not just in the First Nations sense of the word. An actor, comedian, playwright, screenwriter, radio host, and member of the Shushwap Nation in British Columbia, Dennis is also the author of Peace Pipe Dreams: The Truth About Lies About Indians (Douglas & McIntyre, 2014). In busting through the myths and misconceptions surrounding First Nations people, Dennis leaves no stone unturned. Sports mascots, substance abuse statistics, the Christopher Columbus narrative, movies featuring the noble savage ("Always-Helps-The-White-Man"); movies featuring the nasty savage (think eat-your-heart-out Magua from "The Last of the Mohicans") are all ripe for a rethink. Then there's Canada as the ultimate "deadbeat dad" when it comes to honouring...

Friday, September 4, 2015 Stage and screen star, SCTV alumnus and Tony/Gemini/Emmy-winning actress, comedienne and now memoirist Andrea Martin has a few confessions to make. She hasn’t read The Goldfinch (she’s a little off books these days) she’d rather chat with telemarketers than write, and every two months she flies to Atlanta to get her hair done. She knits, likes using the F word, is pretty sure that she wasn’t a perfect mother, hates being called perky and nothing, but nothing, makes her laugh like a rumba-dancing dog in a pink tuxedo. Oh, and one more thing. Brace yourself. She. Is. Not. Canadian. She’s not Greek, either. And she’s not even a little bit Jewish (she’s just “good at it”). But take a few deep yoga breaths and let it go. Because it’s hard to be mad at “Canada’s favourite illegitimate child” for even a sentence or two of Andrea Martin’s Lady Parts . And why would you even want to be? After all, she’s been making us laugh for over 40 years. We practica...

In the digital age, could success be just a tweet or two away? Probably not. Take it from Aliza Licht, senior vice president of global communications at Donna Karan International, a clear career path, perseverance, and passion matter as much as they ever did. It’s just that how to make (or break) a career online (“killing it” works both ways) is now an essential part of understanding the wired world of work. Licht has plenty to draw upon in Leave Your Mark: Land Your Dream Job. Kill it in Your Career. Rock Social Media. It took a detour out of med school and into fashion, first as a magazine intern and eventually up to the executive suite, for Licht to find her own brand within a brand and build a following more than half-a-million strong. The author and creator of DKNY PR GIRL® knows from experience that no matter how sharp and snappy your tweets, it’s sustaining a start-up spirit that counts more. Going above and beyond (think spending your unpaid weekends sorting shoe inve...