Mimi Power and Magnifico: an author's blog

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...

“My elementary school was Lord Roberts in the west end of Vancouver. Its library was the place where I felt most like me.” —from the Foreword by Sarah Ellis in  The Library Book: A History of Service to British Columbia 150 years of anything would probably make a good book—so long as the research and writing are up to snuff. In 2011, the British Columbia Library Association marked its centennial, fittingly, with a book dedicated to the development of libraries over the past one-and-a-half centuries. Journalist and author Dave Obee was awarded the task, and the result is a visually engaging history appealing to anyone with a love of libraries and history. Explorers as far back as Simon Fraser brought books with them on their journeys, to stock the lending libraries of the Northwest Trading Company. British Columbia’s early libraries were established in saloons, hotels, news agents, in private collections, company reading rooms and a shelf or two of shop space. ...

“You go somewhere when you’re on the ice,”  Virgil said to me after one practice.  “It’s like watching you walk into a secret place  that no one else knows how to get to.” Hockey is the saving grace of young Saul Indian Horse’s life. Lost to his family and orphaned in his grandmother’s arms, eight-year-old Saul is discovered at an icy railroad stop in northern Ontario and stolen away to spend the next six years at St. Jerome’s Indian Residential School. “St. Jerome’s took all the light from my world,” Saul remembers. He saw children die of abuse or suicide, with whatever they had to take themselves away from hell on earth: a pitchfork; rocks to weigh down a dress in water; rope to swing from the rafters of a barn. Anything, even death, was better than the despair of suffering the school’s daily humiliations. It is a hockey ice rink, built at St. Jerome’s during Saul’s second winter, that saves him. In the years that follow, the crack of light o...

February 11, 2015 In his 1986 autobiography Is that it? Bob Geldof, the Irish rock musician and humanitarian, quotes Mother Theresa on giving. “When you give, give generously and without conditions,” said the Albanian nun known for her lifelong devotion to the poorest of the poor. But in organizational dynamics, it’s not that simple—an individual may be a giver, a matcher or a taker or a complex combination of the three. Their dominant tendency will not only shape their career, and the satisfaction they draw from it, it can also create a ripple effect throughout the organizations and the communities they serve. The giving that The Wharton School's Adam Grant studies is not primarily of the charitable kind, but it is no less generous. Grant’s givers may or may not be writing cheques to worthy causes, but they share a common aptitude and interest in supporting the well-being and fulfillment of others. In Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success , Grant descri...

November 11, 2014 “And you’d thank everyone for coming. We all raise a glass to Maya. Everyone goes home happy.” “So it’s basically a book party.” “Yeah, sure.”  Lambiase has never been to a book party. “I hate book parties,” A.J. says.  “But you run a bookstore,” Lambiase says. “It’s a problem,” A.J. admits. — from The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin Book parties aren’t the only thing A.J. Fikry hates. He is not fond of book blurbs, summer people, ghostwriters, children’s books (or children, for that matter), celebrity picturebooks, “…’postmodernisms, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism … and… this goes without saying, vampires’”. He does not like how much he drinks (that is, too much), or the frozen Vindaloo entrees and the loneliness that accompany them. And since his wife died, he has hated the work of being what he is, a bookseller on a small New England island. Despite his closely held list of pr...

"Solitary people, these book lovers.  I think it's swell that there are people you don't have to worry about  when you don't see them for a long time,  you don't have to wonder what they do, how they're getting along with themselves.  You just know that they're all right, and probably doing something they like."  -- from Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi Writer St. John Fox has a penchant for killing his heroines and the women in his life don't like it, not one bit. Nor are they terribly keen on each other. So it is that Mr. Fox's wife, Daphne, and his muse, Mary, each vie for his attention and affections while trying to avoid the inevitable losses that come with love. To Oyeyemi's great credit, their insightful discoveries touch upon habits, idiosyncrasies and dilemnas of all who seek love and understanding from those we care for the most. "The girl tried, several times, to give her love away, but her love would not...

"But wouldn't you want to live anyway?"  I asked, astonished by his vehemence.  "Don't you want to live for yourself?"  So asks 22-year-old Grace Winter of Mr. Preston, who sits beside her in an overcrowded lifeboat after the Princess Alexandra sinks in the Atlantic Ocean. It is 1914 and Grace finds herself, suddenly, both newlywed and widow, adrift and waiting for rescue in Charlotte Rogan's The Lifeboat . But when the hardtack is gone and the drinking water run dry, the days wear on with neither land nor salvation in sight. A strange and mysterious separation emerges between passengers with the will to live and lead, at any price, and those made weak--or noble--by their circumstances. This  menacing rift swells and dangerously divides the passengers from "the only person among us who knew anything about boats and currents and the boiling sea."  A tension of opposing forces builds to one of the few decisive acts tha...

June 22, 2014 Think of it, Margaret… Dark skin, a country upbringing-- you would be a curiosity on a visit, but beyond that,  you would never be accepted. -- from The Chief Factor's Daughter  by Vanessa Winn, Touchwood Editions , c. 2009 As Margaret Work fears herself rapidly approaching spinsterhood, her hopes for marriage and full acceptance into society begin to fade. Her Irish-Metis heritage is a source of insecurity she cannot overcome, despite a respectable social standing established by John Work, the family patriarch, as Chief Factor of the Hudson's Bay Company outpost in Fort Victoria.  "A courtship with her, she was painfully aware, would be a one-way passage for Mr. _____.  To marry her would also mean marrying the colony. She was born to the country, and to take her back to the Old World would be nearly unthinkable." Even in her admirers, Margaret detects a disconcerting tendency to scrutinize her features and suspects they...

May 26, 2014 If they could have seen their futures from childhood, Melanie Kupchinsky and Joanne Lipman might well have wondered how they might bear the worst of what fate had in store. Melanie, the daughter of two musical parents, would know tragedy from an early age. Her mother was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis before Melanie, the eldest of two girls, was five. Virtually housebound, Jean Kupchynsky was unable to attend her daughters’ music recitals and performances, and was often hospitalized for long periods of time. Years later, the mysterious disappearance of Melanie’s sister, Stephanie, at the age of 27, left a void in the small and already splintered family. It would be seven long years of not knowing before Stephanie’s fate was resolved, confirming a tragic end to a talented young life. Joanne would one day flee the basement of the World Trade Centre and watch the towers collapse from a few blocks away. Later, as a working mother, treatment for breast cancer wo...

May 1, 2014 Congratulations to Jhumpa Lahiri and all the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction 2014 finalists! "After she became a mother she told Subhash it made her love him more, knowing what he'd done."--from "The Lowland" by Jhumpa Lahiri — Victoria Miles (@victorianunuk) February 15, 2014

April 12, 2014 "..during a time of Depression, and drought and dust storms" Jeanine Stoddard takes her chances. On a horse named Smoky Joe that runs like a rocket, on an abandoned family farm in Texas and on a widowed man who may be her saving grace if she can only bring herself to say yes. Paulette Jiles' Stormy Weather tests her heroine's grit, determination and loyalties to the limits. A wise woman makes her own luck in hard times and Jeanine's instincts for what will be and what is worth having above all proves wise indeed.

May 1, 2014 Sooner or later almost every mere mortal meets their Waterloo in math. For Salman Khan, not the Bollywood-star, but a self-proclaimed math nerd and graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School, it was when he hit a wall tutoring his cousin in sixth grade math. Traditional coaching wasn't getting through, and Khan was troubled as to why his cousin (who was bright, engaged in school and had always done well in math) was even struggling with this particular unit in the first place. Not living in the same city, let alone the same state, was an obstacle quickly resolved when Khan realized that there could be more to Youtube than fluffy cat videos. An advocate of mastery learning over good-enough grades, Khan developed a digital age method of tutoring his cousin that quickly spread to include other family members and students who needed similar support. The roster of videos grew, as the blackboard of the Internet site is never erased, allowing students to mast...

If you haven't done more with kale than pass it over in the produce aisle; if you've never spatzkoched a chicken or assembled a ratatouille sub, or if things have just gotten so downright dirty between you and your stove that you just want to kick all four elements to the curb… you may be overdue for a taste of The Smitten Kitchen.  Based on her award-winning food blog, Deb Perelman's Smitten Kitchen is a down-to-earth place where there's never enough counter space, milk is measured by the "glug",  zucchini salad is the only solution for supper on a hot and humid New York night and a six-inch cake pan positively "brims with good intentions". Well, of course it does. Flat-roast a chicken in 40 minutes? Shave asparagus for pizza? Put peaches in pancakes? When the chemistry is right, it's right as Perelman proves one recipe after another. Take heart then, a boost from The Smitten Kitchen and you might just fall in love with yours ...

January 30, 2014 I actually meant round these up over Christmas, but I did more reading than writing over the holidays and it's taken until now to sit down for a really good gratitude moment. Just like in the days when I was writing Mimi Power , Daphne is in the bath and the kitchen table is a quiet place to be. Apart from me and my laptop, the kitchen table is the collecting place a sprawl of sparkle pens, a paper fortune-teller, a silvery blue Knot Genie , a Klutz kit for making Clay Charms, a Cursive Writing exercise book and a Grade 4 agenda with a reminder in it to bring home spelling words for practice tomorrow. There are also a few stuffies on the surrounding bench backs, some coloured stamp pads for fingerprint art and six little ceramic animals on the windowsill--part of my mother's collection from boxes of Red Rose tea thirty-odd years ago. This would be a light load for our dinner table/craft station/homework centre. Stuff moves around, but it never really ...

January 20, 2014 You can double-click on this image to read the cute review.

January 6, 2014 Being a finalist alongside the likes of Gordon Korman, Karen Rivers, Marie-Louise Gay and other wonderful children's writers, it's easy to think: "Mimi Power, you have no chance." But then I remember how great it is just to be in such good company.  Thank you, Red Cedar Awards , for everything you do to support books and inspire readers in British Columbia.

October 27, 2013 ‘What if we had a chance to do it again and again,’ Teddy said,  ‘until we finally did get it right? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?’ ‘I think it would probably be exhausting. I would quote Nietsche to you  but you would probably thump me.’ ‘Probably,’ he said amiably. -- from Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, Bond Street Books, c. 2013 What if? What if your life were a succession of do-overs, with only the faintest sense of déjà vu as your guide, a vague awareness that you hadn’t got it quite right, that there might be something even you--little, single, solitary you--could do to change the course of history.  Well, if it were possible, then the first order of business for one Ursula Todd would be to make it out of infancy. Which she does. Eventually. Babies, being not terribly well-equipped to take on Nazis, bomb blitzes or bad husbands for that matter. With a deft touch of Mitfordian wit tailored to the times, K...

September 8, 2013 When the ground beneath your feet is gone, it's time to take stock of the world around you. AP reporter Jonathan Katz goes from surviving Haiti's devastating 2010 earthquake to describing how grandiose aid pronouncements of billion-dollar proportions have built little more than castles in clouds. It's not what we in the donor-world want to hear about the international relief and recovery funding for Haiti, but it is what we need to know about how it all works, or doesn't, as is more case. The Big Truck is not a big lecture, it's just what Katz observed about people in crises and promises without the backing of accountability. In trying to piece together why desperately needed reconstruction didn't get off Haiti's badly broken ground and pledges of epic amounts haven't come true, Katz has written a bold, myth-buster of a book that shows how the worst kind of aftershocks may well be all of our own doing, and all in the name of ...

August 12, 2013 'It is a wild time here, is it not?' I said to the man. 'It is wild. I fear it has ruined my character. It has certainly ruined the characters of others.' He nodded, as though answering himself. 'Yes, it has ruined me.' 'How are you ruined?' I asked. 'How am I not?' he wondered. -- from Patrick deWitt's The Sisters Brothers On the trail to the California Gold Rush, you'd be hard-pressed (and a darn sight unlucky) to meet up with a deadlier pair of gunslingers than the infamous Sisters Brothers . Charlie ("the mean one") and Eli ("the fat one") dole out a mostly dubious frontier justice with aplomb. While their quick draws leave little doubt who will still be standing when the smoke clears, it's their mortal souls worth fearing for. This a mother knows, and it's no surprise that Charlie and Eli's won't let them set foot in the door til the day they've given up the ...