HAPPY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY MARCH 8
- PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES!
MARCH 12 She Laughed, She Cried; Fado with Sara Marreiros & Comedy with Jan Derbyshire
Friday, March 12, 2010. 8:00pm - 10:00pm Location: Telus Studio Theatre - Chan Centre for the Performing Arts. UBC
Opening the performance stream of the Kickstart Festival 2010. Fado singer Sara Marreiros and her band bring music steeped in the passion of Portuguese saudade (yearning). Jan Derbyshire performs Funny in the Head, the rollicking story of a bipolar comedian’s fight to stay funny.
Tickets: $22 ($16 students, seniors & fixed income) http://www.ticketmaster.ca/section 604.280.3311
Kickstart Festival 2010 presented in partnership with the Chan Centre
for the Performing Arts. http://www.kickstart-arts.ca/kickstartfestival.html
MARCH 13 Womyn and Mental Health. Saturday, March 13th 2010.
Facilitator: Erin GrahamLocation: Hastings Library
(2674 East Hastings Street). Time: 10 am – 2 pm.
This workshop will offer participants opportunities to talk about their understandings and experiences of psychiatry and mental health. We will discuss some of the ways in which women respond to the sexism and oppression we encounter, and examine how some of those responses are labeled "inappropriate" or as indicative of psychiatric illness. Participants can expect to have lots of time to engage with current ideas about women and mental health, and come away with some concrete strategies for how to get beside and assist women in distress, or who may be looking for resources about mental health. Come with questions, problems, ideas and an appetite for understanding.
Erin Graham is a long-time feminist activist, mental health Worker, storyteller and raconteur. She is presently in the process of getting a PhD from the department of Educational Studies at UBC.
MARCH 6 A Feminist Perspective of the Indian Act.
Saturday, March 6th 2010.Facilitator: Fay Blaney.
Location: Hastings Library (2674 East Hastings Street)
Time: 10Am – 2Pm
With International Women's Day fast approaching, this workshop will take a feminist exploration on the impact of the Indian Act on First Nations women. The feminist principle that “the personal is political” is an effective tool in bringing about greater understandings of gendered inequality. It underscores the relationship between the shaping of ideologies and beliefs through legal and institutional instruments, and its' impact on the lived experiences of First Nations women. The conviction that “Feminist until all women are free” must apply to this discussion!
Fay Blaney is a Xwemalhkwu woman of the Coast Salish First Nation. As a founding mother of the Aboriginal Women's Action Network, Fay lead two participatory action research projects on (i) Bill C-31 and (ii) violence against women as it pertains to alternative justice models. During her years as an instructor at Langara College and UBC, Fay taught Women's Studies, from an Aboriginal feminist perspective. She also played a significant role in the creation of the Aboriginal Studies Program at Langara College. Fay also taught a course on “Racism and Ethnic Relations in Canada”. In addition to several publications, Fay appears in the film, “Finding Dawn” and developed the Study Guide that accompanies this film.
Registration: Swathi Nirmal. Women's Centre Coordinator.
Vancouver Status of Women
Phone 604-255-6554 womencentre(at)vsw.ca. Bus tickets , Snacks and Childcare Provided. Please contact gorgeousmabel(at)hotmail.com in advance if you require childcare.
AVAILABLE NOW Rain and Thunder Issue 45 (Winter 2009): Annual Activism Issue
Featured articles:
Activism as a Disabled Womon by Philippa Willitts
"Fierce Indigenous Love": Fighting for Her Sisters -- An Interview with Aboriginal Radical Feminist Laura Holland
Twin Oaks: Not the Revolution But You Can See it From Here by Valerie LivingWater
Lone Radical ...Feminist Actions by Diana Russell
Forty Years of Activism by Jean Taylor
The Other Side of Activism: Withdrawal as a Radical Act of Defiance by Kim Rivers
ART SUBMISSIONS APRIL Words on the wall: Remembrance Of Patients Past Psychiatric Survivors Archives of Toronto (PSAT) is giving out bricks for artists to create with, deadline for submission April 7th 2010. There will be a silent auction of bricks painted by local artists. Proceeds from the auction will be donated to the Psychiatric Survivors Archives of Toronto (PSAT) for the purpose of buying plaques to commemorate the labour of CAMH patients during the construction of a wall on the institution’s grounds.
Marc Glassman, Executive Director of This Is Not A Reading Series, will host the evening. Gladstone Hotel Ballroom, 1214 Queen St West Wednesday April 21: 7:30pm. To celebrate the re-issue of his groundbreaking study, Remembrance Of Patients Past (University of Toronto Press), scholar and activist Geoffrey Reaume will conduct a walking tour of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) grounds. Reaume will then guide the group to the Gladstone Hotel, where he will have an on-stage conversation Ruth Ruth of Friendly Spike Theatre Band. http://www.tinars.ca/content/remembrance-patients-past.
For bricks contact: 416 661 9975; http://www.psychiatricsurvivorarchives.com/index.html
Don't ask me how, I got to thinking about the Sunday Drive, maybe coz it is Sunday, or maybe it's the crocuses poking through the dirt, or the pee-paw sound of a bird heralding spring, the overcast day. Although hitherto unto now I had completely forgotten about the existence or possibility of the Sunday Drive for a large number of years.
From memory a Sunday Drive require 6 things: 1. A Vehicle any kind will do, truck, car, motorbike. 2. A Driver. 3. Passengers. 4. A Road. 5. Money for gas; and maybe an ice cream. рем. An indeterminate amount of time.
I don't have all that fond memories of the family Sunday Drives, owing to the fact I was the youngest and the smallest, and my siblings were prone to poking me, as siblings are, which made me squeal, I still do can't help it! Which meant when we had the little domed car I had to sit in the front on a board wedged between the parents in their bucket seats, with my three siblings in the backseat. When we had the station wagon I sat in the boot/trunk part, not all that comfortable, nor allowed by law today, but at least no one poked me and could be quite sunny with windows on three sides ( : Either way the Sunday Drive involved staring dreamily out the window at all that passed by in the countryside. The Sunday Drive like theatre does require audience participation, in this case passengers, although the 'performance' itself is mainly the Driving.
Mostly there was no purpose to the Sunday Drive, that was the whole point, you didn't know where you were going. You meandered, the original the journey is the destination experience, route choices were made on impulse. Although secretly you all hoped the Sunday Drive would stop at your favourite ice cream store, and in reality the Driver often did have a plan in mind, they just didn't reveal it. That was part of the deal as they pulled up to the much often visited repast stop of old. You all exclaimed in mock surprise, and excitedly raced in to eyeball every single flavour of ice cream in the open cardboard boxes under the glass refrigerated cabinet, and had the same one you always had. Cherry chocolate, bubblegum or hokey pokey.
I think the Sunday Drive happened more in the winter and spring. In the winter as an antidote to cabin fever and distraction from the rain, which did make the windows kind of misty what with all those people breathing in there. You might stop at some remote part of the road and be let out like puppies to run around on the beach for a few minutes wildly you hair steaming in the wind until you face and fingers were freezing. In the spring you drove by lambs, new grass, daffodils, foals. In the summer if you were near one, you went straight to the nearest waterhole, or beach. Less of a Sunday Drive, and more of an Outing. The only meandering involved picking up more friends to cram in the car.
The Sunday Drive may have been be combined with contemporary hunting and gathering activities, such as going to a pick berries, wild blackberries, cultivated strawberries by the bucketful, more in your stomach than in the pot. That apple orchard by the black stump on the back way to such-and-such, where they sold apples by the wooden box load, in Miss A's childhood; or in plastic bags as tall as an 8 year old in my time. On the way home you might stop at the flower or tomato stand the one you had scoped out as the best on the way up. Take your produce, put the coins in the honesty box, to this day you can still do this in places like the Sunshine Coast.
My Nana took me on plenty of Sunday Drives of the hunting and gathering variety when she came to visit and we were living in the city by then. I returned the favour when I went back to visit her in her 80's. Driving the hour and a half down to see her, and believe me she was ready and waiting (a little too anxiously) at the gate of the old folks home in her finest peacock hued clothes to go out for the Sunday Drive. We went to the Brian Boru pub for fish'n'chips and pavlova, once operated by relatives of Miss A. We drove up the coast to a picnic bench by the ocean on a curve in the road. That may have been the last time I was a regular practitioner of the Sunday Drive, which does really require you to have a car. We did it a bit up the Coast, maybe drive past the house with the arched wall, see if the eagles are out on the rock, look at the colored lights on every ones house in the winter time....
Since my parents, and my grandparents indulged in the Sunday Drive, it's apparent they were well off enough have cars, and some free time. The Sunday Drive is most often done with people you live with, all inmates of a house pile in, including pets. But some one could call you up and say I'm going for a Drive, wanna come? You will say yes, although you have no idea where they plan to go, and maybe neither do they. Sunday driving as an adult with the family can be dangerous, members are prone to reminisce about stories which have become the stuff of family legend. Tales which you now realize have gaping holes in them you could drive a tractor through. Which, when you question the mythologer on, you discover truths you would really rather not know.
Perversely, when you are actually on your way somewhere, an Outing, or emergency, to say a Fair that closes in less than a hour, the hospital, a funeral, a sports meet, and you meet people crawling along the road on a Sunday Drive, you will be infuriated. You will honk your horn, and pound on the steering wheel, gesticulate wildly out the window, yell "come on!" at the top of your lungs until the 4 or more people in the car in front of you finally pull over to the side or you will foolishly gashilit and pass them in the no passing zone at top speed, yelling with some contempt out the window "Sunday Driver!" get off the road!
Fortunately our neighbor Miss D, 80-something, has just dropped by to say hi after I took over some vegetable soup yesterday, and to pass on a spare blood pressure reader for Miss A. Miss D, was able to fill me in on the custom on Sunday Driving on the prairies. Yes indeed, her dad, a farmer, was a proponent of the Sunday Drive, to see how the other farms, his neighbors crops were doing. The Sunday Drive may not have involved ice cream it was 14 miles to the nearest store. When she lived in Vancouver's Westend, she and her husband went on Sunday Drives, out to the forest at UBC, the farmland in Surrey etc.
She thinks the demise of the Sunday Drive, is Television, why she herself has just been watching the women's curling; and paradoxically there being too many cars on the road. I'm not sure where it went. Do people still do it?
I just asked Miss A where she would like to go for her imaginary Sunday Drive. She would like to go to Ponds store at the Mairangi Bay of her childhood, for an ice cream. I would like to go, up north to Trounson Kauri Park, where I heard and saw the beautiful grey/blue rare and endangered Kokako, whose intriguing voice you can hear here, maybe have a swim in the pool in the river there. More of an Outing I guess, but the road is pretty long and winding.
So we are looking for a Sunday Driver, the ideal candidate would be affable, but not verbose. But have you noticed most affable people can talk the leg of an iron pot? While taciturn people can tend to sullenness? Steady on the road, can get hold of a car, able to concentrate on the job at hand while remarking every 6 miles or so, "the lambs are a good weight this time of year"; or "I once saw a hawk on the road here". Fond of ice cream.
Reading the NZ Herald online, R.I.P. Pacific Island music pioneer Pauly Fuemana, innovator behind that classic debut single How Bizarre. Which lead me to think of the late Maori/Jewish/Celtic music pioneer, and later Like Minds Like Mine mental health educator; Mahinaarangi Tocker, whose music formed the soundtrack of the 1980's for me. Which lead me to this soulful version of Po Karekare Ana by Deborah Wai Kapohe who I just discovered right now. She seems to be furthering the honourable tradition of wonderful women musicians who also happen to be lawyers, along with Moana Maniapoto Jackson, Judy Small, and Anne Feeney.
Like I said, feeling all nostalgic for them Black Sand Shores.......
In 1997 I wrote I wanted to perfect the art of writing humorous absurd tragedies about important things where nothing really happened! I think that is still a good aim, and I may be well on my way towards it.
I took a creative writing class that year, in response to my short story submitted for grading, the tutor exhorted me to publish, and wrote amongst other things that my writing had clarity and vividness, was powerful and moving, containing a dark intelligence. I am not immune to such flattery, but me and my creative collaborators of the time, T and, A, did have a lot of fun with it, spending some time debating if we should have an art competition amongst ourselves to see who could create the best image of what my dark intelligence might look like! In the end we didn't, but included above are two images of me drawn around that time by minimalist extraordinaire T, during a session in which we each drew portraits of each other in a set number of lines, in this case 5, and 7. Which illustrates what I might have looked like at the time my dark intelligence may have been in evidence! Yes I still have these things, in journals full of: writing, cards for exhibitions, tickets to movies and plays, photos, leaves, feathers, drawings - mine and others.
Before email, when living at a distance we perfected a way of sharing our writing via the telephone answering service for free. Each of us had voice mail with the same telephone company, which had only one access number for the whole country. We recorded our stories in a series of 3 minute messages on our own voice mail. Then T and A, would call up the system, enter my voice mail number and passcode and listen to the story of the day or week. I could do the same with them, erasing the messages as we went, and leaving messages in response to the stories for instant feedback.
A good 12 years earlier, I was 18, in my first year at university living on campus in the halls of residence, in small wooden room on the second floor, cluttered with posters on the wall, a purple plastic cup and saucer upside down on the ceiling impersonating a light fixture, it was the 1980's so there was some lime green and pink chiffon which were in vogue thanks to Cyndi Lauper. During a one week break from classes, I took all this down from the walls, and put up 7 of my photos of nature, one for each day of the week, along with literary quotes relating to the images under each photo. I had not quite exited christianity at this point so I believe the quotes were from the bible, the poetic parts, song of solomon, pslams, proverbs perhaps, lay me down in cool water etc.
I dragged the single bed in to the middle of the room on a diagonal, and put the desk and chair beside it, I put everything else away in the capacious built-in wooden wardrobe. I bought a hard covered journal with blank unlined crisp pages. Out the window I could hear performances of Shakespeare's A midsummers nights dream, being staged in the open-air by the university drama club. I am not a fan of Shakespeare, but it did make for a nice backdrop. For one week I wrote in to the book, the poems I had written since I was 15, from the loose leaf pages they were recorded on. Now that I would not return to my family's home, and it was safe to do so, where previously such poems had been hidden in a plastic bag in a box, on shelf, deep in the wardrobe. My mother concerned perhaps by my unexplained absence, upon driving up to visit one day looked nervously around my room, and asked if i had become a nun. No not disciple, disciplined. Which brings me to the present day, 27 years and 15 or so journals of writing later. Five of these journals are already deposited with an Archive, and the rest will be one day too, but like Janet Frame, no one gets to read them until I am long gone!
I have a high school English teacher to thank for my earliest literary encouragement. Mrs D, where are you? I had the pleasure of being in her class for two years, she really did love writing. I was one of few who actually enjoyed being left with creative writing assignments, on rainy days, when she had to leave the classroom. While my classmates gossiped, ate, threw things, I moved my desk to face the wall at the back of the class, far as I could get from the hub bub, and wrote. Whatever came into my mind, it was such a relief, creative expression, the release from strictly structured lessons. My work was always met by Mrs D with useful pointers, encouraging comments and humorous retorts to my sometimes satirical writing about the class.
She was amused by my audacity and gave me credit for originality at least on a set assignment in small groups to read part of a Shakespeare play, it may have been Macbeth. I rewrote the lines in the language, accent, slang of the present day I heard on television sitcoms. Each character in a different voice, Cockney, African American, Jewish, New York Italian, stereotyped renderings I know, and talked my group in to performing it thus, Shakespeare updated. We also had to study Aeschylus' Agamemnon, which was a bit to close to home and caused me to have a small nervous breakdown.
I wrote studious book reviews about the life of Ghandi and such like. It may have been Mrs D who was instrumental in having eight of my poems published (anonymously) in the school magazine in my final year. I will always be grateful for her literary nurturing, and recognition of possibilities, that writing had it's own value.
Aha a visit to the mailbox reveals cheques in the mail from various artistic endeavors. This will enable me to write guilt free for several more weeks. I have started work editing what will one day be a book with 25 of my short stories; as well as a book of poetry. Content to be writing, I say, let it rain let it rain let it rain!
