Kate Jaimet's Blog, page 5

Storytime with Dunces Rock

The Ballad of Principal Hale

Ballad of Principal Hale debuts at kid lit fest!

The very rockin’ Connor McGuire and I have been working on  setting the Ballad of Principal Hale from Dunces Rock to music! Come out on Monday November 23, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m. at the Sunnyside Library to hear the world premiere! Also, get a chance to meet fabulous kidlit authors Tim Wynne-Jones, Don Cummer and Rachna Gilmore. See you there!

Canadian Irony Killed Stephen Harper

Who defeated Stephen Harper? It was Martin Short and Mary Walsh; Luba Goy and Shaun Majumder. These comedians didn’t campaign for the Liberals or NDP. What they did, over the past five decades, is to crystallize, hone and heighten the inborn Canadian sense of irony. And irony killed Stephen Harper.

For a sense of irony lodges deep in the Canadian soul. Some say it comes from being the saucy little sister of the mighty United States of America. Whatever the origins of Canadian irony, it rests in that same sacred place where we store our memories of log fires on cold winter days, of springtime sap dripping from the maple trees, of glorious summer canoe trips and of auburn leaves ablaze on the autumn hillsides. Politicians ignore it at their peril.

Look at the defining ads of the election campaign: Harper went after Trudeau with a sledgehammer, airing attack ads that condemned him for being “just not ready.” Mulcair swallowed the narrative line and earnestly proclaimed: “I’m ready!”

What did Trudeau do? Did he swing back with a bigger sledgehammer? No, he turned the phrase on its head. Sure, he said, with an ironic twinkle in those teasing brown eyes, I’m ‘just not ready’ — then came the punchline: just not ready to put up with five more years of Conservative rule.

It was clever, oh so clever, that ironic twist on Harper’s own phrase. Some have said that Harper was tone-deaf to the plight of Syrian refugees. He was equally tone-deaf to Canadian irony.

For proof, look no further than Harper’s promise in the late stages of the campaign to establish a tipline where Canadians could rat each other out for Barbaric Cultural Practices. “Barbaric Cultural Practices” — my God, it was comic gold! The name itself cried out to be mocked, and mock it we did. This Hour Has 22 Minutes immediately jumped on it, creating a sketch in which anonymous tipsters called into the hotline to report such offenses as a captive woman being forced to kiss a fish – a ‘barbaric practice’ that turned out to be a Newfoundland screeching-in ceremony. Meanwhile, Canadians spontaneously created the twitter hashtag #BarbaricCulturalPractices to report a slew of horrific offenses: Wearing socks with sandals #BarbaricCulturalPractices! Beer-bellied men in Speedos #BarbaricCulturalPractices! Triple-bacon-pork-belly poutine #BarbaricCulturalPractices!

Then, like the punchline to a 78-day-long joke, came Harper’s final, desperate appearance at a suburban Toronto rally with the Rob and Doug Ford. To his loyal legions of followers, Rob Ford could get away with being Rob Ford, because he didn’t pretend to be anything other than what he was: a loudmouthed, hard-drinking, hard-partying, unapolegetic boor. But for Harper — prim, proper, puritanical Stephen Harper — to hitch his wagon to the erratically careening star of the Ford Brothers? For tough-on-drugs Harper — who had spent the entire campaign warning Canadians that Trudeau would hook their kids on weed and install an injection site on every streetcorner – to embrace the crack-smoking ex-mayor of Toronto? The irony was thicker than a pot of French-Canadian pea soup in a Halifax fog.

Irony does not let hypocrisy go unpunished. Irony overturns the over-confident and sabotages the smug. Irony is the friend of the people. This year, it was the enemy of Stephen Harper.

Childrens’ Book Authors support Doctors Without Borders

I urge all my colleagues in the world of kidlit to support the initiative by my publisher, Orca, and the wonderful author & editor Sarah Harvey, to raise money for Doctors Without Borders as they assist refugees caught in the current crisis.

Barbados turtles: endangered and enchanting

Last night I watched a Hawksbill turtle crawl out of the moonlit sea to lay her eggs. She rose like a coracle from the lapping waves, graceful and buoyant until her flippers reached the shore. Weighed down by her heavy shell, she dragged herself over mounds of sargassum seaweed, up the steep berm to the dark beach dotted with coconut palms. To her right, as far away as a neighbourhood block, a calypso band played on the patio of the Savannah Beach resort, where tourists sipped rum punch under the glaring illumination of electric lights. To her left, a little farther away, the water sparkled in the artificial pool of the Hilton hotel, and plastic deck chairs sat stacked on a beach empty of trees. Ahead of her, beyond three rows of palms, occasional cars jolted by on a rutted backroad. This patch of dark beach, hemmed in on three sides by human development, is a remnant of the tropical forest where her fore-mothers came for millions of years to dig their nests. Following a primal instinct, she too had come.

She doesn’t need much space on land. Apart from hatching and nesting, she will spend her entire life at sea. But a stretch of dark, undeveloped beach is crucial to her and her babies. And on this small Caribbean island, a group of remarkable volunteers with the Barbados Sea Turtle Project is working literally night and day to protect the beaches and make the modern world a safer place for this 150-million year old species.

I’m here with independent filmmaker Melanie Willis to shoot a documentary video about the turtles and the young, enthusiastic, heat-soaked volunteers who work with them. We’ve walked alongside the volunteers on midnight beach patrols to monitor the nesting females. And we’ve accompanied them on the sea turtle hotline, responding to calls from tourists and hotel staff who’ve found lost hatchlings straying into roadways or wandering the grounds of swanky resorts. The volunteers pick up the hatchlings and take them to a safe beach, where they’re released on to the sand to begin their life’s voyage on the currents of the ocean.

The video is intended as an educational and inspirational tie-in to my new YA mystery novel, Endangered. I began writing Endangered several years ago, when I was working as a daily newspaper reporter at the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal. Pursuing my interest in outdoor and environmental reporting, I covered several stories involving endangered species and wildlife smuggling. Out of those stories grew the idea of a mystery novel involving a smuggling ring and an endangered sea turtle. I won’t reveal anything more about the plot of the novel, but in the video you’ll see footage of a mother turtle lovingly carving an underground nest with her back flippers, and of newly-hatched babies poking their heads above the sand to glimpse the world for the first time.

After we head back home, Melanie will be retreating to her editing suite to put together the documentary. We’re planning a formal launch at the Ottawa International Writers’ Festival this fall. I’ll be touring the book and video to schools as part of the TD Canada Children’s Book Week in May, 2016, and would welcome the opportunity to visit more schools. The video will also be available for download when it’s completed. We hope to reach a wide audience with the story of these endangered, enchanting creatures.

Ottawa Magazine loves Endangered

My new YA mystery Endangered hits bookshore shelves today, just as Ottawa Magazine columnist Paul Gessell gives the book a thumbs-up in his Artful Blogger column. (Full disclosure, Paul is a former colleague from the Ottawa Citizen.) Says Paul:

“I would love to read more stories involving Hayley Makk, a more mature version of Flavia de Luce, the girl detective (and chemist) who is the phenomenally popular heroine of Alan Bradley’s books set in a small English town. Hayley has hormones; Flavia is too young for lust.”

Read the full review on the Ottawa Magazine website.

Song and Story Fest at W.E. Gowling public school

Booklist gives thumbs-up to Endangered

“Twisting Plotlines and Unexpected Dangers”

Hayley has been reporting for her father’s newspaper all through high school, and she loves going after a story. When she fails her biology exam, she is willing to forgo her di- ploma, but then Ms. Cameron offers her a chance to redeem herself: Hayley can help her track down a rare sea turtle off the Nova Scotia coast and get enough credit to graduate. Even though Hayley does not want to leave what seems to be a breaking crime story (lots of blood spattered in a deserted hunting cabin) to accompany Ms. Cameron and her friend, the hippie animal-lover Ernest, her father insists. Along the way, Hayley comes to appreciate nature, even while spinning a story: the elusive sea turtle has also gained the attention of poachers and collectors of rare species. Readers will find Hayley an intriguing heroine as she works to identify the enemy, avoid unexpected dangers, and capture the story. Plotlines inter- sect and twist in unexpected ways, making this fast-paced ecological mystery a great choice for nature-lovers and those, like Hayley, who are ready to learn more about the great outdoors. —Melissa Moore

Read the Book — Support the Movie!

When Poisoned Pencil press accepted the manuscript of my YA mystery novel Endangered, I started looking forward to the day that I’d be invited on school visits to talk about my novel.

Meeting teenage readers can be exhilarating, or it can be  excruciating. I remember vividly one day when I was invited to give a presentation about my teen sports novels to a high school in rural northern Ontario. I had a great sports trivia game all prepared, hoping to interest the students in a fun and interactive activity. But when I arrived, I discovered that on that very day, the school hockey team was playing a grudge match against their arch-rivals in the next town, and any student who was even vaguely interested in hockey had gotten the day off to attend the game. The period that I spent capering around in front of a half-empty classroom, trying to drum up enthusiasm for sports trivia among a group of self-selected non-jocks, ranks among the most awkward and, frankly, unsuccessful 60 minutes of my life.

Not wanting to fall flat on my face again, I wracked my brains to come up with some kind of engaging material to accompany my new novel. Since the main character in Endangered is a teen news reporter, I wanted to do something that used my own journalistic background. And since the novel’s subplot revolves around a black-market turtle smuggling scheme, I came up with the idea of producing a short documentary movie à la National Geographic, about endangered sea turtles.

With the expert assistance of professional filmmaker Melanie Willis, I started conducting interviews and putting a plan together. We were lucky enough to receive an invitation from University of the West Indies Professor Julia Horrocks, Director of the Barbados Sea Turtle Project, to travel to Barbados and film her turtle rescue crews in action.

Melanie and I are now making plans to travel to Barbados at the end of August, when the Hawksbill sea turtles hatch. Disoriented by the lights of towns, resorts and highways, many of the hatchlings become confused and fail to make their way toward the ocean where they belong. That’s where the volunteers come in, responding to calls from all over the island and safely guiding the hatchlings on their way.

Filming this event and the volunteers who help the turtles will make our movie a great educational tool for use in classrooms (not to mention saving me from the embarrassment of another disastrous sports-trivia presentation).  As a way of fundraising for the production of our film, Melanie and I are offering a chance to pre-purchase classroom visits — by Skype and in person — as well a movie downloads and autographed copies of the book.

If you’d like to support us, please visit our crowdfunding campaign page. And please share the news with others who might be interested in the novel or the film.

I appreciate everyone’s support as I look forward to the launch of the book and film this fall.