Kate Inglis's Blog, page 10

flowers and dragons

I heard sad news today. A loss that has me looking slowly through photographs, hardly breathing, willing it to be a misreport. News abounds, it would seem, from here on out. We meet our various fates. Maybe news always abounded, but when we are young, all we hear is our own—not much more than the odd bit of gossip or darker whispers of things that happen to other people, or eventually to us, but not within a reasonable number of years measured in dozens. That was me until it wasn't—the day I was wheeled, heavily dosed with morphine, to the NICU.

"Do you remember the first time you saw me?" Ben asked tonight.

I was terrified, I thought.

"Yes, love."

"How big was my head? Was it fuzzy?"

I held up a fist.

+++

The first place I land, when I'm shooting a wedding, is with the bride in a robe or sweats or a plaid shirt. There are croissants and the people around her fuss. Eat something. Drink some juice. You'll hardly get anything once this all starts.

Someone new comes into the room, and everyone squeals and hugs, and the little cycle of feeding and adornment replays. The dress hangs there, waiting to make her. It's a costume for a play. Bridesmaids lift it down with reverence, giggling about blueberry juice and peanut butter. She disappears and comes out again in need of nimble hands for hooks and eyes, the last bit of her everyday self peeking out before the theatre begins.

He will emerge from around a corner and see his wife.

A bride and groom command whatever vista they decorate. This is why we love weddings.

We want archetypal proof of our potential to navigate the unnavigable human condition. The bride and groom know their way. We like this painting. Its composition pleases us.

"Let's frighten the dragons," I said to Pooh.

"That's right," said Pooh to Me.
"I'm not afraid," I said to Pooh,
And I held his paw and I shouted "Shoo!
Silly old dragons!" —and off they flew.

"I wasn't afraid," said Pooh, said he,
"I'm never afraid with you."

—A.A. Milne

Even when we're young, before we can possibly understand our own fragility, we love to watch. A wedding is a brandishing of our collective best, some kind of a taunt. It's the most sparkling, most affirming taunt we've got to throw. The universe catches it and lets us play, even still.

We glow in their glow.

I run for twelve hours straight lugging that kit, kicking off my shoes, hunting patches of light, being invisible. But what knocks me flat, every time—what I could never take lightly or with the slightest bit of cynicism—is the visceral responsibility of recording something that will never happen again. Not between these two particular people on this particular day, with these witnesses. These lovers who somehow found one another in the midst of all this noise and worry and fear.

+++

Our time here is finite, quantifiably so. The evidence is constant. We have the power of man's red flower! We have opposable thumbs and the wheel. We are the only animals who know our lives will end. But that's not enough to make us more kind, gentle, appreciative, and more presently helpful to others. We are engrossed in a neverending inventory of shoulds and should-haves.

If I knew my exact number of days or years—the precise granting of how many weekend cuddles with flannel sheets and a tangle of small legs and a pile of comic books—I would be awake. All the time. So would you.

+++

You can't frighten the dragons. Even with a vow, with the bolster of a hand in yours. You just can't. Dragons define the human existence. We can befriend them, sort of, once we get used to the constancy of their hot breath and the unfairness of it touching us. We can hold on to our glow even after we have outgrown or lost or forgotten it. Doesn't matter that it lacks permanence. The glow, however fleeting, defines us just as much as all the rest.

Permalink

shed love

The next morning, after everyone had left, I went outside with my camera. Everything was painted into a perfect still-life: a bottle abandoned by the fire pit. The lanterns all bedraggled, hanging from trees across the creek and down by the field by the blueberry bush. The breeze will help them dry out and stay a while, or at least until the next storm. Bits and pieces of props: a beaded headpiece, my great-great-grandfather's 1840s telescope, the sunflowers. A woven chair that got left out in the rain. A soggy bowl of my mom's cheese biscuits, three origami puzzle boxes, the cords that Dan used to plug in the amps.

The next morning, I almost didn't want to clean up. It was all too perfect.

Before everyone arrived, Jess and I went out to a stand of birches beyond the creek to play in the sun. She wore crinoline one of three that I bought the other day. These crinolines! One with descending shelves of layered, white polka dot ruffles; one sort of tutu contraption with a cream satin bustier; the red one. Life is nothing without theatre.

Then people joined us, more and more. From England and the prairies, Toronto, Ottawa, New Brunswick, New York. The second annual Shed Workshop felt like an impossibility—how could we do the same thing again? It would be different, somehow—more expected, less special. But it wasn't. The living room was thick with cameras and laptops and heaps of gear, and we ate together. We feasted. We filled every space in the shed, talked for a while, and then I gave them assignments, and they all spilled out into the field and the birch grove and the creek and the hidden cave of bamboo leaves. I ran back and forth delivering shared lenses from shoot to shoot. Jenn Grant and Jennah Barry played on the speakers while the sun draped the most perfect light across every tree, such a perfect golden fall day. Then more people joined us, a little crowd, and we feasted again, and Grassmarket, Tara Thorne's Dance Movie, and Kim Harris played for us on the shed stage while the fire pit sent sparks high into the canopy above. All three of them made me cry, sheets and sheets of it. An inchworm wove its way from a branch to the ground and back up again as Tara and Kim sang. That night was everything.

After it was all done, and the last of the houseguests headed off for highways and airports, I didn't clean or move or cook or speak for a week. It was some kind of emotional bomb that went off, this constant state of disbelief and grateful overwhelm. How can I know these people? How is it possible that a weekend this special happens at this little house—this crooked, paint-peeled, lost and abandoned place that I found when I felt just the same—how can it be mine, any of it?

Shelagh by Neil.

My parents are present, always, helping to make this real in the things they do. Shortbread cookies and chocolate and her homemade granola; frayed flea market quilts fixed up with new binding. My dad hustled with me to finish the dining room renovation, and teased me mercilessly when I dragged a retired lobster trap home from someone's garbage along the Aspotogan shore. Can we put some of the leftover floorboards on it! I begged him. I need something for outside.

That's the tackiest thing I've ever seen, he said, but he was smiling.

It's great. It's a lobster trap table. Please dad, please.

He looked through the pile of leftovers from the reclaimed wood we'd used for the dining room—planks from an 1840s house, as everything these days seems to be from the 1840s—and he measured, sawed, sanded, and varnished. In the end, he was pleased, but he wouldn't say so. I could tell. I love it.

He dug a spotlight out of his bottomless basement, and brought it over with his ladder to fix onto a tree. We tested it, Ben and Evan and Jess and I dancing in the yellow beam after the moon came out.

I loved gathering it all together: from tulle and feathers to paper lanterns and sunflowers, the props and small spaces that made art.

Neil sees Jess and I, the macro, and our damselfly.

Teaching is a funny business. I don't even know if I'd call it that. It's reminding, and then prompting. They go off and choose a spot in the woods and I troubleshoot, suggest, nudge. It's some kind of translation marathon, and a devotion to occasion. And maybe that's all. The rest is made by people who show up.

The view from Neil's spot in the shed.

Elan's view: Daphne.

Aidan's view: Jess.

Katie and Aidan fool around in the bamboo cave with my crow and my wide-angle lens.

Next year, most certainly. The shed workshop kicks off the fall, always a season of adventure. This year, more than ever—Amsterdam, North Carolina, Vancouver. Canals and crashing warm waves and mountains. I think maybe the very best of it is right here, though. Putting on coffee in the morning, that unfamiliar but lovely scent. Everyone rolls out of beds to the kitchen and someone says Mmmm. My clothes and my hair smell like woodsmoke. As they should.

Permalink

The great zombie massacre: how editors make writers

Manuscripts don't come out this way, tidy and reconciled. Not much ever does, does it? Chefs curse and yell in a pressure cooker, squishing organic matter into mathematically-shaped molds. Organic matter always objects, and this is art. It's absurd, but presentation is at least three of five stars. That's what makes you gasp. Not the ingredients. It's the crisp edges and the control.

Publishing—that gut-wrenching and necessary domain of querying and hustling and rejection—is the gateway to knowledgeable, passionately literate people who are incented to care enough about you to not care about your feelings. They are paid to not ever pussyfoot around your gigantic, glitter-sparkled ego. Writers write books. Editors make writers.

Without an editor to yank back on the leash — or mandate a brutal swat to a lagging behind — you can't write well. You can't grow. You can't see clearly. Everything sounds fine. Everything looks perfect! Everything belongs. Nothing is missing. Your ideal reader, as you see it? Your mom. Because she'll say Everything sounds fine! Everything looks perfect! Everything belongs. She'll top it off with a honey. She'll tell her quilting bee all about you, about how proud she is. And meanwhile, you're sitting on mediocrity. You always are, if you trust your mom or anyone who remembers your birthday. The only one to trust is your Penelope.

When I present to junior high and high school students, I show them evidence of the revision and re-revision process. It's important. They need to know that books are made with chisels, not with starbursts. They need to know, no matter what they end up doing in life, that the only way to grow is to surround yourself with people who never call you honey.

Penelope rarely tells me what to do—just that there's something out of balance. Or disharmonious. Or crappity-crap baloney stinker patooey crap.

That last one's my favourite. I only tell you to be less weak because I know you can be, she said, after I told her I was once again taking her indispensability and making it public. I'm not that hard on everyone.

It looks brutal, doesn't it? It can be, sort of. But not really. The compliment is in her persistence. To make the point, I'm not showing you the comments about how she loved a line, or the stretches where she had nothing to correct at all. But what you see here is the gold. Not the encouragement or the sarcastic life-coaching. The gold is in the brutality. Without it, I am lost. Without it, I can't be better than I am. Neither can you.

I'm thrilled to announce that If I Were A Zombie, my next book, is officially on the roster for release with Nimbus in Fall 2015. It's a picture book of monster poetry for 4-8 year-olds. The final copy is due at the end of September, at which point we'll hand it off to the yet-unconfirmed unbelievably amazing super-fantastic gloomy quirky illustrator. By this time next year, I'll have lost my voice with all the yelling and growling, reading these poems. Penelope Jackson is the reigning queen. Do you write? Enlist her. But not until she's done with me.

tickle trunk

Lately I've been a borrower of little daughters. Not for their generally-associated qualities, which, of course, are bunk—they are bruisers, couch-leapers, squirt-gun attackers, stick-finders, creek-dousers, breakfast-thieves, and sneaky little foxes. But there are some things I can do for them that I've never been able to do for my sons.

May-May (that's Marianne). C'mere.

Ya? WHAT.

Gimme your fingertips.

Ya. She sticks them out.

What colours do you want?

All of 'em. Dis one dis one dat one.

I paint her nails. Pink, orange, pink. Then her toes. We take a photo and send it to her mom. We are both satisfied. Mhmm yup. Good.

A few days later, Gwen and Maeve are here. Gwen has never been in my house before, so I don't know what makes her do it—spidey-sense?—she marches right over to the old captain's chest in the living room and shoves up the lid like the queen bee. It's like she knew: that's my tickle trunk.

Everything came out, stuff I've been collecting for years. Not one boa but two. Not one gypsy skirt but two. A soft pink 1980s prom dress. A witch hat. A woodland fairy, a hippie, a go-go girl. A disco-dancing alien witch. A woodland-fairy flapper. They dress up all day long, emerging from the exploded trunk to the fire pit for a parade on every costume change. Their moms are drinking beer and sitting with feet curled up underneath legs. The girls twirl in the sun and spray reflected rainbow glitter light through the woods.

They are, at four, pretty much the same as I am at forty. Scruffy and all about the tights and the bobbles on the ends of their braids. I wore this 'coz it's got dots on it. They squeal when they pull out the good stuff. So do I. They get real quiet when embroiled in the business of dressup. So do I.

The older kids are in the sprinkler playing Cops And Robbers, but not Ben. At first he is shy but digs in the trunk. He comes to me and pulls me down to whisper. This. And this. And this. I will be a clown.

There's all kinds of deadfall on the ground after the hurricane. I've made piles of mess for burning, and they hop over it with little pointed toes. Limbs and twigs yank on the bottom of skirts and they don't notice. It suits, somehow. They are wild. We ooooh, and we aaahhh.

 

alberta alberta

I drove into Milk River, like all the little towns, and it was an island, an outport in a sea of gold and green. Lighthouses and truck-boats and black bull-whales.

[image error]

I watched for raised eyebrows among parents and teachers, because I come to oil country with a book about radicals who wish for the end of pipelines. But that's not what it's about. It's the friction point of prosperity and concern, ability and disability, the loss of bodily presence and the gain of ghost messages. It's misplaced outrage and well-placed courage. It's banjo song and smoke in your eye. Stories hinge there, swinging this way and that.

[image error]

In Milk River I met my first real-life junk pirate. His name is Pudge. They called me that when I was two. Then they kept calling me that. Now it's my name. See? He points to a sign on his house that says PUDGE. It's made of welded rebar. He scraps. People bring him stuff — a junked-out bike, a box of bolts, a rusty horseshoe or forty. He decorates his street.

[image error]

[image error]

[image error]

[image error]

Being in the CBC Studios in Edmonton and Calgary was like peeking into the little room where the bishop gets to eat his lunch. You know? It's the Canadian church. It's the common element that unites every kitchen, every batch of cookies, every afternoon with the crowbar or the mower, every road trip. I walked through the halls feeling like I should tiptoe and whisper, peeking everywhere I could peek — at rooms full of blinking lights, at people in headsets, wishing I could hug and thank them all. They work hard, and we need them so much. We need them to be valued, not only hugged and thanked.

[image error]

[image error]

Two interviews in one day, and listeners who need the quick pitch as well as a not-so-quick answering for all kinds of things — why anti-oil? Why radicals? Why pirates? Why pipelines? Why Alberta? Why Stand Off?

Edmonton's host, Portia Clark, was kind and lovely. Calgary's host (that second interview is here), Doug Dirks, was kind and lovely too, but dug a little more into the guts of all those whys. I was glad he did, though I had sprinted from the Edmonton studio into the Budget Rent-A-Car place, and gunned it the three hours to land in Calgary in 5 PM traffic, and sprinted down the hall to sit in front of a microphone with Doug. It was a flurry, the whole trip. A flurry with a 10-mile view that never failed.

[image error]

Nimbus had sent ahead signs for all the readings and signings, and it was always such a !!! to arrive and have it there, on paper: this is you and that's your book. Except that you don't feel like a writer of books unless you're writing books. Promoting doesn't count. Right now, I am dragging every limb. I am renovating and summering and rolling around with the boys, and I was wandering Alberta. Right now, I am not writing. I should be in the middle of something. I'm not. And so this sign made me shrink a little. But that's another story.

[image error]

This trip was the first time I've ever rented a car and driven myself in unfamiliar territory, turning when the nice GPS lady-voice told me to turn. Or, more appropriately, not-turn. I'd blow into little roadside motels and eat alone, sometimes with librarians. It was dusty and drifty. My head was on a swivel, so taken by the prairies. White windmills and black oil rigs, mechanical figures reaching and reaching into the sky and into the earth, and herds of cattle all lying and all standing. I'd pull over to the side of the road and get out, walking as far into it as I could before stopping at somebody's barbed wire. I'd stand there, listening to how silent the silence is when it's grasslands. But then if you listen — really listen — it's not silent at all. A resting bull heaves himself to his feet and snorts at me. He paws the earth and I back away. Can it have been romantic? It was.

[image error]

[image error]

Stand Off, where much of the book happens and where the Bloods of the Blackfoot Nation live, did something to me. Everything I saw was a statement. Everything was both political and apolitical, meaningless and packed-full. Everything was a painting. I wanted something from Stand Off. I wasn't sure what.

[image error]

I fell in love with three rez dogs. They hustled me, this little posse, running to me with tongues flopping. They used me as a stretching post and begged me for scratches. They lolled in the sun in front of the school and walked me inside.

In some other life, they would be mine. I'd say Come on, you three, hop in. I don't know what I'd do at that point, other than get in trouble with Budget Rent-A-Car and with every roadside motel. I would have spent the nights picking out burrs. I would have put them all in the bath and bought them some quick-fry steaks. I've already named them, in the fantasy world where I went home in a private doggie-jet.

[image error]

Blackfoot is the most beautiful language.

[image error]

In the morning, an elder smudged us all. Her name was Harriet. I gave her a pouch of tobacco, and she had the softest hands. She talked about Blackfoot values—kindness, courage—and prayed, a spoken song. I got up to explain who I am, where I come from, why Stand Off, why pirates, why Bloods. Most important: why writing. For when someone dies, something is lost, everything goes upside-down. Art is rightside-up.

The girls in grade eight English had been to an end-of-year ceremony the night before, and came to school with comfy sweats and leftover hot-rolled curls. They asked question after question: what is a query? How do you choose which publisher? What if they don't like it? What do you do then? We talked and talked. Then one of them, the sassy one in the red flats, raised her hand and said, We should sing for her. They all nodded, and gave me (and you) a treat at the end.

[image error]

The prairies left me feeling thoughtful to the point where I didn't have any report of it at all, for a long time. This is still a total injustice to how it felt to take Flight of the Griffons to the big sky, to be there first. Stand Off was a beginning. Alberta was a beginning. 

[image error]

People keep asking me for books and I've been so worked-up and so stunned that I haven't said much about where to get it: pretty much everywhere. Chapters, Amazon Canada and US. Indie bookstores and readers in the States can order from Orca, or in Canada or really anywhere, direct from Nimbus. The only thing that makes a book real is readers. Thank you for being friendly to pirates.

The Griffons tour Alberta

It begins on Sunday: a suitcase full of books! Pirates in oil country! I fly into Edmonton and from there it's buses and rental cars all around the province, to schools in Lethbridge and a blessing ceremony in Stand Off—lucky me happens to be passing through for a smudging and I'll be there soaking it up, reading, and stocking their library with Missy and airborne resistance.

Here are the public events—where I hope I'll see some friendly faces, when I'm not either plotting my robbery of The Duchess or trying to hug wild horses in Kananaskis.

Edmonton, AB: Sunday, June 8, 2 - 3:30 PM : Audreys Books

Milk River, AB: Tuesday, June 10, 1:00 PM : Milk River Public Library

Stavely, AB: Wednesday, June 11, 1:00 PM : Stavely Public Library

Calgary, AB: Friday, June 13, 4:00 PM : Monkeyshines Childrens' Bookstore

We're squeezing in more signings and chats wherever we can, so keep an eye on the Facebook page if you're in that part of the country. The same is true of media, squeezing wherever we can, starting with a noon interview in Edmonton on Monday the 9th with Portia Clark and the folks at CBC Radio Active.

I can't believe it's here. Big sky time. Will I see you there?

 

Alberta trilogy

The third western trip in as many months is soon, so soon. After the launch party for Flight of the Griffons this past weekend, the next urgent five-alarm fire (the burningly optimistic and productive kind) is to set up readings, workshops, and media, if we can hustle it, in Alberta.

What's with this book and the prairies, people keep asking. It's a big ship. A big ship needs a big sky. And the tall grasses are an ocean. There's a foreign sort of familiarity there. Towns are islands and the distant wall of mountain peaks is the shore.

[image error]

If you're writing an environmental revenge fantasy, the big story, for now, is under that big sky. Or one of the big stories. All that black gold. In a restaurant in Banff I sat next to a guy who'd grown up in Fort McMurray, where the oil sands are, and he told me he doesn't recognize a single street from his youth. He had this persistent confusion about it. He doesn't know what happened. He said over and over again I don't know what happened. Everything's gone. That could have been partly the Jäger shots but I think it's also just too big to grasp. Even when you've got a cheque in your pocket. He worked on a rig. He told me the story of how his leg got shattered last year. A heavy piece of metal swung from out of nowhere and smashed him. He went to the hospital and stayed there for a long time, and was in physical therapy for a long time. Somebody took his place. Something similar happened, a big piece of something falling, and the replacement guy died.

That's only one story. There are plenty of others, many not nearly as extraordinary, many fine, I guess, and plenty of shiny one-ton trucks bought with cash, and plenty of black gold by-product in this laptop computer.

'Revenge' is too strong. I'm still thinking on the right words. What you say when people say Oh, yeah? What's it about? You need a tidy elevator phrase. That's the hardest part.

[image error]

Next month I'll hit bookstores, libraries, schools, and CBC stations in Edmonton, Calgary, Lethbridge, and in Stand Off, the homebase of the Blood Tribe of the Blackfoot Nation not far from the Montana border. That's the most tender part for me. I haven't quite got words for it yet—especially after Labrador.

The whole trip will be a delicate thing, really, in so many ways. I'm cannonballing into oil sands central. Not necessarily as a provocateur—I'm haven't got the proportions or associations to be one of those, and if there's one thing I'm fully and transparently humble about it's the vastness of all that I don't know. The story just happened this way, and it's still unfolding, and on a scale that's persistently too big to grasp.

[image error]

+++

We saw the first review for Flight of the Griffons yesterday. It was so thoughtful and thorough. She's probably the first person to have finished it, and she had so much to say. I'm grateful to the point of giddy. It was the Monday morning gift after the Saturday launch party, which was such an excellent day.

Post by Kate Inglis.

Thanks to everyone for the cheers here and there, but mostly for bearing with me as all the news and reviews of the Griffons comes out. God, the release of this book is such a thrill, but it ushers in the beginning of an open space that should be occupied, if I want to be any form of legitimate. It's long past time to get moving on the urgent task of creating what's next. After Alberta, that is—after one last adventure to that golden ocean, to bring these pirates to their big sky home.

 

The launch: 2 PM sharp! Tomorrow! Pass the smelling salts.

I don't know if it's fair to feel like the luckiest person in the world when there are people in the world who fall from a third-story window and get caught by a street vendor. But I do, god, I do. The book launch is tomorrow, and I just got off the phone with Chris 'Old Man' Luedecke. We talked about banjo tuning and Banff. I gave him a wish list of all the songs I listened to at a blistering volume on the way home from the Calgary airport at midnight last night, feeling lucky. He's going to play around this story. His music is already seeped into it. See? Lucky.

[image error]

Seen above: favourite-baby-choosing. It's so tough to draw out the right moments, the right glimpses. But I think I've got it. That list is four lists ago. It's the only part about being a writer that makes you feel like a musician, other than the bottomless tail—there's an art to making a good setlist.

So! Tomorrow, Saturday May 24 from 2-4 PM at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic on Halifax's waterfront. And when I say 2-4 PM, that doesn't mean an 'open house-ish' 2-4 PM. That means that we'll start the show right at 2:00 with readings, songs, and a Q&A. Then we'll all eat delicious food and mill around admiring wooden boats and the harbour. And Sydney and I will be signing furiously and cheerfully. We'll have plenty of books for sale, both Flight of the Griffons and The Dread Crew: Pirates of the Backwoods. 

So many people that I love and adore and admire and soak up gratefully, all in the same salty room. We'll be recording it, and will have excerpts to share in the coming weeks, but I hope I'll see you there. 2 PM sharp. I am so excited. I will yell in Swedish, and I will try not to cry.

 

signed copies, mobs, and swedish lessons

Wait. Stop. (Evan pauses it) What does she mean, those people don't matter?

They don't have any money, so they don't have any voice.

...

Wait. Stop. (he pauses it again) So, what will happen when the fridge is no good anymore? Where will it go?

The dump.

But that won't be for a long time, right?

They used to make things to last a lot longer than they do now. Maybe I'll get a few years out of it, but then it'll break and I'll have to get a new one.

And it'll go to the dump.

Yup.

...

Wait. Stop. (he pauses it again) Are those trees going to grow back?

No. Not the way they were.

...

Mom, I don't know if it's okay for me to say this but I'm going to say it. I want to start a mob.

+++

The dying bees, the Antarctic melt, the mountains of old tires, the incessant toxic belch of factories that make Batman bobbleheads for Happy Meals. Off-gassing couches! Cancerous tinned tomatoes! Imprisoned killer whales! Our breastmilk is poisoned. We live absurdedly, ridiculously. OUR BREASTMILK IS POISONED. Try and explain even one sliver of it to a kid, just one angle of a thousand, and you'll see the face of the world's most incredulous and urgent WTF.

We have little to recommend us, and we know it. We shrug.

Rasmus Krook is the Captain of the Griffons. He doesn't shrug.

"…There’s forty-two thousand jobs, near ten thousand of ’em got by people like us. Everyone’s gotta eat. Industry feeds ’em. They figure Little Bear here’s gonna clean it up." He squeezed his baby, a dimpled plump girl with tufts of jet-black hair.

"Paa paa ba baaa!" she said. It was time for a nap.

Lou sipped from his thermos, and Little Bear’s eyes drooped, and Missy remembered the voice of Rasmus Krook. 'The people will pay with their whole being: physically, mentally, ideologically, spiritually, with their land, their soul. And not just country people. Not just native people. Poison will flow through villages, towns, and cities and not stop. We must rise up. We must disrupt the system. Capitalism is a deception.'

"You can help pirates," she said, because that’s the only answer she knew. Lou lifted his coffee in salute, and Missy stood up to jump.

Oh, Krook. Sweet nothings.

The book launch will be the first time I've ever read Flight of the Griffons in public. I've got to yell in Swedish— Rasmus slips into it now and then. I've got to at least do a bit of justice to his voice. Yesterday I sat with Christina and Mikael—recently-landed friends who moved back to Halifax from Sweden and rented the house I grew up in—and they helped me. I don't know that I'd feel brave enough to get loud in Stockholm, but it's a start. Growls and cheers for passionate objection, properly pronounced (or close) (-ish!).

+++

The latest: join us at the Flight of the Griffons Book Launch Party with Old Man Luedecke at 2 PM sharp at Halifax's Maritime Museum. Say yes at the event page on Facebook. It's so close!

And hey! I wore out a sharpie signing books yesterday. If you live too far away to get one of the dozen or so that are currently signed at Woozles, order direct from Nimbus Publishing. They'll ship anywhere! Call 1-800-NIMBUS9—that's 1-800-646-2879—and make sure you talk to a real-live lovely helpful human who can grab one from the signed stash for you.

 

 

big drop: the book launch

Sydney always begins by reading the manuscript—an agonizing wait, for me, like Christmas Eve for a six year-old—and then he starts to sketch. I never know which scene he'll choose, or which faces I will meet of the voices in my head. He sends them through and I cry. I always cry.

Missy has been talking to me for almost ten years. She's an ambitious one. Despite her muffled hearing she is only abled, not disabled. She is keen-eyed and unhesitating and entirely nonplussed. She doesn't stand for any fuss. This girl is my hero.

[image error]

Penelope, my editor, kicks me like a rock down a street. She won't let me mope. Whenever I'm down she posts pictures of a gulper eel to my Facebook and says HA HA THIS IS YOU. And I go GOD. PENELOPE. She's so brutal and so brilliant. She is telling me, right now, to quit thinking I'm special by being afraid to open the box that's on its way from the printer in Quebec. She tells me everybody feels that way right before a book is released. I tell her I wasn't afraid like this last time. She says Maybe that's because when the Dread Crew came out you were a pompous ass.

Blessings and blisses and heart-shaped hands.

Sydney, too. I mean, look at this. He sees her eyes. I hardly say anything at all except There are more trees in that scene and There's a porthole in the belly and they're watching her but beyond that, it's just first sketches to slobbery thanks to finished pages. Can I even call it collaboration? I am too happy with what he does to use that word, as though I have anything to do with this art other than suggesting it.

I wish I could be as wily as she is. She jumps. Today from Nimbus:

"The launch party for Kate Inglis' latest novel, Flight of the Griffons, will be a seaside event featuring good ships, a good story, and the hooligan-worthy accompaniment of award-winning roots singer-songwriter Old Man Luedecke.

Flight of the Griffons is a YA adventure novel about airborne pirates-turned radical environmentalists who sabotage corporate interests in the name of nature. It's loud, inventive, and full of heart—with strong maritime ties and plentiful music. Just like the party to usher it into the world.

In a live performance drawing from the book, we'll celebrate what happens when everyone stomps and sings along together—the book, after all, draws from his banjo and the lineage of protest in folk music. In their storytelling, Kate and Chris share themes of invention and ingenuity, activism, recovery from grief and loss, and the seeking of clean air and joy."

 

We're going to try to either record it with video or live-stream it, because it's going to be a terrific show. Join on Nimbus' event page for all the details as they unfold, and come by the museum on May 24 to stomp along and get a signed book. The more friendly faces among springtime green, the better. It's always that way.