| It was disturbing to see photographs of burned library books at a Jewish school in Montreal that was apparently firebombed last week. Fortunately, the school has received what they call an "outpouring of support" from people who want to help get books back in the hands of those elementary school kids as quickly as possible.
If you’d like to join them, there are a couple of things you can do. Probably the easiest is to make a donation using your Amex or Visa card. Call the head office for United Talmud Torahs Schools at (514) 739-2291 and they’ll take it from there. They’ll even give you a tax receipt. Or send a cheque, payable to United Talmud Torahs, to this address: United Talmud Torahs, 4840 St. Kevin, Suite 210, Montreal, Quebec, H3W 1P2. (Yes, the street address is "St. Kevin.") For more information, write to the school at webmaster@utt.qc.ca.
This summer’s Calgary International Spoken Word Festival promises to be a landmark event – more on participants and details in future columns. For now, there’s Mystix at the Knox II, a festival fundraiser on Thursday, April 22 at 8 p.m at Knox United (506 Fourth St. S.W.). It’s a night of reading and performance featuring the Fates (Lori Reid, Lin Elder and Jenny Allen), bassist John Hyde, Calgary’s Maple Salsa Theatre founder Norma Lewis, and poets Nicole Markotic and Sheri-D Wilson. The MC is poet and Fast Forward contributor Jocelyn Grossé.
Moving from the spoken word to print, on Wednesday, April 21, Calgary publisher Frontenac House makes its annual four-fold foray into poetry publishing with Quartet 2004: No-Holds-Barred Poetry. This year’s books are Kevin Irie’s Angel Blood: The Tess Poems, J. Fisher’s Death Day Erection, Bob Stallworthy’s new book Optics and Lisa Pasold’s Weave. Get to Memorial Park Library early for this 7 p.m. launch event. It’s sponsored by Pages.
Hiromi Goto’s Hopeful Monsters is her third book, following Chorus of Mushrooms and The Kappa Child. What’s a hopeful monster? It’s a term in evolutionary theory for unusual organisms that come about, not by way of classic gradual evolutionary change, but instead through abrupt "monstrous" mutations that actually succeed in fitting into their environment. But Goto is not taking up where Stephen Jay Gould left off. She’s using the image to tell the stories of women who must leap free of what you might call the "fossil records" that limit their lives. What do things like "reality" and "home" mean, when you have to become, in a sense, a new life form in order to survive?
You can start to find out when Goto reads at McNally Robinson on Monday, April 19 at 7:30 p.m.
Deborah Ellis’s trilogy The Breadwinner, Parvana’s Journey and Mud City offers a child’s perspective on life in Afghanistan. She reads at the W.R. Castell Central Library’s John Dutton Theatre on Thursday, April 22 at 7 p.m. The reading is co-sponsored by Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan. |
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