TODAY I MET my book about residential schools — called … um … Residential Schools — for the first time. For that reason alone it was a good day, and I wasn’t even sure if I’d be up for it, since I spent a good part of yesterday in bed with a fever, dreaming about the apocalypse. Or at least I think it was the apocalypse. It could have just been about the publishing industry. Haha! Ever funny that one.
MONEY. Paul McCartney says it can’t buy him love, but Paul McCartney complaining about not being able to buy love is like Paris Hilton lamenting that she can’t smooth-talk her way into a West Hollywood restaurant. And my point here is: where do I sign up to have Paris Hilton problems? Just point me to the office and I’ll be on my way, and thanks.
An excerpt from my book Full Circle: the Aboriginal Healing Foundation & the Unfinished Work of Hope, Healing & Reconciliation, Chapter 3, “Long-Term Visions & Short-Term Politics.”
THE MANDATE of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation was conceived as two related components: healing and reconciliation. As a funding agency, the AHF supported these with money and community support workers and other clerical services. Another large part of the Foundation’s work and legacy subsisted in its research agenda, which by 2010 had produced 20 studies all focused upon the Indian Residential School System and its current-day manifestations. The research was meant to advance one objective above all others: healing. The topics explored were enormously complex and included fetal alcohol syndrome, incarceration, domestic violence, sexual offenses and addiction. Behind the complex subjects however were practical questions: what relationship does the Indian Residential School System have to the realities of current-day life? Is there an underlying and perhaps even unifying agent which may account for the many apparent diverse forms of physical and emotional turmoil we can discern in indigenous communities? When communities undertake to solve their problems for themselves, what works, and why? Such were the sort of concrete prospects to which the research agenda was directed.
HOWDY, and welcome to the End-of Month-Roundup—which for the month of July is coming to you at the beginning of August. That’s because this was a busy and exciting month. Let’s review.
If you’ve been watching this site, you know that two books of mine were released this month. One of them, the 20th Anniversary Edition of Real Things Real People Are Really Doing, is available as a download here. Copies of the other, Full Circle: the Aboriginal Healing Foundation & the unfinished work of hope, healing & reconciliation, can be had by contacting me.
GREETINGS, friends and comrades! To celebrate the release of the 20th Anniversary Edition of Real Things Real People Are Really Doing, this Wednesday at noon I’ll be drawing two names at random from among my monthly newsletter subscribers. Each of these two winners will receive a signed copy of the 1st Edition Real Things Real People Are Really Doing, as well as my latest book Full Circle: The Aboriginal Healing Foundation & The Unfinished Work of Hope, Healing & Reconciliation.
The 20th Anniversary Edition of Real Things Real People Are Really Doing will be available Wednesday at 8 a.m. as a download at waynekspear.com. Included will be a 2014 introduction and a new, hitherto unpublished story called “Consummatum Est.” Click on the button below to subscribe. I’ll contact the winners on Friday to get a mailing address. Every subscriber will receive my monthly newsletter, special book deals, my unyielding gratitude—and maybe even some free books!
LATER THIS MONTH, I’ll be releasing a special 20th anniversary edition of my 1994 hit collection of stories entitled Real Things Real People Are Really Doing. Available as a download at waynekspear.com—for a limited time only!—this 20th anniversary edition will include a new story and my reflections on the making of RTRPARD. What a time it was. My only regret is that my book can’t actually drink beer. Look for it July 30, 2014.
Sign up to receive updates, newsletters, special book deals and my unyielding gratitude.
GREETINGS, Friends and Comrades.
The last two weeks have been on the quiet side, here at this little website of mine. This is not due to any lack of activity, industry or interest. I am busily at work on finishing up books, and I’ve got some other projects on the go as well. Also, I’ve been doing more radio and TV work than usual. But the really engrossing news, for me at least, is that I’m developing my next book. Here are the outlines of several new works, one of which will be the focus of my year. I’d love to know what you think about each, and especially which you’d most like to read. Your comments and ideas are much appreciated ….
“WRITING A BOOK,” according to George Orwell, “is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness.” The good news is that the illness ends after two or three years, or five at the most. When you start to feel better, it’s time to start a new book.
My friends and co-authors, Larry Loyie and Constance Brissenden, discuss residential schools and the forthcoming book Residential School: A Children’s History on CBC Radio.
A TOPIC CAN BE both vast and yet reducible to the most simple of terms. Here’s an example: a writer is a person who does things with words. Whether her goal is to inform, deceive, terrify, entertain, charm, persuade or seduce, a writer will have to do it with words. A reader, also, has nothing but words from which to cultivate the pictures, emotions and experiences which are ‘in’ the text. A writer’s voice is a big topic, but the topic does indeed rest upon these objects called words. And words alone.
I WAS ASKED the other day who I imagined my ideal reader to be. “Well,” I answered – “I hadn’t really thought about that.” Not exactly a stellar reply, I know. Of course I had a half-formed, all-wispy-like inkling of my readers. Tween girls, not on the list. Marxist-Leninists? Not so much. The Nobel Literature Prize Review Board and the editors of Vanity Fair? Hell yes … one day. Well, now I’m curious – just who is my IDEAL reader?
SOME YEARS AGO I had the good fortune and pleasure to befriend the wonderful Larry Loyie and Constance Brissenden. Larry is a Cree author and playwright from Slave Lake in Alberta. Constance is a freelance writer, author and editor who I first encountered when she was writing for Macleans in its glory days, under the capable editorship of Peter C. Newman, in the 1980s. Larry and Constance met in a writing class in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side and within a few years had formed the Living Traditions Writers Group.
There is a famous anecdote concerning two nineteenth-century British Prime Ministers and bitter rivals, Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone. The former may be credited with first articulating “Progressive Conservatism” — by way of his 1844 novel Coningsby, or The New Generation — and the latter with both establishing and dominating the British Liberal Party, having ended his affiliation to the High Tories. According to the standard account, Gladstone asserted (doubtless with approval) “I predict, Sir, that you will die either by hanging or of some vile disease.” Disraeli’s response was characteristically immediate, biting, and witty: “That all depends, sir, upon whether I embrace your principles or your mistress.”
I now have a “Kindle,” which is, for those who do not know this, a device for the purchase and reading of electronic books, or ebooks. In the course of familiarizing myself with the functions and uses of this contraption, I’ve had occasion to make the following observations. Continue reading Whither The Book?
Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books 
