The Season Ends and Life Goes On

Goldfinches at the feeder all the time now.  It's been quite something watching them lose their dull winter colours and get ready for spring.  The males are so vivid.  They truly are a stand-out.  Wish I had other photos to add – the pileated woodpecker who is currently appearing on a daily basis, the beaver who comes nightly, the wood ducks who are temporarily hanging out by our shores.  I say temporarily because I know this happens every year.  They come for a while on their journey somewhere and then move on.  Trouble is I don’t have a hugely superior camera which is what you really need for wildlife photography.  That and rather more patience than I have time for at the moment.

The Dragon’s Gold show was our finale, meaning a) that the 2011/12 2wp season is at an end; b) that we can now turn our thoughts more fully to June 16 and the day long telling of The Odyssey .  One of the things I’m finding fascinating is the way in which simply undertaking this grand adventure is sparking us to risk in all sorts of other ways.  The quirky little promo video, featuring Odysseus wandering through the streets of Ottawa, is just one example.  Then there’s the internet fundraising campaign – both of which you can explore at www.indiegogo.com/ottawastorytellers .  I know it helps that Ottawa Storytellers has some young, vibrant, savvy members and a vibrant, savvy Managing Artistic Director – Caitlyn Paxson.  Still I have a feeling we wouldn’t have come to either of these ventures before.  Could it be that Odysseus’s courage is reaching to us across the centuries, calling us to greater heights ourselves?

The Odyssey notwithstanding I shall be traveling fairly consistently for the next two weeks.  First, I’m off to Kamloops on the TD Canada Trust Children’s Book Week Tour ( http://www.bookweek.ca/ ).  Getting storytellers included in this annual Canadian Children’s Book Centre event is something I consider one of my major lifetime coups and I’m happy to be reaping the benefits myself now.  I’ll be including my books in my work, of course, but definitely emphasizing the storytelling, especially in folktale form.

What I love about the folktales as a teller is their freedom – the fact that you have to respond to emotional changes on the fly.  I just wish kids were getting exposed to this more often.  I’ve worked sometimes with extremely “reluctant readers.”  Always the told tales seem to give them an entrée into what literature might mean in their lives.  I remember once telling an Inuit story about a dog who, though he is sick and weak, persistently rescues a young girl from encroaching bears.  To be honest, I wasn’t even certain I’d captured it that well.   I still got a letter from a teenager who said, “I loved that story.  It told me it doesn’t matter how small and weak you think you are, you might be able to succeed.”

After Kamloops, it’s the Ontario Library Association’s Forest of Reading Awards.  You can find out all about that at: www.accessola.org/.../ Forest_of_Reading /.../ Forest_of_Reading /Welcome .  Do awards make a difference?  This one certainly does.  The biggest thing is that it gets kids reading and talking books and it gives schools a place to focus in their literacy work.  It's also a ton of fun.

All in all I’ll be busy so it was good to look out at lunch time and see the lake flat calm.  Calm brings reflections so I’m closing with a pic of that.  A moment of reflection for each and everyone.