Moving

clarehitchens.posterous.com is my new address

I’ve decided to give Posterous a try and broaden the scope of my blog at the same time. I think planning to post about publishing was a good idea, but in practice it made me nervous to stick my neck out about a subject on which I am by no means an expert.

So the new blog is called Clare’s Stuff (please suggest better names) and will encompass anything I’m interested in. Usually that means books and music, music and books. But I’m also passionate about equity for people with disabilities, and just anyone who is treated as other by the mainstream of society. So you’ll see some of that there/here too.

Happy Reading and thank you for visiting.

TEDxWaterloo 2011

Yesterday I attended my second TEDxWaterloo. Last year I blogged about the first one and how much I enjoyed it. I attended with my friend Jennifer and fully expected I would do the same again this year. But she jumped in with both feet and became one of the lead organizers, so my contact with her during the day consisted of quick hellos in the hallway, except for a few minutes of chat at the supper break. I am so thrilled at what she and the rest of the team put together for us yesterday. It was an inspiring day. What I like about TED is that I go in with a set of expectations with respect to who I want to hear and who I’m not so interested in. By the end of the day those have all been shattered. Yesterday’s blow-me-away talk came from Vicki Keith, marathon swimmer. Her talk about coaching a young athlete with a disability to swim across Lake Erie was just fantastic. Roberta Bondar was another who just rocked my world for fifteen minutes. Jean-Francois Carrey, mountain climber was funny and smart and told a great story, and young sailor Abby Sunderland totally impressed me.

There was great coverage of the event this year and so instead of recapping I will link to someone else who has done a stellar job. Please click here for summary and pictures of the day. A huge thanks to the organizers for all your hard work.

Laziness made easy

I just added the WordPress app for my iPhone. Blogging in bed just a whole lot easier.

Listen to Fabulous Women

Inspired by the intrepid Book Madam I decided to try out this playlist website. Whoa, too much fun. I need to get back to work. Here’s my first attempt.

Happy New Year

Seems a lot of people on Twitter and Facebook had a rough 2010, and I’m sorry about that. I hope 2011 is better for you and is filled with joy and good news.

We had a pretty good year around here. I got lots of freelance work, mostly through The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and through the press (WLUP) itself. Throw in the odd professor’s paper and I was busy pretty much all the time.

It was a year for travelling as well. In May I went out to Regina for the annual Canadian Down Syndrome Society conference and stayed with good friends Gail and Ted Bowen instead of the hotel, which is always nice to do. The conference was excellent and the company fabulous. A few weeks later I was off to Montreal for a week for the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences (Learneds, for the old folk). I love Montreal and didn’t want to leave. We stayed downtown and walked to Concordia every morning for work. Perfect. Right after that we were off to Salt Lake City for the annual conference of Association of American University Presses. Strange city, but good times with colleagues. And a great book store.

The summer brought change for us. Mary was accepted to a French program at Université de Montreal and I had to drive her there since she couldn’t cope with a summer’s worth of supplies on the train. First time I’ve ever driven that far, but Kathleen came with me and we made a weekend of it that included the jazz festival and some very cute Starbucks employees (cue Kathleen swoon here). Kathleen was busy herself this summer. She volunteered in the summer playground at the community centre and also at Camp McGovern up near Hanover for a week. Strange having her working and away.

Change continued into the fall with Mary starting university at Laurier and Kathleen starting high school. She’s on the bus early every morning to head across town to an integrated arts program. Best decision we ever made—she’s having a blast and learning so much. Russell is in grade 12 and although he has a few more years he has chosen to go through graduation with his age peers and so we’ve bought a suit and are getting ready for grad photos and prom. And Bobby is working steadily and not causing me any trouble. I see him once or twice a week and that’s just fine.

This has been the year I throw myself out there on social media as well, especially Twitter. I met a few of the publishing people at the BookNet Tech forum last year and it has grown online since then—to the point that I’m actually really excited about this year’s forum and I hope I have enough nerve to talk to these (mostly much younger) people in person.

2011 is starting with a bang. I leave for San Diego on the 5th for the American Library Association conference. I’m looking forward to being warm for a week. Then we have a big splashy book launch at the Royal Conservatory of Music the week I get back and hopefully after that things will quiet down until the next travel in June (Fredericton and Halifax).

Wishing you all the best in 2011. I said on Twitter yesterday that my resolution is to believe for myself what I tell my girls. That is an all-encompassing message of empowerment, and I do believe it wholeheartedly when I say it to them. As for me, well, I’m a work in progress.

Advent Book Blog 2011

Last year some friends of mine over at Book Madam and Books on the Radio came up with the idea of the “digital hand sell,” book recommendations from people who work with and love books. A simple idea that took off like crazy. My two posts last year sang the praises of Carla Gunn’s very fine Amphibian (Coach House Books) and celebrated Canadian mystery novels from the likes of Gail Bowen, Peter Robinson, Maureen Jennings, and others.

The Advent Book blog is back and will start up again with regular postings at the beginning of December. If you want to be involved, visit the How You Can Participate Page, take a deep breath, and jump in with your recommendations. I look forward to reading what you do.

What the Stratford Shakespeare Festival Means to Me

As another season of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival comes to a close I am reflecting again on how lucky we are to be just thirty minutes down the highway from this amazing experience. I got a chance to see New York last year for the first time and there are not enough superlatives to describe how I feel about New York. I loved every minute, including the two shows we saw. But, here’s the thing: the city aside, I’ve seen just as good at Stratford, year after year.

My first experience at the festival was a school trip in Grade 9 to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That was the Elizabethan year somewhere in the mid-seventies and I was very confused about why all the heroines were wearing red curls and neck ruffs. I’ve since seen Dream twice more. Last year’s production with the bad biker fairies was by far the best. Throughout my high school years I got involved with musical theatre (as an orchestra member) and we put on a production of Jesus Christ Superstar in 1979 that the locals still talk about (well, those of us that were in it, I mean). Cast parties went on for a year after, and a big group of us have become lifelong friends. Such is the power of theatre.

I attended shows sporadically at Stratford when my kids were little and priorities were different, but in the past few years we’ve started going regularly, and I’m so glad to be back. What impresses me about the festival is that it really is for everybody. There are serious plays, there are comedies, there are big productions, and there are one man/woman shows. The spectacle of Peter Pan and the intimacy of The Little Years in the Studio Theatre. And there is a price for everyone, too. Don’t let anyone tell you that you need to have money to go to the theatre. I don’t have any. I buy tickets to previews, rush seats, end of season sales, and I watch for deals on Facebook and Twitter. In the past I have been fortunate to have friends at the theatre who have watched for deals for me too. If you can afford it you can have a luxurious experience in the best seats in the house. But if you can’t, there are other options, and they’re just fine. My daughters and I, and occasionally my son too, try to catch three or four shows over the season, and if we weren’t so busy with our own theatre/music projects we would probably see more.

As the tickets for 2011 go on sale I am already excited about next season. It’s about time to see Twelfth Night again. I’ve never seen Richard III and I think I should, the last time I saw Camelot was the Toronto show with Richard Burton around 1980, so I’ll put that on the list, and, what was that other show again? OH YEAH, Jesus Christ Superstar!! You can bet I’ll be there for that!

LCBO Fail

I had an hour to kill last night between dropping Kathleen off for her concert and going back to sit in the audience, so I headed next door to the mall. Oooh, look, an LCBO, I thought. I haven’t had a nice bottle of wine in a while. So in I went, and the first person I saw was a woman offering samples of wine.
Woman: Would you like to try some wine?
Me: Sure, where’s it from?
Woman: Africa
[Intrigued, I bend my head to look.]
Me: Oh, South Africa. Sure, I’ll try the Sauvignon Blanc. I’ve really been enjoying the New Zealand ones lately from the Marlborough region.
[Blank stare}
Woman (to woman behind me): Would you like to try some wine?
Woman 2: Sure, where's it from?
Woman: Africa!
[Women2 peers at bottle]
Woman2: Oh South Africa. Sure I’ll try the Sauvignon Blanc.
Woman: OMG I LOVE your pendant.
Woman2:OMG I KNOW. I saw it at the mall last night and I just COULDN’T leave it on the shelf.
[I drift away obviously unneeded and buy my bottle of Kim Crawford wine]

Ok, so for the next part you need to understand how much I love eggnogg. It’s the only thing I welcome about early Christmas marketing. We go through buckets of it at our place. So I was in the line waiting to pay for my wine and I spot a display of eggnog liqueur, kind of like a Bailey’s.

Me: Impulse buy — is this good?
Clerk: I don’t know. I hate eggnog. I’ve only tried it once but I thought it was disgusting.

Thoughts on Community

I’m being lazy here, but I wrote a post over at my other place that people seem to like, so go on over and take a look. It’s about community, social media, cookbooks, and remembered friends.

Holy Neglected Blog, Batman

I just got a request to approve a comment from a very old post, which makes me weep with joy that people are somehow still reading what I write even though I neglect them for months (thanks, Susan). I started the blog so that I could talk about publishing without wearing my work hat, but lately I’ve spent most of my time on Twitter, doing basically that in much fewer words.

Twitter has been fun. My “tweeps” have seen me through tragedies, such as the earthquake in Haiti and the election of Rob Ford (tasteless association, I know), and through hilarious and silly days in which we mock each other just to break the tedium. I’m looking at you @kingvonelk, @biancaspence, and @stevenwbeattie. I also met someone who loves Bruce Springsteen as much as I do. Kindred spirits are always welcome discoveries.

I’ve also met some people in real life that I first met on Twitter and have started to attend some local social media face-to-face events to keep those connections going. I look forward to more of that down the road.

Most recently I’ve been using Twitter to follow the municipal elections, both in my home community of Kitchener-Waterloo, and in Toronto. Because I’ve been so caught up in a process that fellow twitterers are passionate about, I am always surprised at how many people I meet in real life just don’t care, or don’t think through the implications of their vote (hence a Rob Ford result). Kitchener voted 65% in favour of entering talks about a possible merger of the two cities. Waterloo people voted 65% against. Hence there will be no talks. Really, people? We can never talk about it? How ridiculous is that? I do think that people from outside underestimate how different the two cities really are, but what Waterloo could lose merely by entering into discussion is beyond me.

So that’s it for now. I promise to write more often, I swear.