Last Saturday night was the soaringly splendid anniversary splash of the Toronto Women’s Bookstore which is celebrating its 35th year.

A cornerstone in many feminists’ literary ventures, TWB has broken many barriers and set an international example of what being an inclusive feminist is all about (and it doesn’t only have to do with gender y’all).

A fantastic night was had by all with praise and hope for another 35 years of this necessary store remaining open.

Do you have any memories of TWB you’d like to share?

My sister Jennifer and I with the super-incredible Sto:lo/Métis writer Lee Maracle who was on hand to perform her magical works. She was a huge influence on me to identify as an Indigenous feminist.

Our very own fantastic Anna Leventhal has just released a brand new anthology with Invisible Publishing, titled The Art of Trespassing, and we here at Shameless recommend everyone use this handy link to get themselves a copy. We’re certainly not alone in our endorsement:

“An anthology of new writers that sparkles with imagination, energy, and flashes of poetry. And perhaps most importantly, it’s an awfully fun read.”
-Jonathan Goldstein, Author of Lenny Bruce is Dead

Here’s some more info about our beloved Anna and her brand new book:

The Art of Trespassing explores the systems and structures that frame our everyday lives. Contributors imagine networks, neighbourhoods and relationships, exposing them as both confining and liberating.

Anna Leventhal’s fiction has appeared in Geist and will be published in the forthcoming anthology Journey Prize Stories 20 from McClelland & Stewart. She lives in Montréal.

So, I’m really usually not the type to read young adult romance novels. Don’t get me wrong, if that’s your thing then that’s great, but it’s not generally mine. Also, at 23 I’m slightly stretching the definition of “young adult”. But we all need holiday reading and last weekend when I was readying myself to lie on a beach for a couple of days I picked up Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the series (which hit #1 on the NY Times Bestseller list and is soon to be made into a movie), it’s about a 17 year-old girl who moves to a small town and falls in love with a vampire. Right from the beginning, it began ringing alarm bells in my feminist consciousness.

At first, I thought I was being over-sensitive. It’s really about a woman who’s submissive, and that’s not necessarily disempowering. But my list of complaints with it are stacking up, so it’s time for a rant.

Almost the first thing Edward the vampire boy does is save our protagonist Bella’s life, which would be all well and good except that he then saves her from distress every few pages throughout the first book. For reasons that have yet to be explained, Bella is so clumsy that she goes wide-eyed with fear at the prospect of running, walking or anything that requires basic motor skills. Her car is this bitchin’ pickup truck, which would be totally awesome except that once she and Edward start dating he jumps in the driver’s seat every time they go anywhere together and refuses to let her drive.

In fact, Bella is so helpless she can’t even figure out how to buckle her seatbelt in Edward’s jeep and he has to help her (after he helps her get in by lifting her bodily into her seat), all the while chuckling condescendingly at her.

And so far, everything Edward does to show his love for Bella is completely creepy. After a while, he reveals that he’s been watching her sleep from outside her room every night since they met. Her reaction? Embarassment that she’s been saying his name in her sleep. Not for a second does she chew him out for invading her privacy.

The really supremely icky thing about the book though is the root of Edward’s desire. From the second he first sees her, he’s consumed by lust for her blood. At first he can’t even get close to her because he’s so overcome by fear that he won’t be able to control himself. Instead he finally settles for telling Bella repeatedly, “I’m really dangerous. Really, I could totally kill you and you wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it. You should stay away from me.” Instead of backing the hell off and getting as far away from him as possible, Bella quietly decides that if she dies, she dies - at least she’ll get to be with this boy. Argh.

Give me Buffy the Vampire Slayer with its powerful female characters, sharp dialogue and singing demons any day.

Don’t school administrations ever learn? 12-year-old Amelia Robbins has been suspended after dying her hair pink as a tribute to her late father who died of cancer.

Broadsheet sums it up:

Administrators argue that the dye job is a “distraction” to other students, but with the full support of her mom, Amelia’s choosing to fight the suspension rather than adopt a more conventional hair color. “I don’t feel like I should have to, because i’m expressing myself as an individual. Because they constantly tell us be different, don’t follow the crowd.”

Nice one, kiddo! It’s never too early to start calling out your superiors’ hypocrisy!

A League of Their Own is one of my all-time favourite movies. I relished every moment of it, from women kicking ass in baseball, to the sultry Madonna pushing the envelope in sports (something I could always personally relate to!), to the oh so strong and beautiful Geena Davis who just kept carrying it on her own way as the best damn player in the league.

On my way back from the United States this time around I couldn’t pull the all-nighter drive I usually do so I can have the next full day to work, so around 2:45am my sagging eyes looked for somewhere to pull over and came upon the exit off 49 South in Wisconsin for Racine.

Racine??!! As in, the Racine Belles from A League of Their Own?!

Yup, it was indeed, so if I was going to pick any random town in the good ole US of A to rest up for a few hours, it might as well be this one!

Racine was part of several midwest towns who formed the original All American Girls Baseball League, which also included the Kenosha Comets, the Rockford Peaches, and the South Bend Blue Sox. The organization formed in 1943 to keep the sport of baseball going when the men went away to war.

I always liked girls playing baseball better anyways.

Today on The Kitchn there was an article about The Perfect Tomato Sandwich and it reminded me of Harriet’s struggle with her mastery of cutting a tomato.

I always felt kind of childish watching the Harriet the Spy movie with my little sister. I was in high school and “kid” movies like that weren’t supposed to make me cry! Especially since I read the book when I was a wee one. I think what I liked most about the story was that it was about a curious young girl who had a love for tomato sandwiches and an ability to have incredibly true emotions for a young fictional person. I love the part in the movie where Harriet is fighting with her mom about being a big enough person to cut the tomato for her sandwich, but her mom gives her a butter knife and splat goes the tomato. Oh the angst of the pre-teen. Didn’t her mother know that she was an amazing spy and had the skills to use a sharp knife?

It was that moment of her struggling with the tomato that I took on the tomato sandwich as my daily I’m-a-new-vegetarian lunch. I mean, if this cool spy can relish in the tomato sandwich its simplicity was good for me!

According to the CBC, Stats Can is reporting a drop in the number of teens who say they’ve had sexual intercourse at least once.

The decline occurred due to young women. For them, the proportion who reported having had intercourse decreased from 51 per cent in 1996 to 43 per cent in 2005. Among young men, the proportion stayed unchanged at 43 per cent.

There’s also some information in the report about increased condom use.

Sex education seems to be paying off among younger teens in terms of greater condom use, said Alex McKay of the Sex Information and Education Council in Toronto.

The report is based on interviews with about 4,500 teens in 1996, and about 10,000 teenagers for 2003 and 2005. Read more here.

A few years ago I wrote a piece for This Magazine on the important role campus/community radio stations have played in the lives and activism of feminists. The piece isn’t available online, so I’ll just cut and paste my general point.

Campus/community radio has long been welcoming to women and their views, especially considering the limited access feminists have historically had to mainstream media. Campus/community radio has been an important platform for feminists to engage in discussions rarely heard on mainstream airwaves, tackle important women’s issues and give underrepresented female musicians a presence. It’s a vital outlet in the face of mass media that is becoming increasingly hostile to feminist ideas and generally perpetuates narrow, stereotypical ideas about gender.

That said, I’d like to draw your attention to the horrible situation over at CKLN, the campus/community based at Ryerson University in Toronto. Over the past few months, many programmers and hosts that have been at the station for years have been shut out by illegitimate station management in an effort to make the station commercial.

Among the lists of cancelled shows is Radio Cliteracy, an important and bold feminist talk show, as well as Frequency Feminisms and Honour The Earth, which have been removed from the Sunday grid. So far, over 30 volunteers have been dismissed from CLKN without warning and without cause, including many LGTB, First Nations, psychiatric survivor programmers, women of colour and a trans person.

Luckily, people have been fighting to get back into the station and onto the airwaves with pickets, and by organizing meetings and a website. They need our support, so please do what you can to spread the word about keeping campus/community radio open for all.

(Apologies for being a bad blogger as of late. I’ve been a bit busy with some life stuff, but I’ll be back in regular rotation shortly. For now here’s a shameless plug.)

On Saturday August 23 at 8 p.m., with the invaluable help of Nightwood Theatre and the emerging actors program, there will be a staged reading of Fear of Fighting, a short, fifteen minute play based on my upcoming illustrated novel. (Put out by the same publishers who put out this amazing book by our very own Thea Lim.) The play will be staged, along with five others from Nightwood’s Write From The Hip! program, at Nightwood Studio 315 in the Cannery Building at the Distillery District in Toronto. Tickets at the door are PWYC (with suggested donation of $10).

I have to say I’ve been so very proud to work with the five other writers who also have staged readings the same evening - Briana Brown, Michael Reynolds, Marika Schwandt, Christina Wong, and Lukas Sidaravicius. Their talent is immeasurable, their help invaluable, and I’ve been consistently blown away by their insight and the awesomeness of their finished works. The evening is a great opportunity to see some fresh talent.

The following day at 4 p.m. Nightwood will also present works from their Busting Out! program, a free theatre program for girls aged 12 to 16. The goal of Busting Out! is to provide a forum for young women, through a series of theatre-based workshops, discussion and collective creation. The participants of the program will have the opportunity to work with professional playwrights, actors and directors on their own writing projects, as well as a public presentation of their own creation.

If you’re in Toronto this weekend take the opportunity to experience some exciting new works by emerging youth talent. More info after the jump.

(more inside…)