Freedom to Read Week is an annual event that encourages Canadians to think about and reaffirm their commitment to intellectual freedom, which is guaranteed them under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Click here to find out how you can celebrate Freedom to Read week.
Shameless Magazine is putting together an anthology for publication in Spring 2009 and we’re currently looking for submissions! Check out the call below!
Call for Submissions: A Shameless Anthology
Co-editors Megan Griffith-Greene and Stacey May Fowles are seeking submissions for an anthology for teen girls to be published by Tightrope Books in Spring 2009.
The anthology will include creative non-fiction essays by women and trans-identified adults about their formative experiences as teens, and is primarily intended for a youth audience. Specifically, we’re looking for submissions about how teen experiences (positive and negative) shaped our writers’ lives and made them the people they are today.
This project is affiliated with Shameless magazine and is based on the magazine’s signature mix of smart, sassy, honest and inclusive writing. In keeping with the mandate of Shameless, we want to reach out to young female readers who are often ignored by mainstream media: freethinkers, queer youth, young women of colour, punk rockers, feminists, intellectuals, artists, and activists. We hope this book will open up a real dialogue about growing up female, creating a book that is pro-choice, queer-positive, sex-positive, girl-positive.
(Unsure of what we want? We suggest you pick up a back issue of the magazine.)
Your contribution can be personal, educational or political; it can be fuelled by humour, rage or sadness; but make sure what you write is honest, accessible and meaningful to teen girls, does not patronize or preach, and is in keeping with Shameless magazine’s mandate.(more inside…)
Just a reminder that our very own Thea Lim will be reading at Toronto’s famed IV Lounge tonight!
Here are the details…
Friday, January 11th @ 8 PM
Thea Lim (The Same Woman, novel)
The IV Lounge at 326 Dundas St (across from the AGO,) Toronto
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape
Co-editors Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti are seeking submissions for their anthology on sex, rape and power, Yes Means Yes!, to be published by Seal Press in Fall 2008.
Imagine a world where women enjoy sex on their own terms and aren’t shamed for it. Imagine a world where men treat their sexual partners as collaborators, not conquests. Imagine a world where rape is rare and swiftly punished.
Welcome to the world of Yes Means Yes.(more inside…)
He was right for her. She was his one and only.
Here’s a funny story from the CBC: Harlequin of the Harlequin romance novels have created new imprints to appeal to (female) readers of African and (East?) Asian descent:
Publishing houses across North American are creating new lines of romances aimed at people of Asian and African descent, according to Brian Miller, a Seattle journalist who follows the market for romance novels.
While that may sound like disgusting targeted marketing, Miller makes this excellent point about how people of colour have been traditionally left out of romance novels, or at least rarely seen as protagonists:
“So much of romance has been English and set in the past, whereas people of colour were the great other across the waves,” he told CBC cultural affairs show Q.
Damn right we should all have equal rights to trashy romance novels!
Does anyone know of romance novels that appeal to queer women?
Our very own fabulous Thea Lim of Shameless Blog Fame will be reading at the IV Lounge next friday and I encourage you all to make it out and experience how fantastic she is yourself. The IV Lounge always offers a wonderful evening of intimate literary bliss. By the way, in case you have yet to hear, Thea has written a book that you should definitely buy so you can more thoroughly enjoy her writing talents.
Check her out…
Friday, January 11th @ 8 PM
Stan Rogal (As Good As Dead, novel)
Irene Marques (Wearing Glasses of Water, poems)
Thea Lim (The Same Woman, novel)
The IV Lounge at 326 Dundas St (across from the AGO,) Toronto
The League of Canadian Poets and youngpoets.ca invites entries from Canadian youth to participate in its 2008 Poetic Licence Contest. Two age categories: junior (grades 7-9) and senior (grades 10-12). First prize in each category: $200; additional prizes available. All winning poems will be published in the League of Canadian Poets’ e-zine. No entry fee. Deadline: January 31, 2008. More details here.
The Canadian Aboriginal Writing Challenge is a short story contest for young Aboriginal Canadians. First prize: $2000. Participants must be of Aboriginal ancestry (Status, Non-Status, Inuit and Metis) and between the ages of 14-18 or 19-29. Submit stories 800-1400 words based on a moment or period in Aboriginal history. The event should be tied to Canadian history and/or the participant’s ancestral history. Deadline: March 31, 2008. More details here.
Maybe you are still looking for a last minute stuffer for your very own stocking, or maybe you plan to make 2008 the year you take charge of your health. Either way, for many gals who deal with chronic pain and confusion due to endometriosis, ovarian cysts, fibroids, painful periods or any other pelvic trouble, the following treats will be a welcome addition to the coping ritual.
A hot water bottle cozy. When your pelvis feels like its being ripped to shreds by a meat grinder, the last sensation you want is impersonal, corrugated rubber pressing into your tender region. The luxurious cashmere one pictured here looks heavenly, but a hand-sewn flannel pouch or a knit “sweater” would be just as sweet and snugly.
From Quill and Quire:
“Reuters has picked up on Wonder Woman’s 66th birthday – not much of a milestone, admittedly, but 2007 is, incredibly, the first year that the comic is being penned by a woman, one Gail Simone.”
From an interview with Simone:
“I don’t feel that being a female writer makes it so that I will be any better than any male writers. But it kind of catches people’s attention because we do have stereotypes about the industry. It’s no longer a little niche industry of white guys who hang out in comic book stores and don’t have girlfriends.”
No, not that Celine.
Who knows why our brains work this way? It’s been two weeks since Stacey May asked for our recommendations for young adult fiction of days gone by, and this book just came to me today, while riding the bus. Maybe because I don’t think of Celine, by Brock Cole, as “young adult” fiction - it’s simply one of my favorite books ever, categories be darned. If you can image Miranda July writing Catcher in the Rye, it’s something like that - a wry, hilarious, at times almost creepily intimate story about a sixteen-year-old who is painfully aware of the falseness and manipulation of the adults around her, and whose running commentary on the absurdities of the world and her place in it is consistently dead-on and funny as hell.
I haven’t heard of Brock Cole before or since, but moments from this book still haunt me to this day, a good 17 years after I read it for the first time. Like Celine’s thoughts on sex:
Ah! Sweet mystery of life! I’m beginning at last to understand those darker, irrational impulses that shape one’s life. I, too, have done strange and inexplicable things, almost against my will. I once pushed a navy bean up my nose… I know what it is for the body to be invaded by foreign objects, half consented to.
The New York Times reviews it here; if that’s not enough incentive, let me say again: GET THEE TO THE LIBERRY.
Plus: How to get published, pay for school, and bind your own books.
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