“The look of a guitar is important, but really it’s a tool, and as everyone is differently shaped, each one has to be custom-designed,” says Al Hosokawa, with one of his hand-made guitars in his workshop.

Photo by Boomer Jerritt

The home of Alfred Hosokawa is much like its owner—compact, with a quiet charm and rustic attraction.  The house sits modestly overlooking a small piece of garden, yet it hides a treasure trove.

Behind the house is Hosokawa’s workshop and entering it is like walking into another time—inside, there is nothing made of plastic, nothing glowing and bleeping.  The walls and posts are warm, brown unfinished lumber and the small space is filled with tools of all manner.  Some are recognizable—woodworking tools, augers of differing widths, screwdrivers and chisels—while others look like art sculptures; a wooden arm with a stone wired on top of it, for instance.  Three instruments gleam among the supplies of raw wood and wooden tools on the shelves, their bodies shining, their shapes inviting touch.  These are some of the treasures wrought by Hosokawa in creating his hand-made guitars.

“I had to invent lots of machines and tools for myself once I started making musical instruments,” explains Hosokawa with a smile. “Once I took a trip across Canada with a backpack, and I think I stopped at every secondhand store across the country, looking for old woodworking tools.  They were hard to come by then.  There has been a revival of Luthiers (instrument makers) in recent years, but back then, I had to be creative.”

There is now a school in Qualicum—the Summit School of Guitar Building—which has been in existence for about 15 years, that inspiring Luthiers may attend to learn the ancient art of guitar making.

Hosokawa built his first guitar in 1972; it took him six months to complete. “I’d grown up around woodworking,“ he says.  “My dad was a boat builder and I’d worked with him as a teenager, so I was quite accustomed to using my hands and had always enjoyed it.”

The Hosokawa family grew up in Salmon Arm.  But the family—although all had been born in Canada and Hosokawa’s grandfather had fought with the Canadian Infantry in the First World War—was forcibly moved from their home by the Canadian Government when all people of Japanese ancestry were forbidden to live on the coast.  The government’s rationale was that Japanese-Canadians might assist Japan in an invasion of Canada after Japan dropped bombs on Pearl Harbor during the Second World War, destroying much of the American fleet.  It is only within the last 10 years that Japanese people have been compensated for the homes and businesses the government seized at that time.

Hosokawa and his parents eventually made their way back to Salmon Arm.  “My parents liked it in Salmon Arm and stayed there.  I was a child when we were expatriated, so to me it was home,” Hosokawa says simply.

Despite the turmoil of being uprooted from his home, Hosokawa had a happy childhood.  “It was a farming community, and I spent a lot of time working on ranches with animals, haying—one of our neighborhood friends had a ranch with cattle and I worked there quite a bit.”

He began playing guitar when he was 15.  “Actually, all my brothers and sisters—12 of us in total—enjoy music and when we get together we still sing and play.  I remember sitting around bonfires as a child and my older brothers playing guitar.”

A dyed-in-the-wool BC boy, Hosokawa spent his working life moving around, part of the boom of the seemingly never-ending supply of natural resources.  He worked in the woods, as a logger, in pulp mills, sawmills, fishing and more.  When he did begin making instruments, Hosokawa followed every lead he could to meet other instrument makers, learning from them and exchanging ideas.  “There were no schools back then, like there is now where you can go and learn the skills to make instruments, so it took a lot longer to amass the knowledge necessary to make instruments.”

Hosokawa smiles and gives a shrug, adding:  “When it’s your passion, though, you don’t care.

“I think I must have read every book there was on the subject to get ideas and information, some of the tricks of the trade.  It’s funny though, lots of the people who wrote them weren’t very good builders, so I got a lot of misinformation as well.”

Hosokawa worked from books and experimentation, mostly on his own, until he began working in Vancouver and Victoria in the 1970s.  “I remember working at Bill Lewis Music, a shop in Vancouver.  I was making speaker cabinets there for a while and I saw all these people in the back building instruments.  There was another guitar shop up on 10th Avenue and there were people building there, too.  Ray Nurse, Michael Dunn—they were the established builders of the time, and Anton Smith, a lute builder.  I talked to him for a long time and, you know, I got a lot of information in that one talk.  He really got me going.”

He found more established builders to draw from in Victoria too.  “I set up a shop with two others and we were making dulcimers, violins, guitars—everything you could think of.”

He smiles, remembering a fellow builder who worked near his shop.  “There was an old guy just round the corner, and he was building huge organs for churches—that was his job.  He came round and talked to us and lots of people were taking him guitars to get fixed, and he didn’t really know about that.  He was building these big organs with long metal tubes for churches—of which there were many—and they all had wonderful organs.”

“Performing really imbues young people with a sense of confidence,” says Loreen Johnson, whose four kids—above from left: Sophia, Caleb, Carter and Spencer—all participate in the North Island Festival of Performing Arts, which will take place this February at the Sid Williams Theatre.

Photo by Photo by Boomer Jerritt

To Beverly Chalk, no matter what kids go on to do in life, an early exposure to the performing arts is a huge gift.

Chalk, recently appointed president of the North Island Festival of Performing Arts (NIFPA), sees first-hand how beneficial the arts can be. “If gives self-confidence, they have to find their strength and inner core and young people do that intuitively when they engage in learning a piece of prose, a hip-hop routine, a tune—whatever it is,” she says. “The sooner they start the better. If fine arts are introduced later in life, too often teenagers are blocked from their creativity because of self-consciousness, a feeling that it’s not ‘cool’, which isn’t there in young children.

“I see the positive attitude that all these young people have, the huge sense of accomplishment they feel after their performances,” adds Chalk. “I think performing arts can help a young person form their ideas of who they are, before something else comes along to do that.”

The North Island Festival of Performing Arts provides an ideal opportunity for kids to get their feet wet performing in front of audiences and adjudicators. A non-profit society, NIFPA has been dedicated to providing this annual festival for students of the Comox Valley and surrounding communities for more than 30 years. Last year 17 students were chosen to represent NIFPA at the Provincials. The adjudicating portion of the festival takes place in February; following this are two grand finales—an Honors Concert, which will be held February 26, and the Dance Gala, to be held February 27.  These concerts also act as fund-raisers for NIFPA bursaries and scholarships.

NIFPA’s goal is to advance, promote and develop the performing arts in its various forms, and to encourage performing arts as an adjunct to community life.   Performing arts include Ballet, Stage Dance, Modern Dance, Brass, Woodwinds, Strings, Ensemble, Speech Arts, Choral Speech, Piano, Voice, Choirs and Fiddle.
Chalk, along with fellow board members—including Carol Martin, who recently took on the role of education and publicity—are keen to have more local involvement in NIFPA. “We want to get the word out that it’s a friendly, supportive festival, open to anyone who has the desire to perform a piece of prose or poetry, tell a story, play an instrument or dance,” says Chalk. “That includes adults too! Anyone is welcome to enter and it’s not necessary to be given a mark; a few adults enter just to have the benefit of the critique from the adjudicator.”

Small wonder, as there are many highly experienced and qualified actors, musicians and dancers sitting in as adjudicators, offering a wealth of knowledge. Jonathan Love is a stage and screen actor who has also dubbed for cartoons. Professional ballerina Erica Trivett, who has recently returned to Vancouver after years in Europe as a soloist and choreographer, will be sharing her insights with young dancers.

So You Think You Can Dance, the popular TV show, is possibly the biggest spur dance has had since the days of big bands, when everyone went out dancing. Sherrie Scherger, assistant choreographer to Sean Cheesman—who gives the dancers their moves for the show—will also be in Courtenay as the adjudicator for Stage, along with hip-hop professional Kim Sato. Sato likewise has a long list of credits to her name, both live and in movies and videos.

“It’s a tremendous opportunity for any performer, particularly if there’s a desire to go on and be a professional,” says Chalk. “These adjudicators are living proof that it is possible to make a living in the performing arts. We want to encourage anyone at all to enter and get the benefits of both performing, then having a critique afterwards. We want to encourage performing arts as an adjunct to community life.”

Participants come from as far north as Port Hardy, south to Parksville and east to Port Alberni. In February the Sid Williams will be buzzing with Festival performances. Speech Arts begins on February 1; the following week is strings, guitar and piano; the third week ballet and modern dance, with stage and hip hop the fourth week.

Audience drop-ins are invited throughout the Festival with the understanding that they will be seeing a series of performers who will be adjudicated—different from a show, with lights and non-stop performance.

Well established in the Comox Valley, The North Island Festival of Music was formed in 1977 by piano teachers from the Comox Valley and Campbell River. The name was changed to North Island Festival of Performing Arts in 1992, to better reflect all the disciplines involved. The organization is part of a not-for-profit charity under the umbrella of Performing Arts BC, which was established in 1964.

Many families are involved with parents and children attending the Festival, keen to participate and display their talents. One family travels from Campbell River weekly to receive coaching from someone who has been instrumental in the high standards and success of the Festival.

Eleanor Philips, despite being in her 80s, is still a dedicated teacher in speech arts. “The success of our children in competition has to be shared with Eleanor,” says parent Loreen Johnson. “She’s been marvelous.” All Johnson’s four children are currently involved in performing arts and are keen Festival goers. Carter is 13 years old and won the piano prize in the BC Provincial Festival last year; brothers Spencer 11, and Caleb, 5, and sister Sophia, 8 all compete in the speech arts, with the two oldest boys competing musically as well. This year, Spencer is part of a guitar group ensemble and is also playing two solo pieces. He has been playing for four years and thoroughly enjoys both practicing and competing. “I like being on stage,” he says simply. “I like performing in front of my parents and grandparents and all the other kids.”

Caleb is working on two poems, as well as a piece of prose and a monologue for this year’s Festival. “They’re funny, and I like making people laugh,” he says.
Their mom is enthusiastic about the benefits of performance at a young age. “It really imbues young people with a sense of confidence,” she says. “I think public speaking is the best gift to give kids. As well as building their confidence, it enhances their verbal skills.” The Johnson family is perhaps the most prolific in terms of entries and this year the Johnson children will participate in 21 categories at the Festival. Last year they carried off 15 firsts out of the 17 categories they entered in.

“The Festival isn’t just about picking the best though,” Chalk points out. “Sometimes a child may not be chosen for first place, yet the adjudicators recommend they go on to participate in the BC Provincial Festival. If they believe that the child will benefit from wider exposure to the artistic world, then that child goes on to the next level of competition.

This indirect education is an important part of the Festival, Chalk adds. “It’s not just about choosing the best. I like to see children given opportunities and I’ve been battling this in the schools systems. Too often the same children are given lead roles, time and again—why? It should be a place for encouraging and grooming children’s desires to do well and participate in the arts. How is little Janey or Jimmy to know whether or not they like being on stage—and most children do—if they’re not given the opportunity?”

As one might expect, Chalk’s own children all participate in the performing arts. Kaitlin, now 16 years old, and a past performer in dance, is a volunteer at this year’s event, time-keeping being one of her tasks. Her younger sisters Courtney, 14, and Cassidy, 8, will be dancing.

Chalk herself grew up in a family that sang and played devotional music. Her dad was a band teacher with the Salvation Army and as a young girl Chalk was more than happy and willing to go to band boarding school for three weeks in her summer holidays. “I began playing an instrument in Kindergarten and music was always a part of my upbringing,” says Chalk, who performed in her first musical when she was six years old.

“If young people aren’t ever exposed to piano playing, singing, dancing, whatever, how can they know they have a desire to do it? If they’re lucky enough to have a music teacher in primary school they can be part of a show or a concert, but that’s a bit hit and miss. Sparking that creativity at an early age is crucial, I think.”
President of NIFPA for a year, Chalk recognizes that she is able to build on a strong foundation built up by past president Collette Marshall, known to all as Sam. “Sam was the president for 12 years and she and the board have established the Festival of Performing Arts as an organization with high standards of excellence. I’m pushing the envelope a little further, by reaching out to the wider community of the North Island to participate and support this Festival. I could not be enjoying what I’m doing right now if things had not been brought along to this stage.”

To that end, Chalk and the board are changing things slightly this year. “There is a re-definition of the categories—musical, vocal and speech arts are no longer lumped together; they each have a separate category. With the adjudication, we’re getting the word out to participants through their teachers that it is only one person’s opinion—we all have our pet likes and adjudicators are no different.

“We’re seeing this as an interpretation of a performance piece, and marks are never publicly announced on stage. I sensed that the public was a little intimidated by the process, and we don’t want that. We want to be seen as the organic, approachable living organism we are, rather than a staid and rigid body. The adjudication process is that after the performances in a particular class, all the kids are called back to the stage and the professionals in their field will give feedback to them all. The classes are broken into age categories as well, and professionals are not eligible for grants or bursaries. Placements will also not be announced at that time. We want to change the focus of the kids from being first to participation. Too often they don’t hear any of the remarks made by the adjudicators once they’ve been told their mark,” says Chalk.

“Dance is generally a group activity, but more often the music and speech are individuals. There is now going to be a grouping of kids who don’t want to be graded or given a mark on their efforts, but only receive adjudication. It’s all about the kids and educating them. I don’t want to water down the competitive aspect—I believe competition to be healthy and a growth process—but I realized that within the scope of where we live, we want everyone to get up and compete. This innovation allows for that, and it will be completely unknown to the other participants.”

All the marks of the competitors will be online as well as posted in the lobby of The Sid, but not announced publicly.
Most entrants to the Festival are part of a studio, or a group. Dancers have to be part of a studio to enter because of insurance liability, but individuals can participate in the other disciplines. Quite a few home-educating families take advantage of the Festival with its opportunities to learn from highly experienced professionals. Two of the Johnson children are home-educated in fact.

“Most of the teachers in the Valley are familiar with the Festival, and without their hard work that has been going on for years, we certainly wouldn’t have the high standards we do. Kymme Patrick does wonderful work with young people in the dramatic arts, as do the drama teachers in the high schools,” Chalk says.
Chalk, too, continues to learn in her role with NIFPA. “One of the most surprising things to me has been how much I’ve enjoyed hearing and seeing players in disciplines that didn’t interest me before, particularly,” she says. “I hadn’t paid much attention to strings and vocal in the classical field, so it’s been a delight for me learning more about that. The adjudicators can demystify areas of the arts that perhaps we aren’t so familiar with.”

The winners, as well as other participants recommended by the adjudicators, go on from the North Island Festival here in Courtenay to the BC Provincial Festival. This year it is to be held in Duncan, and it moves around the province each year.

One of the participants last year was John Rim, a 14 year old whose family now lives in Comox. Rim moved here in 2005 from South Korea and has been a violin player since he was four. He took the strings award and went on to the BC Provincial Festival. Rim also plays clarinet and Korean drums in the Mark Isfeld school band. His particular favorite composer is Vivaldi, whom he likes because his works can be played quickly and energetically. Rim has been chosen as an adjudicator this year in the strings section. As well as a classical strings component, there is also a fiddle section.

“We’re hoping to expand the repertoire of the Festival locally to include things like jazz and rock-a-billy,” notes Chalk. “They may remain outside of the National Festival scope, but they could be adjudicated within our own local region.”

As fine arts are now under severe threat financially in our school, and the position of fine arts coordinator may be chopped by the school board due to lack of provincial funding, the Festival of Performing Arts may take on even more significance. But it’s obvious that under the direction of Beverly Chalk and the board of NIFPA, there is a dedicated commitment to educating and encouraging young local performing artists.

For more information go to www.nipa.org. Admission to each adjudicated session is $2, or $10 for the month. The Festival Variety Showcase will take place Friday, February 26 at 7:00pm and the Festival Dance Gala on Saturday, February 27 at 7:00pm.

“I know that after some films the audience feels that they’ve been on a shared journey,” says Sara Turner, in the theatre at Reel Films in Cumberland. “That’s the feeling I want to engender.”

Photo by Boomer Jerritt

The main street in Cumberland has changed somewhat since the inception of the town in the late 1800s, when thousands of miners uprooted themselves, from Britain primarily, to follow King Coal to the land of opportunity, Canada. Back then Cumberland was a boomtown and Courtenay’s population was dwarfed by that of the instant, industrial domain of Robert Dunsmuir—a miner who became a millionaire.

One feature of the Cumberland landscape that time hasn’t changed is the front of Frelone’s Grocery Store on Dunsmuir Avenue. It still retains the carved name in the stone lintel above the door, although the exotic turquoise paint is a recent innovation.

Frelone’s Grocery is now the home of Reel Films, the brainchild of Sara Turner, a 28-year-old entrepreneur who has launched into a new field of endeavor. Turner was looking for a new way to make a living after giving birth to her son, Cohen, now a year and a half. “I’d been working as a cook in tree-planting camps—which isn’t a lifestyle particularly conducive to parenting—for about seven years, and cooking had palled for me. I was actually studying traditional Chinese acupuncture just before Cohen’s birth, which I thoroughly enjoyed, but it’s also very intense. I wanted something that would allow me to parent Cohen in a more relaxed fashion.”

Turner’s brown eyes sparkle with enthusiasm and her elfin face lights up as she continues her tale. “I was sitting with my older sister, Jessie, last Christmas, throwing around business ideas, and that’s when the seed of a cinema first planted itself. I was mulling over my options, having moved from Victoria to Cumberland, and looking after Cohen most of the time. His dad, Mike, also works in a tree planting camp, so is gone for long periods of time.”

The history of Frelone’s Grocery seems to be an integral part of the building. “So many people come in to watch a movie and tell me, “Oh, I used to come here to listen to jazz, or they’ll say, ‘I had my first Chinese acupuncture treatment in here.’ It’s a fascinating part of running Reel Films. In fact, an elderly woman came in the other week and told me she used to buy candy here as a child.”

The original grocery store was built in 1935 by Louis Frelone, whose family ran the modest shop for many years. The next owners, Leo and Barbara LeBlanc, continued it as a grocery store until 1981. After that, Frelone’s Grocery had a variety of incarnations, including a motorcycle shop and a health food store. In the more recent past, it has been a weekend entertainment venue and an accountant’s office.

Interestingly enough, Frelone’s has come full circle in that once more it is a venue for movie watching. At another time it was also home to a film projector. Turner has been told that there used to be a large, hand cranked metal wheel projector that the cellulose film would run round. “Apparently the equipment had to be shut down in the middle of a film to stop it going up in flames caused by the friction of the cellulose film,” Turner says, laughing. “A fan had to be employed to cool everything down! At least I don’t have that worry—the current equipment is all digital!”

Turner confesses to not knowing anything about running a movie house at the time she had the initial idea. “I just thought the Comox Valley would support another movie venue, The Rialto being the lone movie house now, when there used to be three cinemas. It also seemed to me it would be a creative and satisfying thing to do.
“I wanted to show films that would be thought-provoking and stimulate discussion of ideas, rather than just fill people’s heads with mindless images of destruction and mayhem, which is much of the fare on offer from Hollywood these days. I also thought it would be fun!”

What followed was a huge learning curve for Turner, as well as lots of ‘sweat equity’. She took advantage of a program offered by Community Futures, which provides a three week business course for those eligible under the Employment Insurance umbrella. Participants have to present their business proposal, which if accepted, leads to basic living expenses being paid for 10 months. During this time, the business has to become self-supporting. Not an easy task, as statistics show that most businesses take a five year period to show a profit.

Turner is extremely grateful for the business courses. “I learned so much,” she says. “Things I didn’t have a clue about—advertising, accounting, internet use. It was hugely valuable, and now I run my business, and they deposit money into my account every month. I’m so grateful to live in a country that provides us with that kind of support. I like to see the money citizens pay to government being made available for our own uses.”

Turner’s aunt, who lives in New York, was also able to offer the fledgling movie mogul some sage advice. “My aunt had been involved in running film festivals, editing film and presenting tributes to actors no longer in the prime of their youth, so she had a wealth of experience. I wasn’t shy about phoning her to ask, ‘OK, what about this aspect’ or ‘how do I go about doing this?’”

With the idea and plan in plan, Turner set to with a will. She bought a huge piece of canvas and experimented painting it with strips of shades from white to dark grey, then showing film on top of it. She discovered the light grey shade brought out the color and contrast of the DVDs to their best. “I laid the canvas down on the floor and ran around with bare feet and a long roller and put about seven coats of paint down. It was quite the project!” That canvas was then pinned to the front wall of Frelone’s, in front of the bay window, where it takes up the whole wall. DVDs can be formatted to fit onto the canvas, which is actually slightly bigger than a typical film screen.

“The technical side was mind boggling, actually,” Turner says. “I didn’t realize I’d have to learn so much about it all. Fortunately, I was able to hire a friend who taught me the ropes.”

The next task was finding seats for the theatre—35 of them. “I felt a bit daunted to begin with. New theatre seats costs a fortune, and likewise old re-vamped seats. I had a limited amount of savings to spend, and was in a bit of a quandary. Then I thought of the wonderful old Palace Theatre, which was closed for renovations a couple of years ago, and the roof was set on fire accidentally. The water damage was such that the owners decided to demolish the whole place.

“I tracked down the man who had done the work, and asked him about the seats. ‘What happened to them,’ I asked. ‘They’re in my barn, waiting for you to buy them!’ he joked. I went out to see them and they were in a huge higgledy-piggledy pile in this hay barn, with cats sleeping on them. Some of them had been broken during removal and I had to sort through them to find the best. Once I got them bolted into the new, raised floor at Frelone’s then came the back-breaking job of cleaning them all.”

She laughs, remembering how hot it was at the time. “It was the beginning of the heat wave we had this summer. I had to steam clean them numerous times and there was as much water dripping off my face as coming out the machine. It was worth it though—after days and days of cleaning them and emptying out gallons of filthy, sooty water, they finally came up a rich crimson—it was thrilling. They give the air of elegance I wanted to create.”

That old time elegance is an important part of her vision for Reel Films. “People have used movies as a means of escape since their inception,” she says. “During the Depression, in the ’30s, movies were never more popular. Of course, it was a new technology then, plus there wasn’t the option of sitting in the seclusion of one’s own home to watch a movie.

“That feeling of being a part of a larger humanity is what I want to re-create. There’s a sense of having shared an experience with other people when the movie is on a big screen and in public. The difference between laughing at something on a home video, alone, or laughing with other people, is a subtle one, but I think it engenders a sense of sharing and belonging.”

Turner pauses before adding, “That’s part of my objective—to create a sense of community, to bring home the truth that we share this planet with others who are, basically, just like us. We might have different outward appearances, varying opinions and views, but those differences are superficial. I think what connects us as humans is deeper than what appears to separate us.”

Turner believes film can help a person come to terms with their own reality, and often put one’s life in a different perspective, bringing a sense of gratitude and clarity. “For many Canadians, it’s an eye opener to recognize that we have a highly privileged lifestyle here,” she says. “Some of us may not have much money, but we have tremendous everyday things, like clean water and air, which is often taken completely for granted. Film can take us into another person’s life and that gives us cause to reflect on our own.”

Choosing the films to be presented is the fun part of Turner’s job. “I watch a lot of movies,” she says with a smile. “I only present second-run movies, which means that they’ve already been round the circuit, like to The Rialto, and the other movie houses that are tied into a distributor. With a set up like mine, I actually choose which movies I want to present. One of the most popular up to now is Tootsie. That one drew a larger audience than others.”

Turner has a suggestion box for patrons to use. “I don’t want to only show movies I like,” she explains. “It’s an interesting part of running Reel Films—sharing ideas and suggestions with other small specialist movie house owners, and movie fans in general. Most of this dialogue happens over the internet, and there are sites that deal with alternative movies as well. When I’ve been in contact with someone who shares the pleasure I have had with a particular film, then I can pick their brains about others they’ve enjoyed, with the knowledge that I may like them too. Of course, I don’t have to like all the movies I show, either.”

She pauses. “It’s such a curious thing—a person of whom one is really fond and share a multitude of common likes and dislikes can recommend a movie, yet when you watch it, you don’t like it one bit—which again, doesn’t mean I won’t show it. Art is such a subjective, slippery preference.”

Her criteria for choosing films is broad. “It may be that a movie has a fabulous soundtrack, perhaps it has become a cult movie, and I want people to have the opportunity to explore what made it a cult movie. On Thursday nights I only show documentaries, and Sunday afternoons are for family films, so they’re more general.”

Recognizing that often hard-hitting documentaries can leave viewers feeling doomed, Turner consciously mixes lighter subject matter in the menu of film fare. “I recently screened Baraka, which is a highly watchable film that shows many aspects of humanity as well as the natural world, with images cleverly juxtaposed. Without using any dialogue, the film says a lot with its use of images and sound. I know that after some films the audience feels that they’ve been on a shared journey. That’s the feeling I want to engender.”

At the time Turner was applying for funding she took part in the annual World Community Film Festival, whose goals are similar to Turner’s. They want to educate and inspire people to become more politically active, in whatever way they chose. “At the time, I was still slightly unsure if I was doing the right thing,” says Turner. “I like to do things I’m good at, and this was uncharted territory, but being there, seeing those films that would never be available in Courtenay without a group to research alternative films, have the contacts with other communities that have already been presenting Film Festivals, and then obtain those films that are definitely not in the mainstream, really inspired me. Sensing how important it was to other people to share those experiences, have that new information about an event or an occurrence that otherwise we wouldn’t have had knowledge of, convinced me.

“It really solidified my intuitive feeling that when a group of people come together to share something, like watching a film, we’re subconsciously bound together in our experience,” adds Turner. “To begin with, all the people with their talents and skill who came together to create the movie in the first place, and then all the viewers watching it together, sharing that information combined with the visual experience. It feels really special and unifying, kind of sacred. It connects us to our human-ness. The more of that feeling that I can promote in my own way, the better I feel about what I’m doing, and the outcome of my efforts.”

Turner sees a huge difference between films and television. “I think most of what’s shown on TV is garbage,” she says bluntly. While she recognizes that many films are churned out to a target audience and follow a predictable format like many TV programs, she does think films are usually made with more intent. “And I don’t show run-of-the-mill dross at Reel Films,” she says. “There has to be something interesting or curious—some aspect that makes a film worth watching to begin with.”

When Reel Films had its very first showing, BC was sweltering in an unusual heat wave. “I opened at the end of July,” Turner says. “Everyone stared at me in amazement when I told them I was opening a cinema then. ‘Really? Who’s going to come? It’s belting hot, people want to be by the river or the ocean,’ my friends said. And it was hot! On the day of opening, the heat was so intense in Frelone’s, with the heavy curtains over the doors and windows and the high temperatures, I rushed off into town to try and get an air conditioner.”

Turner rolls her eyes and pulls a face at the memory, and adds, “Of course, I used it once and now it sits there taking up space!” Despite the heat, the opening of Reel Films was well supported by Turner’s friends, family and movie fans who turned out to watch Cinema Paradiso, an aptly chosen first film, as its subject is a boy whose dad runs a movie house.

A business entrepreneur with principles, Turner was recently put in an awkward position. “A family wanted to hire Frelone’s for a teenage birthday party, and show a teen movie. I cringed at the idea of showing this particular movie as it perpetuates a lot of unpleasant stereotypes, as far as I’m concerned. Particularly as to how young men and women need to be in order to be popular and fit in; the males are judged by their cars and the females by their bodies. I suggested that the girls might like to watch something else—with some trepidation I add, as I could have done with the money—but I just didn’t want to be part of perpetuating values I don’t hold. The girls were very curious as to why I didn’t like the movie, and more than interested to know what other movies were available. We had quite a long chat and they chose another movie which they thoroughly enjoyed, and I felt good about what I was doing.”

Turner is hoping more families and groups will be interested in renting Frelone’s space. “There’s someone who wants to screen Jazz on a Summer’s Day, which is a film from the ‘70s, in black and white, about the Newport Jazz Festival, and invite jazz fans; another idea is a live Stevie Wonder gig that his fans and admirers would enjoy. I really want the community to use this space.”

Despite the headaches of maintaining an old building—“The electrics are most unusual and needed some looking at”—plus the new reality of going from being a highly-paid seasonal worker to running a cinema that sometimes has five people, sometimes a full house, Turner is relishing her new endeavor.

She has developed her own recipe for home-popped popcorn and makes cookies and other treats for movie-goers. So delicious is her popcorn that many locals call in only for that! One Cumberland resident came into Frelone’s and said that he’d already seen the current film and his pregnant wife had asked him to come for Turner’s popcorn, which she was craving.

Delicious home-made goodies and movies chosen with intent sounds like a winning combination for Frelone’s latest makeover.

To find out what’s showing, log on to reelfilmsatfrelones.com or phone 250-336-0190.

Documentaries show on Thursday, general films Friday and Saturday and family movies on Sunday afternoons.

A scene from ‘Garbage Dreams’, showing at this year’s Festival in February.

The World Community Film Festival has been bringing films from around the globe to Courtenay for the past 18 years. February 5 and 6, 2010 sees the 19th annual festival launch yet another exciting weekend of documentary films showing in five venues in Downtown Courtenay.

“It seems that there’s an organic process that happens,” explains Wayne Bradley, one of the four committee members who chooses the films. “The films we receive for selection seem to reflect the issues we hear people talking about in our own community—how to live sustainably, global warming, healthcare, the economy, farming and finding common ground. Issues such as resource extraction, whether from the Canadian tar sands or Latin America, whether it’s for minerals, oil or exporting water, these are big issues that affect people all round the globe.”

It’s issues like this that many Valley residents and people from as far as Victoria come to find out about. They want to be informed and independent movie making is an excellent source for information. People also want to know about solutions to many problems we experience in our own towns. The festival is a showcase of stories of everyday heroes who have stepped forward to take action, responding to the challenges they see in their world. Those solutions can come from as far afield as Bogata, Columbia.

“To many of us, Columbia is a country filled with drug-running gangsters, and we don’t know of the huge strides being made in its capital city,” Bradley says. “The film, Bogotá: Building a Sustainable City, shows how the mayor of Bogata had a vision for his city. In Bogotá they have an enviable transportation system with bikes and walking being an integral part of it; parks and green spaces are proliferating—it’s marvellous. These people are creating a sustainable city, it’s an inspiration.”

The Film Festival is a vital conduit for information from unusual and alternative sources. Solutions to common problems are being found around the planet and their films share the information and knowledge with us.

Choosing the films is a long process that begins months before opening night. Films make the rounds of the four committee members—Bradley, Janet Fairbanks, Heather Wilkinson and Gordon Darby. Each participant rates their opinion on the cover before sending it on. All the films are chosen by concensus. This is a time-consuming labour of love with the potential to be overwhelming—there are films on many topics most of us don’t want to know about. The committee has to do a fine juggling act between information that is helpful or that they think ought to be more widely known, yet not have the viewers leave with a feeling of helplessness and that the world is a vile place.

“The aims are to unite people and let us see we are facing the same problems, and that there is power in protest, raising one’s voice, getting involved politically, whether it’s writing letters or running for office.

“We’ve never had such a huge choice before,” Bradley says. “With the recent strides in affordable technology, anyone can make a film now. One of our selections comes from Burma and was made by Burmese people with cell phone cameras, or little cameras held at waist-height, during the recent uprisings there. Brave people—and it’s totally riveting!”
Another film entitled Garbage Dreams, was filmed over four years and has won multiple international awards, including being short listed for an Academy Award. Garbage Dreams follows three teenage boys born into the trash trade in the world’s largest garbage village, a ghetto on the outskirts of Cairo and the decisions they are forced to make when globalization threatens their livelihood.

“In these times of wars, financial collapse, and environmental devastation, people everywhere are wondering, is change possible? When you find out what people are doing around the world to help make a positive change, it’s inspiring. Gandhi called it ‘soul force,’ and Martin Luther King called it ‘love in action’—it’s discovering the fierce light of compassionate activism, which awakens the human heart while simultaneously transforming the world.”

Tickets for the festival will be available at the Sid Williams Theatre mid-December, just in time for Christmas. $28/weekend pass and $18 Saturday only. Low-income tickets $12 for the weekend and $8 Saturday; youth under 20 can attend for $3. When not viewing films, festival-goers can browse through the Bazaar, held Saturday in the Upper Florence Filberg Centre, to find info about community groups and have a snack. For a list of films see the program guide at worldcommunity.ca

More than 70 artisans display their wares at the annual Denman Christmas Craft Faire, to be held December 5-6. If you’d like a less crowded shopping experience, come on Sunday, which is consistently less busy. It’s not true that you have to arrive early to get the ‘best stuff,’ says Leslie Dunsmore. The exhibitors have generally been working for six months to build up inventory for the whole holiday season and have plenty of merchandise on hand.

Photo by Jane Guest

In terms of Christmas traditions, 28 years is not very old. Given that historians trace many of our winter holiday customs back several thousand years to pre-Christian times, 28 years is actually just a blip.

But 28 years has been ample time for the Denman Island Christmas Craft Faire to become, for many people, as essential to the season as carols, colored lights, presents and latkes.  For these people, the Faire, reputed to be one of the best in BC, is not just a great place to buy gifts; it’s a treasured holiday-season tradition.

The biggest draw, of course, is the variety and quality of the wares: pottery, weaving, jewellery, cosmetics, toys, carvings, culinary items, clothing and more.  People come to shop, but also to enjoy.  Gathered into the 8,300 square feet of two community halls is an array of artistic output that is the equivalent of several dozen gallery exhibits.  There’s home-made food for sale in both halls and a variety of tempting snacks (poutine, steaming lattés made from locally roasted coffee, fresh-pressed apple juice) at the funky outdoor booths. There are twinkling lights and sprigs of holly and smiling faces, and there is beauty and color everywhere you look.

“There are people who have been attending regularly for over two decades,” says Faire coordinator Leslie Dunsmore.  In fact, she knows people who have been to every single Faire since it was launched— including herself.  Dunsmore has been coordinator since the second Faire took place in 1981.

Over the years, Dunsmore has seen both the Faire, and the artisans it features, mature. The Faire started as the brainchild of Denman artist Sudasi Gardner, whose booth, featuring her luminous paintings, colorful wall-hangings, hand-knitted and woven clothing, soaps, cards and more, is still a Faire favorite.  ‘Planning’ and ‘publicity’ happened through word of mouth and it seemed as if the Faire sprung into being spontaneously, says Dunsmore.  “We all arrived at 9:30 am on a Saturday, threw $5 into a pot to cover hall rental, and found a spot in the Hall.  It was fun, and very social, with lots of locals coming to check it out.  And there were some purchases, as well.”

It was clear that this event was going to grow and would need some focused management, so Gardner asked Dunsmore, an accomplished painter and community organizer, to take over as coordinator in the second year.  Since then, the Faire, and her job, have both grown substantially.  The task of putting on an event of this size—70-plus artisans, two community halls, more than 3,000 visitors—is huge, and not without challenges.

Rumors that artisans have had fist-fights over prime spots for their booths are entirely unfounded, says Dunsmore.  All she will say is that as the Faire grew more popular, competition for spots intensified and she realized she needed to set up some guidelines.

Thus was born another local tradition: the Craft Faire application deadline.  For years, Denman artisans have planned their lives in order to be available for this late-September date.  Annually, they would crawl out of bed in the wee hours to line up at the Denman Craft Shop with their completed application forms.  Those in the front of the line got first choice for their table location.  When the Shop opened at 9:00 there would be as many as 50 people waiting.  Over the years, Dunsmore developed strict protocols so no one can ‘work the system,’ for instance, by coming later and handing their application form to someone in the front of the line.

This year the tradition has changed; Dunsmore has initiated a mailing system, which, she says, has worked well.  “This year there were 40 applicants on the first day and only two spots were claimed by two people.”  The conflict, she assures us, was solved peacefully.

The Faire offers remaining spaces to artists from off-island.  There is always more interest than space for these, says Dunsmore, so artisans must submit their work to a local jury, which has the difficult task of choosing who will exhibit at the Faire.

All of the work submitted to the jury is good quality, says Dunsmore. “So it’s not about who’s better than who. The jury prioritizes the work based on its uniqueness. That is what we look for.”

The practical challenges of the event are many, and Dunsmore can remember overcoming all kinds of crises. There have been last-minute blown fuses, repeated brown-outs, and total power outages, but the Faire has always gone on.  The year of the power outage, the hall was lit entirely by about 70 candles.  “It was a beautiful shopping experience, but the fire chief didn’t know,” Dunsmore says with a chuckle. “That was a long time ago. These days we are much more careful,” she adds reassuringly.

She laughs, as well, about the year two three-gallon buckets of honey leaked in the trunk of her car as she was about to set up for the Faire. “It was one of those moments—do I scream in total frustration, wail at the exhaustion of getting ready for the Faire, or keep pushing forward?” She chose the latter, and simply closed the car trunk on the three-inch deep pool of golden honey.  Out of sight, out of mind—at least for a while.

“Three days later, at home, on my third attempt at scooping up gobs of sticky honey, a friend arrived and said, ‘Oh, didn’t you know, cars nowadays have a plug at the bottom of the trunk so liquid can drain out easily…’ I was ecstatic to discover this simple engineering feature, failing to remember that honey running down the driveway in the middle of a beekeeping operation is not always a good thing.

“With the winter sun beating on the bee meadow, tens of thousands of bees from 50 hives arrived to fight it out and slurp up the sweet remains. I was happy they could get more food stored for winter. And I prayed that the neighbors would not drop by that day!”

This being the West Coast, every now and then it snows, and when that happens, things can get crazy.  In 2007, it started snowing early in the week of the Craft Faire and, in spite of the fervent prayers of many, didn’t really stop.  On Thursday, Dunsmore started to get frantic phone calls.  Some of the artists had no electricity for days before the event; others were stuck at home due to impassable driveways, or even stuck part-way down impassable driveways.

This is when things get heart-warming.  Volunteers showed up, often unbidden, wherever they were needed, with tractors, shovels and strong arms and backs; driveways were cleared, boxes carried, and nerves soothed.  Dunsmore transported 40 strings of Christmas lights and 70 electrical cords down her steep and winding driveway on a make-shift ‘sled,’ which was just a sheet of plywood sliding precariously over the snow.

The event carried on more or less as planned under a magical blanket of snow, with more white stuff falling from the sky all weekend.  Attendance was lower than usual, but community spirit ran high.

Community spirit, of course, is a big part of the Faire.  The Faire brings the Island together to honor its artists, boost its economy, enhance community pride and celebrate the season.

Dunsmore estimates the number of people involved in the event (vendors, assistants to vendors, decorators, shuttle-van drivers, food concession workers, buskers, cleaners, organizational support, and other helpers) as approximately 250; hundreds of other locals attend the event and host guests from off-island.

Over the years, Dunsmore has seen many hobby crafters use the Faire as a stepping stone toward launching a business. Through their experience setting up and staffing a booth, talking to and observing their peers and interacting with clients, participants get a crash course in marketing over the weekend; they gain confidence, make business contacts, and often, come away inspired.

The event brings in money not just for the vendors, but also for the community non-profit groups which run the food concessions and sell raffle tickets and other goods.  All their profits go to worthy causes ranging from children’s orphanages in Nepal to local land conservation.

As well, the children’s table brings kids out to take part in the ‘adult’ world, giving them a chance to experience the value of their efforts, practice business skills, and be recognized for their work.  Oh—and have fun, too. After their shifts, many of the children gather up their earnings and cruise the Faire to get presents for their parents.

“It’s not just about economic enhancement, it’s about bonding in the community,” says Dunsmore.

The deep community roots of the event are part of what attracts so many visitors from outside of Denman Island as well.  People are thrilled to experience such a vibrant alternative to mass consumption of mass produced goods.

“In typical gift shopping, you go out to a big centre and look for the best bargain.  You generally have no idea where it was made or by who. At the Craft Faire, everything you buy has the added value of relationship,” says Dunsmore.  Artisans at the Faire are required to staff their own tables; for shoppers, being able to buy something directly from the person who made it is both fun and meaningful.

As evidenced by the recent interest in local eating, more and more people these days are looking for authenticity, personal connection, and environmental sustainability in their lives—all of which the Craft Faire doles out a-plenty.

“There’s a hand-made revolution going on right now,” says Denman artisan and Craft Faire exhibitor Bronwyn Simons, who along with her partner Bob runs Terra Home, producer of exquisite art tiles and hand-built tableware.

“We’re paying more attention to where things come from and what they’re made of.  Is it sustainable?  Is it ethical?  Does it have enduring value?  Does it connect me with others in a positive way?  Is it special and unique?  A well and lovingly hand-made object usually answers ‘yes’ to all these questions,” says Simons.

Dunsmore agrees. “Appreciation of the value of handcrafted objects has waxed and waned over the decades.  Right now interest is high,” she says.

The Denman Craft Faire, she says, just gets more and more popular.  “I do keep statistics, and the revenue has increased every year, except for the year with the big snowfall.  And we made up the difference the next year, which was fantastic.”

Dunsmore says she has three favorite Craft Faire moments that recur each year.  “The first great moment is at about 10-to-10 on the Saturday morning, when we are just about to open. I’m in the Community Hall.  There’s a large surge of visitors at the doors; the guards are preventing them from getting in.  Everything is looking pretty good; the crises are mostly over.  I stand back and look around me and say to myself, ‘This is all quite beautiful.’  I know that mostly, my job is done.  Now it’s up to the artists,” she says.

Her second favorite moment comes soon after closing time later that day.  The vendors have tidied up and gone home to rest; the night attendant (someone is needed to ensure the thousands of dollars worth of merchandise stays safe) doesn’t come till later.  Dunsmore is alone, surrounded by an absolutely amazing collection of arts and crafts, like a kid in a candy store accidentally left behind after hours.

“I make my way around the two empty halls, taking my time, and I memorize what I want.  The next morning, once we’re open, I go around and buy it all,” she says.

The third special moment is very simple: on Sunday afternoon, as the Faire moves into its final hour or two, Dunsmore makes the rounds of both halls handing out Japanese oranges to the vendors.  She has processed applications from each and every one of them, answered their questions and promoted their goods; some of them she has coached through their first-ever craft sales experience; others she has seen grow as artists and entrepreneurs for almost three decades. Everyone is exhausted, and usually exhilarated as well.  The orange provides a bit of sweet juicy energy to help make it through to the end.

It’s a small gesture that always elicits big smiles.  It’s become a tradition, in a relatively short time—just like the Craft Faire itself.

The Denman Island Christmas Craft Faire takes place Saturday, Dec 5th, and Sunday, Dec 6th, from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm at the Denman Community Hall and the Seniors’ Hall. Visitors from Vancouver Island are invited to leave their cars at the Buckley Bay Ferry Terminal and walk onto the ferry, thus saving money and avoiding ferry line-ups. From the Denman terminal, it’s a short walk up the hill to the site, or take the Faire’s shuttle service which runs continually from the ferry to the Faire.

Amanda Hale’s third novel could be described as part historical fiction, part contemporary urban romance and part immigrant saga, with a poetic sensibility infusing the prose throughout.

Amanda Hale is not daunted by borders. In fact, this Hornby Island writer, who recently published her third novel, seems to thrive on crossing them.

As a creative person, Hale has travelled back and forth between visual art, theatre and writing, not just crossing borders but also forging paths, bringing ideas and inspiration from one genre to another with prolific ease.

Home, as well, takes her across borders. Hale lives part of the year in her sunny cottage overlooking the beach on Hornby Island, part of the year in Toronto, where she teaches creative writing, and part of the year in Cuba, home to the man she loves and a new-found community of artists and writers.

And on top of that, she’s an avid traveller. When I meet with Hale to talk about her latest novel, she is getting ready to head off to Europe, where she will be writer-in-residence at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic.

This penchant for border crossing shows up in her novels—perhaps even defines them. The new novel, My Sweet Curiosity, published by Thistledown Press, has multiple plot lines located in different parts of the world and different centuries.

If you were forced to identify it by genre, you could say it’s part well-researched historical fiction, part contemporary urban gay romance, and part immigrant saga, with a poetic sensibility infusing the prose throughout. You could also call it a philosophical meditation on science, love, music, the medical profession, and the ways in which our family heritage both does and doesn’t define who we are.

If you found that description a bit overwhelming, don’t worry. The novel is held together beautifully by strongly wrought characters who easily slip under your skin, so you soon feel that you know and care about them.

There’s Talya, a brilliant, charismatic and often maddeningly self-absorbed medical student, who, when we meet her, is falling deeply and passionately in love, while at the same time falling just as profoundly into grief, as her mother lies dying of cancer. There’s Dai Ling, the gifted and dedicated musician Talya falls in love with, who surprises herself—but even more so, her traditional Chinese immigrant parents—by her choice of a woman partner. There are Talya’s glamorous Russian émigré parents and there are Dai Ling’s Chinese parents and grandparents, their stories entwined with China’s complex history.

And there is Andreas Vesalius, the real-life 16-century doctor who revolutionized medicine by being one of the first to dissect the human body. The fictionalized story of his dramatic work and his passionate yet troubled marriage runs alongside the story of the two women. Vesalius shows up in the contemporary section of the book as well: Talya and Dai Ling first meet in the library, where Talya has gone to find Vesalius’ book of anatomical drawings, with which she is obsessed.

It was Vesalius who planted the first seed of the novel for Hale, she says.

“Back in the early 1990s I was on Hornby and I was only doing visual art. I had a book from the library on anatomy drawing, and there was an illustration by Andreas Vesalius—who at the time I’d never heard of—in the book. There was a bit written about him—about his passion to understand the human body, about his clandestine activity and how he used to rob graves, and how he was the father of anatomy.

“He captured my imagination,” she says. “I thought, ‘What a wonderful character.’ I toyed with the idea of writing a play about him, because I’d been trained as a playwright, but didn’t go anywhere with the idea then.”

Through Vesalius, My Sweet Curiosity sheds light on the history of medicine. As well, the novel offers a number of windows into modern medicine, through Talya’s experience as a medical student, her mother’s treatment for cancer, and especially through Talya’s fascination with the reproductive technology that gave her life. This piece of the novel, says Hale, can trace its origin back to her earlier work in politically engaged theatre. “I was living in Toronto in the 1980s and was involved in an agit-prop theatre collective. We did things for conferences, union conventions, schools, women’s centres and so on. There was all this stuff in the press then about reproductive technology, and we were asked to provide some entertainment for a conference of the National Association for Women and the Law. I did a lot of research into repro-tech and we took that and did some really fun, absurd skits. Back then it all seemed like science fiction, but now much of it is just normal,” says Hale.

Hale’s fictionalized character, Vesalius, is obsessed with finding the soul, the very seat of life, as he dissects bodies. He looks for it in the tissues, but in vain. ‘Where is it?’ he wonders, and prays fervently for an answer to be revealed. His obsession steals his attention and energy, so much so that he loses touch with his own heart. Similarly, Hale seems to be saying, modern medical technology seeks to know and control the genesis of life itself, but risks losing touch with its own heart.

“Something that intrigues me is the journey the medical profession has had. Like many people I resent the control the medical professional and the pharmaceutical industry has over us. I try to show that in the book. I didn’t want to rant about it, but rather tried to embed some of those issues in the story. After all, the story is how you engage people,” she says.

My Sweet Curiosity is Hale’s third novel and, although it is entirely unique, it could be called a ‘typical Amanda Hale novel,’ with multiple points of view and intersecting stories.

Hale’s first novel, Sounding the Blood, is set in BC on Haida Gwaii (formerly known as the Queen Charlotte Islands).

“It came about when I went to that place. The history and the feeling of the place just grabbed me. But I was well into it before I realized it was a novel. I had started out to write a travel journal,” she explains.

Her second novel, The Reddening Path, has a similar structure to My Sweet Curiosity. There is a contemporary plot about a woman named Pamela, who has been adopted from Guatemala and brought up by a lesbian couple in Canada. The book centres on her return to Guatemala and her discovery of her own heritage. There is a secondary plot about Cortez and the conquest of the Aztec, focusing on Cortez’ translator, an indigenous woman. “She is a fascinating character,” says Hale. “In a way, she enabled the whole conquest.”

In all three books, Hale takes on the point of view of characters from cultures not her own.

“I seem to always write out of my culture,” says Hale, adding that writing from multiple cultural and historical perspectives is a way of affirming our commonalities as humans, while at the same time exploring the richness of our variety.

“I’ve travelled a lot and I don’t like to acknowledge the boundaries between us. I’ve always felt at home wherever I go,” she says. Not everyone is entirely comfortable with this literary culture crossing, Hale adds.
“In the 80s there was this huge insistence on political correctness,” she says. Part of that was the conviction that it was potentially oppressive for a white woman to write in the voice of someone from another culture.

When Hale published The Reddening Path, where the main character is a Mayan woman adopted into a Canadian family, the Women’s Bookstore refused to stock the book. “I was quite surprised,” she says. “This is where most of my friends would have gone to buy it.” When she asked the management why, they said they had a policy not to sell books about adoptees written by someone outside the culture of that character.

“And yet, they stocked Memoirs of a Geisha, which is written by a man!” says Hale wonderingly.

These sorts of attitudes have never deterred Hale from telling the stories that, to her, call out to be told.
“I understand where those kinds of concerns come from. But Canada is such a multicultural society, and it’s hard to write in a multi-cultural society without including a multiplicity of voices.”

Besides, she says, she doesn’t really choose her characters. They come to her—often, she says, fully complete and with stories to be told. And sometimes, real-life people ask her to tell their stories as well.

“When I was in Guatemala to paint a mural and do art installations we were interviewing women and children from destroyed villages, hiding out in churches. They said please, please go back to your country and tell people what we have told you. They wanted their stories told and had no way to get them out into the world.”

Because she writes outside of her own culture, Hale relies on extensive research in order to create convincing voices and worlds for her characters.

“For instance, my first novel had five voices, including a Chinese Canadian immigrant and a Japanese Canadian immigrant. I had to do lots of research and also to enlist the help of readers from those traditions. There are many things I can’t learn from [book] research; I need to learn from people.

“When I first moved to BC I got to know a Mayan family in Surrey and learned a huge amount from them. I took two trips to Guatemala to stay in my friend`s village. That gave a much stronger sense of place to that book.”

For My Sweet Curiosity, Hale’s biggest challenge was the character of Vesalius. She began by absorbing his anatomical drawings, then read and re-read his autobiography. But that was not enough, so she got on a plane and went to Italy.

“I was able to go to Padua [where Vesalius lived and worked] and to the university where he held the chair of anatomy. To stand in the operating theatre where he did his dissections was absolutely thrilling! To stand there, feeling the same sunlight, seeing the same pillars, knowing that there across the courtyard was where Galileo had lectured, there was the same wooden lectern he’d stood in front of.

“Being there and walking the streets is so important. It gave me a sense of confidence and it re-inspired me, because after that, when I am writing, I feel I am there.”

Hale’s next novel, which she has just sent out to her publisher, is set in Cuba, and she has another one in the works set in Europe during World War II. “I’ve been working on that one intermittently for many years and now that I’m on my way to Europe, it feels very timely. I really want to immerse myself in the European atmosphere and history.”

The Europe trip came about because Hale’s work has a following in academia. Both of her earlier novels show up on university reading lists, even as far away as Brno, Czech Republic.

Hale says she’s very happy with this academic acceptance, not just because it is a marker of literary success, but also because it brings her books to a community of passionate readers—people who read and re-read, discuss, write about and deeply engage with the books. “Who is going to read a book more closely than someone who is going to write an essay on it?” she asks.

Hale didn’t go looking for academic attention, however. “It was something that came out of the blue,” she says. “It happened serendipitously.

“I was doing a reading of Sounding the Blood on Commercial Drive in Vancouver and when I finished, this man came up to me and handed me an envelope and said ‘read this later.’ It turned out he was a professor at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia. He had reviewed the book for a literary magazine and liked it so much he put it on his reading lists. I was thrilled.” From there it spread to other universities.

The recognition for her work is gratifying, but Hale’s motivation for writing doesn’t hinge on it. Like most writers, Hale writes because she must.

“It’s a passion,” she says simply. “As an artist, running creativity has always been something I needed to do. It hasn’t always been writing for me. I started in my late 20s. As soon as I took a creative writing course it became a way of making sense of my personal existence, and then as I matured it became wider and wider, as I started wanting to make sense of history and the phenomena of the modern world.

“Without going into it much, I would say that I had a pretty bad childhood. The world outside was not acceptable so I went into the world of the imagination. It was essential for my survival. So I’ve always had fantasies, inner dialogues, stories coming from my imagination. Writing is a way of giving voice to all that,” she says.

“As a result, I am a very complex writer. I have all these tangles and all these threads that I’ve been interested in and explored in other realms, and they all coalesce in the novels. I try to keep things simple, and I never can; I just can’t do it,” she says with a laugh.

Shaping the expression of that complex inner world into a finished novel is a long and demanding process. Hale often works on a novel for years, focusing intensely on it for a while, then taking breaks to get distance and work on something else, then returning for re-writing and re-shaping, then more distance, and then another re-write, and so on.

“Typically, I need about nine drafts till a novel is finished,” says Hale.

She keeps to a fairly stringent writing routine, sitting down at her desk at eight or nine in the morning and writing until mid-afternoon. Once she’s immersed in a project, she doesn’t like to take breaks, because she begins to feel disconnected from the characters and story. However, these days she has to take time off to promote My Sweet Curiosity. And then there is travel and teaching.

Hale’s semi-nomadic life evolved naturally out of her passions, and at the same time feeds those passions. In the spring and summer, she is on Hornby, where she loves the peace and beauty, as well as the vibrant community of artists and writers.

In Toronto, where she spends each fall, she enjoys the urban cultural energy and the contact with her creative writing students. And in Cuba, where she lives from Christmastime into spring—well, there is much she enjoys about Cuba.

Hales’ Cuban connection came out of her visual art. She first went there eight years ago when her friend and fellow artist Lynn Hutchinson invited her to come to Havana to paint a mural. During that trip she made contacts in the Havana art world and was invited back a year and a half later to create an art installation about colonialism, slavery and sugar.

“At the end of that I had two weeks on my own and I wanted to see more of Cuba,” she says. She decided to take the 21-hour bus trip down to Baracoa on the Southeastern tip of the island. To explain why she chose Baracoa, she navigates the conversation back to Hornby Island and its renowned summer festival.

“There’s a wonderful Cuban folkloric dance and music troupe called Bara Rumba who has performed at the festival twice now. They are from Baracoa,” she explains, adding that she’d had a chance to meet them on Hornby and talk to them about their home.

Baracoa is a small seaside community filled with musicians and artists, says Hale. “If you’ve been there three months, you start to recognize everyone. It starts to feel very similar to the community here on Hornby, and yet very different.”

On her first night in Baracoa she went to see Bara Rumba perform. A friend introduced her to a man named Victor, a writer who works for the Casa de la Cultura. “I just fell totally in love with this man and have been going back to Cuba to spend as much time as I can with him,” says Hale.

It’s not surprising at all, really, that for Hale, love means crossing borders. In her life, as in her writing, she continues to happily step right past the artificial boundaries humans create, to inhabit a world where it is the connections—not the divisions—that matter.

Luckily for her readers, Hale knows no bounds.

For more information visit amandahale.com

Piano teacher Kelly Thomas takes a unique approach to helping students like Zak Watson learn.

Photo by Boomer Jerritt

Even without an instrument, piano instructor Kelly Thomas is musical. As she talks about how music has shaped and guided her life, her silver bracelets quietly chime together. And as she excitedly discusses the power of music and the inspiration she finds in sharing her musical passions with her students, her wrist symphony rises to a crescendo.

Nestled into a First Street green space, Thomas’ home and studio look out onto a small creek and the wildlife that use the space as a corridor to the Puntledge River. Thomas moved to the Valley from Edmonton two years ago and started teaching piano and salsa dancing. She had 25 years of experience as an accompanist but had only taught art—never piano—before this. “The traditional piano methods that I had learned with didn’t even remotely convey the feeling I had about music and where the joy, for me, is,” Thomas explains.

This joy comes in giving her students music as a lifelong companion and empowering them to find their own individual voice through music. She accomplishes this by using a non-traditional, or playing-based, method of teaching called Simply Music.

Simply Music was developed by an Australian musician, Neil Moore, who was given the challenge to teach a blind, eight-year-old boy to play the piano. So, Moore began to compose pieces and ‘distill’ them into patterns that he could translate directly into his student’s hands, and thus onto the keyboard.

Thomas glances toward her upright Steinway as she describes the process. “He touched his student’s hands and gave them a sequence. He explained that this is a pattern and you repeat the pattern and it goes up here and then down here. This motivic repetition, variation and development is the compositional and improvisational foundation for western popular, jazz and classical music.”

It sounds complicated but it is as natural as learning how to speak. Not only did Moore’s student excel through this method of teaching, he was able to pass on these lessons to his four-year-old sister, who was also blind. Moore began to share these techniques with other teachers and Simply Music was born.

“The idea here is that the teaching is not hinged on reading,” says Thomas, furthering her explanation by holding out her hands and saying: “Music is put into your hands and put directly onto the instrument, which then becomes part of a song and, from there, a part of your musical language for self expression.”

Neil Moore recognized a recurring problem with traditional reading-based approaches to teaching piano. How many people had piano lessons as kids and then abandon their lessons as soon as they are old enough to decide for themselves? In his article The Piano: Its Present and Future, pianist Jeffrey Chappell cites Morty Manus’s ponderings on the drop out rates for piano lessons. “There are statistics which indicate that 90 per cent of students who drop out still wish that they could play the piano. The future of the piano as a pedagogical instrument should consist of supportive, client-oriented approaches which recognize the study of music as a means for fulfillment and self-expression.”

Thomas couldn’t agree more. She pushes her curly hair back and leans forward to emphasize her next point: “This curriculum is designed to facilitate music as being a companion for life so that students will stick with it, so that music will be a friend, a source of solace, and an integral part of their entire lives.”

The Simply Music program covers popular music, classical, blues, gospel and accompaniment. The accompaniment aspect of Simply Music is important because it is, by its very definition, playing with another instrument. Thomas points out that “piano has generally been one person with one piano in a practice room.” She pauses here to sing a few scales. “But by learning accompaniment fairly early, it means that people can get together with other instrumentalists or vocalists, much the way guitar players do.”

This deep connection with a musical community is what Thomas has found in her own life, whether playing in a band or accompanying others. Thomas met her lifelong friend, the piano, at the age of seven with reading based lessons starting in Calgary and eventually in Yellowknife. She played both popular and conservatory pieces but didn’t participate in any of the exams until university where she went straight into the Grade 9 exam and came out with first class honors.

“The turning point for me,” Thomas recalls, “and I remember it so clearly, was when I was around 12 and I was playing this piece, a Christmas pop song.” She hums the tune, head bopping, hands tapping. “And I really couldn’t play it the way it was written so I just slightly modified it. In retrospect I can tell that I added a swing feel to it. I didn’t know that’s what it was—I just knew that that was how I heard the song. When I played it at the lesson, the piano teacher’s reaction was: ‘Hmmm, you can play it that way if you want to.’ Compare that to my next teacher, who was amazing and she said, ‘OK, look, if you can’t play it, fake it.’ What that meant to me was that you have to know: what the genre is, what is going on in the piece, where it is going, and what the form is so that you can get through without stopping and without anyone thinking ‘this person doesn’t know what they are doing.’ The idea is to make sure that you know what is going on so that you can play convincingly.”

Arriving in Edmonton, after growing up in Yellowknife, Thomas initially enrolled in the University of Alberta’s music program, but later switched to another highly successful music program offered by Grant MacEwan Community College. There she developed her music skills in the jazz program and cultivated her interest in a broad range of music.

Thomas’ belief in lifelong learning led her toward the education sector, where she began her career in television and video production with AccessTV, Alberta’s educational television station, whilst pursuing her avocation as a community choir accompanist. For 25 years she was the accompanist for the Ekos choir. “That was my main enjoyment,” she says with a tinge of nostalgic sadness. “It is a wonderful group of people from all walks of life who come together because they love to share music.”

Six years ago Thomas returned to university to finish her degree. Her major was fine arts and her minor was music with a focus on ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicology is a branch of musicology defined as “the study of social and cultural aspects of music and dance in local and global contexts.” According to Thomas, the focus was immersion in the topic of study. “It’s not studying it in the third person, it is actually doing it. That is when I got involved in African dance and drumming and realized that many cultures pass on their music through means other than writing. This really resonated with me.”

To make ends meet while at school, Thomas hosted a classical music show on Alberta’s CKUA radio station. CKUA is a listener-funded radio station “with a tremendously broad range of programming in classical, jazz, folk, rock, world, alternative as well as educational segments”—a perfect fit for someone with Thomas’ background and predilections.

It was about this time that Thomas reconnected with another great love in her life: Cuban music. A Nigerian with a cockney accent and a PhD in genetics had started teaching Cuban salsa and it caught on like wildfire. “It is a hugely popular dance that is taking the whole world by storm,” Thomas says. “And, one of the best things about it is that you can go almost anywhere in the world and find a place to dance salsa.

“Playing music has been with me all my life and I feel so fortunate to have that. But,” Thomas confesses, “I never thought that I could dance. I was a total sports geek. Growing up in Yellowknife, all I seemed to do was train for competitive swimming. So, I never really got the opportunity to learn partner dancing. And let’s face it—musicians rarely get to dance, unless of course you’re Cuban.”

So, when a friend invited Thomas to come out to a Cuban salsa class she was amazed to discover how quickly she picked it up and, that suddenly Cuban music began to make a lot more sense. “I had heard Cuban music before and I was really interested in it but it was so complicated. The rhythms were fascinating but complex and I just didn’t get it. But, as soon as I learned to dance, it all became so much clearer because it is a music that is derived from dance. The music and the dance are inseparable. I started hearing things that I hadn’t heard before in the music so it was doubly great because I felt that I was expanding myself musically, plus I was starting to become more coordinated on the dance floor which was fabulous.”

When Thomas and her husband moved to Courtenay a few years ago they were happy to find that many in the community were interested in salsa and that, with their own experience in Cuban salsa, they had something to add. They began SalsaSundays and a drop in Friday night practice. “After learning salsa and enjoying it so much it would be terrible not to have it continue as part of our lives,” Thomas says. “We really just want to dance and socialize with people that love to salsa dance.”

Thomas’ shift from participant in music to teacher coincides with her move to the Comox Valley. Her commitment to contributing to the musical community is evident in her other endeavours: pianist with the Georgia Straight Big Band and flautist with the Comox Valley Concert Band.

And how has the Comox Valley responded to these new teachings? “So far, I am just so thrilled with how things are going,” Thomas says with a huge smile. “I have a lot of kids in my Simply Music lessons, but I also really enjoy working with adults because they bring so much life experience to what they want to express. They ask really interesting questions and want to know the history and the ethnomusicology behind the pieces. It is also a great activity for adults because it keeps the mind sharp. It opens up whole new avenues in your brain when you learn something new.”

One of Thomas’ students, Janet Rogers, has thoroughly enjoyed coming back to playing the piano as an adult student.  “Kelly’s passion for music, her patience with me as a ‘mature’ student and her innovative ways of teaching, have produced remarkable results,” Rogers says. “She ignites in me a joy to connect with music and then she provides the structure to let that musicality flow out to the piano.”

In their first couple of lessons, Thomas taught Rogers some basic movements on the piano and some terminology. By the third lesson, Rogers was learning the blues form and in the first year she learned a number of well known classical pieces, accompaniment, major, minor, seventh and thirteenth cords, some popular pieces, and a number of pieces that she wanted to learn that weren’t part of the core curriculum.

Students in the first year are getting accustomed to playing and recognizing how to learn pieces. “You are learning how to learn,” she explains. “In the first year you don’t look at any sheet music. You just play. By about a year and half you’re learning how to write and read rhythm. Into the second year you learn how to read music based on what you know how to play. When you learn to read the music, the world really opens up. It is like learning any language where you learn to speak and then to read. When you learn to read music, you already have a vocabulary. It makes it so much easier to follow a piece of music and also to improvise on it. You can go in any direction in terms of genre and improvising.”

Her younger students are equally enthusiastic, and the feedback Thomas hears from parents and teachers is that the kids are happy they can just sit down and play. “They all want to visit the piano regularly. When they see a piano they will go to it and play around, which is exceptional. Most of my students are beginners but later on if they want to focus on a specific genre they would have many tools already. They would be light years ahead of most other people. Even in terms of analysis, they are absorbing song form and motivic development and they don’t even know it. They are getting advanced concepts and it is just a part of learning a song.”

Ikuko Watson’s two children, Zak, 10 and Taeo, seven, love the variety of music—from upbeat blues to Mama Mia—that they get to play. Watson is especially impressed with the progress and enthusiasm her kids display. “The process looks very natural and they are clever players, not just readers of music.”

To find out more about group lessons, lunch hour lessons for adults, private lessons, and SalsaSundays classes please contact Kelly Thomas at 250.338.8079 or kthomas6@telus.net

Comox Valley artist Brian Scott in studio

Photo by http://www.strathconaphotography.com/

Although his paintings depict a remarkable level of creativity that is vibrant, whimsically flamboyant, full of mischief and zest for life, Brian Scott is surprisingly normal. The artist doesn’t have wild Einstein-style hair and he dresses in regular clothes. The only indication of the creative genius within is the paint splatters on the toes of his sensible shoes.

I meet him at his home in Black Creek, which also does double duty as his studio and personal art gallery. I take a few minutes before our meeting to check out the Brian Scott originals that hang on the fence and outbuildings, making them as colorful as a clothesline. At the base of his property, a giant and (of course) gaily painted carving of a Spirit Bear stands upright, one paw held high, as if beckoning passersby to come on in. At the bear’s feet a riot of bright yellow dandelions and tall green grass dances in the wind. It is the perfect showcase for this unusual work of art.

Upon closer inspection, I find there is a myriad of other items in the yard that sport Brian Scott’s trademark kaleidoscope of color—a trashcan, a birdhouse, a mailbox and many other everyday items have been graced by his brushes. Is there anything, I wonder, that Scott doesn’t consider a potential canvas?

I am invited to join him on the back deck for coffee and a chat. He has no sugar for the coffee so, instead, roots around in the fridge and offers me some Bailey’s. It’s mid-afternoon, so I take him up on his offer.

The writer/researcher in me wants to methodically ask him a series of “W5” questions. I want to hear his story—with a beginning, middle and end. The artist in him immediately starts talking about color, geometrics and the fluidity of nature.

I listen, and am intrigued. Brian Scott is, after all, one of British Columbia’s (and indeed all of Canada’s) most renowned artists. His expressionist original oil and acrylic paintings are prized on Vancouver Island and have sold across Canada and internationally, in the UK, Hong Kong, Germany, Holland, Norway, Switzerland, Australia and the United States.

In addition to his original paintings and papier mâché sculptures, Brian Scott’s work has been replicated in limited edition prints, books and greeting cards, even chocolate bar wrappers. (You can buy the chocolate bars at Hot Chocolates, on 5th Street.) Without a doubt, he is a success. But I still wanted to know—how did he make it happen?
“I was born in Winnipeg,” explains Scott. “But I never actually lived there! My father was in the Canadian Air Force, so we lived in various places in Canada and Europe throughout my youth. My mother just went home to her family in Winnipeg to have her babies.”

One of four children born to Ralph and Dorothy Scott, who now live in Courtenay, Brian and his siblings spent their formative years day-tripping through Europe with mom and dad. They visited art galleries, castles and cathedrals. This experience helped him develop what would become a life-long interest in architecture, history and art.
While Scott has fond memories about his years in Europe, being part of an “Air Force family” surrounded him, he says, in a world that was a sea of “olive drab.” Perhaps this is why his first memory of color goes back to when he was a toddler in his playpen. Scott can still vividly recall how the bright and flashy primary colors on this vinyl safety net mesmerized him.

In 1961, Ralph Scott was posted to CFB Comox and moved his family here. By now, Brian was in his early teens, and he fell in love with Vancouver Island. A couple of years later, his dad was re-assigned to North Bay, Ontario, so Brian attended and graduated from a high school there.

Scott says that even as a child he was seldom without a sketchbook and art was his favorite subject at school. One of his earliest inspirations was his art teacher at Rob Road Junior High—Leo Auterson. “There wasn’t a lot of art education in the school system back in those days, so I was really excited when Mr. Auterson introduced us to using color in our work,” recalls Scott.

Scott’s list of famous artists he most admires includes: Emily Carr, van Gogh, Oskar Kokoschka and Picasso. Picasso, he explains, was one of the first artists to take objects others might consider junk and turn them into masterpieces.
When he graduated from high school, Brian told his dad he wanted to be an artist. “Follow you dream,” urged his father, “but be sure to get a good education and a ‘career’ first.” So Scott decided he would become an art and history teacher.

The next step in Scott’s journey took him to the University of British Columbia, where he earned his Bachelor of Education. From there, he earned his Masters Degree in Art Education from Western Washington University and a Diploma of Fine Art with Honors from the Vancouver School of Fine Arts (now called the Emily Carr College of Art and Design). At UBC he was inspired by teacher and fellow artist, Gordon Smith.

Scott says it was an amazing feeling when he actually sold his first painting. Although he won’t tell me how much it sold for—“It’s funny in our culture how we always want to talk about price,” he says with just a hint of defiance.
Scott’s big break came in 1979, fresh out of art school, when he was commissioned to produce 53 oil paintings for Tungsten Mining Corporation, on location in the Northwest Territories. “I had just been offered a teaching job at North Island College and this commission enabled me to purchase my first home and studio in Cumberland, where I lived and painted for the next 20 years,” says Scott.