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Paula Johanson and Celu Amberstone
44 Plays1 year ago
This episode of Re-Creative is a first for the show as Joe and Mark host two guests at the same time. Celu Amberstone and Paula Johanson, both writers and educators with a love of the natural world. They both live in British Columbia.
In a fascinating and evocative conversation, Paula and Celu explain how maps and music inspire their works of fiction.
"Tribal music tells me about the people and the land," Celu says. "If I'm listening to the old people sing, I can feel the land through their songs."
Find out more about this episode at re-creative.ca
Re-Creative is a co-production of Donovan Street Press Inc. in association with Mark A. Rayner.
Contact us at: joemahoney@donovanstreetpress.com
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Transcript
Season Preferences: Summer vs. Fall
00:00:08
Speaker
Hello, Mark. Joe, how are you? I am very well today. So the question this week is what season would you live in if you could only choose one season? Oh, that's easy for me. All right. Summer. I used to be a fall man and now I'm a summer man because some people like it hot and I'm one of them. All right. I was worried you're going to say something like baseball.
00:00:34
Speaker
You know, I thought about being kind of a smart ass and then I thought, no, I'm going to play it straight. I think I'm still still a fall guy, but, uh, but um, bum, but, uh, yeah, so I'm with you because summer's my happy time. Cause that's when I get to write. So I'm becoming a summer guy too.
00:00:50
Speaker
Now, okay.
Guest Introductions: Paula and Saylu
00:00:51
Speaker
Our guests, we have guests today. Perhaps we can pose the same question to them. So welcome to the show, guys. Paula Johansson. And I want to make sure that I pronounce your name correctly. Is it Saylu? Yeah. Saylu Ambruston. Saylu Ambruston. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you. And do you have a favorite season or a season that you would like to, if you had to live in only one?
Seasonal Beauty: Autumn on the West Coast
00:01:16
Speaker
I would probably say autumn as well because of
00:01:19
Speaker
you know, the warm but not too warm days and, you know, the cool nights and the beautiful colors. Now, do you get the same automotive mode on the West Coast that we do here in Ontario?
00:01:30
Speaker
It's not as bright as back east. A lot of our trees, just the deciduous ones, just turn gold instead of all the reds. But in town, at least, there's lots of trees that are imports from elsewhere. So we get red maples and, you know, different things like that. But it's definitely not as colorful as back east.
00:01:56
Speaker
for sure. But then you don't get drifts of snow after that. The West Coast forests are green in the winter, you know, because all the moss on the trees is green. It's not like, you know, late fall or winter back east where everything is browns and grays out here. The evergreen cedars and pines and stuff are green, but
00:02:23
Speaker
The trunks of all the trees are green as well from all the moss that's growing on them. Yeah. Now you have those amazing rainforests out there too, which are beautiful. Yeah, whereas out here we just have snow for us. Yeah. And Paula, we don't leave you out. Do you have an answer to this question? Yes, I'd have to say I'm definitely more of an autumn person and I'm living in the right location for it.
00:02:50
Speaker
Here on the south end of Vancouver Island, it's almost a perpetual autumn weather. The weather that you have in any months of the year could be almost any month of the year, except for August, which is usually a little warmer and drier. But there have been a lot of foggists, as we call them here, with a spog every day and it's chilly.
00:03:13
Speaker
And there's been a lot of warm winters where you have a January instead of a January. So.
Saylu's Teepee Life in Arizona
00:03:22
Speaker
Did you have a reason for asking that question, Mark? No, I'm just asking things I don't know about you that, you know, I figure I should know. Or is this like some kind of an attempt to turn this into a meteorological podcast? No, yeah, I apologize. I, maybe I should. No, these are fair questions to ask of C. Lu and I in particular. We've both lived in the natural world a lot.
00:03:44
Speaker
CILU lived in a teepee. Really? I read that about you. Yes. When did you do that? When my kids were younger, I was in my late 20s, early 30s. I lived for about two and a half, three years in a teepee. Wow. Holy cow. And where was that? It was in the desert. Manitoba. It was in the desert. And we were about 30 miles, I guess, from town. Had to
00:04:12
Speaker
all water from a cattle tank, maybe about 15, 20 minute truck ride. We'd go fill up big barrels from the cattle tank every few days. Wow. Which desert was it? Well, I was down in the States at that time in Arizona, in the plateau land between the White Mountains and the Maggion Rim.
00:04:39
Speaker
We were about 6,000 feet above sea level there. It was mostly bunchgrass and juniper trees in the flat areas.
Saylu's Journey: Heritage and Writing Start
00:04:51
Speaker
Probably at this point, we should actually, what we normally do on this podcast is we have the guests introduce themselves because we want you to do so as you see yourselves as opposed to how we might interpret you. And probably at this juncture, it would make sense to have you do that. Tell us who you are. Who am I? I'm a mixed race woman. I am 75 years old. I have five children.
00:05:20
Speaker
grown children and about nine grandchildren.
00:05:24
Speaker
I lived in lots of different areas of Canada and the US. I was living in the Northwest Territories for a number of years, sometimes in town, sometimes on the trapline. I've lived on the West Coast here for, I guess, close to 30 years now. You have some academic training there. Yeah, I've got a couple of degrees as well.
00:05:52
Speaker
bachelor's in social anthropology and a master's in health education. So when I was in the north and in town, like Yellowknife or Fort Smith, I was working for the Deny Nation and the government doing health materials for indigenous people in the communities. But you're a writer as well.
00:06:18
Speaker
Yeah, I got into writing when I was in the North as well, because when I went up there to live, I was working for a doctor and she sent me back to business school to learn to do typing and different things better. I'm legally blind, so I had trouble
00:06:37
Speaker
in the class of reading the textbook and typing at the same time. So I told my instructor about these dreams I kept having about different stories. She gave me a dictaphone and she said, go home and write, talk into the machine, and then when you come to class, you can type them.
00:06:58
Speaker
instead of using the dry old textbooks. So that's what I started doing. And that's what I got into writing my first book. When I started, it took me six weeks to write the first draft of my renewal books, which are now out of print. And by the time that the term ended, I other people in the class were also typing my stories as well.
00:07:24
Speaker
So that's how I began actually writing books back in the 70s. Oh, wow. Yeah. What a great origin story for writing books. It took me about 10 years after that to get them published. But of course. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's how it goes. And Paula, how about you?
Paula's Writing Background and Non-Fiction Works
00:07:44
Speaker
Well, I'm a writer as well. I was born of a settler people living here in Victoria. I've spent time
00:07:54
Speaker
in Alberta as well, living with my husband on his parents' farm north of Edmonton. He lived 15 years in a little farmhouse built in 1908. So when I say that we could definitely all stand to have a 1920 living standard at home, provided that there was a real school down the road and a real library and a real hospital, I do mean it. I've been writing all along.
00:08:24
Speaker
I break neck pace and reading everything I can get my hands on. When I finished my bachelor degree in writing and French, I got a teaching certificate, which I've only used for a few months really, except for teaching writing workshops with people.
00:08:41
Speaker
and that's been working really well. My fiction has sold but I got introduced by a member of SF Canada to an educational publisher and they and another publisher have brought out 42 of my short non-fiction books for school libraries.
00:09:00
Speaker
Incredible. It's a big number, but each of them is very short. And they have detailed bibliographies at the back so that you read this brief introduction and feel smart. And you feel like you actually understand a part of whatever this topic is. And then you look at the back of the book and say, well, I'm so smart. I could look up this other book. That would be complicated, but I know how to start at it. And that makes me feel like I'm really enabling.
00:09:28
Speaker
Takes a lot of research to do her books. It does. I wrote about AIDS and HIV at a grade four reading level. That would have been challenging. Protease inhibitors and all. But you can get there. You can get there describing protease inhibitors in words and sentences that make sense to somebody who reads at a grade four level.
00:09:50
Speaker
That's a real talent though. Not many people can do that. Even good science journalists don't necessarily do that very well sometimes. They're often the worst.
Artistic Inspirations: Guests' Influences and Creativity
00:10:01
Speaker
I wasn't going to say that. But yeah, sometimes they don't break it down really as much as it could be broken down for people. Stephen Jay Gould is a rare, rare bird in the world. And he can write in a way that his joy shows like the joy that Carl Sagan felt about science.
00:10:20
Speaker
It's just wonderful to see how delighted those people were in science. And they wrote about it in a way that once again made you feel smart because you understood the part that he was talking about. And you knew there were numbers and math and science that would take a lot of studying to learn. But this part, I understood this part.
00:10:42
Speaker
Yeah. So I am in the presence of three educators here. There'll be a test. I was afraid of that. It's always on the test.
00:10:52
Speaker
So three educators, but also creative people, which is another one of the reasons that we're here. As you know, we ask our guests to bring with them a piece of art, any type of art that they're passionate about that perhaps excites them and informs their work. Have you two done your homework? We have. Oh, yeah. I had no doubt. Did you make them agree on one work of art?
00:11:17
Speaker
One thing that inspired both of them, because that would be cruel. No. Yeah. And I guess we should point out too, that this is the first time we've ever had two guests on the show. So this is like an historical moment. And yeah, I look forward to hearing what you both have brought to the table. Well, I think Seeloo should go first.
00:11:37
Speaker
because unless you would like to defer to me and have me go first. Well, it's up to you. Well, my art that inspires me for some of my fiction projects has been maps. Maps? That's a first, okay. Well, I'm a person who writes with a strong focus on dialogue, but also on place. One of my books
00:12:04
Speaker
is called Island Views, and it's set on Salt Spring Island. And when I wrote it, I had one of those little maps that you can get at the local drugstore on Salt Spring, and it's a sketch map of Salt Spring Island with all the roads marked on it and the different bays telling you which one is good for swimming and which one is good to go to look for whales swimming by.
00:12:30
Speaker
and where the mountains are and which ones have parks and trails up to the top. Wow. It's a great little map. I never saw that map. And I used to live there. Before you go on, tell us about Salt Spring Island. I know I got a couple of friends who live there, but I don't know much about it. I know it's on that side of the country, the west side of the country. Rudyard Kipling.
00:12:52
Speaker
went to Salt Spring Island when he was on this coast of the continent. Oh, that must have been 140 years ago. Rudyard Kipling believed that Salt Spring Island was surpassed in beauty only by the gardens of the island of Sri Lanka.
00:13:12
Speaker
He felt it was the most beautiful and temperate and accommodating place in the world, and he was not wrong. There may be other beautiful places as well, but that one is sublime. I think he saw a different salt spring than I did. I was going to say.
00:13:37
Speaker
I lived there for a while. I would agree that it's beautiful, but I wouldn't put it in my top five or 10. It's an island that's very rural. I had a friend from Ireland who described it a lot as looking like parts of Ireland that he was familiar with. So I see that about what, 10,000 people live there? Yeah, I think it's closer to 15 now because there's a lot of rich people that
00:14:06
Speaker
have bought up property there and use it like for summer homes or whatever. So you have this real contrast of people, some very, very wealthy, like the Kellogg's have an estate on the west coast of the Musgrave, which you can only arrive at by boat. I know this because I have a friend who used to care take for them. And then you have very poor hippies who
00:14:34
Speaker
are living in shacks or just tents as well. So nowadays it's not quite like when I was living there in the nineties, there were a lot more hippies around and this contrast between the very rich and the very poor. Yeah. Today it's a little more mixed. There are a lot of artists over there. I was going to say as Baldy used to live there, right? Yep. Oh yeah. He used to live right down the lake from me. That's why he uses the name Baldy.
00:15:05
Speaker
rather than his family name. His family told him that this being a song performer was all well and good, but he wasn't used to family names. Oh, so he comes from wealthy stock then.
00:15:19
Speaker
I did not know that. Interesting. I think about Valdi a lot these days as I age, old, tired, bent, and busted, gray, wrinkled, and you can't be trusted. More and more sums me up. I love Valdi. I love his music. But now, okay, so Salt Spring Island is not the piece of art that you're bringing forward. It's a map of Salt Spring Island? A map of Salt Spring. And like all maps, they are not just photographs, not an image that's pretending to be a photograph, a map.
00:15:47
Speaker
is trying to tell you how people think about the place. Yeah. If it shows roads, it tells you that people are thinking about roads. If it shows mountains, it tells you that people are thinking about the terrain. Is it a particular map then? Like one distinctive map that you have in mind?
00:16:04
Speaker
Well, that map in particular is one that's dear my heart because it helped me write that short novel, Island Views. But right now I'm looking at a map which shows the area that is nowadays part of Southern Manitoba and North Dakota and the American side and the Canadian side around the border that was Red River Country in 1868 and 1869.
00:16:33
Speaker
So it's from that era. The map is from that era. I love old maps. I find them fascinating. Understandably, the lines are dotted. The only line that is drawn on the map with any certainty is the line of the 49th parallel.
00:16:49
Speaker
the medicine line across the prairies that had newly been appointed as the line marking out the American territory south of the 49th parallel and Rupert's Land, the land managed by the Hudson's Bay Company north of it. And while it was known intellectually that the border took a little jog around Lake of the Woods and then
00:17:11
Speaker
came to the Western Shore Lake Superior, exactly where it jogged was still being determined. Specifically, who lived there was a point of contention because there were discussions about who lived on which side of the border and whose country it was that was being described by that border.
00:17:33
Speaker
And I'm writing a novel set during that contentious time between October of 1869 and January of 1870, when the people who lived in Red River that runs right across that border had decided that they wanted to be part of the Dominion of Canada. They wanted to join Ontario and Quebec and return down.
00:18:00
Speaker
So they were thinking, oh, well, I guess that's not going to happen. And then Confederation happened where Ontario and Quebec joined with New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and they formed the Dominion of Canada. And they arbitrarily decided that they would acquire Rupert's land from England under their own terms as spare territory, not as a province. And so this is the background of the book that you're writing.
00:18:30
Speaker
This is the background. My viewpoint character is a young Métis lad who ends up bringing the would-be lieutenant governor for the new territory into the border.
00:18:42
Speaker
And he gets halted at the border because north of the border are Louis Riel and the Métis of the Cenoboya, the little colony where we now have the city of Winnipeg. And the provisional government,
00:19:00
Speaker
had decided that they would not have a governor, thank you very much. They would have a proper admission into Canada as a proper province. I've always thought that about maps. They're social documents. They can be very beautiful, I find. Some maps, not all. But they're also political documents, aren't they?
Maps as Tools: Understanding and Influence
00:19:19
Speaker
Yes.
00:19:20
Speaker
And a formal map that is either sold to you or is created for a government always has at least one small lie or error in it. The small untruth is so that if the map is copied entire by someone else for a different purpose,
00:19:42
Speaker
It is immediately obvious to a cartographer that they did not generate their own map. They copied the map that was made for the certain purpose. And you can tell that because here in this corner is the small error that they put in on purpose. Wow. So there's like a built-in copyright by putting a flaw in, right? More like a watermark in a sheet of paper.
00:20:05
Speaker
So this was the practice, but I assume this is no longer the practice. Oh, no, it's still the practice. It's still the practice. Yes. No, wait. You know what? You're describing GPSs. I think that's what you're describing here because I don't trust those. Even when you have proper GPS satellite imagery to go with, it is artificially blurred.
00:20:27
Speaker
around military installations. And certain strategic physical locations are also very carefully blurred so that they are slightly less accurate. Wow. So this is a classic, re-creative, wide-ranging conversation, touching on just about everything. Do you have the map that you're talking about that you're referring to for your book? Can we see that? Yes. Oh, that's great. We'll put it in the show notes. Sure. And email it to all seven of our listeners.
00:20:58
Speaker
Both of my fans will be delighted to see it. That's great. But you'll see on the map that there is a straight line for the medicine line, the 49th parallel. There is an uneven shape at the top of the map, the north end, where that's clearly Lake Winnipeg, or Lake Winnipeg-osis, and a wiggly line up the middle, that's Red River, and a big amoeba-like blob that extends outward.
00:21:27
Speaker
with Red River at its center, but this starfishy shape extends over southern Manitoba and parts of North Dakota, and that is the territory that the Métis people roamed over. Did you mention when this map was drawn? About 1865, it would represent accurately. Do we know who made it? Nope.
00:21:51
Speaker
And there are versions of it that have been redrawn since trying to point out why Riel and his neighbors felt so confident about asserting their provisional government that was representing people fairly, even if it was an ad hoc one of volunteers rather than an elected one. Okay. And the test that you were referring to at the beginning of the podcast, that's to find the error in this particular map?
00:22:21
Speaker
Okay. So that's, that's the art that you brought to the table.
Musical Influence: Saylu's Writing Connection
00:22:25
Speaker
Now, what about Salut? For me as a visually impaired person, music is always a first for me. Okay. When I'm writing, I like to have music in the background because it helps me
00:22:43
Speaker
get into a particular mood and it helps me feel what my characters are experiencing. So I don't play music that has any lyrics to it that I can understand. I'm exactly the same. Because if I can understand the music's words, I am brought out of
00:23:14
Speaker
what I'm thinking, what my characters are experiencing, because I try to totally experience what I'm writing about. So I totally get into it. It's not an intellectual thing for me. It's a visceral,
00:23:30
Speaker
emotional and physical experience for me. And my kids have been just great with this because one of my boys put me on the family Spotify account.
00:23:44
Speaker
So I have a wealth of music from all over the world that I can make into playlists that I use when I'm writing. So when I was writing the seventh and eighth book in my Tales of the Kishallen series,
00:24:04
Speaker
They were natives of an alien world, but they were similar to indigenous people and tribal peoples on our world. So I was listening to a lot of Viking and even Mongolian.
00:24:21
Speaker
wrote singing music. Very evocative. I was listening to The Who and Wardruna and Saffratty and a lot of different people and I have no idea what they were talking about. But the music inspired this war-like atmosphere for me that I could really get into my characters with.
00:24:50
Speaker
And then I shifted to another series I'm working on, which is the books two and three of a published novel of mine, The Dreamer's Legacy, which is an indigenous fantasy. And for those books, I've been listening to a lot of indigenous music.
00:25:15
Speaker
playlists I created with indigenous artists here in Canada and the US. So some of them are powwow songs, some of them are actually religious songs like peyote music and a few West Coast songs though, a lot of the West Coast music is not recorded. But for those who are, I'm
00:25:40
Speaker
listening to those. So it's very kind of a little bit with each book. I also have just created a list that sort of a mix of indigenous and Celtic music, which is in Gaelic. And that's the other part of your heritage. Yes. So I'm listening to songs and music. I don't particularly care a lot for classical music.
00:26:08
Speaker
That doesn't interest me, the more wild tribal stuff, you know, that speaks to the people, that tells me about people. Because for me, music, tribal music from around the world tells me about the people and their land. And unfortunately,
00:26:33
Speaker
I'm old enough to remember a lot with indigenous music because I've lived in so many areas of this country and the US that I know when I hear music from different areas, if I'm listening to the old people sing,
00:26:49
Speaker
I can feel the land coming through their songs. Unfortunately today, a lot of the powwow music and different songs that are being created is music that has been too influenced by modern music that's coming over the radio or TV. So even the scales of the notes is different now.
00:27:16
Speaker
than it used to be. A lot of the older, older music would sound flat to a modern listener because the people who were creating it were creating music that had quarter and half tones
00:27:33
Speaker
in it compared to the Dore Mi scale that most popular modern music or even classical music is based on. But actually that eight note scale is, if you read musical theory history, is fairly recent in time. It's not something that can be traced back to the ancient music that
00:27:58
Speaker
was based on the sounds that people heard from the land. So when I hear West Coast music sung by old singers, I can hear the wind and the cedars. When I listen to the rapid music of the hand drums in the north and the people singing the diné and other people up there, I hear
00:28:22
Speaker
You know, racing caribou, I hear the dog teams running. When I hear the big drums on the prairie, I hear the buffalo and, you know, the big herd beasts running. And then back home where we used rattles.
00:28:39
Speaker
I hear a different sound, the sounds of rain, the sound of snakes and other animals in the grain, among the grain fields and stuff. So to me, it's a very expressive way of experiencing the world. And I draw that into when I'm writing, because the land where my stories take place is another character in my books
00:29:09
Speaker
So much like with Paula, how the maps are important to her. But now I have to stop you there because I recognize the truth of what you're saying about how the older music means more to you for all the reasons that you stated. But I have to challenge you there a little bit because, and I do it in the spirit of fun, it sounded to me a little bit like maybe
00:29:30
Speaker
if you change that to rock and roll, right? And then, you know, the people growing up listening to music prior to rock and roll and then listening to rock and roll and saying, okay, this isn't music anymore. Is there any of that in what you're saying? No, that's not what I'm saying. Okay. I would like to answer that one, not for Celu, but at you.
00:29:57
Speaker
To point out that the tonal singing that Silou's describing, the music theory in Europe clearly predates the Greeks, who named the Ionian and Dorian scales and the other scales that are understandable with our modern musical instruments and musical notation, half tones and full tones and octaves.
00:30:23
Speaker
That dates back at least 20,000 years to the bone flutes that have been discovered among not only our modern human ancestors, but our Neanderthal cousins.
00:30:36
Speaker
And when you look at the flutes, the spacing on the flute is the same as the spacing on modern flutes that are played. And flute players looking at these bones have been able to say with confidence that this would sound like modern flutes, this would play notes in the same scale, but that is the style of music from Europe.
00:31:02
Speaker
That is not the small music that Celia was describing from her own peoples. It's not that I'm saying that it's not music. I'm saying that it speaks to our modern urban society, but it has a different message and tone to what older songs that speak with the voice of the land would say. It's not that it's better or worse. It's different.
00:31:32
Speaker
Right. So yeah, no less valid, but different, as you say. So when modern songs, you know, powwow songs are more rock and roll type, it's because the modern people who are singing those songs are living in a more urban environment.
00:31:50
Speaker
Yeah, so they're more influenced by what's around. I bet you you would hear a similar thing from people who, you know, live in China who remember music before, you know, because there's a different scale there too. Yeah, it's a five knot scale. But I have a practical question, which is, do you think about what you're going to be writing that day before you put the music on? Or do you put the music on and what happens happens?
00:32:19
Speaker
Well, usually when I start something, I listen to a particular style of playlist. Like when I was writing books seven and eight in the Kishallen books, I listened to the playlist that I created throughout that entire time. It wasn't that, oh, I'm going to write about this today, so I'll think about this kind of music.
00:32:44
Speaker
Some people may do that, but I had a particular theme of music that I used during the entire time of writing those books. And that sort of triggered me when I heard it to think in that type of way.
00:33:04
Speaker
And it sort of enhanced those characters and thinking about how they would respond to different situations. It was a trigger for that. So I would say sort of maybe.
00:33:19
Speaker
The music triggered it, but also it didn't change from day to day. It was the same playlist throughout the entire writing of that book, and that just sort of brought me right back into where I could pick up from where I left off the day before. Do you guys listen to music when you're reading?
00:33:41
Speaker
I don't. If I'm reading a talking book, no, I don't read visually anymore. My eyes have gotten too bad over the years. So I'm only listening to audio books and have been for maybe the last 10 years or so. My eyes aren't good enough anymore, even with a strong reading glass to go through books, which is kind of sad because there's so much in our craft that is not audio recorded anywhere.
00:34:12
Speaker
So I'm very limited on SF and fantasy titles specifically because they're not recorded anywhere. But I don't listen to music while I'm listening to books and I really hate the audio books that have music in the background. I find it very distracting.
00:34:32
Speaker
I don't mind the artificial intelligence voices that sound a little robotic. You like that? That's okay. Well, it's better than nothing. Call me Ishmael. Yeah, it's better than nothing. But I find actually, over the years, my imagination creates different voices, because I have a voice software for the blind, which actually anybody can
00:35:00
Speaker
download. It's called NVDA. It's a free software on the internet and anybody can download it and listen. It will read what's on your screen. But I find that I create different voices inside my mind.
00:35:17
Speaker
Interesting. So you're listening to a specific voice and then transmitting it into a different voice as you're listening to it. Slightly. Yeah, I find it. Or give it more inflection, you know, especially if it's stuff I'm writing, because I'm usually not reading books that other people have written when I do that. But you know, when I'm editing my own stuff, I have in my mind, different ways that different characters speak. So they just automatically kind of, I have that inflection.
00:35:47
Speaker
I want to do something that's important for Celu to let you know.
Celebrated Works: Saylu's Refugees and Publishing Efforts
00:35:52
Speaker
Celu's most celebrated work is a short story called Refugees. It's been ancologized several times and written about by professors who are praising it for post-colonial studies. We've collected that story together with Celu's few other short stories, which are mostly science fiction and fantasy.
00:36:13
Speaker
and made refugees and other stories collection that we think is the book of hers with a lot of commercial interest. And that Selah has mentioned her books, the renewal books, two of them that were her first two books that were published. And then she also had a pair of nonfiction books called the blessings of the blood and deepening the power. Yeah.
00:36:40
Speaker
and they are now being re-released by Silou herself in her own independent small press called Cashallen Press. And you can read about it.
00:36:52
Speaker
at a website. I'll give you the URL. It's books2read.com slash Amberstone. That's great. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Is there something for you, Paula, that you'd like? Yeah. You're doing a great job, Paula, of celebrating other people's works. What about you? He actually needs to do her own.
Community Wealth: Paula's New Books and Library Importance
00:37:14
Speaker
My own new books are out on a similar small press that I call Double Joy Books and I have a couple of short novels and a couple of short non-fiction books and they are available to be read about at my website which is books2read.com slash Paula J.
00:37:35
Speaker
You can ask your library to order a copy, and we really encourage people to do that. We know people can't afford to buy all the books that they want to read, but your library wants to know what people want to read. And you tell them what you would like. They will get an ebook copy or a print copy.
00:37:53
Speaker
and then you can read it. You can have it in your hands, you can tell your friends where it is. Yeah, very true. Yeah, we don't do that enough as authors in Canada. And we should because we still get some benefit from that too, right? Our friend Cory Doctorow, he's a big promoter not only of his own writing, but of writing in general and Canadian writing and science fiction writing as well as the nonfiction that he writes also. And Cory points out that
00:38:23
Speaker
Most people first learn about a writer because they borrowed one of his books from a friend or from a library. How are they ever going to go to buy my book if they've never heard of me or my book? That's right, yeah. Yeah, he paraphrases somebody else who says his problem isn't wealth, his problem is obscurity. Yeah, we have to remember that libraries are our wealth.
00:38:47
Speaker
that when we have a good library, it is wealth, not just in a personal sense in my house, but it is wealth for our community, wealth for all kinds of people. It's opportunity. Now, any final thoughts before we part ways on the earth that you brought forward? I think that's pretty well said at all for me.
00:39:10
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. And I have to, we're not working alone in a barren wilderness. We are dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants. We are people standing in a crowd of people and every now and then each of us gets a boost from all our neighbors who lift us up a little bit higher than the crowd for a few moments, but only a few moments. And then we're boosting someone else the next time.
00:39:39
Speaker
Well, those are excellent words I think to finish off with. Thank you both very much for being on our podcast today. Thank you. It was lovely to meet you both. Thank you. And perhaps we'll speak again. See you again, guys.
00:40:05
Speaker
Joe, I'm really enjoying this. This has been fun, but I don't want to do this podcast anymore. You're talking about stopping the podcast. No, I'm just kidding. But I do want to take August off. I just had like a heart attack, Mark. I was just trying to get that rise out of you. So yeah, I think we should take August off. I think we should end of July and come back after Labor Day. I think that's a terrific idea. Why don't we do a special episode to finish the whole thing off? A very special episode? A very special episode, yes. And we're going to launch your book, right?
00:40:32
Speaker
Yes, we're going to launch my book, Adventures in the Radio Trade with a special live edition of Recreative. That sounds perfect. So we'll do that on the 30th. Sunday the 30th will be a special live edition of Recreative, after which we'll take August off. And then we'll be back on... After Labor Day. After Labor Day. I'll take my white pants off at that point. Your white pants. Right, because you're not supposed to wear white after Labor Day. Do I look like someone who pays any attention to that kind of... Do I look like someone who has white pants?