|
I had an amazing time touring Newfoundland for Book Week back in May. I was too wildly busy to blog about it but here are some photos of a week I'll always remember.    
0 Comments
I was excited yesterday when the announcements were made of the nominees for the 2015 T-D/CCBC Children's Book Awards. From Vimy to Victory is one of the 5 nominees for the $30,000 Toronto-Dominion Canadian Children's Literature Award. It's unusual for a non-fiction book of this kind to be nominated for the literature award so, win or lose, I'm excited. It was also great to see that the book has also been nominated for the $10,000 Norma Fleck Award which is for the best Canadian non-fiction book. I won this award in '07 so don't expect to win again but a nomination is just great. The awards are given out on November 18th at a swank gala generously hosted by the T-D Bank who do so much for Canadian children's books.
Check out this video from the TD Children's Literature Awards. After the success of "Canada, Fall In' last year, I was worried that doing a performance this year about the Canadians in World War II might seem like an also-ran. So I worked hard to tell the story of the war with real-life stories, images and music. And I'm delighted to say that it worked! Audiences were very moved and people came up afterward with stories about their parents and grandparents. I was able to use photos in the A/V presentation of my mother and father as well as the parents and grandparents of some of the singers and performers in the show. Actress Brigitte Robinson's father was an intelligence officer in Holland so we had an excerpt from his diary. My mother at 98 was able to attend and I included a story of hers about nursing during the Blitz in London. And Marg Reynolds, the widow of Ron Reynolds, a Dieppe veteran, was also there for the first performance. (She is the gray haired woman in front of the church with me in the photo below.) And I'm delighted that we'll be doing it again in Toronto at Hart House on November 11, Remembrance Day at 7:30. Ticket information will be on the Hart House Ticket site by October 1.  I've been working for over a year on a play entitled Last Day, Last Hour which is about one of the most sensational courtroom battles in Canadian history. The case was a libel suit brought in 1928 by Sir Arthur Currie, the man who had led the Canadian Corps to victory in World War I. The cause of his grievance was a front-page editorial in the Port Hope Evening Guide which claimed that Currie had needlessly wasted Canadian lives, particularly during the advance toward Mons in the last days of the war. The trial placed Canada’s role in the war under a microscope and its proceedings kept the country riveted for weeks. I've incorporated some of the dialogue from the trial transcripts for the courtroom scenes in what I trust will be a compelling drama. The Curtain Club in Richmond Hill did a first reading of the play in March which was hugely helpful. I've revised it since then and the VOS Theatre Group in Cobourg will be giving another reading on Saturday October 17 at 7:00. And what I'm very excited about is that it will take place in the historic courthouse in Victoria Hall, Cobourg, where the original trial took place 88 years ago. Even more exciting is that the VOS plans to do a full production of the play in May 2016 as part of Cobourg's World War I commemorations. Here's a photo of director Bea Quarrie with VOS member Florence Fletcher making plans in the Cobourg courthouse. What a setting!   |
Archives
August 2022
|
RSS Feed