In honor of my first post in an embarrassingly long time, let me present a wonderful emerging talent in the world of women’s fiction and a lovely person, Japan aficionado Wendy Tokunaga!!!!

Wendy is the author of the well-received, MIDORI BY MOONLIGHT, two children’s novels, and many short stories published in various literary journals. Not only is she a rockin’ novelist, but in her spare time, Wendy is Wendy sings bossa nova, cool pop, jazz standards and Japanese songs accompanied by her surfer dude husband Manabu on electronic keyboards. Her latest is LOVE IN TRANSLATION a November 2009 release from St. Martin’s.

A teaser…..

After receiving a puzzling phone call and a box full of mysterious family heirlooms, 33-year-old fledgling singer Celeste Duncan is off to Japan to search for a long, lost relative who could hold the key to the identity of the father she never knew. Once there she stumbles head first into a weird, wonderful world where nothing is quite as it seems—a land with an inexplicable fascination with foreigners, karaoke boxes, and unbearably perky TV stars.

What inspired Love in Translation?

Many things. LOVE IN TRANSLATION is my cockeyed valentine to Japan, which is a place I’ve both loved and loathed, a place that has fueled both fascination and frustration. And it is also a place that has had a huge impact on my life and writing. I also wanted to explore what it means to be a gaijin (foreigner) in Japanand the benefits and downsides of that status and what happens when a gaijin sings in Japanese. I also am fascinated by the concept of the homestay, (something I never experienced), and how that would impact someone as an adult who grew up in foster homes and who never experienced a real family.

How do you go about choosing a setting for your novel? Does it, like New York in Sex and the City, almost play the part of another character in the book?

Love in Translation takes place mainly in Tokyo and because of the circumstances of the story, that’s really the only place it can be. Yes, I think Tokyo does become a character in the book. The novel is sort of my cockeyed valentine to Japan, a place I’ve found both fascinating and frustrating at different times in my life and one that has had a major impact on my life and writing. 

Who’s your favorite literary villain? Why?

Actually, I like it when the hero or heroine can also be seen as kind of a villain. And one of my favorite literary characters of this variety is probably Emma Bovary in Madame Bovary. She can be construed as both an oppressed woman and a selfish jerk, a victim of her time and circumstances and a conniving manipulator. When I first read it in high school, I found her deeply sympathetic. When I revisited the book again more recently, a lot of my reaction was along the lines of, “What a bitch!” (Sorry…must interceed…Nadine here. I LOVED Madame Bovary. I had the opposite reaction. Wasn’t too sypathetic towards her as a still-in-the-bloom-of-youth teenager, but as I got older, I totally got her.)

Where do you write?

I’m lucky enough to have my own office at home where I do most of my writing. In the last place we lived I used to share an office with my husband and that was much too distracting and cramped. But after I’ve done some writing I like to print out what I’ve written and go to a coffee house or somewhere to read it and make notes. And I also do writing in my mind as I lie awake in bed, trying to fall asleep! (Isnt that the most inspiring time of the day?? Maybe it’s all that reflecting on the hours that just passed…)

Which craft books have inspired or helped you throughout your writing career?

 There are many and some are not technically “craft” books such as “The Resilient Writer: Tales of Rejection and Triumph from 23 Top Authors” by Catherine Wald. Others include “bird by bird” by Anne Lamott, “The First Five Pages” by Noah Lukeman and “The Art & Craft of Novel Writing” by Oakley Hall.

What comes most naturally for you to write, dialogue? plot? character? What’s the hardest?

 Easiest for me is plot and that’s what I try to spend time sorting that out on the first draft.  I also like to “talk out” my plot to friends and keep refining it that way. The most difficult is slowing down and spending time on description. I don’t care for long passages of description, but you must have some. So I try and strike a happy medium, but it isn’t easy for me.

What has brought the greatest joy since you were published? The greatest angst?

 I’d say the greatest joy is having readers who appreciate your writing. And the greatest angst is in working hard to keep those readers and gain more.

What do you love about being an author?

 There’s so much that I enjoy. First, it’s great to be paid for something you love to do. But I also find it inspiring to help other writers. I enjoy telling my story of woe on my road to publication and let others know that they don’t need any special connections to the publishing world in order to get published. I like to promote the message that you should never give up. And if you work hard, keep at it and be flexible, your publishing dream may come true. I also like helping other writers make their work the best it can be.

What’s one piece of writing advice you’ve found valuable on your journey to publication?

 That often you won’t discover the real story you’re trying to tell until the revision process. (Amen, sista)

What’s next for you?

 I’m working on a novel that is a different departure for me: it has very little to do with Japan!

Find more information at Wendy’s website (www.WendyTokunaga.com). And look for her on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Wendy-Nelson-Tokunaga/52795977320) and Twitter (http://twitter.com/Wendy_Tokunaga)

Since that semester in high school that introduced me to George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, I’ve been a huge fan of anti-Utopian literature - books that imagine the ills of our present spiraling out of control, creating such dark, dismal (and devastatingly plausible) futures that the reader can’t help but be jolted into thinking: why didn’t we see the signs? Why didn’t we stop it when we still could have?

In this week’s New York Times, columnist Thomas Friedman points, rightly, to the miserable state of education in North America as a major contributor to the unemployment crisis and the likelihood it will persist in spite of an economic recovery. (If you think this sounds vaguely oxymoronic then clearly you still have’t grasped that the “economy” and the “real economy” are two very different concepts).

Tom Friedman, who worships at the altar of globalization, has concluded that in an increasingly globalized world, it’s not enough to be a lawyer - or even a great lawyer - but it’s a lawyer’s talent for hustling and trolling for business that will count. It’s not the dude who can build the sturdiest home, but the one who can do that and sell you on a fabulous open-concept kitchen that will be the envy of the neighbors who’ll get the job.

In this future Friedman envisions, creativity and arithmetic come together - like water for chocolate - in perfect synergy in service of that most sacred of goals: making money.

And what of those who are lacking in either the creativity or arithmetic departments (or - shudder - both)?

Friedman leaves that to the reader’s imagination, as if those unfortunate souls may be gobbled up by some highly evolved monster with little tolerance for imperfectly solved equations and no interior decorating sense.

I’m sure Tom knows this but a reminder wouldn’t hurt: the “economy” exists to feed people. People have never existed to feed the economy (until very, very recently in our evolution). The economy doesn’t have feelings. It is not its own entity, independent of human beings. We made the economy, and we can unmake it if we damn well choose to.

And unmake it we may very well do, if the economy stops feeding us and starts feeding on us.

Margaret Atwood’s wonderfully imaginative 2003 dystopian novel Orynx and Crake imagines a world split along “word people” and “numbers people” lines (not unlike our own) where numbers people have access to far more wealth and privilege seeing as their skills are so much more in demand (people with neither skill are relegated to wastelands).

It seems that every time the economy runs into a snag it is people who are asked to adapt, not the economy.

Not very long ago, having any education at all was something special, reserved for elites. But when nearly everyone could read and write, things like having a high school diploma, then a college degree and beyond, became a must if you aspired to own an ipod, a car, a house, or participate in the modern economy at all.

Now it seems even that isn’t enough. We are all entrepreneurs, hustlers, fighting for scraps. Some of us are born entrepreneurs. But what becomes of those of us who are not? Will the question that Friedman does not dare answer in his column - what happens to those of us who cannot adapt - be realized through Margaret Atwood’s apocalyptic vision, or will we ever live to see a different sort of economy, one truer to its roots, one that actually exists to feed people?

I could not possibly be more thrilled to present According to Jane, a debut novel by one of my dearest writer friends, and one of the kindest people I’ve ever had the pleasure to know.  And Marylin is truly the postergirl for that karmic adage - what goes around comes around. After joining RWA and become an active member of her chapter and online communities, tirelessly supporting writer friends and soaking up valuable craft knowledge in the meantime, Marylin got every novice author’s Cinderella moment: According to Janewon the much coveted Golden Heart Award for best novel with Romantic Elements and it would go one to be published by Kensington a few months later.

I was lucky enough to read a preview copy of AtJ - fans of Jane Austen, or of great, heartwarming romantic stories shouldn’t miss this one!

Without further ado, here’s the charming author.

(PS - Check out Marylin’s much-trafficked blog where she often hosts coffee, books, and /or chocolate - but mostly chocolate - inspired giveaways, plenty of writing advice, and hilarious life musings)

Q:Tell us about your latest release and the inspiration behind it.
A: My debut novel, According to Jane, is the story of a modern woman who–for almost two decades–has the ghost of Jane Austen in her head giving her dating advice. I first read Pride & Prejudice as a high-school freshman. Like my heroine Ellie, I raced through the novel way ahead of the reading assignments. I loved both the story and Austen’s writing style immediately. Her books changed the way I perceived the behavior of everyone around me, and I spent the rest of freshman year trying to figure out which Austen character each of my friends and family members most resembled! Also like Ellie, I had a few (okay, a lot) of less-than-wonderful boyfriends, and I would have loved to have been given romantic advice from the author I most respected and the one who’d written one of my all-time favorite love stories.

Q: Which scene in your novel did you love writing? Why?
A: One scene I had a lot of fun with was the bar scene in the first chapter where my main character runs into her ex-high-school boyfriend for the first time in four years. It was a situation I had never experienced personally, but I could imagine the comical possibilities so clearly and feel and the frustration of my heroine as if I’d been the one standing there, facing the jerk and his latest girlfriend, while Jane Austen ranted about how “insufferable” he was.

Q: Could you please tell us a little about your writing background and how you made your first sale?
A: Aside from being on the newspaper and yearbook staff in high school and publishing some academic work in college, I didn’t take writing seriously until I was about 30. I was a stay-at-home mom with a baby and desperately in need of a creative outlet, so I began writing poems, essays on being a parent and educational articles for family magazines. I wrote my first book having never taken a creative-writing class or even having read a book on the craft of fiction. (The lack of craft is very evident when I reread chapters from that first book, btw! I don’t recommend this level of ignorance…)  I got some feedback though–mostly negative–from a prominent literary agency, which led me to study fiction formally, delve into craft books and, eventually, go to my first writing conference. It was there that I heard about RWA. I joined, wrote three more unpublished manuscripts and, then, came up with the idea for According to Jane. My agent signed me on this book and submitted it to editors, but it needed to be significantly restructured before it sold. Nine months after it won the Golden Heart and was revised (again), it finally did sell–to John Scognamiglio at Kensington–on a sunny and surrealistic day in April 2008 J.

Q: Which ‘craft’ book has inspired or helped you the most throughout your writing career?
A: I’m a BIG fan of craft books, so I have more than one! I used Blake Snyder’s SAVE THE CAT! almost religiously in the plotting of my past several books. I’m still very sad that he’s no longer with us. As far as a great reference guide, Robert McKee’s STORY is incredible. It has more information about writing craft than I can ever internalize. Also, whenever I need a more emotional pick-me-up, I grab the Ralph Keyes book THE COURAGE TO WRITE. I recommend it to everyone.

Q: Where do you write? Describe your writing space – is it a cluttered mess or minimalist heaven?!
A: I write in my home office–a messy, absolutely cluttered place–I won’t deny it! There are stacks of paper and towers of books everywhere, but also a very nice window overlooking our backyard. Sometimes I’ll write at a local coffee shop (either with my laptop or, most often, just with pen and notebook paper), and that location has the advantage of endless cups of coffee and occasional snacks.

Q: What’s one piece of writing advice you’ve found valuable on your journey to publication?
A: Don’t follow trends just because you think it’ll be an easier sell. And write the books that fit your voice. If what you love writing happens to be a hot-selling genre, great. If your writing voice happens to be perfect for the genre you want to write in and love to read, that’s awesome, too. But–if not–write long and hard enough to find what DOES fit you and your style best. Because then, even if it takes longer to make that first sale than you expect, you’re writing the kinds of stories you most enjoy, and that passion has a way of working itself into the projects you’re creating.

Q: Do you have a sample chapter posted? (URL to chapter, if you have it.)
A: Yes! On my website I have a segment of Chapter One available for anyone interested in reading. It’s here: http://www.marilynbrant.com/extras.html Also, if you go to the Amazon page for According to Jane (here: http://www.amazon.com/According-Jane-Marilyn-Brant/dp/0758234619/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238387155&sr=1-1), there’s a “Search Inside This Book” feature, and people can read samples from scenes throughout the novel.

Thanks for a great interview Marylin!

For the chance to win  a copy of According to Jane (and other cool stuff) please visit Marylin’s blog!

"It is at this cost that you can eat sugar in Europe" said the negro to Candide

Voltaire, the 18th Century French essayist, wrote about it in his 1762 smash hit, Candide: or the Optimist, and now one of my favorite social critics and class warriors, Barbara Ehrenreich, has attacked it in her latest offering, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America (October 2009).

As an early skeptic of heedless happiness, I can tell you it’s a lonely position to assume, kind of like being against puppies, or summer barbecues. Who in their right mind would peg optimism as a bad thing, and how could it positive thinking possible have, well, negative side-effects?

What Warren Buffett famously said about financial markets and other forums of mass self-delusion also turns out to apply to the cult of positive thinking: it’s only when the tide goes out that you find out who’s been swimming naked.

Now that the gravy train of conspicuous consumption and exhuberance has come to a shrieking halt, you can practically hear the air  wheezing out of the positive thinking balloon. The movement is now under attack by the twin spear carriers of logic and reality.

My own opinion on this cultural craze went from indifference to alarm with the dizzying popularity of The Secret, a kind of insidiousphilosophy (and book, and DVD, and multi-million-dollar franchise) which purports that the Universe will work with you to achieve your goals - whatever they are, from health, wealth, or romance - if you believe yourself deserving of them. In other words, it’s a question of mind over matter.

This is not very far removed from Leibnizianism, the popular philosophy Voltaire spoofed in Candide, that sought to prove by logical brain acrobatics and so-called rational thinking that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”. This theory relies heavily on the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful and mysterious God, whose actions on Earth may seem confusing to mere mortals, but who is ultimately perfect. His perfection means that, however nonsensical and odd His works may seems to us, they must be perfect because He is perfect. Nowadays we would refer to this kind of thinking as a “divine plan” or else we might tell ourselves  that everything happens for a reason as a means of coping with a terrifying and unpredictable world over which we have little control, if any.

Positive thinking à la The Secret, The Millionaire Mind, and their self-help ilk is similar to that mode of fatalism in that it also tries to impose an element of control over what is, in essence, a very random reality where luck, accident and coincidence play bigger roles than people would like to admit. The same kind of fatalism prevalent in very poor, terminally violent countries is simply the other side of the delusion coin. The rich, first world nations get to call it “The Power of Positive Thinking” while people whose children still routinely die from malaria and starvation are likely to surrender their collective will to a higher power than themselves. In other words, why bother trying to change things when only those things that are “meant” to happen, ever will? In a prosperous place, people allow themselves to think they “deserve” only good things, while the remaining 80% of the world’s population, mired in misery, will surrender to debilitating fatalism where it’s generally pointless to try and have a better life here on Earth.

This is where, for wealthy societies like those of North America, the Cayman Islands, belief in a benevolent, obliging Universe preoccupiedwith responding to the hopes and positive “vibes” of credulant Earthlings becomes a problem.

Take cancer.

The Cayman Observer ran a brilliant and absolutely terrifying New York Times article a few weeks ago about the gap in perception of cancer survival rates, and actual cancer survival rates. With all the money poured into cancer research over the past 30 years, long-term survival rates have barely budged. But that’s not the impression you and I get when we read the labels on certain foods, or when fruits and vegetables like broccoli and strawberries are touted for their “antioxidant” or cancer-fighting abilities. Of course, none of these foods are promise they’ll prevent cancer, just like The Secret, or The Millionaire Minddon’t promise wealth, health, and happiness, but they imply a correlational relationship which suggests that if you don’t achieve your heart’s desire, it’s very likely because of something you did, ate, thought, didn’t do, didn’t eat, or didn’t think.

And that’s cruel. Not only is it cruel, but it becomes downright dangerous when positive thinking replaces action based on a realistic outlook, paving the way for quick-witted, unscrupulous opportunists to fleece the eternally optimistic among us for all we’ve got.

Like, for example, the recent fleecing of investors, employees, and home-owners by an unregulated and highly speculative financial system. Yes, there is a connection here, and it’s the way wishful thinking has completely replaced our natural aversion to risk taking. It’s more than just the marriage of a keep-up-with-the-Jones’s mentality and the over-availability of consumer credit that’s worrisome, but the injection of spirituality that positive thinking brings into the mix. We should no longer keep our Earthly desires in check because we deserve total fulfillment and happiness, whether in the form of a safe, happy family, or a pair of Gucci pumps. It’s the emotional equivalent of taking materialism out of the closet and placing it on a public alter of worship.

Which brings me to Kenneth and Gloria Copeland and their “prosperity gospel” mega-ministry/business. The Copelands have eschewed preaching humility and simple, conscientious living in favor of spreading the Word of God through conspicuous consumption and the lusting after material delights. The idea is that by giving (presumably, to the Copelands and their network of ministries) you can achieve happiness here on Earth, instead of waiting around for a heavenly reward. And they’ve made millions. About a hundred million a year, actually, lifted entirely from an economic class of people that religion professor Dr. Jonathan L. Watler says resides “in that nebulous category between the working poor and the middle class”. People like truckers, and elementary school teachers, and nursing assistants. People who’ve had plenty of reason to mistrust the banks that sold them predatory sub-prime mortgages, and a government that pockets large chunks of their meager salaries and offers very little in return. Why not resort to a kind of delusional positive thinking that promises payoffs through prayer, when lifetimes of working hard and being productive citizens have resulted in exorbitant personal debt, foreclosures, and the looming threat that they are one medical crisis away from complete ruin.

It’s only normal that people, whether those stricken with scary diseases or personal disasters, turn to spirituality. It’s only normal to want - to need- to believe that we are more than just these imperfect vessels of hardship, disease, and misfortune. This is why the words of a poor Judeancarpenter who praised  compassion and humanized the poor still resonate today. He voiced a truth suspected by most, that spiritual comfort could not be found in material things or endeavors. But for a world order that depends so mightily upon the United States, and other wealthy nations’ willingness to spend, spend, spend, Jesus’s original message proves decidedly impractical, if not outright subversive.

Positive thinking, on the other hand, offers an adequate substitute for true spirituality while insidiously fuelling the fires that ravage our daily existence.

While I don’t suggest that we boycott Oprah until she starts running a ”Oprah’s Most Reviled Things” segment, or CNBC unless they create a show featuring failed entrepreneurs, I wonder if all future cancer patients might not be served better with a realistic approach to the disease and better end-of-life counseling. Maybe then we’d see fit to prioritize funding of new and risky types of research (like stem cell) over spending on more F-16 fighter jets. Or if a realistic picture of how easy it is for middle-class people to fall into poverty might not breathe new life into debates over welfare, health care, and other social programs. Hope is great, until it gets turned into a business model.

Optimism that is not tempered by critical thinking breeds selfishness and passivity in societies, and at the personal level, instills the same kind of guilt Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam burden their less-than-perfect flock with. Did the cancer come back because of something I did? as opposed to: cancer is notoriously difficult to beat. Am I struggling to feed my kids because I am lazy? versus large swathes of people suffer because they are simply a low priority for their governments who are more interested in giving tax breaks to corporations without asking for anything in return.

What kind of social change can be affected with a little less positive thinking, and a little more positive action?

I wonder.

Picture it.

You’re a nine-year old recent immigrant, one-time exemplary student, forced by a certain language law that shall remain nameless to undergo a year-long French immersion program ironically called (I can only imagine, by a civil servant with a twisted sense of humour) “Welcome Class” where you find out that anything you accomplished in your home country wasn’t worth much if you couldn’t speak French. You would expect that the government, in its wisdom, would enlist culturally-sensitive teachers to ease the transition of impressionable, terrified, and in some cases, somewhat traumatized youngsters into Canadian and Quebecois society.

You’d be wrong. Or at least you would have been in a certain classroom in 1987 Saint-Laurent, Quebec.

 “What is this?”

The teacher, who shall also remain nameless, pointed to the picture I’d been asked to draw of myself earlier that day with the word “Palestine” scripted in a child’s hand underneath. It was past 3:30 pm, the class had emptied, and a ragtag group of fellow-immigrant friends with whom I communicated mainly through sign language were waiting for me outside. Also, the teacher had spoken in French which at that point in my life, sounded like what you might get if you played a Pink Floyd tape backwards.

Eventually, through a combination of terrible English (hers), exasperated explaining (mine), and yes, sign language, I managed to decipher that Miss Cultural Sensitivity 1987 could not understand how a person born in Beirut, Lebanon, could possibly call herself Palestinian. My nine-year-old self threw around words I once thought of as mundane as “bread” or “water” but were actually inflammatory, misunderstood, and controversial in this frosty new country of mine. Words like “refugee” and “birthplace” versus “racial ancestry” or even “travel visa” versus “passport”.

Clearly in no mood to argue, my teacher tore off the part of the picture that said “Palestine” and wrote “Lebanon” instead. She hung it back up on the wall, along a row of similarly crafted self-portraits, drawings with words like “Syria”, “Iran”, or “El Salvador” written in brightly coloured crayons underneath the smiling stick figures.

The curiously altered piece of art was the subject of some discussion among my classmates the next morning, but I quickly cleared it up. Though I was born in Lebanon I had never, in my entire life, held a Lebanese passport. My grandparents were Palestinian, as are my parents, which in turn makes me Palestinian. Simple. The kids got it. The adult had not. Call it an early lesson in absurdity.

Some years later I’d come to understand that in the Western world, unlike the one I’d come from, there was not one set of laws for some people, and another for others. It didn’t matter that your grandfather was born in a small coastal village south of Jaffa where he tended the local coffee shop until the Nakba of 1948. Neither the olive hue of your skin, nor the distinctive shape of your eyes ever drew any special attention beyond mildly annoying comparisons to Disney’s Princess Jasmine.

What mattered in this new country was a newfangled notion regarded as quaint where I’d come from. If you were born in Canada, you were Canadian. If you weren’t, you could become one through a clear and unbiased process, after which you were every bit as Canadian as the descendants of Samuel de Champlain. It was a cultural quirk that had pitted the preconceived notions of a stubborn nine-year-old against those of a narrow-minded teacher.

But that was 1987.

In 2009, the picture has become very different.

In 2009 Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who was taken back to his native Afghanistan by his father when he was a minor and was subsequently labelled an “enemy combatant” in a questionable conflict, with questionable goals and questionable motives and currently sits in a cell located in a tropical naval base of questionable repute and origin. He’s been sitting there since 2002, waiting for the federal government to throw a charge at him that actually sticks.

Also, in 2009, Suaad Mohamud, a Canadian citizen was finally allowed back into Canada after being unlawfully detained for three months in Kenya because a customs official didn’t think she looked like her passport picture too much. Maybe she’d lost weight; maybe she’d gotten a haircut, or switched her glasses for coloured contacts. Who knows. You’d think the process standing between you and three months in an African prison would come down to something slightly more substantial than whether you happen to be bloated that day. Anyway, she’s back, after DNA testing established that she was indeed the biological mother of a Canadian kid whose two-week stint with babysitters had turned into three months. The Canadian IDs, credit cards, transit tickets and old dry cleaning stubs hadn’t done the trick.

Finally, this summer, a bittersweet ending to a six year ordeal. The court-ordered return of Sudanese-Canadian, Abousfian Abdelrasik to Montreal after countless efforts by the federal government to bar his re-entry, each more surreal and cruel than the next (decreeing, for example, that he will be re-issued a Canadian passport if he can purchase his ticket back to Canada, knowing full well that all his assets have been frozen, and invoking a law stating than anyone caught assisting Abdelrasik in obtaining return fare to Canada can be prosecuted. George Orwell couldn’t have made this up).

Today, September 11^th, marks the eighth anniversary of the event that triggered the reconsidering of such quaint notions as citizenship rights, Canadian support for citizens incarcerated abroad, or even clemency requests for Canadians sitting on death row – a practice in direct violation of Canadian laws and principles.

South of the border, a Black man ran for president on a platform of change, and won. Here in Canada, our government has morphed into a gleeful champion not of its citizens, but of the laws and decrees set by the now-defunct and discredited Bush administration, ex-rulers of a foreign nation.

Some might say the world the nine-year-old immigrant girl had left behind, the one her coddled teacher knew nothing about, had triumphed over Canadian principles and values. That Canada is slowly turning into the kind of place where things like where having a Middle-Eastern, African, or Southeast Asian last name and tan skin matters more than what kind of passport you hold, or whether or not you’ve actually committed a crime.

Some might also say a Canadian passport is no longer worth much at all.

Here’s an apt quote, on this day of rememberance, to keep in mind. In his decision ordering the Federal Canadian government to repatriate Abdelrazik, Federal Court Judge Russell Zinn writes that this unlucky Canadian is:

 ”as much a victim of international terrorism as the innocent persons whose lives have been taken by recent barbaric acts of terrorists.”

Indeed.

Cross-posted on the CJPME (Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle-East) Blog where I’ll now be contributing every once in a while. CJPME is entirely volonteer-run and has been an tireless advocate for the rights of Middle-Eastern and Southeast Asian Canadians, and has become the Canadian governments source for the reactions and positions of the Canadian Middle-Eastern community. CJPME has produced dozens of fact sheets providing a brief but meticulously researched background on hot political topics on anything from settlement building activity in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, to the case of victims of anti-terrositm discrimination like Omar Khadr’s. Please check out their website.

I’m still travelling around, hence the erratic nature of these postings, but I just couldn’t resist this…

I don’t know what those poor Minnesotans did to deserve this, other than enable Norm Coleman to be such a leechy spaz for so long, but still… low blow.

I did it - I cracked the Cayman Islands opinion and commentary market with an Op-Ed piece about the military coup in Honduras - hizzah!

So my last name is misspelled… a small detail…

Here it is my Caymanian debut. The piece is called “Good Intentions, Wrong Side of History?” and it’s basically an admission that while we (me included… probably me more than most) can be self-righteous about events that happened in the past, with all the benefits of hind-sight this confers, when it comes to a proper analysis of current events, things are seldom as black and white as they seem.

I’m very excited to be touring Carleen Brice today, and her second novel, Children of the Waters, the follow-up to her best-selling debut novel, Orange Mint and Honey.

Carleen doesn’t just write and blog about racially diverse characters - in the age of exploding Hispanic and Latino populations in the US, a half-Hawaiian, half-Kenyan President at the helm of the world’s sole Superpower, and, my personal favorite, an Arab version of American Idol on my mother’s kitchen TV set, you have to have something more than a racially diverse cast of characters to contribute to the dialogue.

In Children of the Waters, Carleen presents us with two sisters on opposite sides of the racial divide, and spins a tale of reconciliation through a maze of rejection, lies, and pain.

Here’s the author, in her own words…

Q. Readers of this blog know I am very seriously into traveling - what’s your idea of the perfect travel destination and why?

A. Someplace with a beach, turquoise waters, a hammock & drinks with umbrellas in them. Self-explanatory I think.

Q. How do you go about choosing a setting for your novel? Does it, like New York in Sex and the City, almost play the part of another character in the book, or could the plot be transported to another setting and work?

A. So far, my books have been set in Denver and I kind of like writing about this city, but setting isn’t really a character in either novel.

Q. Who’s your favorite literary (or movie) villain? Why?

A. The monster in Aliens. I love that it’s a kick-ass female monster vs. a kick-ass female heroine!

Q. What would you change about your life if you became the next Sophie Kinsella?

A. I’ve fantasized a lot about winning the Oprah lottery or having one of my books pictured in Michelle Obama’s hands. But really my imagination fails after paying off debt, helping out my family and taking a trip to some destination like the above. I think I’m pretty much living the way I want to be living, so I don’t think much would really change.

About the author

Carleen Brice’s debut novel, Orange Mint and Honey, was an Essence “Recommended Read” and a Target “Bookmarked Breakout Book.”  For this book, she won the 2009 First Novelist Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and the 2008 Break Out Author Award at the African American Literary Awards Show. Orange Mint and Honey was optioned by Lifetime Movie Network.

Her second novel, Children of the Waters (One World/Ballantine), a book about race, love and family, just came out at the end of June. Booklist Online called it “a compelling read, difficult to put down.” Essence says, “Brice has a new hit.” You can read an excerpt at her website http://www.carleenbrice.com/.

She is at work on her third novel, Calling Every Good Wish Home, and she maintains the blogs “White Readers Meet Black Authors” www.welcomewhitefolks.blogspot.com and “The Pajama Gardener” www.pajamagardener.blogspot.com.

Thanks so much for stopping by, Carleen!

…Puerto Rico. Which I hope, dear readers, will (partially) explain my recent absence from the blogosphere. I am trying to divide my days between working on projects I’ve long wanted to do (finish Upside of Down, start exclusive-for-Kindle novella, bask in the Puerto Rican sun..) But I’ll be back, so please hang in there.

Just before I start posting about more reviews, photos of gorgeous San Juan, and announcements of contest winners, allow me to please share with you this gem I happened upon in the New York Times.

This 10-page article is about whales, and is absolutely fascinating. I’m a nature girl, and like a lot of people, am especially curious about whales, but even with my natural inclinations aside, I found the insights in this article to be pretty mind blowing.

Here’s one of the best parts:

“…We do have compelling evidence of the experience of grief in cetaceans; and of joy, anger, frustration and distress and self-awareness and tool use; and of protecting not just their young but also their companions from humans and other predators. So these are reasons why something like forgiveness is a possibility.”

The background to that quote is this: whales, until recently, had been fished to near-extinction. However, with preservation and re-population strategies, some species have rebounded. Past whale behavior had shown them to be extremely cautious towards the humans who’d massacred their kind into near-non-existence, but now, it seems that they just might have forgiven our past transgressions. They are interacting with humans again, and NOT in situations where food or feeding grounds are involved.

It would seem that whales are ready to give peaceful co-existence a second chance.

As a Palestinian I have to wonder - if whales can forgive humans for hundreds of years of hunting, how is it that Israelis and Palestinians can’t find a way to co-exist peacefully?

When we say that someone is behaving like an animal, we mean it in the sense that this person is sub-human, savage, and incapable of emotion beyond the most basic, instinctive kind.

After reading this I have to wonder if humans aren’t the more barbaric, savage species.

I started watching this story on Jon Stewart at 8 pm, and at that time, this was just a really hilarious comic piece about a high-ranking politician going totally AWOL. By the time Rachel Maddow rolled around, Mark Sanford was discovered at the Altanta airport, returning from a very poorly-planned, impromptu trip to see a woman in Argentina he is apparantly having an affair with. So by the time you read this - who knows? Maybe we’ll find out he has a whole other family down there, with four daughters and a poodle named Fifi (not terribly unlike a subplot in a Sidney Sheldon book I read many moons ago)

I’m going to jump on this bandwagon right now, before everyone with a Twitter account and their grandmother has weighed in - I feel bad for the guy.

I shouldn’t - he’s cheated on his wife, he left his kids on Father’s day to be with his girlfriend in Argentina, AND, most important of all - this is a Republican so dedicated to party politics that he would rather turn down federal stimulus money than assist his fellow South Carolinians in the the midst of the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression.

From the sounds of that, Mark Sanford should be the poster boy for arrogant jerk.

Except it’s pretty clear from his pitiable press conference that he’s not. Or at least not just an arrogant jerk. Look at the guy!

This is a dude who seems like he went to sleep reasonably happy one day, woke up in a completely different one, and has no clue how he got there.

What’s notable about the media reaction to all this isn’t so much how a guy with such a bright future ahead of him had an affair and “blew it all up” to quote one pundit, but that he was caught being…well… so emotional and flaky about it. How dare he appear human on television, admit to crying, when a sterile statement from his chief of staff would have sufficed? How are you supposed to mindlessly bleat stupid party lines after you’ve shown your human side?

And you know what else? He doesn’t actually sound that repentant! He’s sorry he hurt people, like his wife and sons and staffers, but the guy isn’t sorry he hopped a flight to BA to be with his darling after his wife kicked him out of the house.

Obviously, this is a guy who did not “have it all” to quote another pundit. And we’re not talking about a sleazy affair with an intern or who hired a hooker, or going to public bathrooms in search of a thrill. This was obviously an unstudied move - with no premeditation or planning - and the press conference delivery was heartfelt, if not polished. The “crime” is notable only for its humanity, its all-too-familiar ring of man’s inner struggle against society’s expectations gone wrong.

It reminds me of a recent case of a very popular Latino priest based in Miami - Padre Alberto (who also happens to be quite the looker) - who was caught… wait for it… cavorting with a woman on the beach. A woman, who it had been revealed, was his girlfriend of many years. Was teh Catholic church relieved that he’d been caught with a consenting adult rather than molesting a minor - the church’s usual MO? Of course not! The man had to choose between the little lady and the Catholic church and Padre Alberto is now an Episcopalian.

I wonder how much longer before we acknowledge how much hyprocricy hurts us all by enabling us into believing other people’s lies and therefore making us feel doubly guilty for our desires, controversial and upsetting though they may be? Isn’t honesty also an important Christian/Muslim value - and wouldn’t it include honesty to our own selves?