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 Jim Payne, from Notre Dame Bay, Newfoundland, He has
been a professional performing artist and writer for 22 years. A leading
performer and collector of Newfoundland traditional music,
 he is one of the province’s most
prolific songwriters, working in several genres to create musical mosaics of
local life. Jim has directed, composed and performed music for theatre
productions, as well as soundtracks for plays, documentaries and videos. He has
performed on radio and television in Canada and abroad, and has toured in North
America and abroad. Jim has many recording credits, He also owns and operates
his own recording label, SingSong Inc., which has fifteen currently available
titles, and produces concerts and special events featuring traditional and
contemporary music, song, story and dance that reflect the Newfoundland
experience. Jim plays guitar, accordion, mandolin, tin whistle and violin, and
is a singer, storyteller, actor, writer, stepdancer, and teacher of traditional
Newfoundland set and square dances.
Web:
www.singsong.nfld.com
Carmelita McGrath is a writer, editor, researcher
and educator. She has authored books of poetry, fiction, children’s
literature, and social history for adult learners. As a member of the Writers
Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador/ABE Social History Project writing team,
she combined family stories, interviews and archival research to explore the
links between oral narratives and documented history. As a workshop facilitator
with Educational Planning and Design, she brought creative writing workshop
techniques to displaced fishery workers in adult education programs. As
contributing co-editor of Wayfaring, Journeys in Language, Learning and
Culture, she has co-led workshops in which both learners and educators recast
themselves as writers to explore their personal experience of language and
education. She recently developed Voice2Voice, a course for Mount St. Vincent
University’s Distance Education Program, which explores the intersections
of oral and written culture and the ownership of narrative. Her most recent
book, a chapbook called Ghost Poems (Running the Goat Books & Broadsides),
2001, delves into the ghost stories of her childhood through the medium of
poetry. Her short story collection Stranger Things Have Happened (Killick
Press), 1999, won the Writers’ Alliance/Bennington Gate Newfoundland Book
Award for fiction and was shortlisted for the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction
Award.
| MARK THESE DATES April 4-5, 2003 |
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GRASSROOTS: COMMUNITY WRITING
Reading the
world, Reading the word
-- "I
believe theatre can speak to the whole population. The role of theatre is to
give the community an image of itself. I think of our task as being a kind of
'thinking in public', and thinking in public works most effectively when the
whole public, the hoi polloi, is really there. That's why we do our theatre in
parks and on the street. We save the best seats for the groundlings."
– David Anderson, Clay and Paper Theatre
Friday, April 4, 2003,
reading/performing at Blue Metropolis
Saturday, April
5, 2003,
workshop at The Centre for Literacy
Watch our
web site for details |
|
Paolo
Freire believed that adult literacy could only be built on a conscious
awareness of the social and political realities of the world. For him, there
was no separate set of skills to be mastered. Once an awareness or
“conscientization” was aroused, he believed, the struggle for social
justice would motivate adults to become literate. This concept is not a
mainstream practice in North America where literacy is too often reduced to a
commodity. Nevertheless, there are a surprising number of programs and
organizations that foster innovative ways of connecting the world and the word,
through community theatre, photography, music and writing.
This
year’s Grassroots: Community Writing event will bring writers and
performers from street theatre in Vancouver and Toronto, from adult new
writers’ programs, from neighborhood writing alliances, from youth
anti-violence programs, and from rural literacy programs to read and share
their perspectives on writing and performing as ways of creating and reshaping
their worlds. |
Cree
writer Larry Loyie is a playwright and
children’s book author. Ora Pro Nobis (Pray for Us), a play about his
experiences in residential school in Alberta, has been performed in B.C.,
Alberta and Ontario. His new book, As Long as the Rivers Flow, the story of a
boy’s summer learning First Nations traditions, was written with his
partner, Constance Brissenden. It became available in the fall of 2002 from
Groundwood Books in Toronto. In 1993 Larry started Living Traditions Writers
Group with Constance, encouraging and teaching creative writing in First
Nations Communities.
Constance
Brissenden (BA, MA) is a longtime freelance writer and creative
writing instructor. She has written 8 non-fiction books and hundreds of
magazine articles. She teaches creative writing across Canada with Larry.
Web: www.firstnationswriter.com
[See excerpt from As Long as the Rivers Flow ]
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