Special Announcement from Jen Frankel – jenstuff online!
Hey, y’all,
My long anticipated (mostly by me because I haven’t actually said much about it to anyone else. . . where the heck was I?) . . . anticipated – oh yeah – my long anticipated online anthology has finally come online. I invite all of you to check out jenstuff, which now has its own home within the WILDsound website family.
You can start reading the brand-new edition of The Last Rite, my 2002 novel of supernatural adventure featuring the redoubtable Maggie Stuart.
I’m almost finished the sequel, The Red Ring, and discovered that both work best in the first person. If you’ve read the book already, I invite you to compare. If not, I hope you’ll opt in and come along for the ride! (and help pick out any remaining “she’s” that should be “I’s”. . .)
The novel is password-protected, but there’s no cost to read – all you have to do is fill in the form on the jenstuff home page, and I’ll send you the access code. You’ll also have access to special jenstuff features not available through the main page.
And so, on to this week’s column. . .
Jen Frankel admits to a bit of schizophrenia
Not the real thing, mind you. It’s just that, trying to decide what I’m going to write about today, I realize that the two things I want to put down are so incongruous that I can find no possible segue. Nor, because of what they are, would I want to.
So instead, I’ll just begin. I’ve been reviewing and typing over all my journals these last few weeks, as you may have already been aware if you check out this column every now and then.
It’s been a great ride, and I’m over twenty books through, with at least the same number to go, but I’m rather hopeful about the whole enterprise. I’m rediscovering all the scattered bits and pieces that have, to some psychological crutch-like extend, been weighing down on me and making me just a little afraid of putting together new work. Nothing like a crutch you finally acknowledge, huh? I feel like I suddenly discovered I was able to walk without one all along.
So I may feel a little foolish for not beginning this exercise earlier, but I can’t slam the results.
Jen finds sorrow in transcription
The latest series of notes I’ve just completed are the ones I took at a lecture I was truly blessed to attend a couple of years ago at my parents’ church in London ON. My dad has been helping put together this great program of workshops, lectures, and lunches for the congregants for the last few years, and the speakers they get to this “Time Out” program are really extraordinary.
It was a blast hearing Buzz Hargrove, for example, talk union-speak in the sanctuary to a full house of religious retirees. But the notes I took were on a presentation that moved me so much that, in revisiting them, I found myself close to tears. For the record, I don’t cry at the drop of a hat.
But the plight of the enormous and increasing number of AIDS-infected Africans and the picture painted by the truly astonishing Stephen Lewis brings me face to face with mortality on a cataclysmic and unimaginable scale.
So I thought, while the feelings are fresh in my mind, I might try to share some of what Lewis told us, and maybe this time, I’ll keep the facts a little fresher in my mind, and find some ways to contribute myself to solutions that have been too long in coming.
Jen runs down the stats and conjures the faces
I recall that Lewis was speaking to the crowd at Metropolitan United Church not even twenty-four hours after leaving Zambia. Despite his obvious fatigue, he spoke for an hour straight without notes, then took questions from the audience. His passion was plain, and his simple eloquence illuminated the sad facts more than any angry harangue.
It seems to have grown popular in North America to treat the AIDS epidemic as something that happened and ended, something that has little relevance to life as we know it. I’ve known lots of people over recent years who have engaged in potentially dangerous sexual behaviour – I myself cannot claim to be perfect in this regard – with little fear of the risk they’re assuming.
Still, I think most people my age know the terror of waiting for the results of an AIDS test. And we’re still the lucky ones. How much worse, in a country like South Africa, or Swaziland, where rates of the infected are already at pandemic levels?
The gender divide in Africa that often leaves women without legal rights, property rights, or inheritance rights, and where there is no legal infrastructure to deal with violence against women has allowed AIDS rates to grow incredibly fast. And since women are both the care-takers in the family unit and the farmers, famine follows were AIDS goes.
An entire sector of the population – men and women between the age of 15 and 49 – is vanishing from the continent. This leaves orphaned children and grandparents to struggle on – and when the grandparents die, Africa is seeing a huge rise in the number of child-led households.The images Lewis conjured for us, of ten year old orphans who looked like they were three and moved like zombies, of people unable to get the benefit of their medication because their bodies were so malnourished, of hospitals with 2 or 3 people per bed and another beneath it, of babies four and five to a crib. . .
After a while, you begin to O.D. on the sad images, and all you can think is, “How could this happen, in a world that also contains what I see around me, and how can it be made better?”
Good on Bill and Tony
The Clinton Foundation has done a lot of good work to get aid flowing to Africa, and Tony Blair has been a real voice for the education of the Western world about the pandemic. But even the target Lewis said was needed at the very minimum – $20 billion by 2007 – was far greater than the amount being spent at the time, only $3-5 billion.
To put this in perspective, the same week I heard Lewis speak, George W. Bush was asking Congress for a further $80 for the war in Iraq.
The Stephen Lewis Foundation does wonderful educational work, and Lewis has been a tireless speaker and travels back and forth to Africa many times every year. He recommends contributions to all the major aid organizations – like Doctors Without Borders, OXFAM, CARE and the like – but says we have to continue raising our own consciousness level and trying to galvanize public opinion to be aware, first, of the problem, and to realize that we are capable of making a difference.
We talk a lot, especially during the lead-up to both Canadian and American elections, about what can be done to make things better for us. I believe that the most essential thing for Canadians to remember is what is supposed to define us – that we care about justice and human rights. I want to see Canadians galvanized to look outwards to Africa and the rest of the world, to see pandemics and poverty, genocide and injustice, and to have those as our touchstones when we build foreign policy and decide how much to contribute to foreign aid.
What I think we’ve forgotten as Canadians, perhaps as inhabitants of North America, is to concentrate on what we’re supposed to stand for. We hear a lot of talk about freedom and justice from south of the border, but I see only obfuscation and confusion on what that means in practical terms.
AIDS is a calamity that has a face – it has 45 million faces in South Africa alone. We can help. Isn’t that more important than any partisan politics, or militaristic imposition of “democracy?”
You see how difficult, not to mention IMPOSSIBLE it is to segue cleanly from an issue like that? And, having been a cabaret-emcee in Stratford many, many times, I think of myself as a bit of a segue master. . .
So here is my second thang for the column, with no attempt to be neat about it.
Having failed, Jen gives a clumsy update on VORTEX
Wanted to update you on the Vortex competition, and push push push for you prospective game-writing geniuses to get your entries in! And I’ll stress that the biggest bonus you get by being even a finalist in this very exciting competition is the chance to receive consultations and mentoring from some of the biggest names in Canadian gaming. Not to mention a shot at the XBOXes and the big prize.
Vortex has extended its deadline for submissions to June 7, but if you wait that long you’ll miss out on the coaching sessions on June 2 and 4, which would be a terrible pity. And need I say, $2,500?
For all of you who said they would definitely play a “Fat Ladies’ Mafia in Outer Space” game, my apologies – I think I’m going to have to do a bit more research myself before those wonderful big babes take to the stars. Besides, it would be unfair of me to walk away with an XBOX when until recently I thought “Wii” was synonymous with “pee-pee.”
Here’s the latest from Vortex (although please remember the new June 7 closing date for submissions): it’ll open in a new window so you can continue your WILDsound browsing apres.
I’m almost finished the sequel, The Red Ring, and discovered that both work best in the first person. If you’ve read the book already, I invite you to compare. If not, I hope you’ll opt in and come along for the ride! (and help pick out any remaining “she’s” that should be “I’s”. . .)
For all of you who said they would definitely play a “Fat Ladies’ Mafia in Outer Space” game, my apologies – I think I’m going to have to do a bit more research myself before those wonderful big babes take to the stars. Besides, it would be unfair of me to walk away with an XBOX when until recently I thought “Wii” was synonymous with “pee-pee.”
