I’m very pleased that my YA story Marcus the Great has just been published in an anthology for the educational market by McGraw-Hill Ryerson. The anthology has the rather clunky title of iLit: Reality Imagined: Stories of Identity and Change and also includes stories by Jean Little, Richard Scrimger, Sheree Fitch, and several other established and up-and-coming Canadian writers.
Marcus the Great is a coming of age story of sorts, about a mellow biracial basketball player from downtown Toronto who attends the city’s Northern Secondary School, likes history class, and starts dating an uptown girl. It was totally inspired by the exposure I got to the fascinating Toronto high school basketball scene when my two sons played ball for Northern. Go Red Knights!
The story will also be available soon as a download for teachers who want to pick and choose from a selection of stories on offer to put together their own classroom anthologies at ilit.ca. To that end, the ilit site is currently offering up Marcus the Great as a sample work – you can read (but not print) the whole thing, with illustrations! – here.
How much do I love the idea of high school students studying my story? A lot.
1) Sweet bell pepper and egg sandwiches, a traditional Italian-American Easter food that I discovered at Torrisi Italian Specialties in New York, and created my own non-Easter version of at home [The Hungry Novelist]
2) The Writers Reading Recipes podcasts on Julie Wilson’s BookMadam blog, including one of me reading a recipe for Butterscotch Brownies from The Joy of Cooking, which can be found here. Figuring out how to record myself without using an iphone or mic was a real technical adventure, alright. [BookMadam]
3) A Tony Awards afterglow: I loved the telecast, loved seeing How To Succeed, Catch Me If You Can and Sister Act – shows I’d enjoyed seeing on Broadway – bringing it to their musical numbers, and I now can’t get out of my head the beautiful chorus in the song Commencing in Chattanooga from The Scottsboro Boys, a show I hadn’t loved when I saw it last fall. Check it (earworm alert):
This Saturday, May 7th, 2011 at 1:30 p.m. I’ll be co-leading a free Heritage Toronto and Jane’s Walk walking tour of Toronto’s North Rosedale neighbourhood with the catchy title of “Hidden Treasures in North Rosedale.” I originally designed and wrote this walking tour partly as a way to promote my novel The Glenwood Treasure, which is set in a fictionalized version of North Rosedale, and also so that I could repurpose some of the research that I did while writing that novel.
My new Rapid Reads book, And Everything Nice, was officially published on April 1. You can read the opening chapter of it here, and you can buy it online here. And you can come hear me talk about it – and about my other novels – when I give a talk about Food in my Fiction at the Danforth and Coxwell branch of the Toronto Public Library on Wednesday April 20, 2011 at 6:30 pm.
“In And Everything Nice, twentysomething Stephanie, a Gap store manager, meets local TV personality Anna after she joins a church choir. After a blackmailer steals Anna’s journal and threatens to publically reveal its juicy details, Stephanie tries to help Anna trap the culprit and land an exciting new job at the same time. Many readers will find Stephanie’s voice, both street-smart and strongly principled, to be a winning combination.” – Gillian Engberg
I had an interesting phone conversation this morning (land line to land line, even – how retro are we?), with my writer friend and colleague Antanas Sileika, about publicity, social media, blogs, author websites and how not to fall by the antiquated what-is-this-internet-thing-anyway? wayside.
Hence, I’m posting a link to my latest food blog post on the subject of food in (my) fiction, specifically, this time around, the butterscotch brownies pictured above, that I made with my own hands! Read it and eat. [The Hungry Novelist]
