I'm early posting my YouTube Reading video this week. I'll be busy at VCon 36 on Saturday but I didn't want to miss getting one to you, so here she is. The book is Winter on the Plain of Ghosts by Eileen Kernaghan. One of my all-time favourites. I remember being busy out and about, at the gym or wherever, and thinking about getting home to my book. Not something that happens to me every day.
So here is your tiny sampling. Cheers!
Now, I was about to tell you that I have posted my reading from "The Golem" by Avram Davidson on YouTube today. But I see that I have neglected to tell you that last week I posted my reading from Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea. So I must tell you both now. Or -- well, how about I just embed them here, and let you figure it out?
Happy story-time!
Casey
She's up. "After Hours at the Black Hole" aired today at WRFR in Rockland, Maine and on the Internet at Beam Me Up! In addition to my story, there is one by Devin Miller of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. "Good Business with Guns" is fun, and well read by Ron Huber. If you want to skip straight to my story (though why would you?) I believe it is at 28 minutes and 40 sec into the show, IIRC.
In his introduction, Paul Cole mentions another story I sent him (that would be "Claude and the Henry Moores") which he hopes I will record for him within the month. So I have pencilled that in and look forward to another podcast with Beam Me Up! in the not too distant future.
Theatre! Aliens! Clumsy dancing!
See it all in
"This is For Mrs Zaberewsky"
Saturday October 1st
@ 1pm
Minoru A
Sheraton Vancouver Airport
starring
Pallahaxi Players Readers Theatre
Theo Campbell, Virginia O’Dine, Rhea Rose,
Steph St Laurent, Casey Wolf
VCON 36
– September 30 to October 2, 2011 –
You are invited to the premiere performance of the Pallahaxi Players Readers Theatre. We wish to acknowledge the late Mike Coney, author of Pallahaxi Tide, Fang the Gnome, The Celestial Steam Locomotive and others, for presenting earlier VCon audiences with the Lonely Cry Readers Theatre, of which we are a blatant rip-off – er, homage.
Great news! We'll be on air next Saturday, 24 September 2011, at Beam Me Up! on WRFR radio in Rockland, Maine, and on the internet at the Beam Me Up! podcast site. WRFR is local access, volunteer-run radio and Beam Me Up! is their science and science fiction show, created by Paul Cole and Ron Huber. It's a lot of fun , with news and fiction and all kinds of stuff.
"After Hours at the Black Hole" was first published in OnSpec Magazine, and later collected in Finding Creatures & Other Stories. It follows Jude, a space trucker, as he hauls a very dangerous cargo to a black hole named Old Guzzler.
I submitted the story to Paul a couple of months ago because I liked his style and the way he handled his readings. In the communications that followed I accidentally volunteered to do the reading myself. The delight I experienced in putting this together for Paul led directly to the podcast I did for VCon (where is that podcast, anyway?), and indirectly to my new YouTube channel, or rather, to its use as a site for reading aloud to unsuspecting viewers from favourite books.
Beam Me Up! is available on iTunes and through MySpace. Once it's been aired I'll add here the direct links to "After Hours".
A lovely 11 minute film documentary (Beam Me Up - Local Access Science Fiction Radio, by New Farmer Films***) takes you behind the scenes with Paul and Ron at Beam Me Up! headquarters. If you are interested in public radio, science fiction radio, or SF podcasts, these cats have a lot to say.
Cheers!
***Drat! Blogger won't let me add this many links. So here are the addresses:
Beam Me Up - Local Access Science Fiction Radio --
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyOFOhgTFXg
New Farmer Films --
http://www.youtube.com/user/newfarmerfilms#p/u
Canadian Tales of the Fantastic available now from Red Tuque Books and Amazon.ca.
This is the anthology that Eileen Kernaghan and I were finalist judges for back in February.
Red Tuque Books
Trade paperback 188 pp
$15.95
The Link magazine will be publishing my short story "Invicta", wherein a love of books carries a woman through all the difficult days of her life.
"Invicta" was inspired by my mother's tales of her thirst for books at a young age and her first visit to a library when she was in her early twenties. She vowed to read every book on the shelves and made a very good go of it.
In light of Toronto mayor Rob Ford's attacks on the public library system, the story is a timely one. (Follow this link to read Margaret Atwood's defense of the library system.)
Below is a poem my mum keeps framed in her room. Something else that kept a woman going through all the years and their trials.
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
William Ernest Henley (1849–1903)
I've uploaded my 2nd YouTube "reading" video. The last was from Don Marquis' The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel. This is from Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. I love this book. (This link takes you to Gutenberg books, where you can download the novel.)
I'm still finding my "intro" style. There is a weird eyeball (mine) looking at you at the beginning of this video and that, plus the peculiar "hello", gives the wrong impression of what you will encounter if you continue watching. I'll sort it out. Meanwhile it is very fun to be doing these little readings, to share my great affection for a book while getting to horse around (er, perform), too.
I've got a couple more in the bag but I won't be posting more than one a week. You can look forward to A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K Le Guin, "The Golem", by Avram Davidson, and "M’ap Ekri Youn Powèm/I’m Writing a Poem", by Togiram (Emil Selesten-Meji). That last is from a collection of Haitian Creole poetry that gives the full Kreyol version followed by an English translation. (Open Gate.)
Anyway, here's Bob Louis, courtesy of Casey June:
I have rather belatedly joined the BC SF authors collective, the Lonely Cry, "an informal west coast association of Canadian science fiction and fantasy writers" with which I have long been acquainted.
Belated, because the Age of the Internet has made much of the Lonely Cry's role redundant. There is no longer a need for newsletters to let the world know what the authors are doing: they blog it. Tweet it. Facebook it. And in every other way blast their trumpets to the world.
When Lonely Cry originator Mike Coney was alive the Lonely Cry also banded together to do Readers Theatre at the local SF convention, VCon. Although not an LC member, I was invited to join their performance a couple of times, but mostly I sat in the audience and laughed at their brave idiocy.
Despite the demise of the newsletter, the Lonely Cry remains a respectable group of authors that I am happy and pleased to throw my lot in with. Eileen Kernaghan has put my bio and my first blog announcements onto the site. The site will link back to this blog. And so the life cycle continues.
Have a look. You will find news of Mary E. Choo, Janine Cross, Dave Duncan, Matthew Hughes, Eileen Kernaghan, Linda DeMeulemeester, Clélie Rich and Rhea Rose, all fine local (usually -- that Matt has been gadding around an awful lot) writers of speculative fiction. There is much good reading to be had in their midst.
But first, a little background, gleaned from the memory of Eileen Kernaghan:
It was Mike's idea over twenty, perhaps as much as twenty-five years ago. He had returned jetlagged from a trip and came up with the idea for the Lonely Cry--West Coast speculative fiction writers putting out a periodical newsheet to mail out to libraries, individuals, reviewers, and bookstores, usually promoting one book in particular. Mike did the putting together and publishing at first.
Two or three years later he had the brain wave of putting together a readers theatre piece entitled "Sex and Perversion in Gnomedome". This was a great hit, so he did two or three more at VCons and took it to Context in Alberta as well. Beginning as a small readers theatre, with the readers seated at a table, it developed into an elaborate array of props and costumes, but remained true to the barely rehearsed, read-from-scripts, whacky sensibility of the original. Though the majority of scripts were written by Mike, others were written by Mary Choo, Eileen Kernaghan, and Rhea Rose.
Cool! I just noticed I can now add pages to this blog, so I've added a short story for you to read at your leisure. You'll find the tab just below the blog header above.
The story is "Claude and the Henry Moores".
Cheers,
Casey
I like reading to people. You may have heard me say this before. You may even have heard me read.
Well, it finally occurred to me that I could take this passion to YOUtubb. Then late at night when I have the urge to read a bedtime story, or in the heat of the afternoon when nothing cools like Lucan, I can curl up with a nice cosy webcam and a handful of book and have at it.
As I did tonight.
Behold: Casey Wolf reading Don Marquis, wherein Archy the cockroach proclaims himself to the New York Sun newspaper office, 1927. To wit, the coming of archy, from The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel.
Good lord! The picture looks dreadful! C'est la vie. The story is good.
This video can also be found on YOUtubb, where you will find it nestled among others' tributes to the great Don Marquis.
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