The first Spring Book Hatching, held at the Vancouver Public Library on Saturday, was lots of fun! There were crowds of people and over thirty B.C. authors and illustrators showing their creative stuff. I shared a table with Diane Haynes, author of mystery-wildlife-rescue novels for teens, Flight or Fight and Crow Medicine. Diane was inspired to write her first novel in the series after rescuing an oiled seabird and volunteering with the Burnaby Wildlife Rescue Association. The crow book came about after Diane rescued a baby crow from a busy road. She was also inspired by crows’ intelligence, playfulness and love of all things shiny. I recently profiled Diane’s latest novel (as well as the first book in Clem Martini’s Crow Chronicles, The Mob) in a double-page spread on crows, which I wrote for the latest issue of Bark! the magazine of the BC SPCA Kids’ Club. With both Diane’s and my books focusing on people and animals, and with both of us being crow fans, we were a good match.

A few highlights of the Hatching (most of the photos taken by author/illustrator Cynthia Nugent):

Sorry I haven’t been writing much lately. I’ve either been busy with various projects or resting my eyes. Right now I’m getting ready to be part of the first Spring Book Hatching at the Vancouver Public Library (June 9, 1-3pm, Alice McKay Room). Over thirty B.C. authors and illustrators will be there presenting their newest books for kids. There will also be activities, prizes and treats (Purdy’s Chocolates is one of our sponsors!). I’ll be there with my two latest novels, Dog House Blues and The Truth About Rats (and Dogs). (By the way, I’m on the organizing committee for the Book Hatching and did the “chick hatching out of the egg” part of the design below (Kari Winters created the original background image and Kirsti Wakelin did the overall design, making everything work):

I borrowed a one-inch button-maker from Blim Gallery this week and have been making buttons to sell at the Hatching or to give away to anyone who buys one of my books. I’ll be donating the money from button sales to the SPCA. Below are a few of the animal-themed buttons I made for the Hatching. I’ll post some of my other buttons later (I love the button-making machine!)

I would like to say a special hello to everyone who has been reading my novels about the childhood of artist Emily Carr (Discovering Emily and Emily’s Dream) — especially Mrs. Fung’s class at Lord Nelson Elementary School!

During Spring Break last week I spent a day in Victoria, the city where Emily Carr was born and spent most of her life (1871-1945). Walking around her old neighbourhood, I tried to imagine what it looked like when she was a girl playing in the cow yard beside her house, cutting through her family’s back field to Beacon Hill Park, walking along the road to the James Bay Bridge…. and later, being a landlady at the House of All Sorts (a house built on a piece of her family’s property), raising her bob tail sheep dogs, walking along the streets with her monkey, Woo…..

Above: Carr house in the 1860s and me in front of the house last week.

Above: The House of All Sorts (at left), which is around the corner from Carr House (Carr House is now a museum you can visit, but the House of All Sorts is a privately owned house with apartments, and there is still a mural that Emily Carr painted on the attic ceiling). The house on the right is where I lived during my last year at University in Victoria (a room-mate and I rented the top floor, just a block away from Carr House, and no, Emily Carr was not still alive when I lived in her neighbourhood).

This street in front of the Empress Hotel (photo at left) used to be the James Bay Bridge, which Emily would walk across with her father. The hotel is sitting on what used to be the water of James Bay (the bay was filled in with earth, but sea water still sneaks into the hotel basement at high tide).

Above: The parliament buildings (behind the whale), which are across from the Empress Hotel and overlooking Victoria’s inner harbour (Emily Carr’s old neighbourhood is right behind them).

Below: Me dressed in 19^th century costume, reading in the Emily Carr section of the Vancouver Art Gallery a couple years ago (my daughter, sitting on the floor at left, is dressed like Emily Carr would have dressed when she was a girl).

When I was in grade seven, I used to walk to the local library every Friday after school (about two miles) to drop off last week’s books and select the next week’s. The way I picked the books I wanted to borrow was to walk along the shelves of novels in the children’s section until a spine or cover jumped out at me. This method led me to discover some of my favourite books, including “The Court of the Stone Children” by Eleanor Cameron, “The Book of Three” by Lloyd Alexander (which led me to all of the Prydain Chronicles) and “False Dawn” by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (a graphic science fiction novel, which, as I pointed out to the librarian after I’d read it, definately did not belong in the children’s section).

More recently, this serendipitous selection habbit has led me to books such as “Prodigal Summer” by Barbara Kingslover, “The Mermaid Chair” by Sue Monk Kidd, “Blessed are the Cheesemakers” by Sarah-Kate Lynch (a title I couldn’t resist) and “Down the Rabbit Hole” by Peter Abrahams (a mystery, which I found in the adult section of the library, though it may have belonged in the children’s section, but could work in both, I think).  

There’s something magical about feeling the call of a previously unkown book, or discovering the perfect book by pure chance.

Today, I walked into Chapters, killing time between a dentist appointment and catching the bus home, and not intending to buy anything. I wandered idly down the middle of the store and into the children’s section, turned around, and there was a bright orange and red picture book: “The Company of Crows” by Marilyn Singer. Poems celebrating crows and gorgeous illustrations (by Linda Saport) full of crows! I hadn’t even known the book existed. Of course, I had to buy it.

The cover and the first inside illustration also reminded me of the haiku my friend Jean-Pierre recently added to the comments of my November “Call of the Wild” post:

Eyes are everywhere
Peering through the leaves and branches
In the rookery

Since preparations have begun for the celebration of the Lunar New Year, I’d like to wish a happy new year to everyone! Gung Hay Fat Choy, if you speak Cantonese, or Gong Xi Fa Cai, if you speak Mandarin (wishing you happiness and prosperity).

Chinese New Year is a time for settling old debts and quarrels, cleaning away the dust and clutter of the past year, and making way for new or renewed prosperity, happiness and health. It’s a time for new clothes, family gatherings and food (especially food symbolic of good fortune and long life). It is also a festival that celebrates the coming of spring.

In honour of the occasion and all my friends who celebrate Chinese New Year, I made the artwork below with images of spring and good fortune (including flowers cut from “lucky money” envelopes, stems from “lucky paper,” cookie fortune leaves, and coins).

Also, I can’t resist giving a plug to my most recent novel, The Truth About Rats (and Dogs) (see the “My Books” page in the side bar for more info), which includes a Chinese New Year Celebration (I had a lot of fun researching this part of the book). To find out ten things I learned while doing this research, check out my post at cwillbc. And by the way, I just found out The Truth About Rats (and Dogs) has been nominated for the Atlantic Canada readers’ choice Hackmatack Award (for 2008)!

I am a bad birdwatcher. This is a good thing, according to Simon Barnes, the author of How to Be a Bad Birdwatcher (Short Books 2004), a great book I recently discovered.

Barns says “I don’t go bird watching. I am birdwatching.” It’s simply part of who he is in the world. He notices birds. Anyone can do this. You don’t have to carry around any special equipment or even know the names of all the birds you see. If you can tell a car from a truck, you can tell a swan from a robin. And that’s enough.

Why bother? As Barnes says, “looking at birds is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Looking at birds is a key: it opens doors, and if you choose to go through them you find you enjoy life more and understand life better.”

Barnes tells the story of how he was walking to a London train station one day and paused to watch a bunch of house martins “whizzing round” a church steeple and catching flies in their beaks.

“And then it happened. Bam!”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw what he at first took to be a kestrel in the sky. It suddenly dropped like a thunderbolt into the crowd of martins, took one out, then vanished. Barnes stood on the street, looking up, “uttering incredulous obscenities and prayerful blasphemies.” It was a falcon (specifically, a hobby, but being able to identify it, says Barnes, was not necessary — only a bonus). Not a rare bird or a sighting that would make any headlines in birdwatching journals — “just a wonderful and wholly unexpected sight of a wonderful and wholly unexpected bird. . . a moment of perfect drama.”

Something similar happened to me several years ago when I was a student at York University in Toronoto. I was walking across campus after an Environemntal Studies class when my eye was caught by a movement above a roof-top crowded with pigeons. Something dropped out of the sky, hit the pigeons like an explosion, then was gone. A peregrine falcon. It was like a piece of a nature documentary playing out right in front of me.

I looked around quickly to see if anyone else had seen what I’d just seen. Out of the large group of students walking between buildings, only one other stood still and was excitedly looking around to see if anyone else had seen what he’d just seen. It was a guy from my class who knew birds. Our eyes connected.

“That was a peregrine falcon!” he called across the crowd (this is the only reason I knew for sure what type of bird it was). At that time the peregrine falcon was still on the endangered species list and had been almost wiped out a decade or so earlier due to the pesticide DDT. So, to see a peregrine falcon in action right here in the middle of the city was not only to witness a marvelous  moment of natural drama, but also to experience a sense of wonder and hope.

I haven’t seen a peregrine falcon since then (though I may have without knowing it), and most of my bird sightings are quite calm and ordinary ones (bush tits outside my kitchen window, crows, etc.), but somehow when I catch sight of a bird (especially one I’m not expecting), it’s like glimpsing magic in the world. “Enhanced enjoyment of the ordinary” is what Simon Barnes calls it.

Who needs drugs when you have birds?

[Note: below is a hummingbird at my sister’s feeder on southern Vancouver Island (during our December snowfall), juncos at a pine cone feeder in my backyard, and Sandhill cranes at the Riefel Bird sanctuary near where I live]

I launched my new book this past Saturday at the Vancouver SPCA shelter. “The Truth about Rats (and dogs)” is the second novel in a series the SPCA asked me to write about kids and animals. The first book, “Dog House Blues,” which came out last year, was also launched at a shelter event. I had three dogs as special guests at that one (rats, of course, at this one).

The highlight of last year’s event was when the dogs all ran to the front of the room where I’d been doing my reading, and my dog, Dylan, immediately (and messily) drank up my whole glass of water. The kids thought that was hilarious. The highlight of the recent launch was probably when George, the rat, escaped from my hands and scampered onto my back, where I couldn’t reach him (see above photos). I’d like to think the best part was when I read from my book, but as usual, I was upstaged by the non-human guests!

(George, in the photo on the left, has been living at my house for the past few weeks, along with his brother, Sneaker. They are both available for adoption at the Vancouver shelter. Believe it or not, rats are becoming more popularly adopted pets than the dogs and cats.)

 You can read a different perspective on the launch and see more photos at www.cwillbc.wordpress.com.

Like crows, rats are another sometimes maligned species. They are associated with disease and filth, considered dirty, sneaky, etc. Usually they get cast as the bad guy in children’s cartoons. Although, there are exceptions (the wise martial arts rat who teaches the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, for example), and rats can have different significance in different cultures. If you are born in the Year of the Rat in the Chinese zodiac, you are supposed to be charming and attractive to people of the opposite sex, as well as thrifty, honest and a hard worker.

Athough their public image may not be as bad as it once was, rats are examples of urban wildlife that we generally don’t enjoy catching sight of. Still, I do get a kind of covert thrill when I see a rat run along the underground part of the Skytrain tracks, and I imagine a whole secret world existing under the noses and feet of all the busy business people in the city above. I have to admit, though, that I don’t get the same thrill when I hear rats scrabbling around inside the walls of my house.

When I was writing my latest novel for kids, “The Truth About Rats (and Dogs),” I fostered a rat from the SPCA shelter, so I could experience what pet rats were like and what it would be like to look after one. I found Oscar quite enjoyable and modeled the rat in my story after him. It did seem ironic, however, to be pampering a pet rat inside my house, while scheming of ways to get rid of the wild rats outside my house and in my walls. I’d be sitting at my computer in the basement writing my rat story, and a wild rat would scuttle along outside the window on his nightly rounds, as if to remind me of who the real owners of the city are.