January 19, 2013                     Joseph Frankel

Joe Frankel has worked as a screenwriter and commercial director  in Toronto, New York and Los Angeles.  He has also worked as a story editor, developing screenplays for a diverse array of companies including: Universal Studios (working for director Gary Ross), The Mark Gordon Company (Grey’s Anatomy, Criminal Minds), Stefanie Epstein Productions and The Characters Agency. Somewhere in a filing drawer he has two film degrees including an MFA in screenwriting from the University of Southern California, where he moderated the Zaki Gordon Speaker Series, hosting live interviews with acclaimed filmmakers such as: Gus Van Sant, Nancy Meyers, Robert Towne and Werner Herzog.

Joe currently works as a freelance producer, servicing a wide array of business clients, including authors and publishers.  His dual passion for books and films led him to develop an innovative new production model to promote books and authors using film and video.  Joe’s recent clients include best-selling Canadian mystery writer, Robert Rotenberg and two-time Arthur Ellis Award winner, Jon Redfern.  Although publishers have already begun to produce book trailers, Joe’s approach is unique and idiosyncratic. The stories dictate the approach and the results are uniquely cinematic.

Torontonian, graduate of L.A.U.in writing and directing,  who is working on a way to promote writers.

February 16, 2013                    Barry Siskind

Barry Siskind, President of International Training and Management is one of North America’s most sought after consultants and speakers and an internationally recognized trade and consumer show expert.

Over the past twenty-eight years he has traveled throughout the world working with thousands of clients in virtually all industry groups both in the private and public sectors helping them improve their results at trade and consumer shows.

Each year, Barry delivers over 100 keynotes, workshops and seminars around the world. Barry has traveled across Canada from St John’s NL to Vancouver, BC, in the United States from Philadelphia to Las Vegas as well as Sao Paulo, Brazil, Bogotá, Columbia, Lisbon, Portugal, Bangkok, Thailand, Quito, Ecuador, Zagreb, Croatia and Beirut, Lebanon

Each year he accepts invitations to deliver keynotes at international trade events. A few recent examples are UFI in Moscow, Confexpo in Lisbon, ExpoSystems in Sao Paulo, AITT in Bangkok, Korean Exhibitors Association in Daegu and The Exhibitors Show in Las Vegas.

Barry is an active member of IAEE (International Association of Exhibitions and Events and CEIR (The Centre for Exhibition Industry Research) for whom Barry has developed several Guru reports as well as a series on the Government Exhibitor. He is also a current member of E2MA.

Barry sits on the Board of Directors of The Center for Exhibitor and Event Marketing (ICEEM).

As a business author, Barry Siskind has written seven best-selling books including his most recent, Grab Success by the Horns and Powerful Exhibit Marketing. He has also written over 500 original trade articles and industry reports. Barry’s monthly syndicated column appears in 30 publications worldwide.

He is certificated at the practitioners level from the Neuro-linguistic Institute

Barry is the Community Manager of UFILive, a blog for the global exhibit association, UFI

In 2006 Barry was the recipient of Canadian Exposition Industry Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of 20 years of outstanding achievements in furthering the professionalism of the Canadian Exposition industry.

His energetic, motivational and informative presentation style has earned him a listing in Canada Who’s Who.

March 16, 2013 Speaker

ANDREW J. BORKOWSKI’s critically acclaimed debut short story collection, Copernicus Avenue, published by Cormorant Books, won the 2012 Toronto Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2012 Danuta Gleed Literary Award for short fiction. His work has been published in Grain, The New Quarterly, Dragnet, and in Storyteller magazine. His short story “Twelve Versions of Lech” was a finalist for the 2007 Writer’s Trust/McClelland and Stewart Journey Prize. Andrew’s arts, travel, and human interest journalism has appeared in publications including the Globe and Mail, the Canadian Forum, Quill & Quire, TV Guide, and the Los Angeles Times. As an editor and proofreader, he has contributed to nonfiction titles for McGraw-Hill Ryerson, John Wiley & Sons Canada, Pearson Publishing, and D&M Publishers.

April 20, 2013                            Carl Liberman

Mr. Liberman began his career as an actor, mainly for radio and television at the age of 11.  At the age of 14 he was offered the lead in a film to be shot in Greece, his parents opted to keep him in school, and that gave him something to write about.  An honours graduate of York University’s Fine Arts program in theatre, Carl later went on to write and co-produce several plays during the 80’s cabaret scene in Toronto. Just prior to becoming Canada’s newest and most sought after literary agent, Liberman rehearsed by working in the advertising biz for ten years as a successful new business executive.

Since founding the literary department at The Characters Talent Agency, the largest in Canada, he has overseen its growth from zero billings to over $20 Million nationally, trained three agents, and is heavily involved in its newest arm, the packaging division.  In addition to screenwriters, Carl also represents top directors, producers, A-list cinematographers and internationally renowned production designers and film editors.

Mr. Liberman has set a personal goal of becoming the first Canadian agent to bill $15 million. “We’re open for business and were very merit driven. In other words, if something is good, and presses all the right buttons we’ll sell it, no matter who wrote it.  This business is all about relationships and in my humble opinion we have the best!”

May 18, 2013                             Howard Shrier

Howard Shrier was born and raised in Montreal, where he earned an Honours Degree in journalism and creative writing at Concordia University. He has worked as a writer for more than thirty years in a wide variety of media, including print, magazine and radio journalism, theatre and television, sketch comedy and improv, and high-level corporate and government communications. His critically acclaimed first novel, Buffalo Jump, which introduces Toronto investigator Jonah Geller, won the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel. The sequel, High Chicago, won the Arthur Ellis for Best Novel of 2009, making Howard the first author in the history of the awards to win both back to back. Boston Cream was published to rave reviews in 2013, including starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and the Library Journal. Miss Montreal, the fourth Geller book, is due out May 14, 2013. All the Geller books are published by Random House Canada and have been optioned for television by Toronto-based Media Headquarters.  Howard is also the author of one standalone thriller, Lostport (2011). He now lives in Toronto with his wife and sons and is working on a new novel set in Montreal in 1950-51. He also teaches writing at University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. He plans to write a longer bio when he needs to procrastinate a bit more.

June 15, 2013                           Brenda Wastasecoot

Brenda Isabel Wastasecoot

Cree (Churchill)

(1963- )

Brenda Wastasecoot has lived in Brandon longer than her home town of Churchill, where she was the sixteenth child born to Maria and Harold Wastasecoot.  She grew up down the flats just outside of Churchill, MB and was the only child in her family who did not attend Residential School.  She was first published in Voice of the drum:  Indigenous education and culture   (pp 121-138).  Culturally appropriate healing and Counselling: One woman’s path toward healing.  In R. Neil (Ed.), Brandon, MB: King Fisher Publications.

Her children’s book Granny’s Giant Bannock (Pemmican Publications, 2008)

From a collection of unpublished poems she has written since her teenage years and has only read when invited by community organizations, she managed to give up her one story “Granny’s Giant Bannock” with the encouragement of her daughter’s Grade four teacher;  based on her childhood memories of herself and her mother. 

Her PhD in the Adult Education & Community Development program at OISE, University of Toronto will explore family and community impacts of Residential School.  Her career in counselling began with Aboriginal communities seeking culturally inclusive healing strategies.   The focus of her research is rooted in and informed by her extensive experience in Aboriginal community and teaching background in the First Nations & Aboriginal Counselling Degree program for nine years.     

July 20, 2013                             Members Readings

WEN MEMBER READINGS:

SUBMISSIONS FOR THE JULY 20^TH MEETING

 The program for the July meeting will be the always-popular Readings by Members of WEN. We would love to hear you read your work!

Please note these requirements:

1. Who qualifies: You must be a Member in good standing as of the meeting date (July 20^th, 2013), and the entry must have been written by you.

2. What can be entered: Poems and short prose, fiction or non-fiction, complete or excerpts, are welcome. (One entry per member; at our discretion, we may accept two short poems as one entry.)

3. Duration: You must be able to read the entry aloud in front of an audience in five minutes or less. That includes, of course, any of your introductory notes or explanations. Please read it at home aloud, with all the necessary pauses and emphasis, and time it — the minutes go by more quickly than you might think!

You are not obliged to fill the five minutes — often a shorter piece is more effective, while a longer one will have people clock-watching and not paying attention to your creation.

Readers who run over their time are taking unfair advantage of those who comply. They also alienate their audience and give the organizers heartburn! To be fair to everyone, we will use a stopwatch — readers should expect to be warned at five minutes, and to be cut off shortly thereafter, whether they are finished or not.

Exceeding the time limit has been more of a problem than anything else in the entire history of the Member Readings program. It has also been the most common source of complaints from audience members (and usually the only one).

4. How to submit: We need to review the readings ahead of time so we can organize a varied and interesting program. Please e-mail your submission (MS-Word attachment, .doc or .docx) to jfambury.shire@yahoo.ca. Include “Member Readings” in the subject line. If you don’t have ready access to e-mail, hard-copy submissions will be accepted at the May 18^th meeting only.

5. Submission window: Submissions will be accepted beginning at 12:01 a.m. on the day of the May Meeting: May 18^th. To give everyone an equal chance, any submission made before then will not be considered.

There is no calendar deadline: submissions will be accepted in the order in which they are received, only until the program is full. That usually happens within a week or so of the opening — so do get your submission in soon!

(If you have an entry that needs only a quick final edit before submission, please let me know; but in general, to be fair to everyone, we can NOT “save a place” for anyone.)

6. And finally: See No. 3!

With best wishes for a fine summer,

John Ambury

September 21, 2013 Daniel Karasik

Daniel Karasik is a playwright, poet, actor, and artistic director of Tango Co., a Toronto-based independent theatre company. His story, “Mine“, won the 2011-2012 CBC Short Story Prize.

Shawn Mintz, the Founder and President of MentorCity, has spent over a decade in the career and employment services sector. Realizing the importance of mentoring, Shawn has been driven to develop award winning mentoring solutions that have helped thousands of people to achieve greater success, personally and professionally. In recognition of his efforts, Shawn has received George Brown College’s Career and Work Counsellor Crystal Award for Innovation, been profiled in Canadian Newcomer Magazine as a Canadian who has demonstrated commitment to helping new Canadians succeed and was the runner up in the Canadian Mentorship Challenge. He has also published an eBook called MentorCity: How a few minutes with the right person can change your life.

November 16, 2013                     Leonard Rosmarin is Professor Emeritus of French literature and former Chair of the Department of Modern Languages at Brock University in the Niagara Region of Ontario, Canada. He received his Doctorate from YaleUniversity where he began his teaching career in 1964, then was appointed Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University, also in Connecticut.

He returned to Canada in 1969 to take up a position as Associate, then Full Professor at Brock, which, at that time, was only five years old. Leonard felt it would be an exciting challenge to create programs and traditions at a place that was just beginning its existence.

Before reincarnating himself as a novelist, Leonard has been an internationally recognized scholar and published nine books that have taken him all over the map of literary scholarship, from the 17^th century to the 21^st.

He has been decorated twice by the Government of France for distinguished service in the cause of French letters. From 1992 till 2002 he was Visiting Professor at the School for Doctoral studies at the University of Perpignan in Perpignan, France.

A self-confessed opera addict, he has written a study on the relationship between literature and lyric drama titled When Literature Becomes Opera. He is especially proud of the essays he has devoted to the works of some of the great Franco-Jewish writers of the 20^th century: the novelist Albert Cohen, the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, the dramatist Liliane Atlan and the Nobel Prize winner, Elie Wiesel.

His English adaptation of Mme Atlan’s finest play, Les Mers Rouges, was mounted by the very popular Toronto Fringe Festival in 2005 and will eventually be made into a film for television.His essay on the novels of Elie Wiesel has been enthusiastically endorsed by the great man himself. Leonard is fully fluent in both French and English, and navigates effortlessly between the two languages and cultures.

Leonard has become a novelist rather late in life, at the ripe old age of 70! Why did it take so long? Here is how he relates his unusual trajectory: “For literally decades I had wanted to immortalize my over-the-top, larger-than-life Jewish family. They were refreshingly un-hypocritical. In fact, they were always brutally frank. They would never stab you in the back; it was always in the chest. So at least you knew where the blows were coming from. They were absolutely transparent. What you see was what you got.

“But whenever I felt inclined to sit down and actually write about them, I would begin to worry about what would happen to my academic career. As of the late 70s, Canadian, just like American universities, were becoming afflicted with the neurosis of ‘Publish or Perish.’ In order to rise through the ranks, I simply had to concentrate on my scholarship and leave novel writing on the back burner.

“Once I retired, however, I had no more excuses. My immediate family and friends got after me to finally put down in writing all the tantalizing, scandalous stories I had been relating to them for years about the extended family of my childhood.  So I sat down and started working on the novel in earnest.

“I had written a few chapters way back in 1982, twenty-six years earlier. At that time, all I intended to do was to make fun of my relatives and throw in some sex into the story for good measure. When I returned to them so many years later, my attitude had, by then, changed radically. I felt a deep empathy towards them. I could no longer mock them. Instead of making my readers laugh at them, I wanted my readers to laugh with them.  I still wanted my novel to be hilarious, but I wanted it to have poignancy, too. Hence the title, Getting Enough.

“It’s the story of a group of individuals from the same family who are desperate for emotional and spiritual fulfilment but go about seeking it the wrong way. They get short-circuited by their erotic cravings. Rubbing epidermises is not the same thing as being in love with another human being.

“The two main characters, at least, come out stronger and better people. Once they stop typecasting one another, they can move towards a loving reconciliation after 26 years of an acrimonious, hate-ridden marriage.

“Now that I have written my first work of fiction, I would love to continue. When you create a novel, you experience the thrill of roaming, untrammelled, within your imagination. The sense of freedom is boundless. You are absolute master of the world you are building. And what is so wonderful is that by creating imaginary destinies you can see more clearly into yourself and our whole human condition.”