kickstart's blog

In a DVD extra interview for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, American painter and director Julian Schnabel remarks that he made the film to help his ailing father overcome his fear of death. He goes on to say that, though the film wasn't finished at the point where his father passed on, the making of Diving Bell has at least partially succeeded in expunging the fear in himself.

Paul here –

I want to try a little experiment. At the moment, Andrew is too busy hyping Kickstart on the tour to write a post. This is a shame, because I think he’d bring a very interesting perspective to Open Book. As a result, I’ve decided to write the following post as Andrew. You see, this is a little bit of a voice exercise. I’m going to try to piece together various conversations I’ve had with him into a coherent and artistically unified piece. As I have previously said, voice is a slippery fish. So, Andrew, don’t get mad if I don’t capture your inimitable buoyancy.

Paul here -

It's often difficult to remember why you're doing what you're doing. With deadlines to meet and rent to pay and the constant pressure to produce produce produce, it's sometimes hard to remember why you're writing in the first place.

Thankfully, while sitting beneath a tree in Trinity-Bellwoods park today while my landlord showed my apartment to would-be renters, I returned to Noah Richler's This is My Country, What's Yours yet again. There, I found this:

Andrew Feindel and Alexander Herman met at the Calgary Airport. Andrew was wearing a shirt that read Kickstart: How Successful Canadians Got Started. There were far too many books in each of their bags. They took a taxi, chauffeured by a wild-haired woman of, oh, sixity-five, who took them for a ride through all four quadrants, telling them that no one in Alberta really hated people from Toronto (except when they complained about how "spread out" everything was). Andrew and Alexander found themselves at the door of familiarity and knocked. A friend of a friend answered. Suddenly, they were face to face with hospitality and a place to stay for two nights. Then the real work began...

"I gotta get away from this day to day running around,
Everybody knows this is nowhere."

My friend Andy Bull and I wheel around my dust-caked 98 Tercel coupe, dancing ecstatically for the rising sun. It's March, 2005 and we are in Big Bend National Park in Texas. We have been driving for a month. We have been arrested for accidentally trespassing on US Navy Property. We have been waylaid by police for the "possession of a dubious odour". We have trundled through the heart of the United States of American. And now we are here, in Big Bend, and it feels like the beginning of time.

"Everybody knows this is Nowhere."

Does anyone here know much about Bora Laskin? Probably not. And yet he was one of only a handful of people who has left an indelible imprint on Canadian society. If you were to trounce down to Bay Street, or to Osgoode Hall, or to Flavelle House off Queens Park, you would find small communities that worship the man, almost as a saint. But out in the general public? Not a chance.

Paul here -

I know I shouldn't do this. I know that OpenBook is an a quiet oasis on the prurient, trash-clogged net; that it should be reserved for high-minded discussions about semi-colons and the passive voice, but I kinda want to talk a bit about Facebook.

Now, before I get too far with this, you should know I'm a recovering Luddite (who still occasionally re-lapses when things get to be too much). Until just over a year ago, I didn't even have a bloody cell phone. And when my brother, then at Queen's University, spent the better part of his Christmas vacation ignoring his grandmother and looking at photos of undergrads on some hoaky-looking social networking site, I mocked him relentlessly.

The authors of Kickstart are about to set out on a book tour across Canada! That's right, the Open Book writers in residence for May will be mortgaging that residence for three weeks in order to explore what lies beyond the 416 (and even the 905). These are our dates and events. Please notify whoever you may know in these places. If you're actually from one of these places and are a frequent visitor to this Toronto literary site... well then, more power to you - and please stop by at one of our events.

May 9-11: Regina, SK

EVENT: Sunday, May 11 at 2:00 pm: Reading and signing at the Book & Brier Patch, 4065 Albert Street

May 12: Saskatoon, SK

May 13-15: Calgary, AB

EVENT: Wednesday, May 14 at 7:00 pm: Reading and signing at the Calgary Central Library, 616 MacLeod Trail SE

What does Toronto stand for? Well, it’s a good question and one that I imagine has bugged more than a few contributors to this site. Ever since my earliest memories of moving to the city at the age of four, Toronto has been searching for an identity. At least in my mind. Maybe it’s because I’ve never belonged to one of those lucky groups who rarely seem to lose sleep over questions of Toronto’s civic identity: the hockey players, the bankers, the immigrants. In fact, those groups are likely the best representatives of the city and the uniqueness it has to offer.

Paul here -

I ran into an old friend at a film screening the other day. He had heard about Kickstart and asked, quasi-jokingly, whether I considered myself an author, an editor, or a "compiler." This was a bit of a toughy.