Charlotte Gill | author site & blog

New look

2010-02-03T10:20:00.000-07:00

Blogging has been sparse in recent months, as some may have noticed. I've been pushing ahead with other writing. My second book is about my long career planting trees in the clearcuts of western Canada. I planted 1,000,000 trees. It might be double that, actually--I stopped counting at a million. It will be published in 2011, by Greystone, who make beautiful, forest-friendly books about nature and the environment.

I'll be retiring the blog soon to make way for a reboot. Site redesign is in the works. Stay tuned.

Colombia

2009-12-13T12:10:00.000-07:00

Photos from a recent trip to Colombia. Beautiful Bogota:

And Cartagena:

Treeplanting Tuesday

2009-10-20T12:51:00.002-06:00

A coupla visual treats from the world of planting trees:

Liz Rubincam's photo series, Millions of Seedlings, with a nice little sidebar that answers the question: "What the hell is treeplanting?" Some of you may recognize Scooter from Replant in there--many of the photos were taken in his camp.

And THEN! A video to a song, "Treeplanters' Waltz," which is making the rounds on the interwebs these days:

Courtesy of our pal Baba Brinkman, who you can see above rapping shirtless. I believe that's Baba's dad, Dirk, making an archival cameo in the first few segments, planting trees in the '70s.

Vancouver launch of CABIN FEVER

2009-09-29T15:12:00.005-06:00

Wednesday, September 30 at 8pm
The Brickhouse, 730 Main Street

Join us tomorrow night for the launch of CABIN FEVER + a birthday party celebrating 20 years of literary journalism at the Banff Centre.

About the anthology:

CABIN FEVER offers the finest creative non-fiction written by participants from the past six years.

CABIN FEVER: THE BEST NEW CANADIAN NON-FICTION
Edited by Moira Farr and Ian Pearson; introduction by Marni Jackson

Contributors:
*Taras Grescoe
*Jeff Warren
*Megan Williams
*Bill Reynolds
*Charlotte Gill
*John Vigna
*Margaret Webb
*Jaspreet Singh
*Jeremy Klaszus
*Deborah Ostrovsky
*Jonathan Garfinkel
*Penney Kome
*Andrew Westoll

Published by Thomas Allen

More:

In honour of the twentieth anniversary of the Literary Journalism program at the Banff Centre, CABIN FEVER presents a selection of the finest creative non-fiction written by participants from the past six years.

This anthology includes essays on a strikingly original and global range of topics by some of the best non-fiction writers in the country.

Taras Grescoe goes in search of "pure" absinthe; Jeff Warren examines the way whales think; Megan Williams takes driving lessons in Rome; Bell Reynolds writes about the joys and dangers of riding a bicycle; Charlotte Gill gives us the dirt on her eighteen years as a tree planter; John Vigna confronts his relationship with a troubled brother; Margaret Webb takes a sexy road trip to find oysters; Jaspreet Singh ruminates on life in Kashmir in the age of plutonium; Jeremy Klaszus gets to know his grandfather, a former Hitler Youth who is obsessed with Google Maps; Deborah Ostrovsky explores bilingualism and the "grammar of relationships" after she marries into a Quebecois family; Jonathan Garfinkel goes to Israel to find a house occupied by an Arab and a Jew; Penney Kome writes about a family friend in Chicago who helped invent the atomic bomb; and Andrew Westoll gives up love in order to hunt for a rare frog in Suriname.

Unique, engaging and enriching, Cabin Fever is a testament to the literary talents of each individual and a tribute to the longevity and excellence of The Banff Centre's Literary Journalism program over the past twenty years.

Cabin Fever
Edited by Moira Farr and Ian Pearson
Introduction by Marni Jackson
Thomas Allen Publishers
ISBN: 978-0-88762-476-6
$24.95

*Special thanks to our onsite bookseller, Duthie Books.

Calgary reading this Thursday

2009-09-12T10:42:00.003-06:00

For friends in Colberta, I'll be reading this Thursday in Calgary with incoming U of C writer-in-residence, Marcello Di Cintio:

Thursday, September 17 @ 7:30pm.
Engineered Air Theatre, Epcor Centre
205 8th Ave. SE

See you there!

And you thought you were alone

2009-07-28T00:42:00.006-06:00

If you've ever read a much-lauded Canlit tome rife with lurid purple flourishes and female characters who have orgasms from simply listening to beautiful prose being read aloud; if you've ever flung a novel from a car window because he kissed her porcelain cheek just one too many times, I promise you will love this essay in CNQ:

Time is a blind guide.
Bog-boy, I surfaced into the miry streets of the drowned city. For over a thousand years, only fish wandered Biskupin's wooden sidewalks. Houses, built to face the sun, were flooded by the silty gloom of the Gasawka River. Gardens grew luxurious in subaqueous silence; lilies, rushes, stinkweed.
No one is born just once. If you're lucky, you'll emerge again in someone's arms; or unlucky, wake when the long tail of terror brushes the inside of your skull.

Fuck books!

How vulgar that short sentence looks, how brutal in its Germanic bluntness when juxtaposed with the ornate, mythopoetic musings that prompted it. And yet, in their violence and brevity, those two short words capture the commingled frustration and exasperated wonderment that attends to reading passages such as the one above, which are, unfortunately, all too common among what gets lauded as the finest of this country's literature.

Kindle disappears Orwell

2009-07-19T12:47:00.003-06:00

As with aliens reclaiming their humanoid lizard children, Amazon, with its tractor beams, can abduct your library right off the overpriced Kindle you mistakenly believed was yours.

In a case of life imitating art, Amazon has angered some customers of its Kindle electronic book service by remotely deleting two George Orwell books, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Copies of the novels, which feature dystopian worlds, were wiped from the book readers this week.

Many have compared the move to the workings of the totalitarian government in Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which documents deemed inappropriate are dropped into a "memory hole" and erased forever.

A licensing issue with the Orwell novels, apparently, but still, shit storms in the forecast for Amazon next week.

Betcha Vancouver could use one

2009-07-14T19:12:00.003-06:00

If you haven't seen Dave Eggers' Ted Talk about his charity/educational pet project 826 Valencia, it's worth a watch, and not just because of the pirate supply shop.

Ladykiller for your iPhone

2009-06-20T15:52:00.004-06:00

Okay, so this is totally beta, which means I'm basically pulling it out of my ass and not even remotely sure about the technical soundness of this project, but now you can download some Ladykiller at Feedbooks. For iPhone, Sony Reader, Kindle, a bunch of other gizmo gadgetry probs, and, of course, good old PDF. If it works out, I might add more. If these formats don't work for your device, send me an email or leave a comment.

Last-ditch, last-chance Calgary reading

2009-06-02T11:03:00.002-06:00

The last reading of my residency is this Thursday night @ the Flywheel series. Pages in Kensington. And you know Pages always has good cheese.

Here's the line-up:

Ross Priddle
Sarah Gibbs
Helen Hajnoczky
Charlotte Gill (Markin-Flanagan Writers-in-Residence at U of C for 08-09)
and Eva Tihanyi launching her new book, Truth and Other Fictions

Thursday, June 4th

Pages Books on Kensington
1135 Kensington Road NW

7:30 pm sharp

Done*

2009-05-31T22:53:00.003-06:00

*Am non-verbal.

In the Rundle Lounge

2009-05-08T08:18:00.001-06:00

At the Banff Springs Hotel.

This guy gives me hope

2009-03-20T11:19:00.005-06:00

Michael Tamblyn, CEO of BookNet Canada, is unafraid of technology:

I can't explain this, but as an author I feel comforted by a publishing helmsman who can throw around a phrase like, "bring in someone who can hack some PHP and configure a database," and not sound like my mom trying to use the word "bling."

A fair question: "When was the last time you saw this on a publisher's website?: beta."

Via Q&Q.

In praise of dark books

2009-03-11T10:23:00.003-06:00

Thank you, Steven Beattie:

Heller has hit on the precise word to describe this demand for uplift and sympathetic characters in fiction: infantile. It's almost pathologically regressive to demand that writers, who are supposed to engage with the world as it is, not as it ought to be, should spend their time rubbing their readers' backs and cooing about how everything's going to be okay before sending them off to bed with a cup of hot cocoa. Fortunately, there are writers--Heller, Richards, Barbara Gowdy, Philip Roth, Michel Houellebecq--who understand this. But it's unlikely any of them will be making an appearance on Oprah's book club any time soon.

Readings aplenty - Marina Endicott

2009-03-06T14:32:00.002-07:00

Tonight @ Pages. Marina Endicott's readings are so good, you wish she could bottle and sell them.

Readings aplenty - Alberto Rios

2009-03-06T14:24:00.002-07:00

Arizona poet Alberto Rios reads at U of C next Monday. I just finished his memoir, Capirotada--a warm, funny multicultural boyhood told in clean, poetic sentences, one after another, from start to finish. Proves it's impossible to grow up with a British mum and a Mexican dad and keep a straight face.

Motherland

2009-03-03T18:19:00.005-07:00

Am jetlagged from last week's trip to London, where it become immediately evident the benefits of living in a megacity that never sleeps when the trains come every two minutes instead of every hour. Where I ate tomatoes that were red instead of that insipid pink that make me somehow think of a fishy gene-splice. Where there were a lot of purple coats and high-heeled Mary Janes going on down the sidewalks. Where friends may or may not be anticipating the high finance shitcan. Where it is possible to be called an "international" by a bald old man whose mouth makes you bless North America for its dentistry alone. Even if it means you get to live in a place where the walk to work is not a fashionable trot but some kinda deep Antarctic break-up of slush and sloshing floes.

Not all hell and handbasket

2009-02-20T08:42:00.006-07:00

Now that we're in the thick of recession, is it just me or does all this doom and gloom smell faintly like bullshit?

I am currently in love with WebEcoist, where you can see all kinds of miraculous things every day, including their 7 Wonders Series, featuring not benighted CEOs or shamed fund managers, but rocks that "sail" on their own across the desert, exotic clouds that look like UFOs, and giant oceanic sinkholes.

Contrary to current reports, is not the world still full of amazement?

Keanu reads

2009-01-23T16:23:00.002-07:00

A dude's bookshelf, including such titles as:

Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
Proust's Temps Perdu
The Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq (annotated with: "Oh, yeah, baby!!" he says. "When I read this, my head exploded.")

Excellent!

Upcoming in Edmonton

2009-01-19T15:38:00.003-07:00

Now that I own proper winter attire besides Gore-Tex ski pants, I am fit for my first-ever literary visit to the upper regions of Alberta. I'll be reading at the U of A campus on February 5 with Marina Endicott and Thomas Wharton.

Fakoir

2008-12-29T13:38:00.005-07:00

Sweet old couple with Holocaust memoir outed as fakers:

Again, Oprah is just a sucker for a wildly implausible story about the damn Holocaust. All the way back in 1996, Herman and his lady had a gushy segment on Oprah's show, and their tale was deemed "the greatest love story ever told." Trouble is, the romance at the heart of Rosenblat's story (which was turned into the now-canceled memoir Angel at the Fence)--about a young man in a concentration camp who was thrown an apple a day (to keep Dr. Mengele away) by a young woman across the fence; later they met in Brooklyn and fell in love--turns out to be completely fake, and everyone's sad because why would these nice old people lie? And about something so terrible. Ah well. Oprah hasn't spoken out yet, but when she does... Oh lord help us. She has been jilted one too many times, this book-loving Patron Saint of Sad, Lonely, and/or Awful People.

We just love these amazingly miraculous life-affirming redemption stories. You know the ones where the woman waits a hundred years for her lover to come back from the war, or the one where the quadriplegic blind mountain climber is rescued from snowy hypothermic death by his preternaturally intelligent dog. But life--what a pain in the ass--just doesn't actually cough up the goods. No wait, maybe we want to read novels, but we don't like that they're such a patent crock. What we like is books that are secretly fake. Everyone's sad all right.

New Year's resolutions

2008-12-29T11:41:00.003-07:00

Anyone who's patient enough to be my friend knows I can't stand the telephone. This year, my lovely neglected people, I promise to try harder to stay in touch. I'm going to indulge a little more in home cooking, and try more often to share the table with friends. We'll all be eating in a bit more, I'm assuming.

I figure it's been a strange and interesting year for Heather Mallick, who posted her resolutions at the Ceeb:

5.) I will stop buying embossed patent leather Italian Moro triangle totes and black buckled boots for a shiny life I do not in fact live.

Same goes for oversized clutch purses, ivory satin office separates and costume jewelry with grosgrain ribbon in the links. It's sad but factual: you don't have to dress up to write. Hairdressers have snaggle-tooth hair; fashion editors look pale, pimpled and wretched; it works for them.

So true. You need yoga pants, one of your husband's ming T-shirts, wool socks and a toothbrush. Though I wish I'd read this before I fell into Arnold Churgin the other day.

Happy holidays

2008-12-28T14:57:00.002-07:00

Best wishes for the new year!

And a warming blip of Euro-prop from the excellent people at DeSmog:

Xmas Eve tubage

2008-12-22T12:18:00.004-07:00

You can see me--if you look really hard--inside the Christmas Eve episode of Writer's Confessions on Bravo:

Writers' Confessions EP: 3/04 (E) 2007

Series that examines issues central to the complex craft of writing. This episode looks at acclaimed authors including William Boyd, Jonathan Safron Foer, Charlotte Gill, Nicole Krauss and Richard Ford as they discuss how writers get through the hard times, bouncing back-and-forth between ego and self-doubt, and the pros and cons of being a successful writer.

We're living without The Box of Irresistible Rays this year, which is a relief, because everybody knows there's no better incidence of writerly mortification that to witness oneself on TV.

December 24, 9:30 a.m. EST.

Pulp

2008-12-17T15:05:00.008-07:00

Over at Q & Q today, a rundown of this cheeky bit of NYT rhetoric, an author's appeal for a wedge of that U.S. bailout cheddar:

Overcapacity has been something generally acknowledged across the writing industry for at least 10 years. In a 2002 essay in The New York Times, the onetime best-selling novelist and story writer Ann Beattie mourned the situation of the modern writer, living in a world where people are more interested in "being a writer" than in writing itself. "There are too many of us, and M.F.A. programs graduate more every year, causing publishers to suffer snow-blindness, which has resulted in everyone getting lost," she lamented. That Ann Beattie must now compete on Amazon with a self-published author named Ann Rothrock Beattie is proof of how enormous the blizzard has become.

So how would my big St. Bernard of a bailout dig the publishers out of their drifts? According to the industry tracker Bowker, about 275,000 new titles and editions are published in the United States each year. Let's say we want to eliminate half of them. Assuming it takes about two years to write your average book, we would offer book writers two years of salary at the writers' average annual income of $38,000 a year. Add it all up and you get a paltry $10.5 billion to dramatically reduce the book overcapacity.

Too many books, people? Quill says yes, and apart from rope and hanging oneself, I think I probably do, too. My sister used to work in a bookstore where employees wore out this acronym: STLR, or Straight-To-Landfill Release.

Think of the trees, one commenter says. Which got me to wondering: exactly how many trees does it take to make a book?

One ton of virgin free-sheet paper is made using the pulp and bark from 24 trees. 1 tree makes 16.67 reams of paper or 8,333 sheets. Say the average novel uses 320 pages or 80 sheets. And is printed at the bestseller threshold of 5,000 copies.

1 book = 48 trees.