We were in the company of about 150 others last night, at the Harvey Stevenson Southam lecture given by Ojibwa story-teller Richard Wagamese.

Invoking the likes of CS Lewis and Norval Morrisseau, Wagamese spoke on the roles of stories in self-actualization; affirming childhood’s freedom with narrative; community building; and even the building of garden sheds. Demonstrating with a few stories of his own, and framing the talk with an Ojibwa story about the bringing of light into the world by a spider (which is also the story behind dream-catchers) he spoke to an attentive audience, mostly white, partially students. Wagamese is one who embraces contemporary tools – Facebook, Twitter, blog – unapologetically (“I welcome all those who are friends I don’t know..”). I confess my favourite lessons were those of Lewis (You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.) and Morriseau (who urged Wagamese to tell the story for the story’s sake). Perhaps that only affirms the role of the story teller as sharer of wider wisdoms.

Some clarity about why Canadian writers are concerned about proposed copyright legislation… in under 3 minutes. Join the cause, send a letter to Ottawa, and/or learn more at Copyrightgetitright.

Thanks to CBAN for providing a list of the MPs who voted on Bill C-474 (defeated 176-97). Interesting to see that Michael Ignatieff was missing from the vote and so was our own Keith Martin.

I have been a student in my day. Several times over in fact. And I know the pain of textbook costs, which is a large pain. As a poet, I also know the pleasure of being included in textbooks, and it is a large pleasure. Though relative to the pleasure of a living wage, it is a veritable widow’s mite.

I know we live in Google’s world, which promises to deliver free information to everyone, and I know that Google doesn’t really care how that information is created or obtained, so long as it’s provided free to the user in ways that help Google boost its revenues through other channels.

And in keeping with this spirit of largesse, the Chronicle of Higher Education recently published a revealing article (which, it has to be said, I read for free) about the struggles of Washington State to meet the cap of $30 per online textbook that will unlock a large grant from Bill & Melissa Gates, with the aim of reducing textbook costs for the state’s students.

What I find most interesting about this article is that it makes not the slightest attempt to address the reasons why textbooks are expensive, which include – but are not limited to – that irritating cog in the wheel of free information: the textbook’s author, who must be paid. Or more typically, the several authors and/or editors who put the material together. All the article does is bemoan the fact that it’s very hard to find good quality educational materials for free or cheap.

Like many of us, I sit on both sides of this particular fence. I benefit greatly from all the free information that’s available online. On the other hand, for many of the past few years if I were living on my earnings from writing alone I couldn’t have afforded to pay for what I accessed, had the authors been fairly compensated for their work. Because the opportunities for me to earn a living wage from my writing – once a respectable and reasonably lucrative profession – dwindle with the days.

In discussing course materials for the online course I teach, for a college with a less than ample budget, it became clear that new online program areas in bricks ‘n mortar institutions take a while to catch up with details like copyright fees and electronic rights. So for the time being I point students to a lot of free newspaper articles and other freely available materials to augment the (reasonably priced) textbook.

Are these freebies the best available materials? Possibly not, but who knows? It’s as hard for academic publishers to keep up with changing trends and topics as it is for today’s academics to monitor the listservs and discussion boards, the conferences and webinars and workshops, the tweets and the blogs. And of course the published materials, whether online or in paper.

VIDA has published a revealing set of pie charts based on a count of the number of women publishing or reviewed in some big name journals, including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harpers, Poetry, London Review of Books, and others. They’ve broken the figures down into overall figures, reviewers, authors reviewed, etc. as relevant.

Interesting viewing.

Shame on everyone.

There’s so much going on in the GMO world right now. All a-flutter about GM Alfalfa down south, and tomorrow there’s the final debate on Bill C-474, with the vote on February 9.

If you’re Canadian, it’s worth writing your MP. CBAN makes it easy…

And if you’re interested in knowing more about why it’s worth trying to protect our organic and non-GM growers, there are good reasons why you as a consumer might not want to be eating genetically modified foods. Or exporting them elsewhere.

Because there is no mandatory labelling of GM foods in this country, at the moment your only option not to eat genetically modified foods in Canada is to buy organic .

And here’s why organics might be worth your investment, excerpt from the American Academy of Environmental Medicine’s Position Paper on GMOs (from May, 2009):

Natural breeding processes have been safely utilized for the past several thousand years. In contrast, “GE crop technology abrogates natural reproductive processes, selection occurs at the single cell level, the procedure is highly mutagenic and routinely breeches genera barriers, and the technique has only been used commercially for 10 years.”

Despite these differences, safety assessment of GM foods has been based on the idea of “substantial equivalence” such that “if a new food is found to be substantially equivalent in composition and nutritional characteristics to an existing food, it can be regarded as safe as the conventional food.” However, several animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with GM food consumption including infertility, immune dysregulation, accelerated aging, dysregulation of genes associated with cholesterol synthesis, insulin regulation, cell signaling, and protein formation, and changes in the liver, kidney, spleen and gastrointestinal system.

According to Dr. Arpad Pusztai,who exposed risks to the immune system associated with GM potatoes, “it’s not the foreign gene that’s added to a food product or animal hybrid that is dangerous – these things taken on their own had little to no effect – but it’s the entire process of changing the genes that creates the problem” (quoted last March). And that’s the outcome on which we’re gambling our health and that of our children.

The other thing to remember about genetically-modified foods is that they’re not developed for better flavour or nutritional qualities. They’re developed to tackle weeds by making the patented seeds resistant to a patented pesticide, the herbicide Roundup (glyphosate). So that means that when you eat genetically-modified foods, you are consuming foods produced with ever-increasing amounts of pesticides, which are proving ever less effective.

We have Monsanto’s assurance that glyphosate is not harmful to us. Curiously, it’s been deemed safe for us to eat, but is labelled a groundwater contaminant and is toxic to fish and marine life. I can’t help but wonder what long-term effect will it have if it reaches human digestive systems through seafood or groundwater?