A second short screenplay by Heather Morrow is a finalist in the Comox Valley International Film Festival’s screenwriting competition!
Reasons I Hate Being Single is in the Short Film Script International (that is, not B.C.!) competition. The festival is in May, and winners in all categories will be announced May 12, 2022. Yay!
Otherworldly news. Take a Bite’s first short film, Nowhere Normal has received a grant from the Canada Council! We are officially in pre-production!
Follow for updates on cast and crew, production, and showings.
#WelcomeToCanada pic.twitter.com/47edRsHLJ5
— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) January 28, 2017
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My goodness. That went well!
But it’s not remotely over yet. Next: the “hard” part.
Immediately after the inauguration, The Village Voice published a series of mini-interviews done with attendees. The very first interviewee said that the new president’s words were being parsed by the media, and he didn’t believe that all of things the president said were in fact going to happen, that it was his, very good, way of saying he was simply putting the US’s interests first. When asked if he had in fact voted for Trump, this man answered:
“No, I’m a Canadian citizen.”
I’m not linking to that article, because I don’t want to contribute to that person being tracked down and bile thrown at him over the internet — if you want to read it yourself, you’ll have no trouble finding it.
The fact that Canada has not one but two proponents of the new president’s ideology running for the PC leadership (you know who I mean — I’m not furthering the indignity they’ve heaped on other people), and that this ideology has support in Canada, might make clear-headed Canadians panic and say “no, we DON’T have time! It’s inevitable.”
It’s NOT inevitable. If you believe that, you’ve said you’re going to do nothing. Which is what happened before and during WWII. THAT’S were we are now. That is NOT inevitable in Canada, we CAN stop it.
And it’s, again, very simple, BUT. Turnout for the 2015 federal election was the highest in ages, yet over 30% of voters still didn’t show up. The only way to prove to the right-wing that the majority does not agree with them IS to utterly prove the majority is against them…that is, to VOTE AGAINST THEM.
The only way to not let either of those potential PCs have power, is to NOT let them have that power. If the majority of Canadians don’t vote for a party, they don’t get the power to enact what they want to do.
See? Simple.
Yes, we have first-past-the-post, we’ve had minority governments in recent history, blah blah. We somehow allowed Harper in power for 10 years, and finally, enough Canadians got sick of him to hand him a resounding Defeat. We can, and we must, keep fascism out of the Canadian parliament. And we can. By voting.
So do it.
The horrors have been coming so thick and fast that no one can process them all. Which is part of the strategy, clearly: throw in all the immigration, abortion, and press bans, one right after the other, and there are too many things to nail down and protest.
Which is why I am — for the moment — still happy and relieved to be Canadian. Because we still have time.
The solution is very simple, so simple we already know what it is, but it does take work. Part of the issue has been simple complacency, the old “we took for granted” that racism, sexism, and hate speech weren’t as bad in Canada, and we made the false assumption that “not as bad as” meant “no problem at all.” Pretty obvious now that assumption was incorrect. So the obvious, simple way to combat all that is to: STOP. IT.
People who aren’t white are being harassed. When you see that, stop it. Call the police. Yell. Start carrying a black marker with you, and when you see hate propaganda posters anywhere, DON’T tear them down, but write this across them: Section 319 (1) . That’s “hate speech”, in the Criminal Code of Canada.
CANADIANS EVERYWHERE, in Canada, living outside of it, ALL OF YOU:
Write to your MLA, your premier, your MP, and the Prime Minister. Today, every day. Tell them that what it happening in the US will not happen here.
And if the new president wants to get shirty, I am willing to live without avocados. I survived without a car most of my adult life. If things get so tough that I can’t get a job in Canada, I now have the ability to teach pretty much anywhere in the world, and come back…thanks to my Canadian passport. That’s how lucky I am.
Refugees — NOT “migrants” for god’s sake! — are worse than unlucky. They are in danger. People who are anything but white-Caucasian, are in danger.
Canada is better than the US. Prove it, and make the people we elected to represent us prove it.
Yes. An insane, impossible idea, and one which brings the trolls to this website, I’m sure.
Three very, very bad events have happened the last two weeks, in California, then in Moncton, New Brunswick (a place not even many Canadians take note of…our radio broadcasters in Edmonton got the capital city of New Brunswick wrong!), and another, just yesterday, in Seattle.
We Canadians take some rather misplaced pride in not having the level of gun violence the US does. I say misplaced because ANY is too much. Despite what this says.
While I was living in Scotland, a police officer was shot and killed in Bradford, Yorkshire, England. This was huge news, gigantic. I admitted to being surprised at how big the news was…a police officer was killed in the line duty – awful but true, that happens. NOT in the UK, ladies and gentlemen. Read this Guardian piece from the time…”more than 160 officers have been ‘killed in the line of duty by a criminal act’ in mainland Britain since 1900.” That was in 2005. Since 1900 ?? Know WHY that is?
Because in the UK, it’s almost impossible for even criminals to get guns. It’s all but impossible for anyone to get one.
So I have a preposterous idea. I’m writing to my (conservative) MP, and requesting that guns – whose purpose is too kill things – be subjected to the same restrictions as cars. Vehicles are recognized as useful, yet potentially dangerous items, and so the use of them is subject to the users proving they can use cars responsibly. THE SAME SHOULD GO FOR GUNS. Rifles of any kind, hunting, recreational in a gun range, doesn’t matter. Anyone who wants to buy a gun has to go through a GRADUATED licensing program. And, at certain periods, gun owners will be required to undergo a test to prove they are still sound and capable gun users. Part of that test will be proving you have done the utter utmost to make certain no one else can get your gun or its ammunition. IF THEY FAIL the test, THEY LOSE THEIR GUN. And, AND, the government could usefully track something: instead of eavesdropping on cellphones, why not use all the technology and manpower instead to track who is building and selling guns, and to WHO.
I’m sick of this argument, which shouldn’t even BE an argument. Guns are for killing – in the hands of responsible people, they kill animals for eating. And if someone breaks into a responsible gun owner’s house, that gun is then apt to get to someone who will kill people. I’m sick of guns getting into the hands of, and remaining with, people who shouldn’t have them, and I’m REALLY sick people being surprised when others are killed as a direct result of those people having guns.
Let’s prove that we are better than the US on this. PROVE IT.
I have just had my Critter-nominated play Take a Bite listed on Playwrights Guild of Canada’s Ready to Stage site. $10 and it’s immediately yours. Have a look!
I, Heather that is, have finally decided that maintaining two blogs is tedious. I had the notion it’d be wise to keep separate my personal blog — keeping it more about writing and the stuff going on in my own head — and this one, Take a Bite Productions, solely about my professional world.
Last weekend, the Northern Alberta caucus of the Playwrights Guild of Canada (very official-sounding isn’t it?), had a soiree (THAT’s more like it), with our rep, David Belke. The AGM of PGC is soon, and David had the lovely idea of arranging a chance for playwrights in our part of the country to meet, and discuss things we’d like to see brought up at the AGM. It came up that playwrights really have two (or more) jobs; the writing, and then marketing yourself…because no one’s going to do it for you. So I asked David if we could ask PGC if they might help arrange workshops on how to use the newest tools available to us — blogs, Twitter, Facebook — on selling ourselves. And it occurred to me that the personality behind the play, the person who writes it, has become as important to marketing as the play. A lot of people attending the Fringe go specifically to see the newest show by the person they’re fans of, Twitter is full of accounts for individual shows AND the people putting them on.
So, this is me taking my own advice. Take a Bite Productions really is me, so I am officially blowing my own horn. Happy reading!
