From 1975-77 Maybin, still a “non-professional,” taught English as a volunteer for the Immigrant Services Society (ISS) in Vancouver. His students were South Asian women, many of whom had recently arrived and were illiterate, terrified, and desperately in need of language skills that would enable them to navigate the nightmare of shopping for meal ingredients and household supplies in a totally unfamiliar environment. The plight of these unfortunate women made the harried teacher quickly realize the importance of tying language instruction directly to the immediate communication needs of the student and of applying language skills to the real world as soon as they are learned.

At ISS, Maybin had been flying by the seat of his pants, observing the needs, degree of ability, and personal circumstances of each student in order to design and implement the curriculum materials necessary to get the job done. In such a context, a textbook was simply not an option. At Mitsui he began to refine his teaching approach by delving into theoretical works and consulting with other professionals in the field. The lessons he learned from Frau N and from his experience at ISS never left him, however; in fact, these principles formed the core of his pedagogical approach.

Application of these principles—and an unending process of trial and error—through thirty-five years of language teaching and study led to the creation of a unique instructional program designed to provide students with the language skills necessary to function at a basic level in the target language within a very short time.

The system, called ABLE, for Action-based Language Empowerment, is made up of two major components. The first is 10-12 hours of classroom instruction delivered by a native speaker of the target language, usually with little or no teaching experience. Lessons are focused on students acquiring the communication skills needed to survive in the country in which the language is spoken, so there are no grammar explanations. On the last day of instruction, the students head to the airport and fly to the country in which the target language is spoken. There they are required to independently complete a variety of tasks in their new language; these tasks may include asking for directions, ordering in a restaurant, and buying items in a department store. This is the second component of the program.

Paul Batten, an associate professor of education at Kagawa University on the island of Shikoku, attended one ABLE course as an observer. He recalls drinking tea with Maybin in Bangkok “as we watched his students in pairs go to the ticket lady and buy their return tickets to Ubon Ratchathani. They did it by using the skills they had learnt in his classes—key wording, asking for repetition, checking, eliciting, as well as the core of survival Thai they had got from the ABLE classes.”

By the time ABLE was fully developed and its effectiveness proven in numerous trials, Maybin was already thinking about how to create an online version of the system. But the technology necessary to program the unique features of the ABLE curriculum did not yet exist. And there were other obstacles: the significant investment in time and money needed to develop what has now become Sulantra as well as Maybin’s own lack of appropriate technical and business expertise kept the project on the shelf for several years.

But the same patient determination that over the years has characterized Maybin’s other projects, large and small, has guided Sulantra into reality. Thousands of travel miles and thousands of hours of planning, recording, programming, and debugging, not to mention the financial resources of Maybin, Tsuji, and the other business partners, have resulted in a one-of-a-kind language training site. Sulantra embodies Maybin’s ability to connect with people and build long-term relationships based on honesty and trust; his years of experience as language teacher, linguistic researcher, and language learner; and his passion for making a second or third language accessible to anyone regardless of their economic, geographic, or social condition.

For Maybin, “Sulantra is just the latest phase of this ‘language-soaked’ life.” Whether the project succeeds wildly or falls flat on its face, he is convinced that he will remain both a language teacher and a language learner until the day he dies. One also suspects that whatever the outcome for Sulantra, the next call to adventure will be embraced with a “Oui” that is as enthusiastic as the response of an intrepid teenager to a similar call in Quebec forty years ago.

“This Language-Soaked Life” Part One 

“This Language-Soaked Life” Part Two 

“This Language-Soaked Life” Part Three 

Check out Don Maybin’s blog, “Fool for Language“ 

Photo courtesy Emma Bardizbanian

“This Language-Soaked Life” Part Four is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Following an unrewarding series of “language” lessons with a Japanese university professor, who, while collecting a fee from the student, spent most of the lesson time talking about “the intricacies of Shakespeare’s plots in English (his speciality),” Maybin opted for a radically different approach to learning Japanese: he began to study sado, the Japanese art of the tea ceremony.

“For a few brief hours every Friday morning before going to the shipyard, I escaped into a fantasy world filled with kimono, traditional gardens, and incense plumes floating up into the air. My first teacher, Takahashi-sensei, was in her 90s and smoked a kiseru (think hash pipe with long bamboo stem and small, hot metal bowl), which she would rap me on the hand with if I made a mistake. In my third year, she passed away and her daughter-in-law took over. A gentler soul, Inoue-sensei was much more tolerant of banter during our sessions and I was soon getting language training in the form of local gossip and newsworthy items as interpreted by my gray-haired female tea(m)mates.”

Studying tea ceremony involves mastering a number of collateral skills, such as wearing a kimono in the proper manner, arranging flowers, identifying different types of pottery, choosing the appropriate hanging scroll for the season, and “opening sliding doors elegantly.” After eight years of such comprehensive study, Maybin emerged with a beginner license to teach sado. In the process, he went from sounding, in Japanese, like “a shipyard welder aspiring to join the yakuza” to possessing “the speech and mannerisms of a 65-year-old obaasan, my peer group in the tea room.”

In the late 1970s, the discipline of teaching of English as a foreign language (TEFL) was in its nascent stages; very few, if any, foreigners teaching in Japan possessed formal qualification in English-language instruction. Many had no language-teaching experience and more than a few were not even interested in becoming effective classroom instructors. While he was not formally qualified, Don Maybin was one of the rare language instructors who did bring both language-teaching experience and a passion for teaching to the job.

In 1983 he left Mitsui and went to England for six months to obtain professional certification in teaching English as a foreign language; he returned in 1986 to complete his Master’s degree in applied linguistics. For the next twenty-five years, he held a series of academic and managerial positions in English-language training in Japan. In the process he developed an innovative approach to teaching language. He subsequently published a number of articles and academic papers and presented at several conferences throughout the world on the topic of this unique language-training approach.

The constant and predominating passion of Maybin’s years in Japan has been language. In fact, the passion goes back even further—all the way to the dream of a child in rural Alberta to get out and explore the world, and the encouragement of a mother who had longed to learn a foreign language herself.

“My mother was keen that I should excel at French. Due to financial constraints, her own formal academic education had more or less ended in her early teens, after which she had taken various part-time jobs to help her family. One of these jobs was playing the piano at a ballet school. (She had limited formal training, but could play by ear.) The ballet instructor was ‘Miss Belanger’, a woman from Quebec. My mother adored her and dreamed of learning French, but it wasn’t in the cards. So she transferred the dream to me, her oldest son.

“Where other parents were telling their children that learning French was pointless, my mother sat me down with a dog-eared atlas and started pointing out the various places I could visit if I spoke ‘Miss Belanger’s language’. Frankly, my mother never was that good at geography. She could have been pointing at China or Sri Lanka for all I knew. But I was convinced that a little French would take me a long way and walked into my first French class ready to tackle all things français so as to see the world. This would be my ticket out!”

Despite the motivation provided by his mother, Maybin’s first experience in formal French instruction, in junior high school, was less than inspiring. The instructor, an English-literature major resentful at being required to teach a language class, made the whole experience miserable by abusing students “who made any effort to speak en français, ridiculing their pronunciation and rolling his eyes at grammatical mistakes. Every student attempt was potential fodder for a cruel joke and by the end of the first lesson I was convinced that the coming year would be hell. It was.”

Coerced that same year into studying German with his best friend, who was of German extraction, Maybin soon recognized the profound difference a teacher can make to the experience of learning language. The “instructor,” an East German woman, was actually the home economics teacher at the school; she “offered free German lessons in the early morning while she prepared dishes that she would teach later in the day in her ‘official’ Home Ec classes.

“‘Frau N’ was an absolutely amazing woman. Every morning, she would greet each of us by name as we entered her cooking lab, making everyone feel like she was thrilled that we had shown up at all! She scattered German magazines about the room, which we were encouraged to browse through and ask about. She entertained us with stories of her escape from East Germany while in an opera company, giving the details in a mixture of English and Deutsch. By the end of the term we were able to sing classical German lieder, which I remember to this day. Best of all, we got to taste the dishes that she prepared for her cooking classes, often served with hot chocolate topped mit Schlag – ‘with whipped cream’ – a term I shall never forget.”

This Language-Soaked Life: Part 1

This Language-Soaked Life: Part 2

Check out Don Maybin’s blog, Fool for Language.

Photo courtesy Don Maybin

“This Language-Soaked Life” Part Three is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

The Language-Soaked Life Part One.

At 19 he spent six months in Malaysia, where he lived for a time in an Iban longhouse in Borneo, sleeping under a basket of human skulls; spent a weekend at the mountaintop palace of the Sultan of Kedah; endured buffalo leeches crawling up his legs in a rice paddy in Trengganu; and learned to communicate in Bahasa-Indonesia, the principal language of the Malaysian peninsula. By the time he returned to Canada he was seriously infected with wanderlust, and re-adjusting to Canadian life proved to be a significant challenge.

Following a stint at Carleton University in Ottawa, during which he became English tutor to practically the entire extended family of the Malaysian Deputy High Commissioner, Maybin enrolled in Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia as the first student to major in Southeast Asian Studies. The experience was less than satisfying from an academic perspective as there was no real Southeast Asian program in the department at that time and he was compelled to study Chinese and Japanese.

So when he was invited to Los Angeles in 1978 for an interview with the Mitsui Corporation for a job teaching English to employees in their shipbuilding operations at Tamano, a company town on the Inland Sea of Japan, the wanderlust was easily reignited. Maybin was ready once again with an enthusiastically positive response to what mythologist Joseph Campbell has termed “the call to adventure.”

But life in Tamano turned out to be somewhat of a mixed blessing.

Raised in rural Alberta and then in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, Maybin recognizes that he was lucky to have started his tenure in Japan in a rural locale, in a town “backed by mountains and facing the sea.” If he had landed in an urban setting such as Tokyo, “riding trains surrounded by concrete, cacophony, and the shadows cast by tall, gray buildings,” he would not have stayed in Japan for more than a couple of years.

In his second year in Tamano he moved from “the tool shed” that had been left to him by his American predecessor at Mitsui into “an ancient house with bamboo slats in the windows and a wood-heated bath.” Over several months he completely renovated this house, even redoing the mud plaster walls. “When they came to visit, my Mitsui students inevitably shook their heads and declared that I was ‘living in a museum’, but for me it was a dream as I banged my head on the low ceiling beams and had my ass frozen off by the wind blowing in through cracks around doorways and window frames in the winter months.”

In addition to the remodelling project, Maybin also took up Japanese cooking, attending classes given by the wife of a colleague in the back of the sweet shop she owned. Consigned to mincing onions for the first three months, the intrepid Canadian was grateful for the opportunity to eat wonderful home-cooked Japanese meals as well as to learn “a lot of language as everyone discussed the current local issues while we ate. I was picking up tons of vocabulary and got to recycle the topics at work on Monday.”

But there was definitely a downside to being a foreigner in rural Japan. Maybin’s teaching load at Mitsui quickly increased as his work ethic proved to be accommodatingly Japanese. The Canadian expat grew frustrated when he saw that the time required to prepare for and teach classes to as many as 300 students a week would preclude the possibility of his ever learning Japanese. For a “language junkie” and avid student of other cultures, this was an unacceptable state of affairs. In this case, the old habit of saying “Yes” had become a bit of a liability.

There was also the inevitable homesickness, keenly felt as the first year came to a close.

By his second year in Japan the bloom was fully off the rose. “I think most gaijin [foreigners] become jaded in their second year here. The novelty is wearing off and every time someone compliments your Japanese skills, you want to scream, ‘I sound like a goddamn 5-year-old!’ This was certainly the case with me.” But circumstance, a certain doggedness, and most of all, a passion to truly connect with the culture of Japan trumped all disillusionment.

The homesickness was cured when Maybin returned to Canada for six months, graciously given leave by Mitsui to deal with a family crisis. The crisis turned out to be the hopelessly dysfunctional relationship of his parents. “The home I was sick for had imploded. Six months of suffering in Canada, and I knew that no matter how bad things got in Japan, the chances of surviving were much better in Okayama [the prefecture in which Tamano is located] than on Vancouver Island, so I returned.”

The frustration with work was resolved in an equally dramatic fashion. “The day my department head came and suggested that I move my morning classes earlier and my evening classes later so that I could accommodate yet another group of employees was the day I finally broke. I announced that, after three years and a constantly growing number of students, I was not going to renew my contract.” With a great deal of polite persuasion on the part of the Japanese bosses and much “pissy whining” by Maybin, an agreement was reached whereby the Canadian teacher could work three (exhaustingly long) days a week at the company and spend the rest of his time learning Japanese “properly.”

You can read Don Maybin’s blog, “Fool for Language.“

Photo by sporkist. Creative Commons: Some Rights Reserved

“This Language-Soaked Life” Part Two is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

It’s 8:00 AM and Canadian expat Don Maybin has just arrived at Café de Crie, his favourite coffee shop in Fujisawa City south of Tokyo. As soon as the coffee shop staff see the tall Canadian coming through the door they begin preparing his regular breakfast: a cup of Darjeeling tea and a fuwa fuwa tamago (fluffy egg) sandwich without the ham (it gives him heartburn). As he does every weekday, he has spent the last hour in the “green” (first class) car on the train from home, books and papers spread out in front of him while he creates a lesson plan for his morning first-year English class at Shonan Institute of Technology in Fujisawa. As he finishes his tea at Café de Crie he is still tweaking the plan.

As the plan comes to life in the classroom, it is clear that there is nothing typical about Professor Maybin’s approach to language instruction. At one moment the ever-smiling 57-year-old is circulating among students who are sitting or standing at tables or moving about the room. The students are yelling, gesticulating, rudely interrupting each other or their “professor” (whom they are encouraged to call “Don,” a very un-Japanese practice) to get information—all in broken English, which the instructor does not necessarily correct. A little later, in another activity, groups of students are standing around tables nervously but excitedly watching their teacher, who is holding up a picture. The students are straining to comprehend as he asks a complex question—which actually calls for a simple answer—based on the picture. Before long, astonished and relieved looks appear on the faces of one group as the student with the lowest level of English ability answers the question and the entire group gets to sit down.

Maybin’s English class is radically different from the typical language lesson in Japan, where students listen quietly to lectures on the finer points of English grammar (often delivered in Japanese) or memorize isolated words and phrases from a textbook, all in traditional classroom arrangement. The Canadian expat’s classes are noisy, boisterous, and informal. The noise level is so high, in fact, that, mindful of complaints he received in previous teaching positions, he has requested and been assigned a classroom on the top floor of an isolated, nearly sound proof building.

John Maher, an American colleague of Maybin’s at a Tokyo-area junior college in the 1990s, remembers: “Once an older Japanese professor complained to Don about his students. The professor was using the ‘talk-and-chalk system’—where the instructor lectures and writes on the board while the students sit quietly and take notes—but Don’s students were using the control sentences he had taught them (‘What does that mean?’ ‘Could you repeat that please?’ etc.) in order to better understand the lecture. The professor felt that they were being rude!”

What may appear to the uninitiated visitor as cacophonous chaos in Maybin’s university classroom is actually a highly structured and effective series of strictly timed activities designed to maximize language acquisition and communicative ability. The activities have evolved and been perfected over Maybin’s thirty-five years of teaching English. His unorthodox pedagogical style, his love of teaching and of students, and the sheer fun and excitement of his lessons, not to mention the fact that students actually learn to use English for communication, make his classes among the most popular on campus. Achieving such popularity is a remarkable feat given that Shonan is a technical university full of geeks whose interest in language learning is practically nil.

NOON: Maybin has just made the 35-minute walk from the university to the offices of Sulantra, the company which manages and markets the unique online language training program he created and developed with the assistance of several partners. After a quick lunch prepared by Sulantra’s Sichuanese systems engineer (the partners and staff are a multinational, multicultural group), Maybin spends the rest of the day at Sulantra, dealing with the endless stream of tasks and mini-crises that characterize a fledgling organization attempting to make itself known to the world: making plans for the next overseas junket, wrestling with Paypal transactions that won’t go through, replying to user feedback, meeting with staff to plan and troubleshoot. At 8:00 PM he packs up and heads for the station for the long train ride home.

And there is nothing typical about the Maybin-Tsuji home nestled in the lovely forested hills above the resort town of Atami, an hour’s ride on the shinkansen—the “bullet train”—from central Tokyo. Besides the collection of stray cats and dogs adopted by Maybin and Yoshiharu Tsuji, his partner of twenty years, there is usually at least one house guest—more often several guests—from other parts of Japan, or from locations as varied as Australia, Mexico, Bulgaria, Canada, and Turkey. Members of Maybin and Tsuji’s loosely connected international community of friends, or friends of friends, are all welcome and all are treated like family.

Twice a year the couple hosts a dinner in their home for an eclectic group of 30 or so friends. Despite their insanely busy schedule, Maybin and Tsuji manage to find time to shop, clean, and cook for days beforehand, and when the guests arrive, there is invariably a chorus of oohs and ahs over the international spectrum of dishes that has been laid out. At one such party last year, “the dessert course alone had ten items, including homemade Christmas pudding, pears poached in red wine, mincemeat squares topped with ice cream, and trifle made from scratch.” As the party always goes late into the night, several people usually manage to miss the last train home and end up crashing at the Maybin-Tsujis. It is not unusual for a collective breakfast-making party to erupt when everyone gets up the next day.

The fact is that little of Don Maybin’s 33-year residence in Japan has been typical of the foreigner’s experience in that country; the man himself is, after all, far from ordinary. The key to his unique personality and to the richness of his experience in his adopted country can perhaps be found in a decision he made at the age of sixteen while on a language exchange program in Montreal. As he was expected to participate fully in the life of his host family and as the family spoke virtually no English, the peripatetic youngster decided that “the best strategy for me was to say ‘Oui!’—‘Yes!’—to everything the family suggested:

‘Would you like more (incomprehensible word)?’
‘Oui!’
‘How about if we (incomprehensible phrase)?’
‘Oui!’”

It seems that Maybin has been saying “Oui!” to just about every linguistic and cultural experience since that long-ago ten-day stay in Quebec.

Photos courtesy of Sulantra

Check out Don Maybin’s blog, “Fool for Language,”

“This Language-Soaked Life” Part One is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

George Burden discovers that Father Goose is alive and well and living in Canada.

Far to the north, in the land of Blackstock, lives Father Goose. He dwells in a quaint underground house in the side of a hill at the edge of a deep dark forest full of wild creatures. The wood is forbidden to most men.

Father Goose passes his days flying with his feathery friends: the whooping cranes, the geese and other assorted birds who grew up in his house and think of him as their “mom”. In the fall, when the desire to return to their southerly winter homes prevails he takes wing and shows them the way.

Front door of "Father Goose's" eco-friendly underground home.

While it may sound like the start of a fanciful fairytale, in fact Father Goose is real and his name is a Bill Lishman. Residing in the town of Blackstock, Ontario about two hours north of Toronto, his super-energy efficient home consists of buried stainless steel domes and his property is perched on the edge of the Osler estatte. The estate, which belongs to the descendants of famed Canadian physician, Sir William Osler, comprises 250 hectares of land where an active wildlife population thrives. The estate is forbidden to hunters and developers, though Bill is quite welcome to fly his ultralight aircraft overhead.

Bill Lishman and George Burden in front of one of Bill's ultralights.

This all may be sounding a bit familiar to those who recall the Hollywood movie , tFly Away Home that recounts Bill’s adventures leading a flock of geese south to Virginia with his ultralight aircraft. The movie itself was based on Bill’s book Father Goose. In 1999, Operation Migration began its yearly program of leading baby whooping cranes to reestablish populations in parts of the United States where they are now extinct.

The program is possible due to the principle of imprinting, which causes baby birds to think whatever they see at the beginning of their lives is their mother. While this is in most cases a momma bird, the babies don’t care if their momma happens to be an ultralight plane and its pilot!

Bill is also a talented artist as witnessed by the sometimes whimsical and sometimes dramatic colourful metal sculptures dotting the grounds of his home. He also keeps active, promoting Air First Aid, his program designed to use ultralights to provide medical and food aid to disaster areas in a precise and focused way by ferrying in dozens of specially equipped ultralights in cargo planes along with aid supplies.

With my friends Joe, Diane and Amanda, I had the pleasure of enjoying Bill’s hospitality for an afternoon. His underground dwelling remained delightfully cool despite the hot Ontario summer day and reminded me of a cross between a hobbit’s house and Luke Skywalker’s childhood home.

Author George Burden in front of Bill Lishman's home.

We sipped homemade white wine while he regaled us with stories of his adventures and he autographed a copy of his book for my daughter. So you see that I have written proof that Father Goose actually exist and can fimly state that is alive and well and living in Canada.

Visit William Lishman’s Web Site

Photo Credits

All Photos © Amanda Sutherland. All Rights Reserved.

Father Goose is Alive and Well is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Darcy Rhyno gets to know guitar maker Russel Crosby who, with his beautifully-made instruments, excels at his craft — yet he struggles to get the word out from his house in the Nova Scotia woods.

Beaming, Russel Crosby unlocks the guitar case on the floor by his couch. “Let me show you this one.” He pulls out a small, eight-string tenor guitar he’s just built. The lines and finish are crisp. The curly maple wood grain on the sides glows with some inner light like an abstract hologram. Even before he touches the strings, I’m ready to be impressed.

And I am. Playing finger-style rather than strumming, Russel gets the sound box to resonate with rich, sweet tones. As he plays, I look around the sparsely furnished room. Four finished guitars hang from pegs on the wall behind him, their exotic finished woods gleaming in the light from the window. Beneath them, another three rest on guitar stands. Each has taken Russel 70 to 100 hours to build.

After about half a minute, Russel stops abruptly, and says, “I have no natural talent at all,” and sets the guitar aside. I ask him what he means. “The more guitar players I meet, the more I know I can’t play.” He shuffles through some pages of music strewn across his coffee table. “I can sit down and learn a piece of music, but if I leave it alone for a while, I have to learn it all over again.”

Guitar maker Russel Crosby playing tenor guitar

Russel never aspired to performing. For one thing, he’d die of stage freight if he ever played in public. Russel lives alone. “There wasn’t really a design,” he says of his 30-year-old house. “I just kind of built it.” Russel’s shop is a few steps from his front door. His is the last house down a winding driveway in near Lockeport on Nova Scotia’s South Shore. His brother Donnie – a fine finish carpenter and a keyboard player – lives in the house up the lane.

He built his first guitar for himself. “It made me happy at the time,” he says. “It sounded better than anything out of a store.” Then he built a second one to improve on the first. “It’s a constant battle,” he says. “I’ve built over a hundred now and I still haven’t built the perfect guitar. I never will, but I’m striving to make each one better than the last.”

A Crosby guitar being made.

Russel’s curiosity, intelligence and quiet drive to perfection have led him in some interesting directions. For 20 years, he was an award winning bird carver. For many years, he made his living as a carpenter, highly respected locally both for his construction skills and his finish work. He’s one of those people who would excel at anything that catches his interest.

Since 1996, guitars have captured Russel’s imagination. For the past three years, he’s worked at building them full time. “People have stopped calling me about carpentry,” he says. But he’s not had an easy time of it. He’s had to cash in RSPs and draw on his line of credit to make ends meet while building up his stock, his business and his reputation. He now has a web site, takes his own promotional photographs and does what he can from his house in the woods to get the word out.

He doesn’t sell through music stores because of the mark up. A lot of people just seek him out at home. It’s a lucky guitar player who does. As if he were a fine tailor, Russel fits the guitar to the needs of the player. “A lot of it’s just talking to your musicians. Not all of them know what they want. Sometimes I have to steer them.”

Rosette in Crosby guitar.

Russel’s are gorgeously handcrafted instruments. Several different woods go into each guitar. The top is almost always a softwood, usually spruce. “Different spruces have different sounds,” Russel explains. “Engelmann spruce is suited to finger style guitars because it’s more responsive. It takes less effort to get sound out of it.” It’s not suited to what Russel calls the heavy attack style of some strummers. “Sitka spruce is for guitars that are going to be more flat picked. You can play it hard and the sound doesn’t break up as much.”

The back and sides are made of hardwood. Russel uses a lot of curly maple and curly walnut, but many of the woods are exotic like African Bubinga and East Indian Rosewood. “You buy them as two book match halves,” Russel explains. He gets them from a supplier in California. He makes most of the necks from mahogany. The rosette around the sound hole at the centre of the guitar body is often Cocobolo wood and abalone shell. “It’s a nice contrast, the reddish brown with the dark stripes in it and the abalone.”

Every sound box resonates at a certain frequency depending on the size and shape. Generally, the bigger the box, the lower the frequency. Russel explains that the larger guitars called dreadnoughts with larger bodies and wide waists are favoured by the flat pickers like bluegrass musicians looking for that big, thumping bass sound.

Russel builds a lot of dreadnought-style guitars. As with many other guitar types, the dreadnought came from the famous Martin company. Because the dreadnought body was deeper and larger than most guitars made at the time of its creation – 1916 – it was named for a type of super battleship, the best known of which was the HMS Dreadnought. Russel gives the Dreadnought his own twist like the cutaway at the top of the body “to leave room for those who like to play up the neck.”

Russel’s fine craftsmanship, his attention to detail and his ability to suit the guitar to the player is gaining him a reputation. “People are recommending me,” he says. A representative from a retail musical instrument chain recently told Russel about a customer who complained about a brand name guitar he’d recently purchased on line. The rep suggested he return the guitar for a refund and go find a Crosby instead. This is the kind of slow, word-of-mouth promotion that will give Crosby Guitars the wide spread reputation it deserves.

Guitars in the Woods is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Writer Lorne Daniel pays tribute to a Martin Oordt, a man who mentored willingly and joyfully, with no expectation of return.

A sense of loss is to be expected when someone in our lives passes away. When the deceased person has been a mentor we are fortunate to be able to offset some of those losses with a recognition of what has been gained – all the riches of wisdom and experience that the mentor contributed to our lives.

That was my experience recently when writer, editor and teacher Martin (Marty) Oordt passed away after complications from a heart attack.

Back in the late 60s, Marty came to a new university in the dryland country of southern Alberta after earning his doctorate in English at the University of Kentucky. At The University of Lethbridge, he not only taught English and Creative Writing but mentored young writers like Peter Christensen, Yvonne Trainer and many more.

He received the university’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 1996. Marty also played a lead role in starting a campus newspaper, a literary magazine and a writers’ collective.

He was a writer himself and a catalyst in the fledgling prairie literary community. Marty was always on the hunt for projects and ideas. He and his wife Mary published Lethbridge Living magazine for 10 years after Marty retired from teaching.

Those were the external accomplishments. As a person, Marty was a big man in all the best senses – a huge presence in a room, a personality who brought people together, an open and welcoming person.

He agreed to serve as my faculty advisor in a free-wheeling independent learning program at The University of Lethbridge — a program that unfortunately disappeared when liberal arts took a turn towards “practical” learning in the 1980s and 1990s.

Every week for two years, I sat down with Marty, read poems, talked poetics, mused about craft and generally shot the breeze. He was the kind of editor who could guide your writing with kindness and subtlety.

When I think of Marty’s own skills with words I see a master craftsman. I always imagine him a woodworker. His large hands would turn a piece, examine it from all angles. Take an edge off here, add a bit of polish there.

His suggestions always grew from possibilities. “What would happen if you started the poem here?” he would ask. Or “where do you think that image could go?”

Beyond the poetry, he saw the poet, or the would-be poet – the person. He pulled his chair up close, sat knee to knee, and locked his eyes on you. He cared. No absent-minded multi-tasking.

In Marty’s world, poems mattered. Poets mattered.

“But hang on there, Daniel,” I can imagine him interjecting. “You make it all sound so damn serious.” And he would laugh, reminding we serious poets that life was a lark, that we could ponder the universe with a twinkle in the eye.

At readings, he would stand at the back of the room in his favourite green cowboy boots and shout out encouragements. Yvonne Trainer remembers the voice: “Give ‘em hell, Trainer!”

You knew the cheerleading, the caring, the support was authentic because it spilled over, beyond the campus, past graduation, into the ordinary days and weeks and years of our lives. He kept in touch.

Whenever our paths crossed, on the phone or in writing or in person, I could count on Marty to say, “Damn, it’s good to hear from you!”

When someone like Marty Oordt passes away, we often wish we had had more contact, more recently.

Did I do enough to pay him back? To thank him for his contributions to my life?

Our debt to mentors like Marty is a human debt. By that I mean, it’s not just between him and me. It’s between generations.

We each have a finite number of hours on the planet. To invest a significant number of those hours in another person is a selfless act.

The “pay it forward” concept suggests that we invest in people for future benefit. Implicitly, the mentor gets some payback down the road.

But really it is an investment in humanity. Marty’s joy of discovery, his willingness to explore and create, his fondness for collaboration, his fine eye for the well-turned phrase: these are not things that he gave expecting any big return.

They are qualities he shared with the world. Thanks to mentors like Marty Oordt, we carry these riches forward.

The Unforgettable Mentor is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Katy Henderson and The Falling Stars become bright lights on the music scene with the launch of their CD.

In a world where rising stars are celebrated, Katy Henderson loves the grace of falling stars. And in a brash time when bigger is considered better, Katy is mindful of things that start small. No wonder her band is called Katy Henderson and the Falling Stars and her debut CD is all things start small.

While Katy revels in the grace of small things, there is nothing small about this Vancouver Island native’s talent — or her voice.

In fact, if you were to hear Katy sing, you would know in your bones that singing is what she is born to do — in the way you know it about Sarah McLachlan, Norah Jones or Joni Mitchell. There’s an authenticity to her voice that taps you deep inside and keeps you returning for yet another listen.

“The title all things start small is a testament to the fact that all ideas, dreams, visions start out as small nuggets,” says Katy. “This idea of the power and magic of all things small came about through by seeing my son Angus begin his life as an itty-bitty thing and grow, change and explore, and do things that in the beginning were simply not possible. Yet, the seed was there and here he is…”

The album itself was born in the basement recording studio of Gus Verstraten of Earth Rhythm Productions in Victoria, British Columbia. Joining Katy are Bruce Young on guitar, German Ebert (of The Laundronauts) on drums and David Bigsby on bass. Most of the songs are written by Katy with a few tracks by American singer-songwriter Gillian Welsh, including “No one knows my name.”

One of the most compelling songs on all things start small is the haunting “Father’s Kin” inspired by Katy’s father’s college roommate, Chris Miller, who had died of cancer five years before. The lyrics are pure poetry: Thank you for the silence/and all that it reveals/thank you for the gracefulness/by which you yielded your life…

The simple and beautiful “In this heart” was written by Katy for her wedding to bassist Dave Bigsby; and the country-infused “Star of the Country Down” brings in the folklore and myths of Ireland.

Where she did come from is a musical family who spent their family gatherings sitting around singing and playing music. “We would go to church then for Sunday lunch and sing — I would stand up and sing for a family of 35. So it was always part of who I was.”

She began taking music classes at age five, studying the Kodály Method of music education which studies have shown improves intonation, rhythm skills, music literacy, and the ability to sing in increasingly complex parts. For a vocalist, it was the ideal method. “It focuses on voice,” says Katy, “and I would go every week and sing every week. For me, it was a grounded reason to sing on a regular basis.”

When Katy’s parents divorced when she was 12, music was her solace. “It was a confusing time, when you feel the ground disappear beneath you and you feel anger — but this voice, my voice, it was my companion. It was always there for me.”

“You realize your voice is an instrument that is always with you, wherever you are. My voice always served to reconnect me with myself during hard times. I didn’t always recognize myself but I would recognize my voice and say, ‘This is who I am.’ It was always a place of confidence for me.”

In her 20s, Katy “bridged the crevice” and began to write her own songs. In to her 30s, and through the birth of her son, her confidence grew and so did her voice which is unique but reminiscent of Irish musicians Sinead O’Connor or Andrea Corr. At the same time, Katy is no Irish wannabee. Her sound — which might best be described as crossover folk — is her own.

“As my life became more my own, I looked at the dark places and came though that to the next level. I always felt like I was denying part of myself and as soon as that was let go, I released and moved to a new place with my music.

The result is an extraordinarily melodic album of great nuance, one that moves with the texture and variety of music and of life. The album is personal in the way that the best music is — it’s Katy’s story yet it also becomes the story of whoever listens because they relate to it. “Once you get yourself as a songwriter, once I got it, it’s like it became my job to share,” she says.

What inspires her? Jill Barber, Norah Jones, some Bette Midler, Eddie Vedder…and love. “Love inspires me, it really does. As well as once denying my own voice, I also denied love — but I know it know as a loving presence and a sacred thing. I feel compelled to share.”

That sharing meant performing at coffee houses and folk nights.”Before, I didn’t always get the power of my voice so I jut kept it small — but now I’m sure,” says Katy. The launch of her CD at Hermann’s Jazz Club in Victoria, BC was so affirming, she plans on more performing.

“I know that singing is what I’m born to do and the songs I’ve sung reflect how I’m doing in my life.”

If this is the case, Katy Henderson and The Falling Stars are shining.

For a taste of all things are small, visit cdbaby.com

Visit Katy’s website

Photo Credits

http://chrisholtphotos.com/

The Sound of Falling Stars is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Today, on Saturday, November 13, Aung San Suu Kyi was released in Myanmar (Burma) after being held under house arrest for most of the last two decades.

Amnesty International, the Freedom Forum, the US Campaign for Burma, the United Nations and even the Nobel Prize Committee along with thousands of activist groups have been fighting for her release and the right to democracy. Musicians such as U2 and REM and others have dedicated songs to her and even President Obama sees her as a personal hero.

“While the Burmese regime has gone to extraordinary lengths to isolate and silence Aung San Suu Kyi, she has continued her brave fight for democracy, peace, and change in Burma,” Obama said. “She is a hero of mine and a source of inspiration for all who work to advance basic human rights in Burma and around the world.”

Canada’s prime minister Stephen Harper today issued the following statement on Nobel peace laureate’s release:

“I am pleased that Aung San Suu Kyi has finally been released from house arrest in Burma. She is an unwavering champion of peace, democracy and respect for human rights in Burma, despite being held in detention for 15 of the past 21 years.  In December 2007, Canada imposed the toughest sanctions in the world against the Burmese regime to indicate its condemnation of the regime’s complete disregard for human rights and its repression of the country’s democratic movement. Those sanctions will remain in place.”

The ruling junta in Mynmar has just completed elections this week which once again illegitimately returned them to power held only by the violence of the gun. Their release of Aung San Suu Kyi after the elections is an attempt to gain some measure of legitimacy from the west; but it won’t work of course.

This could be the beginning of a new chapter of  the democracy movement in Burma, but it could also be a ruse in which, should Aung San Suu Kyi leave the country to attend any conference or speaking engagements, they might not let her back in. They may easily re-arrest her prior to any further elections.

There are scores of political prisoners languishing in Burmese jails who have supported Suu Kyi. We can only hope they might be released as well. We must not forget the thousands of Buddhist monks who peacefully protested against the military regime and who were also brutally repressed and many killed.

This is a great development and maybe a tipping point — we can hope and keep watching.

A Woman’s Place – Aung San Suu Kyi Released But Not Free is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Much is being written these days about the Catholic Church, and especially about the hierarchy of the Church. The failure of bishops everywhere to stop the sexual abuse of children by priests has left Catholics and non-Catholics alike wondering how these men could have so callously turned their backs on the terrible reality of the suffering of children. This failure of pastoral care for the most vulnerable of their flock has cast a shadow over the order of Melchizedek, from the lowliest parish priest to the Holy Father himself. It has cast a shadow over the entire Church.

Many are now wondering what the clerical culture of the modern Church has to do with the life and the mission of Jesus of Nazareth. Yet there are priests in small pockets of society whose ministry is so full of love, so steadfastly directed toward the most marginalized—as was the ministry of Jesus himself—that the light of their service dispels some of that shadow. One of these priests is Jesuit Father Gregory Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries of Los Angeles.

In 1986, at his own request, Father Greg was appointed pastor of Dolores Mission in the Boyle Heights neighbourhood of Los Angeles, the poorest parish in the archdiocese. The church is located between the public housing projects of Pico Gardens and Aliso Village, home at that time to eight active street gangs. Under the direction of Father Greg and parish members, Dolores Mission became a kind of community centre where gang members could gather to just “kick it.”

In 1988, when it became clear that what gang members wanted most was a job and that businesses were not particularly interested in hiring a guy covered in gang tattoos, the parish launched Homeboy Industries. Over twenty years later the organization is offering tattoo removal services, psychological and employment counselling, and job placement in the community or in one of several Homeboy industries, including a bakery, a silk-screening factory, and the Homegirls Café. 12,000 gang members go through the doors of Homeboy Industries every year, and the lives of many of them get turned around with the help of Father Greg and his staff.

But Father G (or simply “G”), as he is called by his homies, is much more than a social worker.

“Once I was in my office and there was this gang member named Louis, seventeen years old and happier than a clam, big huge smile on his face, and he says, ‘Here I am! I just got out yesterday, and you were the very first person I came to see’. And never in my life had I seen more hickies on a human being than on this guy Louis—all over his neck, on his cheeks; it was just unbelievable. And I said, ‘Louis, I have a feeling I was your second stop’. Well, we howled with laughter, and suddenly there’s kinship so quickly.”

Father Greg uses his steamer trunk full of stories—touching, humorous, inspiring, and sometimes heartbreakingly tragic—about gang members to make his point about how we relate to “the other” in this world. His stories reflect his familiarity with the gang culture, with the language gang members use, with the horrors and the hopelessness of their childhoods; most important, however, they reflect the humble, deeply intimate kinship he has established with these men and women.

Father G’s point in the Louis story: “It’s not about service provider or about service recipient; it’s about us belonging to each other.” Because most of the young men who join gangs have had no one to belong to in their lives, Father G calls each of them mijo (“my son”), and he loves and cares for them like sons.

CNNs Anderson Cooper, an admirer of Father Greg and of his work, once asked the priest if he wasn’t afraid of being taken advantage of. Father G’s reply was that he gives his advantage away.

The love Father Greg feels for his homies is in fact returned in equal measure. When they learn he has leukemia, there is an outpouring of support and concern expressed in unique ways that are both poignant and funny. One such expression is especially touching. When Father G gives a public talk to raise awareness and money for Homeboy Industries, he usually takes a couple of homies with him to speak to the audience of their experience. At the end of the Mass that follows one of these events, on this occasion held at a university, the university chaplain invites the members of the congregation to come forward and lay hands on the priest for the healing of his leukemia. Father Greg is embarrassed by this gesture, until it is the turn of Matteo, one of the homies, to lay on hands:

My head is inclined and eyes closed. He has my head in a vise grip, and he’s trembling and squeezing it with all his might. He leans right into my ear as he does this and can barely speak through his crying.

“All I know,” he whispers, enunciating with special care, “is that…I love you…so…fucking…much.”

Now I am crying.

(The next day he says “’Spensa for that blessing I gave you. I don’t know how to do ‘em.” I assure him it was the best of the bunch.)

Father Greg’s talks are like homilies. But his words do not come from moral theology class or from scripture studies; they come from the gritty everyday reality of his ministry, which is his life. He knows the language of the gangs and he uses it. In one of his stories, he tells of being in church and saying a “long-ass prayer” while blessing a former gang member’s 18-year-old daughter who is going away to college. When she tells him she is going to study forensic psychology, Father G, appropriately impressed, says in his best gang voice, “Daaaamn….forensic psychology?”

Greg Boyle does not for a moment think that he is Jesus. But there is no question that his ministry models that of Jesus: “We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.”

The work of Homeboy Industries and of Father Greg Boyle has been recognized worldwide. In his talks and in his recent book, Father G mentions—usually with a slightly sardonic tone—that the facilities of Homeboy Industries have been visited by such luminaries as the mayor of Los Angeles, U.S. First Lady Laura Bush and Vice-President Al Gore as well as the official representatives of Prince Charles of Great Britain.

Notably absent from the list is the Archbishop of Los Angeles.

Due to significant reduction in private and corporate donations resulting from the recession as well as to reductions in public funding, Homeboy Industries was forced in the spring of 2010 to lay off most of its employees. Core businesses and services remain open, however.

Father Greg has been cancer-free for several years. His book is Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion.

Photo Credits

“Father Greg Boyle” Father Greg as he’s known to all, started Homeboy in 1988 determined to do something to address LA’s notorious gang violence. It’s the biggest and most successful anti-gang programme in the US but is badly short of funds. The economic downturn means corporations and foundations can’t afford to be as generous as in the past. bbcworldservice @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

The Jesuit and the Homies: It’s All about Kinship is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN