Read To Be Loved – Part 1 here.

With Suman nearly 2 years old, Maya was due to give birth any day with their second child. Throughout her pregnancy Maya didn’t receive pre-natal care even though hospitals and clinics were within walking distance of the slum. Her second birthing experience was no less dramatic than Suman’s birth in Nepal. Home alone once again, she felt a sharp pain and realized quickly that the baby was getting close. She climbed down the rickety wooden ladder to the tap below and began washing her face and was about to call her husband. (During this part of our conversation Maya became very animated and laughed as she told the story). Still standing over the tap, she heard the small cry of a child and looked down. Without so much of a warning or much pain at all, the newest addition to her family was poking his head out of the bottom of her loose pants. She let out a small scream to alert her neighbours and sat below her tap with her newborn son wrapped in her clothing. (Maya laughed loudly as she explained the story and said she literally felt no pain when he was born.) Neighbours arrived and helped cut the cord, freeing her son. The birth of a son is a joyous occasion for most Indian/Nepalese families and they decided to name their new son Prem, which means “love.” Prem’s interesting birth experience may explain his fear of heights and swings.

Mumbai, the city of dreams, draws thousands of rural Nepali villagers every year to the already overcrowded streets with rumours of well paying jobs, hospitals and schools. These rumours travel on the backs of distant relatives and friends who send back stories of their success, whether true or not, luring families with bright hopes and dreams. Mumbai has an altogether different reality and the dreams are available for the relatively lucky ones. With a population of nearly 20 million people, over half of the city live in slum communities made up of rural villagers from India and Nepal.

Pramad and Maya soon realized that life in the big city was never going to be easy with two mouths to feed, rent and bills to pay. Tension grew in the small home spilling over into physical and emotional abuse, with the blows landing hard on a frightened Maya. As tensions grew, so did the violence in the home with the realization that Maya was pregnant once again. Suman and Prem were also very sick, weak from malnutrition, worms and overall bad health. Maya attempted to borrow money from neighbours but with no luck. The children were taken to small clinics, but when the prescriptions came Maya’s husband ripped them up because they didn’t have the money to fill them.

This first time I met Maya, she was five months pregnant with two very sick children in her arms. She barely looked me in the eyes as Ashley and I asked her questions about her children and their health. The next day we took Maya and her children to a hospital and found out just how sick they were. We also learned that Maya had ingested a small amount of poison in an attempt to abort her third child. The doctor prescribed supplements, de-worming medications and a new diet for the children that DWP supports financially. An ultra sound gave us the good news that Maya’s unborn baby appeared healthy. Maya was given a choice by the doctor to abort this 5 month old fetus and she quietly refused. Over the next few months, my mom, Ashley and I visited with the family daily and started to see signs of improvement in the children. Their eyes became less glazed over and even brimmed with excitement from time to time and we were excited to see them slightly rambunctious. Just under a year ago, Maya gave birth to the worlds most precious and beautiful baby girl. (Those of you who have had the opportunity to visit DWP here in Mumbai, can back me up on this.) Little Nandini was born in a hospital and is the first person in the family to have a birth record. The last year has seen tremendous change in the kids. Both Suman and Prem are now enrolled in our free Kindergarten School. Suman is attentive and eager to learn. Prem, although bright and energetic, is more interested in his toes, but he likes his uniform. The kids laugh easily, their good health allowing them excess energy to burn. All about mischief, they are adept at hiding, playing and initiating a chase. Suman is often seen lugging a smiling, teething, Nandini on her hip searching the laneway for someone to play with.

Photo Credits

All photos by Kane Ryan

Portrait of Prem

Nandini sharing her orange with Kane.

Prem standing outside the school.

To be Loved — Part 2 is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

We do not, as “cultural Americans,” tend to think of film actors as artists. As they do with pop singers, the studios and the media commoditize actors by turning them into celebrities. And celebrities are, in fact, brands that moviegoers, like buyers of the next version of an Apple product, will be unable to resist when their next movie is released or that TV watchers or magazine buyers will have to see or read about when the celebrity’s next peccadillo, real or alleged, becomes public.

So the artists get lumped together under the harsh light of celebrity with all the rest—the pretty faces that make box office millions, the sophomoric cretins, and the comic-book caricatures who become governors and even presidents. Perhaps it is time to shine a different-coloured light on those actors who time and again take on roles that test their skill and extend their range, who create, through thoughtful and thorough preparation and through courageous commitment, unique characters of great emotional and (sometimes intellectual) depth. Names like Philip Seymour Hoffman, the late Heath Ledger, Jessica Lange, and Cate Blanchett come to mind. But the epitome of such artistry is unquestionably Meryl Streep.

I have not seen every Streep movie and I am sure there are some I have seen and forgotten about, but in the thirty-year period from Sophie’s Choice to The Iron Lady I have experienced enough magnificent performances to convince me that she is the finest cinema actor in the English language. I love Katharine Hepburn and I believe that she was a wonderful actress, but when I see her in a film, I see Katharine Hepburn, no matter what role she is playing. The same can be said for Jack Nicholson and Julianne Moore. But when Streep plays Karen Blixen, I know I am watching the strong-willed Danish woman who seeks in Africa the life and the love she cannot have. When she plays Julia Child I see the woman who charmed millions of American television viewers with her loving but down-to-earth approach to French cooking. And in The Iron Lady there was hardly a scene in which I recognized Streep playing Margaret Thatcher; I saw only the Iron Lady herself.

In a June 4, 1989 review of the VHS release of A Cry in the Dark, New York Times critic Stephen Holden said of the actress, “Meryl Streep, unlike most film actresses, doesn’t bend her personality gently in the direction of a role. She invents her characters from scratch, creating an entirely different physical vocabulary for each part. One comes away from her performances with the sense of people who are much more than well-observed types. Each is a complex, quirky little universe.”

This “quirky little universe” that is a Streep character, with the accents, the facial expressions, the gestures that make the character both compelling and individual, is Streep’s trademark; it is what sets her apart from the crowd of good, even outstanding actors. In a television interview with Harry Smith after the release of One True Thing, Smith asked her: “Every time I see you on screen, whatever role it is you choose, the second I see you in it, you own it. Your voice is different, you physically may be different. How do you do that?” Streep replied, “Oh well,” and then in an Eastern European accent, “that’s acting.” And she laughed. “I mean it is. That’s what I like to do. That’s total immersion into possibility, a life I could imagine I lived, and that’s infinitely interesting to me.”

While Streep is invariably casual or offhand in remarks about her craft, perhaps disguising a reluctance to talk about this aspect of her work for fear of it being trivialized or misinterpreted by media that focus on the titillations of celebrity, there is no question that a great deal of hard work goes into the creation and the portrayal of each of her characters. She allegedly spent four and a half months studying Polish and German for her role in Sophie’s Choice. For Music of the Heart she practised the violin five or six hours a day for two months. One can only imagine the hours of reading, research, and rehearsal that went into her roles in Out of Africa, Julie and Julia, and The Iron Lady.

But there is something beyond great talent and diligence that informs the cinematic performances of Meryl Streep. A clue to the nature of this artistic alchemy may be found in the words of John Patrick Shanley, director and screenwriter of Doubt, in which Streep plays the fearsome but ultimately very human Sister Aloysius. In the director’s commentary on the DVD version of the movie Shanley describes the filming of the last scene, in which Sister Aloysius breaks down in front of the younger nun, Sister James.

“The amazing thing is that we did the first take in a wider shot and when we got to that point in the scene, Meryl completely broke down. I was very concerned because I knew I wasn’t going to want to be that wide…and I wondered if she could ever do it again. So I immediately abandoned that size and went into a close-up for the second take. Uh…she broke down again, and she broke down with an equal ferocity and genuineness over and over again, take after take, in different sizes, when the camera was on her and when it wasn’t. I remember Amy Adams [Sister James] walking away after this scene and just saying, ‘Meryl Streep. Wow! Now I know why she is Meryl Streep.’”

Streep herself, in a word of advice to younger actors, says that, “if you want [a career] that feeds your soul, I do think you have to go to the limit of experience.” In film after film we see her doing just that. And you only have to watch Sophie’s Choice or The Bridges of Madison County—I mean really watch—to understand that she takes us with her to the limit of experience and through that journey she feeds our soul.

Let us take a look at three Meryl Streep films, from three different decades, paying particular attention to the nuances of her performance in each, with the aim of perhaps teasing out a fuller understanding of the art of this great actor. The films are Sophie’s Choice (1982), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), and Doubt (2008).

Sophie’s Choice

In William Styron’s novel the least fully developed character is Sophie Zawistowski, the beautiful, troubled Polish refugee who lives in the Pink Palace, a Brooklyn rooming house. The narrator, called Stingo, a callow writer from the South who has come to New York to pen his first novel, is far more sharply delineated, as is Nathan Landau, Sophie’s lover, a fiercely intelligent, pathologically mercurial man who exercises a frightening degree of control the other two; both are also denizens of the Pink Palace.

I do think that, in a sense, Styron over-wrote the character of Sophie by providing in the novel such extensive detail of Auschwitz and of the horrors she experienced in the camp. The reader is overwhelmed by the author’s and Sophie’s recounting of the nightmare of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the soul-destroying guilt over the choice that she was forced to make when she arrived there on the train from Warsaw. It is as if all nuances of Sophie’s character have been scared away by the demons and the ghosts that followed her to America and are with her always. Moreover, she is utterly under the spell of Nathan’s powerful and dangerous personality. In the novel, then, it is Stingo who emerges, almost by default but also perhaps through the author’s unconscious choice, as the most interesting character.

In the film Streep gives us a Sophie who is still entirely defined by the searing tragedy she has endured, but with the mass of detail necessarily removed and our gaze fixed on the person of Sophie herself, her pain becomes a fully realized character of its own. And Streep mines every facet of this character, bringing out, sometimes in a dizzying succession of soft and loud notes, the guilt, the anger, the fear, the humiliation, the physical torment and deprivation brought upon her by the Nazi occupation of her homeland and by the eighteen months she spent as a prisoner in Auschwitz.

The opening sequences of scenes in the film, which take place in the Pink Palace and in the amusement park at Coney Island, are a breathtaking overture to Sophie’s and Nathan’s reckless race toward doom and a virtuosic display of Streep’s range and depth as an actor. One of these sequences will serve admirably as an example.

But first a note about accents. Streep’s skill in this area is such that following the inevitable few seconds of surprise when we first hear “Meryl Streep” speaking with a Polish accent, the accent merges with the character and Streep-with-an-accent disappears for the rest of the film. I have found this to be true with every character requiring an accent or a particular tone or timbre that she plays. Moreover, in Sophie’s Choice, in the scenes set in Auschwitz, she actually speaks flawless Polish and German.

The sequence takes place on Sunday morning in Sophie’s room at the Pink Palace. Stingo has been invited to breakfast after a disastrous first meeting with Nathan and Sophie the night before, in which Nathan raged at Sophie, insulted Stingo, and stormed out of the house. The couple has made up and apologies have been offered to Stingo. As Stingo comes into the room, Nathan and Sophie, dressed in outlandish clothing of the twenties, are frenetically dancing the Charleston to music playing on the phonograph. From her expression and the stiffness of her dancing, it is clear that she is not enjoying the dance but is going along with the impulsive Nathan.

In the subsequent scenes, Streep reveals to us, through facial expressions ranging from a varied assortment of smiles—forced, coquettish, self-deprecating, nostalgic, loving—to a sneer, to looks of haughtiness, irritation, hatred, and sadness, and through an entire lexicon of utterly unaffected gestures, a substantial chunk of the character of Sophie Zawistowski. She does this, in her broken English that is at once charming and heart-breaking, in less than eight minutes of screen time. What is more astonishing is that later on in the film, we discover that half of what she said in this sequence was a lie! It is simply impossible for me to imagine any other actress able to so completely inhabit the psyche of a woman from a radically different culture, era, and experience and with such a burden of pain and guilt.

It must be acknowledged here that Kevin Kline and Peter MacNicol are magnificent as Nathan and Stingo, respectively. Kline perfectly captures the schizophrenia that drives Nathan from one extreme of frenzied enthusiasm or rapturous adoration to the other of raging paranoia. MacNicol is equally compelling as the love-starved, idol-worshiping writer who is swept up in the tumultuous lives of the couple upstairs. But in the end it is Streep who holds us in her spell with a performance that must be rated as one of the finest in modern cinema.

It is possible to see on YouTube, the last recorded performance of Vladimir Horowitz playing the Concerto No. 3 in D Minor by Rachmaninoff, with Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1978. The concerto is technically demanding for the pianist; it is, in fact, nothing less than the devil Himself. The piece is filled with pain and pathos and tragedy, expressed in a panoply of musical register. Evoked through the heart and mind and hands of a maestro like Horowitz, it is a work of exquisite sublimity. If the story of Sophie Zawistowski is the Third Concerto, Meryl Streep is indeed Vladimir Horowitz, calling upon her considerable range of technical resources and reaching into her very soul to deliver a performance whose success in moving us to our core merits nothing less than the thunderous ovation of the audience and the beautiful smile on the face of Zubin Mehta we see at the end of the Rachmaninoff.

The Bridges of Madison County

Here again, we observe a shift in emphasis between the book and the movie. Robert James Waller’s novel is as much about Robert Kincaid, a rugged loner who takes photographs for a living, as it is about Francesca Johnson, the middle-aged Italian émigré who is spiritually languishing on an Iowa farm. Thanks to a fine screenplay by Richard LaGravanese (Waller’s novel is mediocre at best) and to the acting of Meryl Streep, the film focuses, as it should, on Francesca; the conflict in the story is hers.

I have heard people say that they consider Streep’s performance in this film to be over the top; I do not find it so. Francesca Johnson is a subtler role for Streep (even the accent is subtler), one that she may not have been able to pull off in 1982 when she was thirty-three. The rural housewife’s pain is less intense, less raw than Sophie Zawistowski’s; it is mitigated by the quiet joys of a close-knit family, by the comforting simplicity of a country life. Francesca suffers from no great emotional or psychological affliction; her husband is not a dangerous paranoid schizophrenic and she does not live with the guilt of having had to select one of her children for death so that the other might live. Francesca suffers merely from a longing for what could have been, from the disappointment of dreams not realized; she listens to opera on the kitchen radio—when her children don’t change the station to rock and roll—instead of sitting in the audience at the Metropolitan in New York.

As I have stated elsewhere on this site, The Bridges of Madison County is a “small story.” There is no great war, no Holocaust looming darkly in the background. It is just a story of two lonely people whom cruel destiny brings together and whom duty, convention, and a different kind of love quickly tear apart leaving only the searing memory and the artefacts of four days of bliss. Much of the story unfolds in a farmhouse kitchen—no romantic landscapes, no lavish hotels, no stirring violins—so it is up to Streep to keep us interested.

A word about Clint Eastwood: fine director, wooden actor; he has the range of a party favour. In this film, his rugged looks suit the role of the National Geographic photographer perfectly, but he is simply incapable of revealing the nuances of Waller’s sensitive, mystical, talented loner. For this reason, Streep’s job is even more challenging as she must compensate for the unfortunate distraction.

In a single scene, almost entirely through gesture and facial expression, Streep tells us the story of Francesca’s life on the farm and gives us a clue to the nature of the agonizing dilemma she will soon face. It is dinnertime at the Johnsons: Francesca is putting the meal on the table as the radio plays opera; it must be a piece she likes because she has just turned up the volume. She calls the children and her husband (in that order) and each of them allows the screen door to slam as they come in and sit at the table, jarring her nerves; she looks up in resigned exasperation as her daughter changes the radio station. There is no dinner conversation and Francesca is bored to the point that she has no interest in eating the meal she has prepared; yet she looks at her silent and insensitive family with the eyes of love, a faint smile gracing her lips, then disappearing, then appearing again and finally dissolving as she absently pulls at a strand of hair and looks into the distance.

The early scenes with Eastwood/Kincaid are masterful. At first Francesca is intrigued by his un-Iowan spontaneity; he has actually been to Bari, her home town in Italy (“You just got off the train because it looked pretty?”). And she is physically attracted to him; she watches him with a kind of growing erotic interest as he preps his shoot of Roseman Bridge. The dialogue is terse; all is told through expression and subtle shifts in posture. And there is a tension between attraction and circumspection which Streep expresses through brusqueness and avoidance of direct looks until Francesca and Robert are actually sitting across from each other at the Johnsons’ kitchen table. When she finally begins to let herself go with him, we are allowed to see the years of frustration and loneliness rise to the surface along with the joy of being near a man who thinks deeply, takes risks, and expresses himself with wit and articulation.

As the emotional intensity quickly builds, Streep does not just move forward with the passion of the affair; she brings along all of the baggage—the disappointment, the spiritual inertia, the traditional beliefs about family—that has been accumulated by Francesca over a lifetime and invites us to peek into that baggage in order to better understand the terrible dilemma she faces. As Oprah Winfrey would say: “Layers!”

Doubt

At the beginning of the film we see Sister Aloysius at morning Mass. As the priest, Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), is giving his sermon, she is walking down the side aisle of the church, quietly but deliberately smacking and barking at inattentive students from St. Nicholas School. Later, as students line up outside the school in preparation to begin their day, Sister Aloysius is watching from a window above, and when a boy touches the young nun, Sister James, who is in charge of the line-up, we suddenly hear, “Boy! William London! Come up here.” And there is silence on the ground as all young eyes turn upward. After Sister has dragged William off to her lair, Father Flynn, who has been mingling with the students, says to the young nun, “The dragon is hungry.” Sister James smiles in spite of herself.

Sister Aloysius is a scary creature, and it is easy for those of us who remember such creatures from our elementary school days—the movie is set in 1964—to project those memories on to Sister Aloysius. For she is stern, strict, eternally vigilant, intolerant, and sometimes even mean, and the students are afraid of her. Sister Aloysius is a far different role for Streep from Sophie Zawistowski and Francesca Johnson—the actress is now 59, after all—but again she fully inhabits the character and fully humanizes her. The angst is still there but it is now cleverly hidden behind a no-nonsense façade.

Screenwriter-director Shanley has a more positive view of Sister Aloysius than we the viewers might have. He believes that she is “a real defender of good against evil, and she knows which is which.” And he calls her stance Victorian in that she believes there is a clear line between the two. Aloysius also reflects some of Shanley’s own views about education, that the nun “represents a major strand of what I believe about what is good in education, and the separation between adults and children: that in fact some of things that were encouraged in terms of education in the Church in the early sixties, which were “Be friends with the kid,” sort of blurred the line between adulthood and childhood and had people who had been very proscribed—these priests and these nuns—cross a certain invisible line and put them in territory that they didn’t completely understand. And I think some of these priests got in big trouble because of that.”

Thus Shanley makes Sister Aloysius a considerably more nuanced character than the viewer might at first see. She was once married (her husband died in the war); she possesses a wry sense of humour; she has accepted a black boy into her school and is concerned for his welfare; she cares for the older and frailer nuns at St. Nicholas, protecting them from the cold calculation of the male-dominated clerical culture. Streep brings out these nuances brilliantly in her portrayal of the nun. Throughout the film she dangles before us this human side of Sister Aloysius as a counterpoint to her natural dislike and her general suspicion of Father Flynn and ultimately her unshakable certainty of his guilt and her determination to destroy him even in the absence of clear proof. What she is doing is clearly monstrous but we cannot possibly hate her for it; this is where the magic of Streep’s art lies.

In the final scene (in which Streep/Sister Aloysius breaks down so convincingly), Sister James has returned to St. Nicholas from visiting her ill brother to find Father Flynn gone from the parish. Sister Aloysius coldly and causally explains how she effected his removal, even lying to achieve her aim. John Patrick Shanley: “It’s interesting how, even leading up to such a great breakdown, she can be this casual, so relaxed, showing no evidence of where she’s about to go, almost jovial. She’s seconds way from it. I really don’t know how she did it. She’s a natural wonder; it’s like watching the Aurora Borealis.”

Meryl Streep is indeed a natural wonder. But all prodigies risk squandering their gift if they do not recognize that the gift is merely a lump of clay, albeit magic clay, whose properties must be carefully studied in order to fathom its potential, then the clay meticulously and painstakingly shaped and reshaped, again and again, out of an acute awareness of the momentary but divine connection between the clay and the artist. The process has nothing to do with celebrity, it has nothing to do with awards, it has nothing to do with contracts and money. It has everything to do with preparation, commitment, courage—and love.

Just ask the Aurora Borealis.

Photo Credits

Sophie’s Choice Poster, from Wikipedia

Main Gate Auschwitz II, by Sue Bowen

covered bridge, by jon.hayes

Farmhouse, by Lydiat

“It’s like watching the Aurora Borealis”: A Profile of Meryl Streep is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

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