It’s Birthday Eve at our house, a holiday Fooey claims to have invented. Birthday Eve means one among us is on the eve of his birthday. And we take photos to mark the occasion, but that’s about it.
“We won’t have a sweet little four-year-old after tomorrow,” I said to Kevin.
“But you’ll have a sweet little five-year-old,” CJ anxiously reassured me.
Won’t we, just?
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Kevin just texted to tell me he’d seen AppleApple and her class running by from their excursion to the library this morning. Meanwhile, I’d received an emailed check-out notice from the library with the following titles:
Fascinating, huh. AppleApple is planning a science project on herbal medicine. Coincidentally, this dovetails with one of the subjects in The Girl Runner, so she might find her mother taking notes.
I love the smallness of the world, sometimes. The magic of connections.
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| Michael Ondaatje’s Bookmark |
Speaking of connections, did you know there’s a registered charity in Canada devoted to marking famous places in Canadian fiction? For real. It’s called Project Bookmark, and it’s the invention of writer Miranda Hill (side note: I’ll be reading with Miranda next Sunday at GritLit in Hamilton).
Project Bookmark is launching a month of fundraising with a creative twist: every day in April there will be a prize draw for that day’s donors. Each day is sponsored by a “reading personality,” who is offering up a prize of his or her own devising. Personalities include Margaret Atwood and Shelagh Rogers, so a mere $20 could get you something pretty unique and amazing.
Sounds like it’s been a helluva lot of work to organize, and I’m hoping Project Bookmark reaps the benefits. I love the idea of marking out our literary landscape, grounding the imaginary in the real, and inviting us to consider how the two interact. I also like imagining where I would place a Bookmark. And thinking about the real places that inhabit my imaginary worlds — or is it the other way round? Do my imaginary worlds inhabit real places?