#stephen hume

[jbbartram-illu]

Today is my birthday (hooray!), so I’m celebrating by posting a sneak peek of the inside of Charles, the book I illustrated for Fitzhenry & Whiteside!

Here’s the description from the publisher:

“Charles is a remarkable baby crow who has lost his mother. This is his story, and the story of his rescuer, intermixed with the story of some strawberries they shared. At times funny and whimsical, it is also a story of the power of the natural world and the ties of love that are never broken. In writing the story, Hume was inspired by his memories of taking care of an injured crow when he was growing up on a farm. Jessica Bartram's classic illustrations amply reflect the grace and timelessness of this tale.“

Charles is available in independent bookstores in Canada (and some Chapters/Indigo locations), as well as online via Indigo and Amazon.

[broadlycast]

“Behind us, spindrift from its crest flying ahead to spatter against Gore-Tex and taut white sails, another five-metre swell gathered, filled the view, seethed into the cockpit, then lifted the hull once again and hissed away beneath the rail. At that moment I sense the organic muscularity of great mother ocean, how when you sail downwind, even a rough sea develops the slow swinging rhythm of the cradle.

And if the ocean is the cradle of life on this planet, its simple rhythms permeate our lives, from the creatures that have evolved to survive in the sloshing and often hostile variable of a world between land and sea, to humans grown so distant from their biological origins that they sometimes forget them. Yet it might be argued that humans are intertidal creatures too. The regions governed by the tides are where we gather food, return to play and sometimes seek inspiration.

For all our urbanity, our high-tech jobs and our abstract educations, the ethernets and the stock exchange, the sea still shapes us in profound, perhaps unconscious ways. Our salty blood is an archetype from the primeval oceans that bore us. Beneath the gloss of commercialized sex and romanticized glamour, the ancient tides of human fertility wax and wane on a twenty-eight-day cycle that mimics the lunar pulsing of the sea. Sperm swim through a salty medium to their destination, and unborn babies float in a salty fluid. Even after eighteen years working away from my coast, I’d still wake to the moonlight on the high plains, startled by the night wind trembling in the aspens, hearing in it the sound of distant surf.”

Stephen Hume in A Walk with the Rainy Sisters

[greencanadavert-blog]

"May has been criticized for running against powerful Conservative defence minister Peter MacKay in 2008. But isn't that what good leaders do -take on the tough fights? Under May's leadership, the Green party earned a million votes across Canada.

Now she's challenging Conservative Gary Lunn in Saanich-Gulf Islands. Lunn's been a political non-entity during his decade in Ottawa. He had his 15 minutes of fame as minister of natural resources -he sacked the head of the Nuclear Safety Commission in a tiff over certifying a reactor. He was shuffled off to minister of state for sport, whatever that entails besides piling up pension points."

[thevancouversun]