'Make the language sing'

Photo by John Pura, Red River College

Armin Wiebe includes plautdietsch, Low German, in the dialogue of much of his work, including his play The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz.

Today he explained his motivation to Creative Communications students at Red River College.

"I like the way that I think I can make the language sing."

Meet The Arminator

This week Creative Communications first-year students will attend a play with the funkiest name of the year – The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz.

They will talk with the actors and the author, Armin Wiebe, and next week they will blog about the experience. And then their semester will be over.

So what and who are Blatz and Wiebe?

“Mennonites in lust! But not talking about it,” is CBC reviewer Joff Schmidt’s capsule take on the play.

Armin Wiebe (The Arminator, to some of his friends) is a Manitoban who has written four novels.

The setting for three of them, and for this play, is the imaginary Mennonite community of Gutenthal, one mile from the U.S. border, a million miles from reality and one inch from truth.

Wiebe writes in his own blend of, mostly, plautdietsch – Low German – and what he calls “buggered-up English.”

The result is funny on the page, hilarious and touching when spoken. That is the strength of the play.

The genesis of Blatz lies in the story And Besides God Made Poison Ivy, published in Due West (Turnstone Press, 1996).

In Spring 2005 Prairie Fire published a revised version called The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz.

Now Scirocco Drama has released the play as a book.

Kevin Prokosh of the Winnipeg Free Press recently interviewed the playwright. He also reviewed Blatz very positively, writing in the spirit of the play.

But hold a minute on!

Blatz also features sex, transgressive and otherwise, cross-dressing, and a brummtopp.

A brummtopp? You have to hear it.

O joy! O delight! An election assignment!

With a federal election set for May 2, can the elections assignments be far behind?

Of course not.

This week my Creative Communications journalism students will choose one of a dozen or so topics, then do some research and present their findings to their class.

Here’s a preview:

Who are the leaders of the federal parties? What are their personal and political histories? Tell us something we didn’t know about each of them. Tell us about a couple of past leaders: the good, the bad (always more interesting) and the otherwise. Finding fun facts is encouraged.

Funny, eh? Show us current and historical examples of interesting cartoons, satire or other humorous takes on Canadian politics.

Wild card: Show us at least 10 interesting things that we did not know about Canadian politics and elections.

Research early and research often!

Books: Not just for old people any more

With our focus on the instant communication that ensures we can receive Charlie Sheen’s latest thoughts even before he thinks them, it’s good to remember the power of books.

In the last couple of weeks Creative Communications students are demonstrating their achievements in creating books and commenting on other writers’ books.

All this while tweeting, blogging, creating ePubs and engaging in all sorts of other online activities.

Recent highlights:

Second-year student Yvonne Raymond has self-published Lockout, a memoir of growing up in the boom-and-bust town of Pine Falls, Manitoba. Her book launch jammed the restaurant at McNally Robinson Booksellers in Winnipeg, she has had to order a second printing to handle the demand, and the Pine Falls public library wants her to hold another launch in the town.

She also runs a website where readers can comment on the book and on life in Pine Falls.

Not bad for a student who was told by a scornful representative of Tembec, the company that shut down the Pine Falls mill, that she would never publish a book.

Last weekend I attended another jammed launch for another student’s self-published book: Pieces by Amanda Hope.

Pieces is a novel based on the life of Hope’s great-aunt, a tale jammed with incident and character.

Both these books required more than a year of interviewing, planning, writing and rewriting. Then there was some more rewriting. Did I mention the rewriting?

Students are also studying two books by Winnipeg writers.

The second-year Journalism majors are investigating Winnipeg’s Great War: A City Comes of Age by Jim Blanchard. You can read their comments in the blogs listed on the right side of this page.

First-year students are reading To the Grave: Inside A Spectacular RCMP Sting by Mike McIntyre. This week they are doing group presentations in class on the book, particularly on what journalists can learn from reading it.

Blanchard and McIntyre have come in and spoken to the students about their work.

Interestingly, McIntyre is a prolific multimedia guy. As @mikeoncrime he tweets vigorously about crime, the justice system and his son’s hockey team.

Books: Still a part of your nutritious information meal.

Let’s mock crazy people

HA HA! LOOKIT THE REE-TARD!

I shouted that lots of times when I was a kid.

Anyone who acted “weird” was a target for my friends and me, anyone who looked as if they had some kind of mental disability or mental illness.

Not to join in the taunting was to become a ree-tard yourself.

I shouldn’t have done that, and I’m sorry I did.

Aren’t we shouting the same thing today at Charlie Sheen?

We put him on display on television, in social media, in all the other media.

Why not? Look at the crazy shit he’s spouting!

Well, that crazy shit might just be an indication that something is not right with Charlie Sheen. Surely we can agree at least that he is not acting in his own best interests.

Yes, he is appearing in public voluntarily. And yes, he is an actor who makes his living by portraying fantasy worlds.

But shouldn’t we feel just a little bit guilty about putting his irrational behaviour on gleeful display?

No?

OK.

All together now:

HA HA! LOOKIT THE REE-TARD!

Reporter does right thing, admits mistake

Good work today by Winnipeg Sun courts reporter Dean Pritchard.

He adds a correction to his recap of the city’s best-read story that is not about Lady Gaga – the trial and conviction of Mark Grant for the 1984 murder of Candace Derksen.

On a different note, I have to confess a mea culpa. In an earlier story I wrote that Mark Grant slumped his head on a table and weeped following a marathon interrogation with police.

Gobsmacked prosecutors later told me Grant shed no tears.

“Sleeping maybe, not weeping,” Crown attorney Brian Bell said.

Reporters don’t like admitting their mistakes but I thought I should set the record straight.

Pritchard gets it right. Admitting a mistake in a timely manner is important to maintaining a journalist’s credibility – his or her brand and, in this case, the brand of his employer.

If only politicians who lie to Parliament felt the same way.

Dean Pritchard’s brand is much stronger today than, oh, how about Bev Oda’s?

How should journalists cover suicide?

Yes, I’m the journalism instructor who made his students talk and write about suicide on Valentine’s Day.

Why not? An important element of love is wanting to protect our loved ones from harming themselves.

There is a journalistic taboo against covering suicide, based on the idea of contagion: reporting about suicide creates more suicides.

Last year the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority invited my students and me to attend a seminar on the topic. It turned out to be a wonderful learning experience, and the students wrote some very informative and readable stories about suicide.

The Canadian Psychiatric Association has published a list of media guidelines on reporting suicide, based on several studies.

Information that should be reported, it says, includes alternatives to suicide and warnings of suicidal behavior. These clearly are sensible suggestions.

More open to dispute and judgment, perhaps, are some of the points that the psychiatrists recommend not reporting, including details of the method of suicide and “simplistic reasons for the suicide.”

Andre Picard, a respected medical journalist at The Globe and Mail, disagrees with many of these suggestions.

This year the students had a vigorous discussion with three representatives of the health field, including one of the authors of the guidelines.

The outcome? I think we agreed to disagree – a little.

No student – no responsible journalist – wants to encourage anyone to kill himself or herself. And the guidelines are a great conversation-starter on a topic that intimidates many people.

But reasonable people can disagree about how best to present information about suicide.

The Ottawa Citizen did a commendable job, in my opinion, in a story last year about the suicide of a 17-year-old young man. But the story provides some information that the psychiatrists suggest withholding.

At the suggestion of one of our guests, Stephanie Loewen, the provincial suicide prevention co-ordinator at Manitoba Health, the students are rewriting the story to follow all the guidelines.

Tomorrow we will look at their reworked stories and discuss which versions work better for several audiences: the general readership of a mass-market newspaper, the relatives and friends of the person who killed himself, and people who are risk of death by suicide.

Now, if you are having suicidal thoughts, lots of help is available.

Please check out these links provided by the Canadian Mental Health Association.