You are currently browsing the monthly archive for August 2004.
Commentary, published ARTiculate Magazine, Fall 2004 / Winter 2005.
“It was just a normal house in the middle of the city — no farmhouse element left to it.”
I spoke to Mitch Miyagawa, who had returned with his father to the site of his grandfather’s farm and homestead in Mission, 50 years after it was taken from his family. “We didn’t end up knocking. My dad went back a little later and did knock on the door and ask, but it didn’t seem like it meant anything necessarily. My imagination was disappointed by that. That’s where it had to kick in and imagine a more exciting story.”
So Miyagawa, the playwright-in-residence at the Nakai Theatre in Whitehorse, Yukon, wrote a play, The Plum Tree, which deals with the impact of the Japanese-Canadian internment and the 1988 national redress.
History and the Art of Creative Writing
Published ARTiculate Magazine, Fall 2004 / Winter 2005
A man was murdered in Coleman along the eastern Crowsnest Pass in 1922. Witnesses say another man and woman, armed for confrontation, drove their “Whiskey Six” sedan to his dwelling. An argument flared and the men grappled. Two gunshots resounded. As the doomed man turned homeward, fresh shots felled him. Although Constable Stephen Lawson’s nine-year-old daughter, Pearl, never saw who fired the fatal bullet, she maintains that 22-year-old immigrant, Filumena “Florence” Lassandro, was a killer. On May 23, 1923, Lassandro and Emilio “Emperor Pic” Picariello, the popular bootlegger who smuggled liquor from Fernie, were hanged on the gallows, making Lassandro the last female convict sentenced to death in Canada.
Arts Education in the Boonies
Published ARTiculate Magazine, Fall 2004 / Winter 2006
Now that school boards are being forced to close schools, increase class sizes, and slash programs, funds once raised by Parent Advisory Councils (PACs) from field trips and cultural activities and supplies are now being allocated to general upkeep and maintenance.
“In one of my schools, it’s going for new playground equipment,” says Maggie Calladine, the performing arts teacher for Lady Grey and Nicholson Elementary Schools in Golden, BC.
When schools must choose between academics, sports, art, life-skills, or even having a school at all, PACs let everything they see as unessential slide. Maggie holds our government responsible. “Arts in the schools are taking a beating,” she says.
