Tag: Social Networking

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Take Ten Thursday: Social Networking in the Future

It’s Take Ten Thursday! For those of you who haven’t been following this blog in the last few weeks, I have started a series of Thursday posts meant to encourage you to take time out every day to write.

You don’t need more than ten minutes to get your creativity flowing. I hope you’ll write for more than ten minutes, but I’m trying to prove the point that, when we say, “I don’t have the time to start a book, a poem, or a short story, I have to work and then there’s driving the kids to xx activities, xx times,” we are selling ourselves short. Whether we think we are lacking creativity or that we’re the next E.L. James, we need to give ourselves those ten minutes a day to find out. Skip a shower if you have to! (I’m kidding. Sort of. There are waterproof note pads on the market. You could stick one on your shower wall. See? There are options to get those ten minutes in every day!)

Today, I’d like you to use this photo prompt and the words within the photo quoto to inspire your writing. Your story can be on the theme of Social Networking: In the Future,or you can simply write about a graveyard, or about the future. Just get some words down on paper or on your computer, and don’t over-edit. See what flows naturally. You can edit tomorrow.

I like to read these posts, so keep them coming, keep linking back to me, and posting the links here in the comments section. You can take until next Thursday to publish your piece – as long as you let me know where to find it, I will read and share them all as often as I can!

Happy writing,

Heather

neglected tombstone

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Fireside Reading Part II: Three poems from ‘Leap’

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Making Poetry Cool for School

I fell in love with a lot of poems when I was given the chance to look at them critically with my own eyes, perhaps even to disagree with the teacher or critics’ opinions, and to debate that point in class with my peers.

Oxford University Press has a new textbook for grade 10 English students, ‘Interface,’ by Oxford Next, which allows students the chance to do just that—on topics as diverse as Careers, Consumerism, Film and War. I’m thrilled that one of my poems, ‘Social Networking’ is featured in the Social Networking section of this modern, intelligent, and engaging textbook.

I got my copy of the texbook on Friday, and–I can’t really say it any other way–I completely flipped out when I saw that my poem is featured alongside poems by Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood, an excerpt from an Amy Tan book, a Hamlet speech by Shakespeare, and part of Barack Obama’s inauguration speech.

I’ve looked over this textbook and am so impressed with how it engages the reader with its modern, web-page-like design; how it asks open-ended questions in the margins, and offers a choice of 3-5 creative projects to help students explore themes further. To have my work featured in a textbook of this quality just blows me away. I hope my poems will ignite young readers’ minds, and stir their souls, or at least give them a chuckle, for many more years.

Interface will soon have an “online interface,” so students can listen to poets read their works, use a personal e-notebook and self assessments, and much more. If you are a Canadian principal or teacher, please check out these incredible textbooks for 21st century students at Oxford Next My poem appears in Interface v2.2, Grade 10 English.

If you’re an educator and you’re interested in this series for your school, here’s a two minute digital video about the Interface series.

I’m a member of the League of Canadian Poets and participate in their ‘Poets in the Schools’ Program for Ontario elementary and high schools (I can visit any locale across Canada as part of Canada Poetry tours). I love reading my poems about computer technology /social networking/ cyber-bullying as part of my school workshops. Please contact the League to make arrangements.

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Hey, Cyberpals

I’ve just discovered Flag Counter, a widget that allows me to find out more about who’s visiting my site, and I have to say, I’m a little obsessed. In the last two days since I installed it, people from 29 different countries have visited Where the Butterflies Go.

Imagine if I could host that party in person! I’d have to serve cake. Coffee cake, crepes flambé, and ice cream. Flowers, lovely amber-coloured dishes and glasses; candles everywhere. A punch with the good stuff in it, a virgin one, and some coffee. And of course, a great mix of music in an attempt to suit all your tastes. I’d read my poetry, and you’d read yours. Then I’d make you strap on a nunchuck controller and play The West Wing for Wii (just wanted to see who’s actually reading this).

I’m learning a little about each of your countries every time you visit. Flag Counter has an option to click on the country name and learn about its history. Every time someone from a new area visits, I’m reading about your country. For instance, I knew very little about Lithuania, until I read this here:

http://s03.flagcounter.com/factbook/lt/1y

It prompted me to scan the Net for some more information on the countries I haven’t visited and know little about. I’m not getting much writing work done today.

I love history and social studies–mix that with a variety of people from around the world who enjoy poetry and photography, and I’m in heaven.

These days, our attention spans are limited, and it seems there aren’t enough hours in the day. Thanks for spending some of your precious time with me here at Where the Butterflies Go. I may just have to host a blog party soon.

Best Wishes,

Heather

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The Fine Line: Emails from L.A.

“Your friend’s on T.V.”

“My friend?”

“Your friend whose name I can’t pronounce.”

“Ohhh! My FRIEND! Mr. Sitcom Actor!” I squealed, and ran from the kitchen, where hubby and I had been making dinner together, to the living room. It was three years after the Crazy Phone Call, and since that time, not one restraining order had been placed against me. Wait, that didn’t come out right. I have never had a restraining order placed against me. Seriously. Please, keep reading.

Mr. Sitcom Actor had, in fact, recently told me I should refer to him as my friend, “even though you’re in Montreal and I’m way over here in L.A.” It never surprised me when he responded to my emails—he’s a dear-heart like that—but I knew it was a rarity for a famous person in Hollywood to give a rat’s ass about someone who could do nothing for them. I enjoyed our rare yet lively e-conversations.

I caught the tail end of the ad that was on for his series, but it was enough to get me jumping up and down, clapping, as I always did when hubby told me my friend was on our TV screen. Our one-year-old was sitting in her high chair, and started clapping along with me.

“Dat? Dat dere?” she asked, big eyes blue and wondering.

“That’s my friend. Mr. Sitcom Actor. He sends me emails from L.A. Well, not really.
I email him, and he’s sweet enough to email back.”

“Nice haih, dat,” Monkeydoodle mumbled through her peas.

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. He really does have great hair.”

I’m going to stop typing immediately and clarify something before I get deluged with excited emails from you, dear readers. This is a fun game to play, keeping you guessing about all the parties in my story, but no, I didn’t get emails from McDreamy in my in-box. Patrick Dempsey wouldn’t return to our TV screens, set my heart racing, and make me put extra mousse in my husband’s hair until a whole year later.

As I finally sat down on the sofa, dinner plate on lap–this has got to be one of Murphy’s Laws–our daughter’s face turned beet red, and she announced an event to us for which anyone with an operating olfactory nerve required no announcement:

“Poop!”

I laughed, and was reminded of an email Mr. Sitcom Actor had sent me a few weeks back. We’d been comparing diaper duty–he’s quite the hands-on Dad and had admitted he and his wife were “knee-deep-in-it” –and, having read some of my poems, he’d told me I should write a Mommy Rap about changing diapers. “That would be hilarious!”

I never did write that rap. Life gets in the way; or perhaps that’s just not how it was supposed to happen. If I’d started practicing my rapping when Mr. Sitcom Actor suggested it, maybe I’d have learned to sing on key and sound bad-ass enough. But then I wouldn’t have earned my “The girl can’t rap, but she sure can write” t-shirt sent to me by The Sex People, along with a delicious strawberry cheesecake, delivered to my door.

Who the hell are The Sex People? I’m sure that’s what the cheesecake delivery guy wanted to know, with every inch of his being, since I wasn’t expecting him, and had answered the door in leggings and the new black stilettos I’d been modeling for my girlfriend Artsy Mommy. He must have thought I was running a very different kind of home business.

Back to The Sex People. The simple answer is I met them online when Mr. Sitcom Actor joked with me tongue-in-cheek, “Yes, Heather, let’s be friends, officially,” when I’d asked him if that was really him on Facebook—as if you have to be on Facebook to make your friendship official. He soon posted a link to a discussion board led by Mr. Screenwriter, which I thought looked quite interesting, so I joined.

Before I knew it I was online every day with a bunch of friends I’d never met, chatting about the in’s and out’s of screenwriting, sex in the movies, baseball, and our messy, beautiful lives.

It was the stuff movies are made of.

Read how this story started:

Prologue: The Fine Line (between persistence and stalking)

1) a-The Fine Line: “Do What You Want”

Read the NEXT CHAPTER: The Fine Line: I’m Afraid to Ask, but What Is Poking?