Troy Wilson wants you to be a book hero

Credit: DAVID COOPER

Artsy type - October 2

A political wreck

If this week’s leaders’ debate wasn’t entertaining enough for you, check out what The Wrecking Ball is bringing to town.

The Toronto-based political-theatre website (thewreckingball.ca) has launched a national campaign to bring more theatre into Canadian politics in advance of the October 14 federal election.

The group has invited theatre artists from all over the country to stage a night of new works written exclusively for the election. Victoria’s contribution, happening at 8 p.m. Monday, October 6 at the Belfry Theatre (1291 Gladstone), will feature new work by award-winning Canadian playwright and Order of Canada member Judith Thompson (White Biting Dog) and Dennis Eberts, with Marcus Youssef of Vancouver’s neworld theatre (who is in town for the Belfry’s production of Half Life) slated to direct one of the shows.

Pop-up poetry

If someone wielding a chapbook accosts you on the street, don’t be alarmed: it’s all part of the fifth annual Random Acts of Poetry week, taking place in Victoria (and 19 other Canadian cities) until October 5.

Poets Janet Marie Rogers and Random Acts of Poetry founder Wendy Morton will be “poem-ing” everywhere from cafes to street corners, with a special focus on ESL, adult literacy and middle-school classrooms (a special book of poetry penned by middle-school students, We Can Say This, will be handed out in classrooms.)

Visit national-random-acts-of-poetry.blogspot.com for more details.

Books are super

Local children’s author Troy Wilson has taken on a project of heroic proportions.

The author of Perfect Man and Frosty is a Stupid Name has launched his Be a Book Hero project, where for every $20 donated, he’ll send an autographed copy of Perfect Man to any school library in North America that the donor chooses and donate $7.50 to either Love of Reading (for Canadian donors) or Reader to Reader (in the United States).

“I was just surfing the ’net and I ran into the fact that October was International School Library Month and it all came together for me,” Wilson says of the project. “It just seemed to me that this is a great occasion to venture out on this kind of thing.”

In addition to the book and donation, Wilson says he’s throwing in a personalized charicature of himself as any superhero the donor chooses. “I’ll stretch my artistic muscles a little bit—even though I’m not an artist, I must stress that,” he says.

Those wishing to donate can visit beabookhero.blogspot.com for more information. The project, which Wilson says will run until October 2009, is a way for him to give back to the school libraries he has such fond memories of from his childhood.

“I can remember [our librarian] giving us graham crackers and honey and reading us Winnie the Pooh and I can remember her reading us the passage in The Secret World of Og where the baby Pollywog escapes from the crib,” he says. “I can remember books I encountered because they were in the library and I probably wouldn’t have run into them otherwise.”