May 19th, 2011

Upcomings

I use this post title a lot, but everything that is not now is upcoming, so the upcoming occurs a lot. Sorry, that’s an awful sentence; I’ve been ill. Hopefully to be better soon. Here’s what’s going on!

Ok, this one actually is from now, but also upcoming–I answered question 5 of The Devil’s Engine on Thirsty blog, and have a few more answers in the pipeline. This is a discussion of Biblioasis’s short-story authors about stories and their writing, so if interested, please read and stay tuned.

I’m reading at the Niagara Literary Arts Festival on June 12 (scroll down to that date to see the listing), in the fine company of Carolyn Black and Jacob McArthur Mooney. If you should be in St. Catherines that afternoon, please check us out.

My story, “Dream Inc.”, is forthcoming in The Fiddlehead‘s summer fiction issue. Rest assured, I’ll let you know when it’s available!

May 16th, 2011

The Capybara

I’m on hiatus last year, but in the winter of 2010, I taught for the second time with the wonderful SWAT program and had some truly awesome students at Jean Vanier High School. I received my copy of the Capybara, the anthology of the best student work in the program, and just today got a chance to see what it contained.

All the work in it is of course fabulous, but I am especially proud of my own former students. Though I very much doubt they are reading this blog, I can’t resist of shoutout to the wonderfully talented Jamie Guerrero, Gowseca Muthiah, Godfrey Manfiwiza, Vanessa Miraples, and Mary Delfin. You guys are brilliant, and I really appreciate your humouring me and submitting your work to the anthology like I asked/begged/ordered you to. These stories and poems deserve to be read!!

May 15th, 2011

Rose-coloured reviews *Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone* by J.K. Rowling

Well, it took me 14 years to read the most wildly loved children’s book of my generation. Partly because I just never got around to it, partly because I’m not a big fan of fantasy, partly because the Harry Potter zealots are so obnoxious. “You’ve never read Harry Potter?? But you love books!” one such specimen remarked. Humph.

I finally read it because someone I respect asked me to very gently, and I’m glad she did because J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philospher’s Stone is truly charming, very funny, and sweet as pie.

On the front flap of the book, it says that HP&tPS won the 1997 Smarties Gold for 9 to 11 years, and this truly is a dream book for that set. The first 3.5 chapters are a hilarious sendup of awful British bourgeois family values, complete with privet hedges, vicious capitalist dad, smarmy mom and spoiled child. And a spider-filled cupboard under the stairs where they hide even the gentlest, most innocuous weirdness in their lives, orphaned cousin Harry Potter.

The horrible hinjinx of the Dursleys, including vicious assault on innocent loveable Harry, is cringy and funny simultaneously. As the book goes on, it becomes increasingly unclear whether the world the Dursleys inhabit is meant to be our own or not and, if it is, where is child services. But if I were 9, I wouldn’t care; I would only laugh gleefully over passages like this, where awful Dudley Dursley, brat and bully, cannot have his way:

“He’d screamed, whacked his father with his Smeltings stick, been sick on purpose, kicked his mother and thrown his tortoise through the greenhouse roof and still he did not have his room back.”

I think it’s the British-ism of “been sick on purpose” that makes this so funny, but I can’t really be sure–it’s just so hyperbolically *evil*. Someone told me that the American version of HP is rather bastardized to get out those Britishisms–I wonder if that version says “thrown up”? I have the Canadian, Raincoast edition, and it seems to have retain all the Britsy cadences (“to hospital,” “give it here”) as well as more obvious references like the West Ham football team (I don’t quite know what that is, but I can guess). Then again, having not read the original Brit edition, I don’t know what I’m missing.

Sorry for the digression–as I was saying, so Harry is a lonely and miserable orphan at his aunt and uncle’s until one day a letter arrives, admitting him to Hogwarts, a school for wizards and witches. The aunt and uncle try some very amusing stunts to prevent Harry from going, motivations on this being somewhat unclear as they purport to hate having him in their home.

In the end, Harry is spirited away by Hagrid, the loveable gameskeeper from Hogwarts. Hagrid also introduces Harry to his legacy–his parents were powerful and well-respected wizards, killed by an wizard gone back. That bad wizard, named Voldemort, tried to kill Harry too, when he was but a very tiny baby. He couldn’t; baby Harry was powerful enough to defeat this bad dude and save himself when his parents couldn’t. Even better, his triumph sent Volemort packing, and no one’s seen him since.

Harry Potter has become famous as a hero in the magic world, while the non-magic world (the world of “Muggles” in the language of the book) thought he was just a loser who had to sleep with the spiders. Moreover, his parents had wealth and social position, all of which he is now entitled to. Hagrid takes him shopping for all sorts of wonderful magical paraphenalia, and since Harry is finally in possession of his inheritance, he can afford whatever he likes.

The delights continue when he heads off to Hogwarts where his fame, and that of his parents, is well-known, and Harry is the immediate object of interest and admiration. He has never had friends before, but he picks up a few quite easily. He has never played the magic world’s premier sport, Quidditch, before but he is a natural and easily makes the team.

This is, without a doubt, the best possible fantasy for the 9-11 set, and much older besides. I loved all the descriptions of the beautiful old castle Harry moves into, the delicious foods they have the welcome banquet, the sporting equipment and spooky labs (not mentioned in the book: who pays the tuition here?) The dream of finding out that one is not as dull and ordinary as one appears is as old as time, and Rowling does it superbly. And the invention of Quidditch, and making the very complex descriptions perfectly clear in my mind is the act of a superlative creative force.

But…does it make me sound snobby to say this really is a book for children, and very young children at that? The first half of the book is entirely devoted to Harry’s life with the Dursley’s, his passage to and arrival at Hogswart’s. The second half is a series of adventures that lead Harry and his friends to discover a mystery at the school, and then to solving it.

The whole second half is one self-contained adventure after another, although in retrospect, HP and co usually discover a clue to the ongoing mystery in their seemingly unrelated scrapes and mistakes. They are thwarted by a very bad bully named Draco Malfoy, and annoyed then befriended by a know-it-all girl named Hermione Granger (all the names in this book are wonderful). There is no character development to speak of–good people are very very good, bad people are very very bad (often for no reason) and there’s no good saying anyone might reform because they won’t.

I don’t think I’m spoiling anything for you to say that everything works out awesome in the end, Harry becomes more of a hero than ever, and the reader is very glad that this is so. Rowling crafts a simple, elegant tale. Even though there’s no real suspense (there’s six more books; I know no one dies now) I was very eager to keep reading and to find out what exactly happened.

And now that I know, I’m quite satisfied, but feel no particularly burning urge for book 2.

May 10th, 2011

Spare prose

I spent a lot of time writing and then editing this passage, only to realize I can’t really use it in the story. It’s sort of inane, but I still like it, though, so am posting here in case you might enjoy:

*
Gretta rarely went to women’s homes. The library gave her 6 to 8 hours a day with her all-female colleagues, so she didn’t need to follow them home to have all the conversations needed to about books and movies and what one might do with leftover hard-boiled eggs. She was always so studiously avoiding speaking of anything personal that she certainly would never have occurred to her to ajourn the conversation to a more private location. But she went to Danja’s house, in a pleasantly crowded part of town by the highway.
The houses were tall and tippy-looking like houses in cartoons, and the apartment buildings were all low-rises. Danja’s apartment was just like Gretta’s, except three girls lived there, and two of them had cats. When Gretta sat down on the futon, a cat jumped up and began to sneeze. It was a white, long-haired cat, and when it sneezed it shook itself and bits of fur flew off, giving the impression that thing was allergic to itself.
Danja said, “Don’t mind Haruki, he’s just trying to make you feel uncomfortable.” She handed them Gretta a glass of something red, and put a bowl of chips down on the coffee table. “It’s Kool-aid, isn’t that funny? I hadn’t had Kool-Aid since I was a kid, and then I saw it in the Metro and I thought, ‘Why not? It’s only pennies a glass, after all.’ Isn’t it good? I mean, I sort of bought it ironically, but it does actually taste good.”
“It tastes like sugar,” said Gretta. “Red sugar.”
Gretta took a single chip. The dust on it was brownish red. She put it on her tongue and tasted salt, smoke, something vaguely meaty. “What flavour chip?”
Danja went back into the kitchen and picked up a crumpled silver bag. “Chicken wing.” She seemed to flush. “Uh-oh, you aren’t veggie, are you? My roommate must’ve got these.”
Gretta put another chip in her mouth without thinking, but wasn’t sorry. They really did taste fine. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Not really. Not…as such.” Danja put a handful of chips in her mouth and chewed quickly, then more slowly. “Wow, these really do taste like chicken. How do they do that?”
Gretta shrugged.
“I was seeing this guy from the theatre program? …it was sort of weird? He had this thing with this ex that never really got sorted? And then he just he was doing this internship in France and…well, mainly stopped calling and emailing and stuff.”
Danja’s upspeak made Gretta nervous. Danja was always quite happy to admit that she had jammed the router, that she’d lost the address to the gallery they were going to, that her current series of photographs was sort of crappy. “I’m sorry.”
“Well, no, long-distance is always sort of fucked, I guess. You never know if you’re fighting or if your emails are getting sent to his spam folder or what.”
“I guess…I guess all relationships are hard,” said Gretta, not sure whether she was lying because all her relationships had been easy, or telling the truth because she had never had a relationship.
“Tell me about it. Forrest has this ex, Gabrielle? Oh, she was a giant bitch. Always coming to class crying. Our classes. She wasn’t in school. But she’d know where Forrest’s classes were and come knock on the door. The prof would stop the seminar and open it, and she’d be there bawling her eyes out.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Poor Forrest. The new girl, she’s all right.”
Gretta said quietly, “New girl?”
“Oh, I forget her name.” Danja had gone back to the chips, enthusiastically. With her mouth full, she added, “He met her online, one of them dating sites.”
Gretta was silent for a moment, thinking about the lunchroom at the library, the smell of reheated chili and perfume, the chatter about husbands and garbage day and recipes. Then she took a sip of her Kool-aid and reached to get one of the chicken chips before they were all gone.

May 9th, 2011

Rose-coloured reviews CoverGirl Natureluxe foundation

Warning: I suspect that this post is not going to be of interest to many. I’ve often thought it would be fun to write service pieces for women’s magazines: getting paid to write zippy little articles about how I made use of some lovely free sample the magazine would give me. But I actually have plenty of free samples, due to a boring and impoverished period a few years back when I put myself on every mailing list on earth. So I thought I’d give the form a try here, just to see if I like it. Also, as you might guess, I still haven’t fully settled into my new at-home lifestyle, and now there is something baffling wrong with my neck. Thus the paucity of posts, so I’m just glad I’ve gotten myself to my desk long enough to write this.

I do not normally wear foundations. I think a lot of females got into the habit of foundation in early adolescence, when so many people’s skin goes crazy. Mine didn’t, actually–I only got the occasional zit throughout high school, so I never bothered with cover-up. And this remains the case–I think if you don’t use up your lifetime alottment of zits in youth, you’ll just keep getting them once in a while forever, at least in my case, well into your thirties. So while I don’t have amazing skin, it is largely fine and I am very lazy and cheap, and therefore I do not wear foundation.

Except when it comes in the mail at a time in my life when I am looking for distractions. Natureluxe foundation came in two tiny packets in the mail last week. I tried the “Aspen” first (will there be a follow-up post about the “Maple” packet? Probably not.) It was immediately apparent that I am not aspen-complected–the goop out of the packet was several shades fairer than my actual face. However, since it was already there, I rubbed it in and strangely it blended ok. The subtitle of this stuff is “liquid silk foundation” and it is actually very silky. There was a lot in the packet, and it took me four uses over five days to use it all up. By the fifth day, it was a bit thick and gritty, but I think if you were to actually pay money for the stuff and it came in a bottle with a lid, that wouldn’t happen.

I applied a really small amount the first time, and the stuff was thin and runny, but the coverage was actually really amazing. As I say, I believe my skin to be fine, but it was shocking to see all the veins and shadows around my eyes disappear, all the little blotches and colour variations and ghosts of zits past. When I finally had it all worked it in, my face was completely monochromatic except mouth and eyes–without depth or shadow. Successful foundation, I guess, but slightly creepy.

What this pushed me to do is I suppose what the CoverGirl people want–I put on more makeup. Blush, eye-shadow, even mascara gave my face back some depth, and I felt I looked more or less normal, and not like I was about to star in a musical.

I spent the day, and the several subsequent, watching people closely for their reactions to my miraculously even skin tones. There were none; even those I asked about it couldn’t go much farther than “You look very nice!” Which just goes to show what I always believed about most beauty products–they are far more for the wearer than the viewer. I actually felt kind of glam with my smoothed-out aspen-coloured skin, and if that helped me enjoy my day more, I’d probably go out and buy Natureluxe. But otherwise–no one cares.

Oh, I should note that it was easy to get this stuff off with cleanser and a washcloth at the end of the evenings–a very important plus in the makeup world, in my book anyway. It really is nice to wear, too–my skin didn’t get that naked burny feeling after it was off (I have had some bad makeup experiences). Really, it’s a nice product and I think many people would like it, though I personally remain too cheap and lazy to do more than use the free samples.

EDIT: It turns out I’m a “maple,” almost exactly. The effect is not as spooky when the skin tone matches, it turns out. You know, I might actually buy some of this stuff…someday. But first I have about 4 more uses in the packet.

May 3rd, 2011

Good stuff

While I continue to try to sort myself out on writing new work, some of the older stuff is getting published. The new issue of Prairie Fire arrived today, containing my short story, “Dream Big.” And at long last, coming soon to an online ordering system near you, The Milan Review has my story “Dykadelic.”

You also might be wondering which picture finally got chosen for the book jacket of *The Big Dream.* It’s this one:

It got the second-most votes, but it has the advantages of a) being very clear that it’s on a bus and b) showing my characteristic Rebecca-chin-tilt.

The image with the most votes, by a good margin, actually, was this one:

That will one will definitely come in handy for various other publications and publicity materials where my head won’t look teeny-tiny in the midst of all that red.

The photographer Dave Kemp, who took all these shots, actually prepped a third one for print/web use, this one:

Because it’s just a classy, straight-ahead portrait.

So I feel I’m pretty well-equipped to face the world, photographically, anyway.

May 2nd, 2011

To Make My Own Days

I haven’t posted in a week for the opposite of my usual reason for delayed postings. Instead of too busy, I’ve been overwhelmed with free time, and utterly unable to organize myself to get much done. This is, at least, a new problem.

What it is is: I’ve taken a leave of absence from my job so I can write. I am extremely grateful for the time, both for the support and flexibility of my bosses, and to the generosity and faith of the Canada Council. Believe me, I am not complaining about anything, just a little afraid. Generosity, support, and faith–it’s a lot to live up to.

I don’t know if I made up this expression on my own, but whenever people are self-employed, I always say they “make their own days”–decide on the schedule, and then decide whether to follow it. And I’m slightly in awe of people who can do that. Even during my brief embrace of academia, which is supposed to be largely self-structured and freeing, I marched myself to campus every day and remained for hours, working in the library and common rooms so I could pretend someone else was making the rules.

Allegedly creative people aren’t supposed to admit this but: I love it when other people make the rules. I’m not great at making my own. Also in graduate school, I never had less than 2 jobs, often 3. Part of that was my very natural fear of starving to death, but the other thing was I like having to be certain places at certain times. Then, whenever there is a time when I don’t have to be anywhere, I know that time is for writing. When I *never* have to be anywhere, I’m never sure what time is for writing and what time is for putting up hooks and what part is for running errands and… Which pretty much explains my morning, in a nutshell.

There is also a part of me that believes that grown-up, responsible people get up early, work from 9 to 5, eat dinner, and then squash the rest of their lives into the time that comes after that and before sleep. Although, come to think of it, that never once happened in the house I grew up in.

I possibly picked up this theory during a rather devastating bout of unemployment after university, wherein I applied for 146 jobs before getting one. I think at that point I pretty much decided that if I could just find some people who would let me sit in their office all day and do something useful for them in exchange for enough money to live, I would never be unhappy again. And it worked out well enough; I’ve been basically very lucky in my employers, and I know I’m actually quite well suited to the 9 to 5 lifestyle; better than a lot of people I know, anyway.

But the thing about a good job, one you care about and want to do well, is that it does crowd out other things. It might refuse to stay in the 9 to 5 slot, and even if the actually work ends at 5, the more you care, the more you might have trouble turning your brain to other matters. And the thing about writing on a very flexible schedule is that you can always do it later. Later later later, there’s an infinite amount of it.

So to dedicate myself to writing *now*–that’s new to me. And in the 2.5 days since I’ve started, I have written a good chunk of pages, but I’ve also passed a lot of time fretting, working out, eating, staring out the window, looking at Facebook, and trying to reconfigure my internet connection. And wondering when the mail will come. And phoning my parents.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’m scared of wasting this wonderful opportunity, but I’m going to try my best. I’m not going to be too hard on myself if I can’t write all day every day–I’m already pretty sure that I can’t. But I’m trying to do all I can, without going insane, and if anyone who makes his or her own days has any tips on keeping to it, I would surely like to hear them.

April 25th, 2011

Just wanted to mention

…that my article on advice columns (one of my favourite things) is in the April Issue of Aggregation Magazine.

Also, thanks to all who voted on my author photo–much appreciated! If you haven’t yet but still want to, please view the photos and post your favourite in the comments on that post by noonish tomorrow, at which point I hope to wrap things up. Interestingly: *all* of the photos have a reasonable number of votes.

Ok, that’s it for now!

Rose-coloured Reviews *Away from Her* by Alice Munro

The movie tie-in paperback of *Away from Her* is cagey about what it actually is. It took me to the very fine print on the copyright page to determine that it’s a recovered, retitled copy of Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage from 2004. Which I always thought was a bit much as a title, so perhaps the editors were always dying to make the switch, and the film coming out gave them a shot.

The other difference about the film tie-in copy is that Sarah Polley, who adapted and directed the film, wrote the intro. Now, I like Polley’s acting a great deal, and though I’ve not seen her work as a director, I’ve heard that’s very good too. But whenever I’ve heard/read her speaking in her own voice, in interviews or essays, I’ve thought she sounded like a nitwit, and this foreword is no exception. I’m not sure how her revealing that her love-life in her twenties was a dreary cliche helps us to understand or appreciate the stories. Especially when she has censored almost all that would be specific or emotional or interesting about her anecdotes, to protect her privacy, I guess. The impersonal-personal is my least favourite form of writing.

I understand that we all read fiction through the prism of our personal experiences, and that good fiction can offer a measure of self-help. But it seems so limited to read through that prism *only*; couldn’t Polley have said *something* about art?

I don’t know the order of the original book, but this version leads with the title story, and it is as good–in fact much better than–Polley says. (The story too, has been retitled, from “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” which is good because I don’t understand in the least what that title would mean.) Polley calls it “the greatest love story I’d ever read,” and the story in part is about the endurance of love. But it’s also about the weird turns and uncomfortable moral machinations love can have us take, the comprimises that seem necessary yet we never fully forgive ourselves for.

The story, in case you haven’t read it or seen the movie (I honestly feel like I’m the last one) is about a bright, vivacious, elderly woman named Fiona who seems to be slipping in to Alzheimer’s disease (the disease isn’t, I believe, named in the story), and has to be institutionalized by her devoted husband, Grant. The story of this sad arrangement is realistic and touching, but what’s far more interesting is Grant’s reflections on his treatment of Fiona earlier in their marriage–his dalliances and indiscretions–and his negotiation with her once in the institution, where she appears to forget who he is.

Munro’s stories are really impossible to summarize–they’re long, but they wouldn’t make sense one word shorter, so I’ll leave it at that for “Away from Her.” It’s as moving as Polley tells us, but it’s also morally squirmy and terribly complicated–you’ll think about it for days, or weeks.

The original title story, “Hateship, etc.” is my favourite in the collection, despite the odd title and some other issues. It’s about housekeeper in her midthirties leaving her post and moving out west to pursue a chance at love. I couldn’t quite guess the period–I suspect this was obtuse of me–1950s, maybe? Anyway, a lot of class consciousness plays into the story, and the narration roams freely from one perspective to another, so we see all the levels and angles. Munro is so widely, wildly good–I can’t imagine being about to just drift from one POV to another without seeming awkward or jarring, but she does it at least 4 times in this story, and it seems the most natural thing in the world.

The story, about 2/3 of the way through, becomes excruciating–I almost had to put it down, my terror for the main character was so intense. I’m glad I didn’t; Munro always has a strange twist to share, and I was really delighted with how things came together at the end. However, and one almost never says this about this author, it was not terrible realistic, the ending anyway. I don’t care, I loved it, but I was surprised.

And then, after these two wildly different stories come the other 7, which I thought were very much like each other and very different from either of the other two. In “Floating Bridge,” Jinny is weak from chemotherapy but forced to drive around town in a hot car while her husband Neal indulges his infatuation with a young offender he’s been teaching, and whom he has now hired to work in their home. “Family Furnishing” has a narrator who violently disapproves of her aunts and uncles marriages, full of gender roles and grim silences. In “Comfort,” Nina’s husband is so obsessed with a political battle that he has nothing left to say to his wife.

And so on. Over and over, in this book and really throughout Munro’s ouevre, hetrosexual relationships betray and humiliate: men are stodgy, judgmental, and selfish (“Post and Beam”) and women are pathetic and desperate for approval (“Nettles,” another favourite from this collection, though it did make me squirm at the protagonist’s utter pathos). Munro is unsparing in her grim portrait of the way men and women–especially women–sacrifice bits of their lives adding up to the whole, just to get and keep a mate.

It’s been a while since I read a Munro collection, and since the last one I’ve read several by Mavis Gallant. If Munro and Gallant are the twin stars in the Canadian short-story firmament, I’m starting to think that my horoscope is more Gallantian. There is, I’m convinced, no disparity of talent between the two of them, nor can I really call it a disparitity of kindness–both seem to extend a measure of patience and generosity towards the characters while never sparing them a glaring exposure if that’s what the story demands. And yet…Gallant’s humour can soften some of her hardest truths, while the reverse seems true for Munro–she uses humour to mock:

“I had known this man before I left my marriage and he was the immediate reason I had left it, though I pretended to him–and to everyone else–that this was not so. When I met him I tried to be carefree and to show an independent spirit. We exchanged news–I made sure I had news–and we laughed and went for walks in the ravine, but all I really wanted was to entice him to have sex with me, because I thought the high enthusiasm of sex fused people’s best selves.”

Ouch! The fact that the mockery comes in the first person–many of these stories are written from a point of view of long retrospect–seems to make the vitriol less poisonous, but to me doesn’t really. And yet there is an elegance to Munro’s savaging of dimwitted youth–the mysteries of what is autobiographical and what isn’t, as well her perfect and surprising ways of situating the stories in time. This is a favourite: “In a hotel room in Vanvouver, Meriel as a young woman is putting on her short white summer gloves.” How lovely, and how efficient an opening.

But I still don’t much like Meriel, and I can’t necessarily decipher her motivations, which is true of so many of Munro’s young women. The retrospecitive narration often implies that the women can’t understand their former selves, either, and the men don’t care to do so. A theme of this collection seems to be youth as a foreign country, and that’s a hard one for this reader to work with. I am close enough to being young to think I remember it well, and it wasn’t such a bingo cage as Munro makes it out to be. It’s hard to take seriously women who marry seemingly at random and then resent their husbands “…she admired his thick shoulders, his bull’s neck, his laughing and commanding golden-brown eyes. When she learned that he was a teacher of mathematics she feel in love with what was inside his head also. She was excited by whatever knowledge a man might have that was utterly strange to her. A knowledge of auto mechanics would have worked as well.”

The fault is mine, for I certainly know that in the 50s and even later, there were many women who married at 18 for sillier reasons. But I am me, now, and I can’t help but thinking Meriel is an idiot, and if she feels so badly done by in her marriage she should just get a divorce.

So. I guess what I’m saying is that Meriel’s story–“Post and Beam”–is a very good story about a character who is very realistically rendered as a person I would not want to talk to if I met her. Which is a good an accomplishment as any.

I’m just saying that reading so many such stories in a row can be a little hard on the soul. But maybe my soul needs the expansion and I’m certainly not sorry I read any of these fine, demanding short stories.

This is my 6th book in the Books to Be Read challenge. More to come!

April 21st, 2011

Rebecca’s author photo–you can vote!

So sometimes being a writer in my own little way is pretty much the best thing on earth, because it gives me license to do strange projects in the name of art, and to enlist others. Last weekend, I got to do my dream photo-shoot, which was me on a bus, being semi-serious, semi-goofball. Thanks–so much–to Dave Kemp for humouring me in this endeavour. It was as fun as I thought it would be–maybe more.

Here (below) are the links to my top 5 pictures (selected with J and the photographer’s help). What is your favourite? I can actually keep two, to use in different situations if I want, so it’s ok if you declare a tie:

Selection 1
Selection 2
Selection 3
Selection 4
Selection 5