Mf Galaxy

A few months back I shared with you a panel convened by comix creator, TV writer, documentarian, and filmmaker Brandon Easton from the 2016 San Diego Comic Con Writers' Journey panel full of the specific how-to advice become a professional writer in comics, TV, and film. In today's episode of MF GALAXY, Brandon Easton is back from the 2015 WonderCon Anaheim Writers' Journey Panel, and this time with actor, television writer, and comix writer Erika Alexander, with screenwriter and comix creator Tony Puryear, with comix critic and writer Hannibal Tabu, and with author, television writer, and indie filmmaker Marc Scott Zicree. In today's episode of MF GALAXY, they discuss: The single most important procedural and psychological step to take as a writer The value of job-shadowing Rod Serling from beyond the grave How and where you can find the right mentor and why you must Where to find the awful and excellent scripts you need to read The importance of writing your bio right, and The surprising early failure of o

How many times have you seen pictures of so-called development workers, who heroically and selflessly leave their privileged homes in the West to travel to any one of 54 countries on the African continent—although they'll usually just say "Africa" as if it were a country? They go to build houses or schools or work in a clinic, sometimes saying that they're there to "save" people or even "save Africa," all one billion of us, despite what is usually zero knowledge of any of the continent's 3000 or more languages, more than 5000 years of civilisations and ancient literatures, its countless cultures, religions, and philosophies, or its contemporary arts, industry, and politics. They also usually do not question why, in the case of the often barely-qualified "voluntourists" who build houses or schools, it is better for them to give airlines and hotels hundreds or even thousands of dollars than it is to pay local citizens of those countries to do the work their countries need. Nor do they ask the effects of spendin

If you're an expert on parenting, chances are you're not a parent. And if you are a parent and you think you're an expert, you're probably not an expert either. Being a parent means constant worrying about getting it wrong and wondering if you'll ever get it right. But at least that's better than being totally sure you're right because that's a really bad sign. That being said, a few things are starting to become clearer in the 21st century, and one is that trying too hard to be the perfect parent is counter-productive. And another is that if your goal is trophy children instead of happy children with the every-expanding wisdom to chart their own course, your kids probably won't be happy or able to chart their own course. Canadian author Carl Honore hit the big time with his 2004 book In Praise of Slow, arguing that people need to, well, chill out. In 2008 he released Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting. While he was born in Scotland he spent much of his childhood in Edmo

I met John Gallagher so long ago I don't even remember it, but we were both members of the same fannish club called ESFCAS, the Edmonton Science Fiction and Comic Arts Society at the University of Alberta. A bunch of us there wanted to be professional artists—including Adrian Kleinbergen and Nigel Tully who found work in comics, Jaemi Hardy who became a fine artist, and Marc Taro Holmes who worked in video games and Hollywood and has published instructional books on art—and you can hear my conversation with him on MF GALAXY. But John Gallagher is a particularly amazing success story. After training at the Alberta College of Art and Design, he went to work at Edmonton's BioWare studio as a production illustrator. Later he broke into Hollywood, and has worked on Riverdale, the 2017 Power Rangers film, Supergirl, The Flash, The Man in the High Castle, Once Upon a Time, Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome, and X-Men: The Last Stand, among many other productions. On April 27, 2017 Gallagher spoke with me by S

Saladin Ahmed is a fascinating cat. He's best known as the Arab and Muslim American fantasy novelist who crafted Throne of the Crescent Moon which was nominated for the Hugo and won the Locus Award for best first novel. But his ethnicity also includes Polish and Irish, and his writing also includes short stories, articles, a stunning number of Tweets, and the new Marvel Comics series Black Bolt about the king of the Inhumans. We met at the Science Fiction Research Association conference in Detroit in 2012, and he was as fun and down to earth in person as he is online. When I learned that he was writing for Marvel I just knew I had to find out what it was like for him as a novelist to leap into the world of comics, and was delighted to learn that like me, he was a lifelong comics fan who'd always wanted to create comics, too. In today's episode of MF GALAXY, Saladin Ahmed discusses: Which influential editors and which groundbreaking comics writer helped him get the gig How his shot at turning a D-list Marvel

Remember when the Chinese, Saudi Arabian, and Nigerian governments invaded Canada and occupied it and it seemed like they would never leave? Remember how every province and territory fell like dominoes even after heroic military struggles against them, and so the invaders jailed or killed our resistance leaders after labelling them terrorists and savages? Remember how they made trillions of dollars in profit for the Chinese communist party, the Saudi monarchy, and the Nigerian government, by stealing our whole country, and then they mocked us for being poor? Remember how they destroyed and outlawed all our cultural institutions, suppressed all our languages, forced us to take Mandarin, Arabic, and Yoruba names, and forcibly converted some of us to communism, Islam, or the Yoruba religion—and punished us if we stayed faithful to our own beliefs? Remember how they sent all our children to their schools where they tortured, starved, and even raped thousands of them, where they tolerated up to a 50 per cent death

Brotherman: Dictator of Discipline is one of the most celebrated indie comics ever to be published in the United States. Brotherman is the creation of two siblings: writer Guy A. Sims and artist-writer Dawud Anyabwile. While Marvel and DC today struggle to sell many of their titles in the low thousands, the original eleven issues of the black-and-white Brotherman comic sold a total of 750,000 copies via indie channels from African-American bookstores to barbershops and Black Expos. Many credit Brotherman with fueling the growth of African-American comics in the 1990s. Now after a long hiatus, the series is back, not as individual pamphlet comics but in graphic novel form. Brotherman: Revelation – Book One is now out and it's as engaging and gorgeous as ever—maybe even more now that it's in full colour as ebook and trade paperback. When I learned the book was out, I just had to contact the artist, since I'd also loved his and his brother's adaptation of Walter Dean Myers' novel Monster. In addition to co-creat

Plenty of aspiring writers think writing for children is easy, and getting published that way is even easier. Wrong! As almost any writer will tell you, unless you're a star, the business is never easy and is definitely never a sure thing. On May 20, 2017, a group of children's writers met at the Capital City Press writers conference in Edmonton for a panel called "From Aliens to the Zodiac: The A-Z's of Writing for Kids and Teens." Who organised the event? Why, the outstanding Katherine Gibson of the Edmonton Public Library and author S.G. Wong who's Capital City Press's featured writer, and they assembled terrific writers to help you learn what you need to break into Kidlit or advance your career there. Those panelists are Marty Chan, Joan Marie Galat, and Tololwa Mollel, and they'll be introducing themselves. The moderator is author Natasha Deen, best known for her Guardian and also Retribution series. During the panel they discuss: Whose advice is worthwhile, and whose is worthless, when it comes to chan

Jacob Banigan is one impressive cat. He knows more about how to build and refine stories than anyone I've ever met, and I know a lot of writers. And yet Banigan doesn't see himself as a writer and writes only occasionally. So how and why does he grok story like no one else? Because he's a master improviser who's been studying the craft since 1990 when he joined Rapid Fire Theatre in Edmonton. Sure, he also gained skills in years of creating and performing sketch comedy, including in The 11:02 Show which is where we worked together for a season, and in Gordon's Big Bald Head, where I also worked with him one summer. But Banigan kept growing in the field, serving as Rapid Fire's Artistic Director from 1995 to 2004, creating news plays, launching improv festivals Nosebowl and the long-form improv show CHiMPROV, and helped make Rapid Fire's reputation go international by winning competition after competition. Now he lives in Austria where he works with Theater Im Bahnhof of Graz and English Lovers of Vienna, and

Today on the show we're talking about 13 Reasons Why, the Netflix series based on the Jay Asher novel. My guests are librarian Ashley Cain and policy manager Jinting Zhao, both of whom attended the high school where I taught for most of my teaching career, and where Cain was one of my English students. I asked them to come onto MF GALAXY because they each posted insightful and powerful remarks following a Facebook thread I started discussing the series and asking about its accuracy. In Edmonton, a school principal banned out-of-class discussion of the series. In the following show you'll hear me incorrectly say to Jinting Zhao that the school was a junior high, but Ashley Cain correctly noted that it was an elementary school. The school emailed to parents to state its ban, but failed to encourage parents to discuss the series' issues with their children. However, according to an online CBC news report, many schools across North America did just that. Other sources including The New Yorker magazine have attac

Guardians of the Galaxy came out in 2014 and blew me away. I've called it the best Star Wars since Star Wars of 1977 for stunning imagery and action, and the feature film version of TV's FarScape, for its gonzo humour and pop culture self-awareness. And like both of shows, Guardians has outrageous, memorable characters that make fans wish we could hang out with them. That film made a billion dollars globally and now the sequel is out, and as of recording today on May 8, 2017, just four days after opening, Volume 2 has already earned $430 million dollars around the world. Guardians is a giga-successful series and if we're lucky, will bring the fun, great characters, and wonder back to science fiction filmmaking. Returning to the show today to discuss Volume 2 are author Krista D. Ball and filmmaker Ben Dobyns. Krista D. Ball is an Edmonton-based science fiction and fantasy author who was born and raised in Newfoundland where she learned how to chainsaw and chop wood before getting a degree in History from Moun

Science fiction has always been a male-dominated literary genre, right? All about steel braziers on submissive women serving—and servicing—Euro-American alpha males on a colonial power trip in space? Where all the authors and editors were men and women were allowed in only to tidy the office and deliver sandwiches and backrubs? Guess again. According to my guests Lisa Yaszek and Patrick B. Sharp and their new book Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women Of Science Fiction, when it comes to women, the accepted history of SF is all wrong. Lisa Yaszek is Professor and Associate Chair in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, and past president of the Science Fiction Research Association. Her areas of expertise include science fiction, cultural history, critical race and gender studies, and science and technology studies. She's written for numerous journals and is the author of books including Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women's Science Fiction. Patrick Sharp is Professor and Chair of

Sheree Renee Thomas changed science fiction publishing by editing the anthologies Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones. Those books won the 2001 and 2005 World Fantasy Awards, and along with the novels of Nalo Hopkinson, Tananarive Due, and Steven Barnes relaunched Africentric science fiction and fantasy in the world of books and gave rise to the revolution which is growing around the African planet. Thomas grew up in Memphis, Tennessee loving science fiction, but abandoned the genre until she encountered the work of Africentric SF luminary Octavia Butler and then found her own path to expanding the genre. In addition to being an editor, Thomas is a poet and short story writer whose work has appeared in literary journals, magazines, and anthologies including Vibe, The Washington Post, Callaloo, Ishmael Reed's Konch, The New York Times, Meridians, Strange Horizons, So Long Been Dreaming, and Hurricane Blues. Numerous prestigious organisation

So many people talk about breaking into comics, New York publishing, or Hollywood, but most of the ones talking haven't done it, and most of those who've done it aren't talking. Today's MF GALAXY features people who can walk the talk and talk the walk, and who are going to give you specific, technical advice and steps to take your writing career forward, such as what magazines and websites you must read, how to manage your social media presence to avoid sabotaging your career, what point in your story to start writing your script, and some surprising realities about mentorship by big-name writers. All of this episode's rising-star writer-creators spoke at a panel called The Writers' Journey at the 2016 San Diego Comic Con, which despite the name is probably the leading TV and movie entertainment convention in the US open to the general public but swarming with professionals. The panel is moderated by Brandon Easton, a recurring guest on MF GALAXY. He's a 2015 Disney/ABC Writing Program winner and 2014 Eisner

Art and activism—should they be friends? Hanging together like Kirk and Spock, Crockett and Tubbs, or Laverne and Shirley? Or should they be enemies like Luke Cage and Cotton Mouth, Avatar Aang and the Fire Lord, or Donald Trump and most of humanity? Some people say that art and politics should never mix. Other people say that they always mix—but that people only protest those politics when they disagree with them. So if that's true, what happens to society when people who define themselves as advocates and activists combine their views and ideas with their novels, paintings, plays, and more? Those are questions that novelist SG Wong wanted answered. Wong is the inaugural featured writer of Capital City Press, a venture by the Edmonton Public Library. Wong is the creator of the Lola Starke hardboiled detective series set in Crescent City, California, in an alternate history in which China colonised North America. She's also an Arthur Ellis Award-finalist and a tireless organiser in Edmonton's literary scene.

Because race-based privilege, power, and exploitation are facts of planetary life, almost any society can be expected to maintain mythologies about race. That mythology includes the belief that those who belong to the racial power structure are superior to those who are excluded from that racial power system. Some of the excluded are deemed intellectually equal or potentially superior, but lacking in physical prowess and, for lack of a better term, "natural rhythm." But then there are other people excluded by the racial power system, and inside the racial mythology, they are deemed intellectually and morally backward, but physically superior. The late Dr. Manning Marable, a Professor of History and Political Science and formerly the Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, discussed in a 1991 column called "Racism and the Black Athlete" how the mythology of race affected athletics. He wrote, "For generations, White athletes who excelled in any sport were descr

Marty Chan is one of E-Town's most successful writers ever. He's best known for his popular children's and young adult books including Keepers of the Vault, Infinity Coil, and the award-winning The Mystery of the Frozen Brains. But he's also a screenwriter who worked on the TV series Jake and the Kid and received a Gemini nomination for his TV pilot The Orange Seed Myth. Chan's best-known play is the semi-autobiographical Mom, Dad, I'm Living With a White Girl, about the culture clash of being a Chinese-Canadian finding work and love in the arts in Edmonton. The play's been produced across Canada and in New York. Chan was the first playwright in residence at Edmonton's Citadel Theatre, Canada's biggest and busiest regional performing arts centre. In today's episode of MF GALAXY, Marty Chan discusses: The professional tension he felt defining himself as a playwright or as Kidlit author The personal meaning and artistic results of his unpublished and innovative zombie novel How and why not having children free

If you listen to CBC Radio then you've almost certainly heard the comedy of Neil Grahn. He's been a debater on The Debaters, but he's best known as one of the sketch comics on and lead writer for The Irrelevant Show. Years ago Grahn was part of a pioneering sketch comedy troupe in Edmonton called Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie which included Cathleen Rootsaert, Wes Borg, and the late Joe Bird, which was briefly a television show. He's currently the writer/director/producer behind the Gemini Award-winning series Taking It Off, and he's a documentarian with many films to his credit including one about Amber Valley, one of the earliest African towns in Alberta. He's constantly busy writing pilots and hustling to put new work into gear. The man is a machine, with plenty of wisdom to share about making it in the business of comedy writing. In today's episode of MF GALAXY, Neil Grahn discusses: The no-nonsense approach to acting for actors and directors and why both must be open to whiplash-inducing turns Why being

If you're a Canadian who loves books as much as you love radio, then it's almost a guarantee that legendary broadcaster Shelagh Rogers has been in your life for a long time. Rogers is the host and producer of CBC Radio's The Next Chapter, Canada's leading author-interview radio show focusing on indigenous and settler Canadian writers. She started at CBC in 1980, hosting music and current affairs programmes, and working her way up eventually became the permanent guest host on Peter Gzowski's Morningside, the host of This Morning, and also of Sounds Like Canada. She's won a range of awards and honourary doctorates, and as a result of her work and advocacy, Native Counseling Services of Alberta gave her their Achievement in the Aboriginal Community Award, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada inducted her as an honourary witness, the Order of Canada elected her as an Officer, and the University of Victoria named her Chancellor. Rogers was in Edmonton on February 28, 2017 to host the Edmonton Public L

You ever dream of being a filmmaker? Maybe writing or directing television? Maybe you thought about it and figured that moving to Hollywood was out of the question, or even if you were willing to go, that climbing the ladder in Hollywood was too long a shot? Or even if you were willing to try the long slog, you wouldn't want men in suits ruining the stories you really want to tell by replacing all your egalitarian ideas with offensive stereotypes, or shoving all your most ingenious character creation, plots, and world-building into a blender to turn them into mass-market pablum? Because it takes millions of dollars to make a movie, which you could never raise on your own? What if I told you that you could stay in your home town or even home country, tell the stories you want to tell and the way you want to tell them, and that it wouldn't be Hollywood paying the bills, but your most loyal fans? Sound too good to be true? It won't sound that way to maverick indie filmmaker and pioneering crowdfunder Ben Dobyns,