Celebrate Valentine’s Day with the Blues

What I love about Huron County is its uniqueness. For those looking for an untraditional way to celebrate Valentine’s Day – either on their own, in a group of friends or as a couple – trek to Brussels, Ont.  to the renown Cinnamon Jim’s Cafe and enjoy an amazing dinner and an incredible Blues experience. I am talking about the music not the emotional pit Valentine’s Day often plunges people into. On February 13, Cinnamon Jim’s offers dinner (a choice of stuffed baked salmon, rolled ribs & dressing, chicken cordon bleu or prime rib with all the fixings) and an evening of open mike blues performances started off by Ronny Kellerman and Johnny Bryndza of the Bad & Blue group. Cost is $35/person and includes the show – (less than you’ll pay at chain restaurants that jack the prices because of the holiday).  Those blues players who want to jam (free admission, no free dinner) and those available can come after 8:30 pm when the admission is $10/person. It all takes place in the Upper Deck above Cinnamon Jim’s in Brussels.

If you have a taste for more Blues in Brussels, circle these dates on your calendar. Cost is $35/person for dinner & music or $10 after 8:30 pm for the music, if there is any room left.

March 19th – Collin Taylor Group

May 21th – Morgan Davis (2004 Juno Blues album of the year & winner of 4 Maple awards) – $15/person after 8:30 pm.

For more information call the Cinnamon Jim cafe at 887-8011. Jim Lee, the owner of the cafe that makes the best cinnamon rolls around, is a multi-talented man who owns a mechanical design firm, operates the cafe and loves the Blues. He’s figured out how to feed both his musical love and his gift of a talented kitchen. This is a popular series, so don’t do the Huron County hangback and wait till the last minute to commit your time. Call the Cafe and book your tickets early. Or take a chance, journey out to Brussels after 8:30 pm and hope there’s room available.

(P.S. Thanks Sheana for the heads up on this cool way to spend Valentine’s Day.)

Nugget of History-Why Huron County exists?

While doing some researching for a contract I am working on,  I came across James Scott’s The Settlement of Huron County. It was published in 1966 by Ryerson Press, Toronto. It is an interesting read and good source of background material on the area. Huron County came into being, according to Scott, because of the War of 1812.

During the War of 1812, when the British and Americans were duking it out on Canadian soil for the ownership of the country, much property was damaged, as happens in a war. The damage was done by both American and British soldiers as the battlelines advanced and retreated. After the British won the war, with the help of the natives, the settlers whose properties suffered damages and theft of produce and livestock, petitioned the British Government for damages. To placate them, (probably so they did not rise in rebellion like their cousins to the south) they sent over a two person Commission – one of whom was John Galt, a tall Scotchman from Greenock. They took note of the damages and recommended a sum to the British government for reparations, which the British Government was very reluctant to cover. Galt was not one to welch on his word (he was not a career politician). He cast about his very creative brain to come up with a solution.

His solution was that the British government sell the large tracts of land they held as Crown reserves and Clergy reserves in Canada to pay the reparation claims. 2/7 of each township was set aside for Crown and Clergy reserves which was impeding settlement. Galt’s plan was to get settlers into these wild, stretches of primary forest that sat in the midst of towns, villages and townships. Strachan, head man of the Anglican Church in Upper Canada, considered the Clergy Reserves his and did not like the plan. The British government essentially put Galt and Strachan in a room and told them to come up with a solution or the reparation plan was off. They were betting on the inability of these two men, an English cleric and a Scottish businessman, to get along, much less cooperate. 

Surprisingly, they came to a compromise. Instead of clergy reserves, Strachan suggested Galt go after the newly negotiated parcel of 1 million acres in the Huron Tract. This former hunting grounds of the Mohawk and Chippewa branches of the Iroquois was the compromise. Long story short – after much haggling, the British government agreed, the Canada Company was formed and the land gradually put on the sales block. Thus began the settlement of Huron County.    

However, the colonists never got their reparation money.

Taglines – What do they say about your museum?

Have you ever noticed the taglines that flood our media? Everything has a one sentence explanation that appears just to the right of the logo or underneath the product/company/museum name. Here are a couple I picked out while flipping through the American Association of State and Local History’s membership magazine and a local culinary magazine EatDrink- Past Perfect (Software for Museums), ChemArt (Keepsakes Etched in Time), Auto Mall (Shop naked for your next wheels), Amici (Authentic Italian Cuisine), Eddingtons of Exeter (Casual Fine Dining), Katana Kafe (A little out of the way, A lot out of the ordinary). What I liked about these taglines was they explained in a millisecond what the business was or how it was different. I probably would have thought the Auto Mall was a huge mall of automobile dealerships, awash in car salesmen, but the tagline lets me know that it is an online place to shop for cars, so that when I do venture to the car dealerships (in my clothes), I’m ready to bargain and not be taken advantage of.

What set off this contemplation of taglines?  I was looking for the rules of the upcoming Toronto Star Short Story contest (for all you writers – the deadline is Feb 28, 2010 - see www.thestar.com/contests for rules) and was smitten with the tagline shown on  the poster for The Book Lover’s Ball (a Toronto Public Library Foundation event, on February 11 at the Fairmont Royal York) Toronto’s Library. Absolutely Vital. – it’s brilliant, simple and gets across the difficult message that library are vital organizations in our communities, without all the excess words. In today’s world, there is so much to read that people tend to graze unless it is something they are deeply interested in. Culture tends to be verboise about itself. How simple a way to convey a very important message – Absolutely Vital.

So I undertook a little experiment. I went to the Canadian Museums Association site and checked out their Canadian Museum Directory. I scrolled through the museum listings, and clicked on museums with websites (you’d be shocked at how many museums do not have a website, or even an email address). I looked through the websites looking for logos and taglines – again  shocking how many don’t have either. I collected a list of museum taglines and I have to say the majority were uninspiring, bland and repetitive – the perennial favourites being – “Preserving the Past, Building the Future” or “Where History Lives.” 

Museums need to revolutionize the public’s perception of them. They must proclaim themselves ”Vital,” “Unique,”  “Important.” In an era when museums, especially Canadian museums, turn more and more to public  funding, they must drag their heads out of the collections, wipe away the cobwebs and figure out where they fit in their local, provincial and national neighbourhoods then strongly proclaim their presence. Declare the importance in short, vibrant terms that the local politicians and the public can easily absorb. Here are some quick, unrefined examples from Huron County, Ontario - Sloman School on Wheels (Only school in a caboose west of Montreal), Reuben R. Sallows Gallery (Photographic Evidence of Canada’s Pioneer Era), Huron County Museum (Experts in Local Culture) - now compare these with typical museum taglines – Sloman School on Wheels (Makes History Come Alive), Reuben R. Sallows Gallery (Where the Past is Present) and Huron County Museum (Where the Past is Our Future). Of course, better taglines can be created when a group of creative, interested individuals gather around a table and volley ideas back and forth. And the great thing about taglines – they can be changed depending on the audience, the event, or the intent. Unlike some museum marketing (and exhibits), they are not etched in stone doomed for use beyond their relevance or timeliness.

My challenge at large is – Museum people grab your pencils and start volleying taglines. Brainstorm about where they could be used. See if this little exercise doesn’t inject some vigour into how you view the outside world and how they view you.

Museums Reconsidered

In 7 years, Canada will celebrate its 150th birthday. I wonder if it will set off the heritage mania that the centennial celebrations of 1967 did. Community museums formed. Local Women’s Institute chapters went door to door collecting artifacts for the new museums. Buildings – old schools, abandoned post offices, empty community halls – were donated to the cause by small municipalities while fervent volunteer organizations sprang up to man them. That was 43 years ago. Many of the original custodians of culture have retired, burned out or died. Over the last 43 years, the position of curator, conservator, even docent has been professionalized. Guidelines and policies define how to collect, how to store, how to exhibit and how to program.

And yet while larger organizations, like the National Museums, are slowly changing, many smaller museums are doing the same things they did in 1967. They exist, precariously supported by municipal charity and volunteer passion. They head the list of ”unnecessary services” in the political book of easy places to cut without arousing huge public outcry. They accept, for the most part, whatever is brought in, struggle to deal with awkward buildings, no storage and little money for staff or exhibits. They go through cycles – dedicated group vowing to save & promote local history, success, initial group retires, complacency, decline, dedicated group vowing to save & promote local history. 

Just as we face the necessity to do things differently economically, we need to reconsider our museums. How many butter churns need to be saved? How many scythes? Wedding dresses? Model Ts? The question of heritage is bigger than the things, yet the things make a concept real. For a time, the amateur museums of the 60s displayed everything in a hodgepodge of discovery. You saw not one shovel but 10, different sizes, shapes, makes and uses. Then came the contextual museum where a room was used to tell the story of how an axe was important to local pioneers. Only the best artifact was used and the rest were stored away from everyone’s eyes, including the family that donated it and wondered what happened to it. To create these displays up rose ranks of professional exhibit designers.  Where are we now? When old museums under go a $2 million facelift and complete with state-of-the-art environmental controls and hire fancy exhibit designers, the response to the new exhibits & buildings is often disappointment. The cases are empty, the artifacts in wonderful new storage and the galleries full of interactives – computer screens, buttons to push, flaps to open, models to look at. But nary an artifact in sight. What once felt homey and interesting now induces museum fatigue, cement ache and boredom.

So where are we as we approach our sesquicentennial? What new museums will arise? What will they exhibit? How will they inform us about the place in which we live? And the everpresent political question - will they be sustainable? As we recognize that culture is an economical force, we need to interact with our heritage in a different way. Not just through an exhibit case or computer screen but by bringing back the open collections, put history in context – not in a gallery but on the street or sideroad where it happened. Imbue our communities with all the stories they have been the setting for. Contain it not in one mouldering heritage building but let it spill out and illuminate all of a community’s facets. Make the museums a celebration of senses and culture by producing butter with the butter churn to put on tea biscuits that we eat as we listen to a Celtic ghost story about that mansion on the corner, told in the faltering but clear voice of the woman whose Scottish family still owns the butter bowl made out of one of the trees from the virgin forests felled to create this town. It is possible.

Path of Most Resistance

Illumination Needed!

I have two deep desires – one is to entice people to support history, heritage and the organizations that support these ideas generously and the other is to write and publish fiction, history and nonfiction books. The two desires seem to be at opposite ends of the spectrum – or at least the way I approach them seems to be. Not to mention the fact I have spectacularly bad timing – or so it would appear.

Finances being what they are, people are clamping their hands around their wallets and cutting back on the frills – and what is more frillish than heritage and books, the two things I love greatly. I’ve watched politicians sit in council chambers  and threaten to “de-designate” heritage buildings because it costs too much to upgrade them. I could just see the imaginary thought bubbles around the political powwow table “Wish we could bulldoze the damn thing.” Lucky for my blood pressure, they were too polite to say so out loud.

So I work away within the heritage organizations, the small ones, trying to help make them count, make them community-centred, interesting, find them money to operate and volunteer up my time, my family’s time and even my family’s friends’ time to help them survive and prosper. All the while thinking there has to be another way.

In  my fiction I set my characters amid historical settings, pit them against those who don’t care about heritage and help them win. I seek the other ways in a world I can construct, or at the very least, influence. It is a great release from the frustration that feeds the passion of those, like me, who wander into the minefields of heritage and history as a calling. And every so often out of the writing emerges a story – some real, some fiction – that stands on its own merits, filling me with the desire to share it and see what journeys it will take its readers on.  Some of the best fiction has inspired me with solutions to real-time challenges, while history is a constant source of enlightenment to the survival of present problems. What comes around, goes around.

Everywhere I go is coloured by its past. A road is not just a road, it is the crossroads where a man was murdered one night after coming home from a visit with friends, the murderer still at large one hundred years later. Or a place where trains used to thunder past three times a day, making the postcard the equivalent of today’s cell phone or text message (believe it or not postcards could arrive the same day they were sent, informing the person who received it that you were coming into town tomorrow on the morning train). I walk through stories and see a world shaded by the past, mired in the present and, sometimes, threatened by the future. And I pursue its right, no its need, to exist through my work in supporting fact and creating fiction.

Culture Funded in Huron County

Pure Huron County youth talent, via HCP

Yesterday (January 4, 2010), at the Blyth Memorial Community Hall in Blyth, Ontario, two  Trillium Foundation grants were announced and presentations made by the MPP for Huron Bruce, Carol Mitchell.  The hard-working recipients of the grants were the Heritage Culture Partnership and Blyth Festival. These  are but two of  many organizations in Huron County that present culture and promote heritage. Although those in the city understand the need for museums, galleries, opera companies and orchestras to enhance the allure of their city, it is taking the smaller centres a longer time to grasp its necessity and more importantly, its ability to attract money to an area.

The latest two Trillium awards are just the tip of the iceberg. Heritage Culture Partnership, a network of over 60 artists, writers, theatres, heritage sites, galleries, businesses and individuals, has ramped up their role in the provision of culture over the last 2 years. At the end of 2009, they had organized and premiered a Huron County food festival,  held a successful second Aboriginal Festival, began planning for a second award-winning Haunted Huron season, and began wrapping up a youth arts program that gave Huron County youth the opportunity to work with professionals in art, film and music. In addition to planning and presenting professional calibre events, they brought in profesional singer/songwriter Jane Siberry, known presently as Issa as well as Buffy Sainte Marie, helped coordinate a book festival and much more. All with a volunteer advisory board, energetic, talented part-time staff and lots of grant proposals and partnerships.

The other recipient of a Trillium grant, the Blyth Festival, is world renown for their development and presentation of high calibre Canadian theatre. They began as a fringe theatre company that took Canadian drama to a country stage 35 years ago. They developed an audience and high level of professionalism and talent, not to mention manage a $1 million budget, bring $2.4 million dollars into the area, and employ 4 to 60 staff as well as over 100 volunteers. They provide over 230 community groups with tickets, that they turn around and use in fundraisers for their organizations, and distribute over $16,900 among church and community groups from their Country Supper program. All this plus amazing Canadian theatre which brings over 21,000 people a year to this small farming village of 1000 people.

Exciting things happen where culture and heritage thrive. The Trillium grants, $32,000 for upgrades to the Blyth Memorial Hall and $34,500 for Heritage Culture Partnership to hire a community cultural advisor are just the tip of the iceberg. The Blyth Memorial Hall upgrade, long overdue, will employ local trades, and stabilize an historic building that was created to recognize the sacrifice made by local men and women who fought overseas under the Canadian flag. This little bit of funding will enhance a unique cultural landmark and make it more accessible for all and more energy efficient for the future. The cultural community advisor will not only participate in the creation of  more outstanding cultural programming in Huron County but will help existing small cultural and heritage organizations work together and work smarter. As more of our smaller organizations learn how to cooperate and plan together, more grant money will flow into the area, funding more programs, events and building/restoration projects.

The difference between supporting and creating culture or letting the buildings fall down and starving the heritage groups is  monumental. In one scenario, is a village of 1000 attracts 21 times its population every year. In the other, is a deserted crossroad with a boarded up hall. No one lives there. They all moved away to the city or nearest town where there was something to do.

P.D. James and the Mystery of Mysteries & History

I was reading the Maclean’s from a couple of weeks ago and came across an article about P.D. James and her latest book, a memoir of sorts about her experience as a mystery writer. I love mysteries – reading them, solving them and writing them. When you get right down to it – what is history but a mystery? Historians try to reconstruct the scene of a time, an event or a person. They sift through clues – written notes from the battlefield, a person’s journal, what other historian’s say about them. They trace down all the sources by going through the bibliographies looking for new information, new interpretations. All this reading, digging and research – it is what a detective does. Like a detective, good historians go to the scene of the crime, scan the landscape for clues, maybe do a little digging (otherwise known as the practice of archaeology). Why else would one spend days in archives, going through old newspapers on microfilm, gently sifting through original papers? Historians like detectives are in search of a clue, that one sliver of information that will shed new light on an old conundrum. The most mysterious thing to me is how so many people assume history is boring. The blame for this widespread misconception I lay at the feet of overworked, unimaginative history teachers who are chained to curriculum. History, like mysteries, can be quite addictive and entertaining.

When I write fiction, it inevitably boils down to a mystery, often inspired by history. I like the genre and like P.D. James I like the structure.  I love the search for the answer – when I write I have no idea how it is going to end and love the surprises that pop up along the way. By the time I get to the end of my first draft, it is like reading a book – I don’t know the end till I get there. It’s the editing that is fun. Now that I know the ending, I go back and tighten up the story, throw in the red herrings and slash the stuff that doesn’t belong. And I fall in love with the story, the characters and the mystery all over again.  The first time I completed a mystery novel, I was amazed – editing felt like cheating. I guess I naively assumed that mystery writers  just wrote out the story and all those cool twists and turns came out with the first draft. Then I discovered as a novelist I could add those cool twists in after and smooth it out so it flows. So much of writing history is linear but writing mysteries allows you to twist and swerve. How much fun is that.