Hundreds of $10 heroes keep the Tall Tales coming

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
December 26, 2011

VICTORIA

A look back at the year that was:

In June, the Big Bad Wolf knocked at the door of Tall Tale Books, a children’s store.

The owners, Kate and Drew Lorimer, were prepared to shutter the store, giving up on a dream of creating a bright, kid-friendly bookstore of their own in downtown Victoria.

They decided to take one last shot, hitting on the idea of what they called the Hero Society. They asked patrons to subscribe for as little as $10 per month in exchange for merchandise at the store. That way the couple could have a predictable, guaranteed income and keep the store afloat.

Kate, Drew and Emma Grace Lorimer.

In a month-long campaign, they sought 400 subscribers by Canada Day.

How’d they do?

”Six months later, we’re still here,” Mr. Lorimer said.

“We got a little over 300, so we didn’t quite make out goal, but we’ve got an amazing group of people supporting us. Things are definitely better. It’s still week to week, month to month. We’re never out of the woods.”

The store’s third Christmas season has been its busiest yet. Particularly popular have been Patrick McDonnell’s Me ... Jane (“a picture book about Jane Goodall as a kid — adorable, simple sweet story but inspirational”) and Sherri Duskey Rinker’s Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site (“a humourous bedtime lullaby book about construction vehicles on a worksite going to bed with teddy bears and blankies”).

In the end, another year passed with the Lorimers having kept the wolf at bay. Can’t yet call it a happy ending, as the story of Tall Tale Books is still being written.

Of the more than 50 “Eyes on the Island” columns published this year, none got as much attention as a report on Daniel Loxton’s efforts to get published an illustrated children’s book on evolution. The Victoria writer and illustrator shopped his book to American publishers, none of which would agree to bring the book to market.

Instead, the evolution book was released by Canadian-owned Kids Can Press of Toronto.

The news that American publishers wouldn’t touch a children’s book about evolution generated about 600 Tweets, including one by the film and culture critic Roger Ebert, as well as more than 4,000 Facebook recommendations. It was mentioned on CNN.

Mr. Loxton’s book, Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be, went on to win the prestigious Lane Anderson Award for young readers. The judges described the book as a “tour de force of science writing.”

Soon after, Loxton launched his second book, Ankylosaur Attack, at Tall Tale Books. A herd of dinosaur-loving children, many of them exhibiting their fierce claws and fangs, listened to the author Grr! Arr! and Rawr! his way through a reading.

Social media also played a prominent role in the municipal campaign of Lisa Helps, who was one of three rookies elected to Victoria city council in November. Ms. Helps’ savvy operation included regular Facebook and Twitter updates. She called on other candidates to join her in a hootenanny at Logan’s Pub and she held weekly work crews to repair fences and tidy community gardens.

The candidate whose name doubles as a campaign slogan finished in third place in the at-large election, within striking distance of topping the polls.

After her victory, she converted her campaign website into one in which she asks the public for input on issues facing council. Her slogan: “A city where citizens lead.” It will be interesting in the new year to see if the citizens feel any more empowered with this council than its predecessors.

Last January, we looked at the shuttering of the Blethering Place, a restaurant on Oak Bay’s High Street decorated as though by one’s eccentric English auntie. For three decades, the restaurant served as Victoria’s “favourite faux Tudor tearoom,” as it was called, offering bangers and mash to a clientele that included Graham Kerr, the Galloping Gourmet. Today, the Oak Bay Bistro offers bison, chicken liver parfait, and local artisan goat cheese from Saltspring Island.

Fish and chips? Not on the menu. But there is slow-roasted Arctic char with roasted sunchoke and sweet potato hash.

Oak Bay has lost some of its Olde England flavour. All for the better.

Children's book too hot for U.S. publishers warmly received in Canada

Daniel Loxton, an illustrator and author, has a deadline reminder in his home office. Chad Hipolito photograph for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
September 14, 2011

VICTORIA

Daniel Loxton, an illustrator and writer, created a children’s book so outrageous, so outlandish, so controversial no American publisher dared touch it.

It does not depict nudity. It does not contain curse words. It does not include blasphemy. The love scenes, such as they are, involve males with females.

It does include a straightforward explanation for the complexity of the natural world through a simple scientific theory.

“So many of the publishing professionals I was talking to were leery,” he said.

“When push came to shove they declined to publish the book. Several did indicate to me it was too hot a topic.”

The book wound up being published by Canadian-owned Kids Can Press, which also expected objections from creationists.

So far, the book, Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be, an illustrated primer written for readers in Grades 3 to 7, has generated more prize nominations than controversy.

Evolution is one of three young-reader finalists in the Lane Anderson Award for Canadian science books. The other finalists for the $10,000 prize, to be awarded Wednesday, are Ultimate Trains by Peter McMahon of Ontario and The Sea Wolves by the British Columbia team of Ian McAllister, a photographer, and Nicholas Read, a writer.

Mr. Loxton’s book is also a finalist in the Norma Fleck Award for Canadian children’s non-fiction. Earlier this year, Evolution was a finalist for the prestigious Silver Birch award.

His latest book, just published, is Ankylosaur Attack about a young, plant-eating, heavy-plated dinosaur.

Mr. Loxton, 36, is editor of Junior Skeptic, a youth supplement included in each issue of Skeptic, a California-based magazine that “examines extraordinary claims.”

He lived an itinerant life in an Airstream trailer as a boy. His parents were contractors who hired planters at clear cuts throughout British Columbia. As for his upbringing, he describes it as being a mix of Utopian and feral.

His parents believed in much paranormal phenomenon. As a boy, he was convinced he had stumbled across a Sasquatch footprint deep in the woods.

He discovered skeptical inquiry as a university student, finding science had explanations for such folkloric beliefs as UFOs and ESP, alien abductions and succubus attacks, human combustion and the predictions of Nostradamus.

Now he has a career solving paranormal mysteries. As Harry Houdini once did. Or Scooby-doo.

Even when displaying a sense of humour, hokum-busting skeptics convey a certain killjoy quality. After all, who does not want to believe in a hairy, harmless, beer-guzzling Bigfoot?

“I want to teach people stuff,” he said. “I don’t want to cram anything down anybody’s throat.”

So, how does a “professional skeptic” handle the topic of the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus with his five-year-old son?

(Spoiler alert: The truth behind fictitious childhood characters revealed below.)

So far, the lad has not asked about a chocolate-sharing rabbit, or a wand-waving dentine thief. As for the gift-toting jolly man whose belly shakes like a bowlful of jelly, the parents are taking a soft position.

“We’re not debunking it,” he said. “I’m a sentimental kind of a guy.”

Which is to say the Loxton household is experiencing the three stages of Santa theorem: You believe in Santa. You don’t believe in Santa. You are Santa.

An illustration from Ankylosaur Attack by Daniel Loxton and Jim W.W. Smith.

Anarchist archive

The University of Victoria library has received seven boxes of papers from Ann Hansen, who was sentenced to a life term for conspiring to rob an armoured car and for a series of bombings in Ontario and British Columbia in the early 1980s. The material, which includes pamphlets and prison correspondence, will be included in the Anarchist Archive founded by art historian Allan Antliff, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Modern Art.

Mr. Antliff approached Ms. Hansen for the donation, for which she will receive no payment. Much of the material will be posted online alongside other anti-authoritarian materials in what is the only archive of its kind in Canada.

The most interesting contribution is a transcript of conversations recorded from a police bug police placed in her bedroom before her arrest. Alas, a 70-year privacy restriction has been placed on the transcript, which will not be accessible to the public until 2081.

Ms. Hansen, 58, spent seven years in jail. She got permission from her parole officer to travel to the campus last week from her home on a farm west of Kingston, Ont., where she remains active in the prison abolition movement.


Official loudmouth

George Bowering, who was Canada’s first parliamentary poet laureate, is a baseball aficionado. He has been issued business cards by the Vancouver Canadians baseball club on which he is identified as the Official Loudmouth Fan. (Anyone who has heard his Foghorn Leghorn declamations from his perch behind home plate would not need a card to confirm his role.) Mr. Bowering’s team won the league championship on the weekend, sending dozens of rooters into paroxysms of non-riotous celebration.

The prolific author took a break from his own merrymaking to write a letter decrying the award of an Order of B.C. to former premier Gordon Campbell. Mr. Bowering was himself invested in the order seven years ago.

Perhaps honours for professional politicians should mirror those of professional athletes, who typically must wait five years before induction into a sports hall of fame. The passage of time allows for a more sober-minded accounting long after passions have cooled.