“On electoral reform, the Liberals have their fingers in their ears,” by Brian Henry

Our Liberal government has made a terrible hash of its bid to engage Canadians in a dialogue about electoral reform. Along with 65% or 73% of Canadians (according to different polls (here & here), I believe that if the government is going to change our electoral system it ought to hold a referendum.

I even put my name to a petition urging the Liberals to do just that. After all, the government claims it wants to hear from Canadians, so what the heck. Some 14,000 other Canadians also thought it was worthwhile engaging in the dialogue the Liberals say they want and also put their names to the petition.

Apparently, though, the Liberals only want to talk to people who agree with them. The minister of democratic reform was good enough to respond to our petition, but apparently without reading it. She did not say whether the government might consider a referendum. She didn’t argue against a referendum. Apparently she didn’t even notice our petition concerned a referendum.

Instead, her response was a collection of off-the-shelf talking points, including two references to the importance of listening to Canadians.

Well, Canadians have spoken: a large majority want a referendum. The Liberal response? To put their fingers in their ears and sing, “La, la, la – we can’t hear you!”

For that matter, Canadians have already spoken on the outcome of the process: we don’t want electoral change. A poll conducted by Insights West found 62% of Canadians are satisfied with our current system, while only 25% dissatisfied (here).

The Broadbent Institute conducted a poll on the issue, and much as this left wing think tank would have loved to report that Canadians want a new electoral system, people just didn’t cooperate. Fifty-eight percent said they’d like only minor changes or no changes, compared to 41% who wanted big changes.

Mind you, that minority who’d like a new voting system don’t all want the same system. When, or if, the Liberals do propose some specific plan, the “change” vote will split, with many saying, No, not this change.

Indeed, Ontario, BC and PEI have already gone down the path of electoral reform, and since these provinces were led by people who believe in democracy, they held referenda. Each time, the proposed change to the way we vote was defeated. In Ontario, by far Canada’s most populous province, the proposal suffered one of the most massive political defeats in Canadian history.

The Liberals know all this. Trudeau has even used the likelihood of defeat as an argument against a referendum. “Many of the people who propose we need a referendum,” said Trudeau, “well they know that the fact is that referendums are a pretty good way of not getting any electoral reform.”

Well, yes, if people don’t want electoral reform, then we shouldn’t have it. That’s called listening to Canadians.

But Trudeau began the debate about electoral change by declaring that 2015 would be the last election held under our current “first past the post” system – in other words, he began disallowing the option most Canadians want. This isn’t listening. This is the Liberals putting their whole fists in their ears and singing, “My way.”

In truth, most Canadians don’t want to discuss our electoral system at all. 

Unfortunately, interested parties are involved. The Greens and the NDP are currently polling at 5% and 13% (here), but would still like to force their policies on Canadians by holding the balance of power. That’s what they hope a move toward proportional representation will give them.

For their part, some Liberals are scheming for a perpetual majority – one that pushes the NDP right off the electoral map – which is what they hope a move toward a preferential ballot will give them.

But the strongest force driving the debate about electoral reform comes from a small but obsessive cult of political wonks. These Utopians share a collective delusion that breaking our electoral system and replacing it with something shiny and new will bring political nirvana down from the heavens.

Of course, others argue that electoral change will multiply our problems. (For example, see what I had to say in the Toronto Star during the debate about electoral reform in Ontario here).

Most Canadians, though, would simply like our politicians to get on with governing.

Maybe there’s hope. In an interview with Paul Wells of the Toronto Star back at the beginning of summer, Trudeau said: “Actually, I have moved in my thinking toward a greater degree of openness towards what Canadians actually want.”

And then just a couple days ago, he told Le Devoir that maybe he won’t change things after all. "With the current system, they {Canadians} now have a government with which they’re happier {his government}. And the need to change the electoral system is less compelling," Trudeau said modestly (here).

He might have added that the Liberals have found almost no support for the preferential voting system which they'd prefer, while any form of proportional system (which the NDP prefers) would be a disaster for the Liberals. It would threaten, not only the Liberal majority next election, but even the continued existence of the Liberal party. (See halfway down here).

But I shouldn’t be cynical. If Trudeau decides to drop the idea of changing the way we vote – for whatever reason – then he can get on with things Canadians actually want him to work on: improving the lot of our aboriginal peoples, funding hospitals, maybe even building a pipeline. Hey, it’s a wonderful world – anything’s possible. 

A story about Israel and Syria for Rosh Hashanah

An Israeli girl (left) smiles at a Syrian girl (right) who suffered severe injuries when a shell exploded in her village.

“.מי שהציל נפש אחת - כאילו הציל עולם ומלואו” 

“Whoever saves a life, it is as if he saved the entire world.”

(Associated Press) NAHARIYA, Israel — It looks like a standard scene in the corner of the children's intensive care unit at a hospital in this northern Israeli town. The counter is jammed with stuffed animals, and balloons shaped like princesses float against the ceiling. A nervous, silent father hovers over his injured daughter.

But he and the girl are Syrians, spirited across the border by the Israeli military for medical treatment unavailable amid the civil war at home. He is silent because he cannot speak Hebrew, nervous because his presence in Israel, Syria's long-time enemy, could place his family in danger if his trip is discovered.

He came to the hospital six days ago, following after his daughter. He refuses to say how he arrived, and hospital staff step in quickly to deflect questions about the journey. He has no contact with his family at home. All of this, he says, is worth it.

“For my daughter, I'm willing to do anything,” said the father, who, like his 12-year-old daughter, could not be named because he fears repercussions in Syria.

While he was grateful for high-quality medical care, he was visibly afraid of the potential consequences of his trip, speaking in one-word answers and keeping his eyes lowered. He checked footage filmed by an AP Television News crew to make sure his daughter's face was obscured.

On both sides of the Syrian civil war, militant groups like Hezbollah and fighters linked to al-Qaida are virulently opposed to Israel's existence.

A young Syrian girl in Israeli hospital

The Syrian regime itself is a longtime Israeli enemy, and its citizens are banned from travel there, facing possible jail time if they are discovered.

The two countries have fought two wars, and Israel has annexed the Golan Heights, a plateau it captured when Syria attacked Israel in 1967.

President Bashar Assad and his late father Hafez, the former Syrian ruler, have used their anti-Israeli stance as a source of legitimacy and have hosted and funded anti-Israeli militants.

Generations of Syrians have grown up under propaganda vilifying the Jewish state.

All of this means that the father's presence in Israel could mean trouble for his family back home from any number of groups.

Those fears, said Dr. Zonis Zeev, the head of the children's ICU at Western Galilee Medical Center in the city of Nahiriya, are often the hardest for the patients to overcome.

"Probably at some time they were told about the 'animals' on the other side of the border, us, like the Zionists or the Jews," he said. "So they are terrified, and we have to treat the anxiety not less than treating the physical part. Sometimes it is much harder."

The hospital has treated 44 Syrian patients since March 27, four of them children as young as 3 years old. The 12-year-old daughter is one of seven Syrians currently scattered throughout different wards of the hospital, most guarded by Israeli soldiers stationed outside their rooms.

The Ziv Medical Center in the city of Safed, along with Army field hospitals, have also taken in Syrian patients.

Dr. Masad Barhoum, director-general of the hospital, said those numbers were a “drop in the ocean” given the scale of violence in Syria. The United Nations announced last month that their estimated death toll in the Syrian civil war had topped 100,000 people. Still, he said, his doctors are proud to offer whatever help they can.

In the case of the 12-year-old girl, her father had taken her to an aunt's house, thinking she would be safer there than at home. Instead, standing in the doorway of the sitting room 16 days ago, the girl was struck by flying shrapnel. The metal damaged her kidneys and spleen and wounded her back, said Zeev, the ICU chief.

The daughter underwent surgery in a hospital in Syria. It was there, the father said, that he heard secondhand whispers that treatment was available in Israel. “I heard from people that they treat people well here,” he said.

After five days in the Syrian hospital, the girl said, a relative of her aunt took her to the border.

The hospital used Arabic-speaking teachers and social workers to talk to the girl, and the aunt of another patient became like a surrogate mother to the rest of the ward. The staff provided comforts like a red stuffed elephant and portable DVD player. Her spirits were lifted five days later when her father showed up.

Shana Tova – happy new year – to all the little girls in the world. May this be a sweet year for us all - Brian

Elmore Leonard, rest in peace

The great crime novelist Elmore Leonard died this week, aged 87.

Here are Leonard’s ten rules for writing:

Get Shorty with Travolta, Hackman,
Russo and DeVito was the best of many 
film adaptations of Leonard's novels

Never open a book with the weather.

Avoid prologues.

Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.

Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said.”

Keep your exclamation points under control!

Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”

Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

Same for places and things.

Leave out the parts readers tend to skip.

Of course, as with all writing rules, there are exception. Orwell's 1984 opens with the weather, and I like prologues, though I seldom suggest them. 

See Brian Henry's upcoming weekly writing classes, one-day workshops, and four-day retreats here.

“It is in our nature to create stories,” by Jag Bhalla

Scientific American, May 8, 2013

For more than 25 years, I’ve been telling participants in my classes and workshops that our brains are designed to generate stories – that’s why writing on the spot from a random prompt works. It’s nice to see that science has gotten around to confirming this. (And thanks to Kathrine Byrnell for bringing this article to my attention.) – Brian

It is in our nature to need stories. They are our earliest sciences, a kind of people-physics. Their logic is how we naturally think. They configure our biology, and how we feel, in ways long essential for our survival.

Like our language instinct, a story drive—an inborn hunger for story hearing and story making—emerges untutored universally in healthy children. Every culture bathes their children in stories to explain how the world works and to engage and educate their emotions. Perhaps story patterns could be considered another higher layer of language. A sort of meta-grammar shaped by and shaping conventions of character types, plots, and social-rule dilemmas prevalent in our culture.

“Stories the world over are almost always about people with problems,” writes Jonathan Gottschall in The Story-telling Animal. They display “a deep pattern of heroes confronting trouble and struggling to overcome.” So a possible formula for a story = character(s) + predicament(s) + attempted extrication(s). This pattern transmits social rules and norms, describing what counts as violations and approved reactions. Stories offer “feelings we don’t have to pay [full cost] for.” They are simulated experiments in people-physics, freeing us from the limits of our own direct experience.

The “human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor,” says Jonathan Haidt.

Certainly we use logic inside stories better than we do outside. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby have shown that the Wason Selection Test can be solved by fewer than 10% as a logic puzzle, but by 70-90% when presented as a story involving detection of social-rule cheating.

Such social-rule monitoring was evolutionarily crucial because as Alison Gopnik notes “other people are the most important part of our environment.” In our ultra-social species, social acceptance matters as much as food. Indeed violating social rules can exclude you from group benefits, including shared food.

Darwin understood how our biology is fitted to the stories in our social environments, noting, “Many a Hindoo…has been stirred to the bottom of his soul by having partaken of unclean food.” The same thing eaten unknowingly would cause no reaction, so the story of the food, not the food itself, causes the “the soul shaking feeling of remorse.” Stories configure contextual triggers and the expected emotional reactions of our culture—perhaps defining a sort of emotional grammar.

Any story we tell of our species, any science of human nature, that leaves out much of what and how we feel is false. Nature shaped us to be ultra-social, and hence to be sharply attentive to character and plot. We are adapted to physiologically interact with stories. They are a key way in which our ruly culture configures our nature.

Previously in this series:

It Is in Our Nature to Be Self-Deficient
Inheriting Second Natures
Our Ruly Nature

Jag Bhalla is an entrepreneur and writer. His current project is Errors We Live By, a series of short exoteric essays exposing errors in the big ideas running our lives, details here. His last book was I'm Not Hanging Noodles On Your Ears, a surreptitious science gift book from National Geographic Books, details here.

See Brian Henry's schedule here, including writing workshops and creative writing courses in Kingston, Peterborough, Toronto, Mississauga, Brampton, Georgetown, Milton, Oakville, Burlington, St. Catharines, Hamilton, Dundas, Kitchener, Guelph, London, Woodstock, Orangeville, Newmarket, Barrie, Orillia, Gravenhurst, Sudbury, Muskoka, Peel, Halton, the GTA, Ontario and beyond.

What is New Adult fiction?

People keep asking me, What is New Adult fiction?

Answer: It’s YA for girls who have outgrown young adult novels or Chick Lit for college age women. Like Chick Lit and YA, New Adult fiction is often written in the first person and focuses on a particular time in a woman’s life. From a publisher’s perspective, an advantage of this new genre is that older women read it, too.

As of yet, there is no genre of New Adult fiction for men as well as women, but there are books that would fit the genre if it existed. Check out The Magicians and The Magician King by Lev Grossman, two novels that redefine the fantasy genre.

And here’s a journalistic take on New Adult fiction….

New Adult novels explore the terrifying and wonderful chasm between adolescence and adulthood.

From USA Today here.

·         New Adult authors include Jamie McGuire, J.Lynn, Molly McAdams, and Tammara Webber

·         The New Adult category draws readers who grew up loving Young Adult novels

·         The novels mix the emotional intensity of YA fiction with more mature elements

Mix the high-octane emotions of youth with the freedom of leaving home and you've brewed up a potent new book category called "New Adult."

Navigating the exhilarating, sometimes dangerous chasm between adolescence and adulthood, these novels — aimed at readers out of high school — are roaring up the best-seller list. The setting often is a college campus and the vibe is intense as only young love can be. It's sex, bad boys, too much drama and, if you consulted the characters' parents, not nearly enough library time!

For evidence, check out USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list, where Jamie McGuire's Walking Disasteris currently No. 1.

It's the companion book to McGuire's 2012 hit Beautiful Disaster, the tale of tormented college lovers Abby and Travis. She's on the straight and narrow while he's "Eastern University's Walking One-Night Stand."

McGuire has gone from a digital self-publishing success to landing a major publisher, Atria, which publishes her books in print and e-book formats. Beautiful Disaster sold more than 500,000 copies and Warner Bros. has optioned the film rights.

McGuire, 34, who lives in Oklahoma, credits the "self-publishing revolution" for the explosion of New Adult and creating a niche where none existed, filling the gap between Young Adult (YA, for readers ages 12-18) and commercial women's fiction for readers in their 20s and older.

"Bookstores didn't have a place for novels about college-aged students so publishers were unable to sell it," says McGuire.

McGuire, who has a 13-year-old daughter and has published a YA trilogy, says her New Adult novels are appropriate for readers 17 and older because "of the language, the mature themes, and there is more detail in the sex scenes."

Other YA novelists are finding success moving into the New Adult category. "Two years ago, agents and publishers couldn't place New Adult in the market," says writer Jennifer L. Armentrout, 32, from her home in West Virginia.

How things change. This spring, Armentrout's New Adult novel Wait for You spent six weeks on USA TODAY's list, reaching No. 5. Released under the name J. Lynn and self-published as an e-book, it tells the story of a 19-year-old college student carrying a terrible secret.

Thanks to the novel's strong sales, Armentrout, like McGuire, has signed with a major publisher, William Morrow, which will take over the e-book distribution of Wait for You, release a trade paperback edition and then publish the subsequent two books in the trilogy.

An established writer of 13 novels, Armentrout says New Adult is "the perfect middle ground" for a YA writer like herself who wanted to explore more mature issues. YA "has your characters' firsts: their first love, first hate." With New Adult, "it's more serious. The characters are older. They love more strongly and they are doing it without the safety net of parents or close high school friends," she says.

New Adult readers usually are women 18 and older who grew up on YA fiction. The category also draws older fans nostalgic for college, says Armentrout.

Colleen Hoover is another star. Three of Hoover's New Adult novels have hit the list with Hopeless reaching No. 2 in January. Her next title, This Girl, arrives April 30. It features a heroine named Layken who first appeared in Hoover's debut novel Slammed at age 18.

Shanyn Day of Elko, Nev., is a book blogger and fan of New Adult. For someone new to the category, she strongly recommends 2012's Easy by Tammara Webber (peaked on the list at No. 61). Set at a college, the novel has romance but also explores the impact of sexual assault.

New Adult fiction isn't simply YA novels with grown-up sex scenes, says Day, 27. "It's more the setting. College is a time of self-development, characters are trying to find themselves."

Interest in the category has generated a New Adult website  for both readers and writers called "NA Alley: Bridging the Gap Between Young Adult and Adult Fiction." One of the founders, Carrie Butler, 26, is an Ohio writer whose New Adult novel Strength (Sapphire Star) was published last month.

Butler credits technology with propelling the New Adult trend: "The e-book revolution pushed (New Adult) into the readers' hands," she says.

Armentrout's new publisher Liate Stehlik notes that with e-books and self-publishing, "things happen so much more quickly." When a mainstream publisher acquires a successful self-published author such as Armentrout, "You have the momentum. Fans of the category are discovering authors like Armentrout digitally."

Like the HBO hit show Girls, the characters in these books "are trying to find their way in the world...It's an intense time in your life," says Stehlik who has published a number of New Adult best sellers. They include Losing It by Cora Carmack and Taking Chances by Molly McAdams. 

Although the novels explore young love in all its glory and misery, the happy-ever-after-ending of a traditional romance isn't required. "It's modern romance … it's a happy-for-now ending," says Stehlik.

Nor is New Adult a variation on the erotic romance category dominated by E.L. James'Fifty Shades of Grey. "Sex is an element," says Stehlik, but "it's not the driving thread."

Laura Carter, 19, who is studying for a master's in chemistry at the University of East Anglia in the U.K., founded Goodreads' "New Adult Book Club" in December 2012. It has more than 1,600 members around the world.

"Self-discovery is often just as big a part of the books as any romance," she says. "Quite simply they are books about people who are new to adulthood. Hence the term New Adult."

Brian Henry will lead a "How to Get Published” workshop on Saturday, May 4, in Barrie, with guest literary agent Olga Filina of The Rights Factory (see here). To register, mail brianhenry@sympatico.ca

He’ll also lead “From the Horse’s Mouth: Getting published or self-published” at Ryerson University on June 15 with Stacey Donaghy of the Corvisiero Literary Agency, Greg Ioannou of Iguana Books, and Patrick Crean of HarperCollins Canada (details here). To register, mail brianhenry@sympatico.ca

However, before you submit, though, the best way to get your manuscript into shape is with a weekly course. This summer, Brian will be leading Intensive Creative Writing courses on Tuesday afternoons in Burlington (details here) and on Thursday evenings in Mississauga (details here). To register, email brianhenry@sympatico.ca

See Brian's full schedule here, including writing workshops and creative writing courses in Kingston, Peterborough, Toronto, Mississauga, Brampton, Georgetown, Milton, Oakville, Burlington, St. Catharines, Hamilton, Dundas, Kitchener, Guelph, London, Woodstock, Orangeville, Newmarket, Barrie, Orillia, Gravenhurst, Sudbury, Muskoka, Peel, Halton, the GTA, Ontario and beyond.