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Mystery tomatoes

For some time now our family has been ordering our groceries online from a local company called “Les Jardins Urbains” (Urban Gardens). At first, the idea was simply to streamline our lives and to save our Saturdays that were getting eaten up by thankless tasks like shopping. We’ve been procuring food like this for well over a year now, and pray that Reza, our friend and proprietor of “Les Jardins Urbains,” will never go out of business, because we could never go back.

Reza’s food is organic and largely local. Our duck, for example, comes from Lac Brome, our carrots from the Saguenay, and our tomatoes from his greenhouses.

I’ve never been a much of a food snob or a big believer in the organic movement (for one thing, I’m suspicious of the ecological argument for organic strawberries that have travelled to Quebec from California), but I have to admit that our new way of accessing food has changed our relationship to it. We now eat more seasonally than ever before — each spring we await the news that the special sweet and spicy lettuce blends are available and that garlic shoots can  be ordered — and food that is grown close by really does taste better.

But tonight, together with my weekly food delivery, came a surprise. I was gardening when Reza announced that he had a gift for me.

A few minutes later he returned from his van bearing four tiny tomato seedlings. He explained that after reading my post about how gardens reflect our lives, he’d been inspired to bring me some plants. There’s a hanging one for our son, one each for my husband and me, and one that I’m symbolically setting aside for our cat Yashka, since we don’t want any orphans or jealousy.

The tomatoes, he said, are a mystery. We don’t know what colour or shape each will bear, but they won’t be conventional.

So what started for me as a purely practical matter — this habit of ordering food every week — has brought unanticipated richness. Friendship, better health, a reader I didn’t even realize I had, and a heartwarming acknowledgment of my work in the form of four mystery tomato plants.

If you live in the Montreal area, check out “Les Jardins Urbains” here.

[Photo: Ken Whytock]

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Malahat Review — Creative Non-Fiction Prize

Creative Non-Fiction Prize

The Malahat Review, Canada’s premier literary magazine, invites entries from Canadian, American, and overseas authors for its Creative Non-Fiction Prize. One award of $1,000 CAD is given.

2010 Deadline

The deadline for the 2010 Creative Non-Fiction Prize is August 1, 2010 (postmark date).

Guidelines

The entry must be between 2,000 and 3,000 words. Please indicate word count on the first page. Please double space your work.
No restrictions as to subject matter or approach apply. For example, the entry may be personal essay, memoir, cultural criticism, nature writing, or literary journalism.

Entry fee required:
$35 CAD for Canadian entries
$40 US for American entries
$45 US for entries from Mexico and outside North America.

Entrants receive a one-year subscription to The Malahat Review for themselves or a friend.

Entries previously published, accepted, or submitted for publication elsewhere are not eligible.

Entrants’ anonymity is preserved throughout the judging. Contact information (including an email address) should not appear on the submission, but along with the title on an enclosed separate page.

No submissions will be accepted by email.

The winner and finalists will be notified via email.

Entrants will not be notified about the judges’ decisions even if an SASE is enclosed for this purpose.

The winner and finalists will be announced on the Malahat web site, with the publication of the winning entry in The Malahat Review’s Winter 2010 issue, and in Malahat lite, the magazine’s quarterly e-newsletter, in October 2010.

No entries will be returned, even if accompanied by an SASE.

Send entries and enquiries to:

The Malahat Review
University of Victoria
P.O. Box 1700
Stn CSC
Victoria, B.C. V8W 2Y2
Canada

Email: malahat@uvic.ca
Telephone: 250-721-8524
Fax: 250-472-5051

Entrants wishing to pay by credit card may download and complete our Credit Card Payment Form then enclose it with their entries.

Previous Creative Non-Fiction Prize Winners:
2009  Judy Copeland
2008 Joel Yanofsky (Won Silver for Personal Journalism at the 32nd Annual National Magazine Awards)
2007 Vaia Barkas

[Photo: cgkinla]

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Job Posting: Writers’ Union of Canada, Executive Director

The Writers’ Union of Canada

Deadline: June 29, 2010

Job Description: Executive Director

www.writersunion.ca/executivedirector.pdf.

The Position Summary:

Reporting to the National Council Executive, the Executive Director is the senior staff officer of the Union, responsible for its successful leadership and management under the strategic direction set by the National Council.

Primary Duties and Responsibilities

The Executive Director performs some or all of the following:

Leadership

· Participates with the National Council in developing a strategic plan to guide the Union

· Identifies, assesses, and informs the National Council of internal and external issues that affect the Union

· Acts as a professional advisor to the National Council on all aspects of the Union‘s activities

· Fosters effective teamwork throughout the organization

· Conducts official correspondence on behalf of and/or in coordination with the National Council as appropriate

· Represents the organization at public activities to enhance the Union‘s community profile

Operational planning and management

· Develops an operational plan to implement the strategic plan of the Union

· Ensures that the operation of the Union meets the expectations of its members, National Council and funders

· Oversees the efficient and effective day-to-day operation of the Union

· Drafts policies for the approval of the National Council and prepares implementation procedures; regularly reviews existing policies and recommends changes to the National Council as appropriate

· Ensures that personnel and member files are securely stored and privacy/ confidentiality is maintained

· Supports the National Council by preparing meeting agendas and support materials, and by comprehensively assisting at the Annual General Meeting and all National Council meetings

Program planning and management

· Oversees the planning, implementation and evaluation of the Union’s programs, services and special projects, ensuring that they contribute to the Union‘s mission and reflect the priorities of the National Council

· Monitors the day-to-day delivery of programs and services to maintain or improve quality

Human resources planning and management

· Determines staffing requirements for organizational management and program delivery

· Oversees the implementation of human resources policies, procedures and practices including the development of job descriptions for all staff

· Recruits, interviews and selects staff that have the right technical and personal abilities to help further the organization’s mission

· Ensures that all staff receive an orientation to the organization and appropriate training

· Establishes a positive, healthy and safe work environment in accordance with all appropriate legislation and regulations

· Coaches and mentors staff as appropriate to improve performance

· Implements a performance management process for all staff which includes regularly monitoring staff performance and conducting an annual performance review

· Disciplines staff when necessary using appropriate techniques; releases staff when necessary using appropriate and legally defensible procedures

Financial planning and management

· Works with staff, the Treasurer and National Council to prepare a comprehensive budget

· Works with the National Council to secure adequate funding for the operation of the Union

· Researches funding sources, oversees the development of fundraising plans, writes proposals, and participates in fundraising activities to increase Union revenues

· Approves expenditures within the authority delegated by the National Council

· Ensures that sound bookkeeping and accounting procedures are followed

· Administers the funds of the Union according to the approved budget and monitors monthly cash flow

· Provides the National Council with comprehensive, regular reports on the revenues and expenditures of the Union

· Ensures that the Union complies with all legislation covering taxation and withholding payments

Community relations/advocacy

· Communicates with members and sector partners to keep them informed of the work of the Union and to identify changes in the community served by the Union

· Establishes good working relationships and collaborative arrangements with community groups, funders, politicians, and other organizations

· Heightens and enhances the Union’s public profile

· Publicizes the Union’s positions on issues as directed by National Council

· Researches arts issues, becomes familiar with government departments, and prepares background papers on policies affecting Union members

· Advocates on behalf of the Union by lobbying federal and provincial governments to forward the interests of Canada’s book writers

Risk management

· Identifies and evaluates the risks to the Union‘s people (members, staff,  volunteers), property, finances, goodwill, and image, and implements measures to control risks

· Ensures that the National Council and the Union carry appropriate and adequate insurance coverage, and that the Board and staff understand the terms, conditions and limitations of that coverage

Qualifications

Education

· University degree in a related field

Knowledge, skills and abilities

· Knowledge of leadership and management principles as they relate to National Arts Service /non-profit/ voluntary organizations

· Knowledge of all federal and provincial legislation applicable to voluntary sector organizations including: employment standards, human rights, occupational health and safety, charities, taxation, CPP, EI, health coverage etc…

· Knowledge of current community challenges and opportunities relating to the mission of the Union

· Knowledge of human resources management

· Knowledge of financial management

· Knowledge of project management

· Knowledge of marketing and communications

Proficiency in the use of computers for:

· Word processing

· Financial management

· E-mail

· Internet research

· Marketing and communications, including social networking

Personal characteristics

The Executive Director should demonstrate competence in some or all of the following:

· Adapts Well: Demonstrates a willingness to be flexible, versatile and/or tolerant in a changing work environment while maintaining effectiveness and efficiency.

· Behaves Ethically: Understands ethical behaviour and business practices, and ensures that his/her own behaviour and the behaviour of others is consistent with these standards and aligns with the values of the Union.

· Thinks Strategically: Assesses options and actions based on trends and conditions in the environment, and the vision and values of the Union.

· Builds Relationships: Establishes and maintains positive working relationships with others, both internally and externally, to achieve the goals of the Union.

· Communicates Effectively: Speaks, listens and writes in a clear, thorough and timely manner excelling in the use of all effective methods of public communication on behalf of the Union.

· Demonstrates Creativity and Innovation: Develops new and unique ways to improve the operations of the Union and to create new opportunities.

· Focuses on Member Needs: Anticipates, understands, and responds to the needs of members and sector partners to meet or exceed their expectations within the Union’s scope of work.

· Fosters Teamwork: Works cooperatively and effectively with others to set goals, resolve problems and enhance organizational effectiveness.

· Excels in Research: Conducts thorough and useful research into writing and other arts-related issues to support informed decision-making by National Council and to enhance member services.

· Leads Effectively: Influences others in positive ways to achieve results that further the work of the Union.

· Makes Decisions: Assesses situations to determine the importance, urgency and risks, and makes clear decisions which are timely and in the best interests of the Union.

· Plans and Organizes: Determines strategies, sets priorities, develops a work schedule, monitors progress towards goals, and evaluates the process and results.

· Solves Problems: Assesses problem situations to identify causes, gathers and processes relevant information, generates possible solutions, and makes recommendations and/or resolves the problem.

Experience

· 5 or more years of progressive management experience in a not for profit organization

Working Conditions

· The Executive Director usually works in an office environment, but the mission of the organization may sometimes take him or her to non standard workplaces. Some travel is usually required.

· The Executive Director works a standard work week, but additionally will often work evening and weekends, to accommodate activities such as National Council meetings and representing the organization at public events.

[Photo: Chapendra]

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On the kindness of strangers

For the past week I’ve been sending badly written Russian emails to strangers all over Siberia. In them I explain that I will be arriving in Tomsk with my cousin in August by train, that we are looking for the village where our grandmother lived and worked for seventeen years, that I am a Canadian writer of English-language books, and that I would appreciate any help they could offer in locating Brovka.

Amazingly, some of these strangers respond.

This is not the first time I’ve imposed myself and my odd sense of what’s worth writing about on people I don’t know. I’ve arrived in small American towns asking strange questions about saints’ relics, place-names and local history and I’ve shown up in French villages inquiring after long-forgotten WWII prison camps.

Perhaps it’s because I’m obviously harmless and seem a bit naive. Or maybe it’s just because I’m genuinely interested in hearing stories about these out-of-the-way places. But strangers tend to be kind and generous to a writer looking for a story, and people from forgotten parts of the world want to share what they know.

So, over the last week I’ve struck up a friendship with a woman in Tomsk who is the president of the region’s Lithuanian friendship society. Her father was a Lithuanian exile who married a Volga German, also exiled to Siberia. Svetlana was born in town on the Mongolian border and moved to Tomsk to study at one of the city’s five universities.

She has already done a great deal of research on my behalf: making phone calls and passing on information to archivists (more kind strangers) who have taken it upon themselves to search for traces of my grandmother amongst old census documents. We write to each other in different languages: I, in Lithuanian, and she, in Russian. We manage to understand one another, and there is a warmth to our communication that I would never have predicted, though perhaps should have, bound as we are by the memory of exile.

For Svetlana, exile has become home. She lives in Siberia not because she must, but because it is where she was born, where she studied, and where she works.

I can’t wait to meet her. I suspect she’ll have a lot of stories to tell.

[Photo: Daniel Gasienica]

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Life-blood: Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Random House, 1994.

Perhaps you know this book already. If you’re a writer, chances are it’s been recommended to you, or you’ve come across it on lists of good books on writing. I know this, because it’s been on my horizon for years. I finally decided to familiarize myself.

I read my tattered second-hand copy this week while navigating through contract negotiations for my second book. (Because of this, Lamott’s description of a New Yorker cartoon struck me as particularly funny: “We’re still pretty far apart,” says a writerly type to a ‘normal’ person at party. “I’m looking for a six-figure advance, and they’re refusing to read the manuscript” [162].) I’m happy to report that negotiations have gone well.

But reading the book on the heels of completing a major project has allowed me to bounce Lamott’s description of the writing process against what I’ve just lived.

Even though she most often appears to be addressing relatively green and unpublished writers, I found many echoes of my own solitude, frustration, demons and necessity of faith and discipline, as well as confirmations of  hunches about the need for truth, honesty and mining  your past for material. Someone recently told me that if I wanted to get published in a “real” magazine, I had to stop writing about myself and start writing about others. Lamott, it seems, would disagree, at least to a certain extent.

In some ways the book is a how-to manual. There are practical tips about how to organize your time (sit down and write every day, even if you feel like you have nothing to give), how to narrow your focus (to the size of a one-inch picture-frame) if overwhelmed, to listen carefully to the world around you (and take notes on index cards), have friends read your work, and write in letter form to loosen stubborn ideas.

In other ways, the book serves as a warning. Writing is hard work and for most authors it reaps few material rewards. Fame, fortune and even publication may remain beyond reach for many, but, Lamott stresses, “the literary life is the loveliest one possible. [. . .] One can find in writing a perfect focus for life. It offers challenge and delight and agony and commitment. We see our work as vocation, with the potential to be as rich and enlivening as the priesthood” (232).

This is a book writers recommend to other writers perhaps because it puts the act of writing (not publishing or book promotion) at its centre. It reminds of the dignity of our work, and reconfirms its importance to culture at large.

For Lamott, writing is a gift to her child, her father, a dying friend, and probably herself. And, for her, writers (despite what the character Julie of the film Julie and Julia might have us believe — “You’re not a writer unless someone publishes you,” was it?) are people who write.

[Photo: TalayehS]

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Stones: on how gardens map our lives

A few days ago I heard a snippet of conversation on the radio that got me thinking about my garden. On an NPR program called “On Point,” the writer Sydney Edison described how she had been gardening more than two acres of land for fifty years. “Gardens reflect your life back to you,” she said. “People garden they way they do because of who they are.”

Two years ago, when our son was just a baby, Sean and I watched in dismay as the front lawn got worse and worse, its water drained by the silver maple next door. Once it had reached an irredeemable shade of gold, we finally decided to do away with it, and replaced the grass with a rocky and cascading riverbed surrounded by plants.

We were short on cash, as ever, so we recycled as much as we could. We divided up hostas from the backyard, moved in tiny perennials pinched from the overflow of a colleague’s gigantic property, and dragged out a pile of old paving stones from under the porch to create a tiny patio surrounded by thyme. The potted cedar that our friends had given us before moving to Whitehorse took a place of honour at one edge. Across from it we transplanted our once sad rhododendron that now flowered for the first time in years. (Woody plants, I learned from the radio, get better with age.)

In many ways, I garden how I write. I use my gut and instinct to guide me. I don’t plan beyond broad strokes or have a colour scheme. Riding a surge of energy and inspiration, I put things where I think they’ll be happy or where there’s a bald spot. If it doesn’t work, I rearrange.

I garden because it feeds me in ways I don’t quite understand, giving me a sense of pleasure that little else does. Both my writing and the garden are maps, recording birth, growth, life, struggle, sickness, death, and robust health. And in the corners of both lie shells and stones from beaches and forests I’ve been to.

Like a magpie, I collect these treasures obsessively, shoving pebbles into pockets and dumping small boulders surreptitiously into the trunk of my car. For the garden, for the garden, for the garden, says the voice in my head. Jagged, smooth, flecked: I can’t help myself.

Stolen bits of the world, I place these amulets in a way that tells a story, protects the past, and wonders at life all around.

Listen to “Gardening Gurus Spill the Dirt” on NPR’s radio show On Point here.

[Photo: withrow]

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Siberian photographs: on home and exile

A couple months ago I took my son to visit my Aunt Birutė to talk about family history and my grandmother’s exile. She gave me some extraordinary photographs during that visit, including several from Siberia. More than I expected.

One small photograph, dated 1957, shows my grandmother’s house. Made of logs and with a straw roof, it stands on fenced property. Both look bigger than I would have expected. I’d always imagined the house surrounded by forest, but the land all around her house is flat.

Another shows my grandmother and her sister Magrieta standing in the garden, up to their knees in lush leaves. They wear matching shirts and skirts made from fabric sent in care-packages by faraway daughters. On the back, in Magrieta’s handwriting: “The cabbage garden, beyond it that you can see the potatoes and fence.” I’m struck by how happy my grandmother looks in these photographs: strong and ruddy, she could be an early American pioneer. (In the above photograph my grandmother sits on the left. She has several teeth missing, knocked out in an accident with a combine harvester.)

For the last few weeks, I’ve been singing a new song to my son Sebastian at bedtime. We call it “The Bird Song.” I learned it at summer camp as a child.

Like birds returning home
Lead us too, oh Lord.
From the sad road of exile,
Gather us up.

The song was written by my grandmother’s generation about returning to the place they fled or were forced to leave. Now, as I sing my son to sleep, it is these photographs of my grandmother in her cabbage garden that appear in my mind’s eye.

Home: I wonder if it felt like a homecoming when my grandmother returned to Lithuania after seventeen years. Can there be home without family? Her children were grown and far away; it would be another seven years before she saw her family again, when she emigrated Canada. But is family enough to restore home? Surely this country wasn’t home either: the language and customs remained strange to her until her death.

Did exile rob my grandmother of her home in more fundamental way than mere displacement? By taking her away by force, did her captors kill the very possibility of home?

Most people still die within a few kilometres of where they were born. Not so for my grandmother. Not so for many of us who move often and far either by choice or necessity. So what are the ties that bind the landless far from loved ones?

What is home to the exiled?

[Photo: Ona and Magrieta in Brovka, Siberia, 1957. Photographer unknown]

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What makes a good book title? Lulu can help.

Titles are my Achilles heel. I’m really, really bad at them.

One problem is that I favour the abstract and poetic: titles whose meaning becomes clear only once you’ve read the book. For example, I wanted to call my first book “Welcome to Elkader” (instead of “Silence is Death”), but that was roundly rejected at the press as being way too obscure.

So what makes a good title?

Judging from what’s floating around the interwebs, conventional wisdom boils down to the following (which, frankly, all seems pretty obvious):

1) A title’s got to be easy to remember.

2) It should be descriptive.

3) It should avoid all the usual pitfalls: cliché, sappiness, clunkiness, being overly literal. . . And apparently, it shouldn’t be a full grammatical sentence (oops).

That said, I do love internet tools when it comes to titles, especially those gimmicky generators, where you plug in a noun, verb, a gerund, etc.

There’s got to be some mathematical calculation or algorithm that will determine success, so when I came across the “Lulu Titlescorer,” I had to give it a whirl.

Here’s what Lulu does (from the website):

The Lulu Titlescorer has been developed exclusively for Lulu by statisticians who studied the titles of 50 years’ worth of top bestsellers and identified which title attributes separated the bestsellers from the rest.

We commissioned a research team to analyse the title of every novel to have topped the hardback fiction section of the New York Times Bestseller List during the half-century from 1955 to 2004 and then compare them with the titles of a control group of less successful novels by the same authors.

The team, lead by British statistician Dr. Atai Winkler, then used the data gathered from a total of some 700 titles to create this “Lulu Titlescorer” a program able to predict the chances that any given title would produce a New York Times No. 1 bestseller.

How could I resist? I plugged in a few titles from my long-list in Lulu. (My book is about a Lithuanian librarian who saved Jews during the Holocaust by hiding them in the university library where she worked. It will require a descriptive subtitle not included in the options below.)

Interestingly, my working title, Beloved Profession (what I’ve been calling the book for about five years now), scored highest. And my current favourite, Ex Libris, scored lowest.

The results:

Beloved Profession = 69.0% chance of being a bestselling title

Margin = 63.7 % chance of being a bestselling title

The Good Librarian = 41.4% chance of being a bestselling title

The Librarian = 35.9% chance of being a bestselling title

Ex Libris = 26.3% chance of being a bestselling title

Thoughts?

[Photo: jayRaz]

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Summer grant deadlines for writers (and an aside)

My favourite blogger Mira Bartok has posted a new list of fellowships, grants and prizes for writers: for lesbian writers, poets (gay, straight or otherwise), Romance-language writers, non-fiction specialists (like yours truly) and the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant that I won last year. Check out Mira’s List here. Tell her I sent you!

* * *

Barbara Deming (of the aforementioned Fund), a feminist and lesbian poet, writer, and civil rights activist founded the Money for Women Fund (that now carries her name) in 1975. She died  of cancer in 1984.

On her deathbed, Deming wrote a letter that the chair of her foundation now sends its fellows.

The letter moved me to tears when I read it. I plan to keep it forever, since it reminds me to honour those who went before me and to learn from their lives.

“May all be made whole,” wrote Deming. I love that.

Here’s the letter:

To so many of you:

I have loved my life so very much and I have loved you so very much and felt so blessed at the love you have given me. I love the work so many of us have been trying to do together and had looked forward to continuing this work but I just feel no more strength in me now and I want to die. I won’t lose you when I die and I won’t leave you when I die. Some of you I have especially loved and felt beloved by and I hope you know that even though I haven’t had the strength lately to reach out to you.

I love you. Hallowed be (may all be made whole), I want you to know, too, that I die happily.

Bobbie (Barbara) Deming

(Naples Community Hospital. Naples, Florida. July 21, 1984. 6:15 p.m.)

[Photo: philippe leroyer]

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How I stopped resisting and returned to the first-person

I keep going back to that month I spent at the Banff Centre for the Arts almost four years ago. Never before had I been treated with such generosity and respect (one of the Literary Journalism program’s mentors jokingly warned us not to get used to it, since never again would we be treated this well). The resources were humbling: everything to foster creativity and work was provided. So when I couldn’t deliver the quality of text I’d set out to write during my tenure there, I felt deep humiliation.

But my failure at Banff ended up teaching me about what kind of writer I am. What’s more, that failed text has finally (finally!) transformed itself into something good.

I travelled to Alberta in the summer of 2006 to write a 10,000 word essay on a librarian who hid Jews in a Lithuanian university library during the Shoah. I had my story, my archival documents to cite, and my ideas about what form it should take: above all, I wanted to keep myself out of the essay and avoid using the first-person voice.

Since I had written my first book in a quirky first-person, I was determined to try something new. I wanted to write something “straight”: to tell a story that deserved to be told without mucking it up with theatrics or by inserting myself into the narrative. It seemed like a good plan, and I stuck to it. At the end of four weeks of painful essay extraction, I submitted my final product.

The essay was a disaster. Clunky and lifeless. Even I had to admit it, so once I came home, I kept working on it, wrestling with it and trying to diagnose the problem.

Only after hundreds of drafts over many months, and a grudging return to the first-person voice, did the text begin to work. The story found its traction and my central character (the librarian) gained colour.

Why? What is it about the first-person voice that is so powerful? And why are we so suspicious of it?

Years ago, I was thinking about pitching something to the Chicago Public Radio show This American Life, and looked at their website for guidelines. One line from their description of what makes a good story has stayed with me. It’s now gone from the site, but it went something like: “We look for stories that appear to be about one thing, but that are actually about another.”

This is what the first-person voice is best at.

It’s easy to sneer at the glut of memoirs of the past decade, and to discredit the genre as somehow dishonest or narcissistic, but autobiographical texts and personal essays that really work are always about something bigger than the person writing them.

The best first-person texts flirt with navel-gazing, but are redeemed by insight, artistry, self-criticism, and honesty. By telling a story about their own singular lives, skilled autobiographers and personal essayists inspire revelations. In other words, these texts not only reveal something about the person writing them, but also about the one reading them.

My Banff essay didn’t work when it was just about my librarian, and began to gel only when I found the something else it was really about. Ultimately, the essay came to tell a love story between a researcher and her subject, and the ways in which a pregnancy disrupts this imagined relationship. This story that appeared to be about a Holocaust rescuer was actually about writing and motherhood.

After more rejections than I care to admit to, the essay (now called “Pregnant Pause: On Ona Šimaitė, Research, Writing and Motherhood”) has found its home in a journal called Feminist Formations, formerly the National Women’s Studies Journal. It will appear very soon, in a matter of weeks. I’ll let you know when it happens.

If you’re interested in thinking more deeply about the first-person voice, or simply in reading some top-notch texts, take a look at Phillip Lopate’s edited volume, The Art of the Personal Essay. It’s a massive, brick-sized tome, and will keep you inspired and interested for years to come.

[Photo: DelosJ]

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