MF GALAXY

If memory serves, I've known Craig DiLouie since 2008, and he immediately struck me as an artist with a gravitic commitment to the craft, business, and community of writers. I saw him giving a book trailer-making workshop at the World Fantasy Convention, held that year in Calgary, and right after that I checked his amazing videos, and later devoured his gripping, terrifying zombie novel The Infection.

DiLouie is the author of a whopping eighteen novels including One of Us, the Crash Dive series, Suffer the Children, and The Great Planet Robbery. His books cross numerous genres including horror, apocalypse, zombie, science fiction, fantasy, historical, and military fiction; his work has been translated into multiple languages and been nominated for major awards including the Bram Stoker and the Audie. Because he's such a heavy-hitter, I always enjoying learn from him about artistic and career development.

So on October 18, 2018, DiLouie spoke with me by web video from his home in Calgary. We discussed: 

• The connection between horror and comedy
• What Stephen King teaches about what it takes to be a great writer
• Why, despite his early literary success, DiLouie experienced major pressure to perform following the publication of his novel Suffer the Children
• Why authors should attend conventions
• How and why to writes series
• What software you should be using to maximise your sales
• The one thing he wishes the fans of his books in separate genres would do, and the most important thing an author must do to sell more books

craigdilouie.com

KD Spy vs KDP Rocket vs Kindle Samurai

SUPPORT MF GALAXY ON PATREON

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON iTUNES

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON iHEARTRADIO

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON PLAYER FM

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON STITCHER

FOR MORE INFORMATION + LINKS

John Jennings is an amazing cat. He's a designer, illustrator, writer, and lecturer at Eye Trauma Comix. He's the artist and co-adapter, with Damian Duffy, of the celebrated hit Kindred based on the novel by Octavia Butler. His other works include I Am Alfonso Jones, Black Kirby: In Search of the Motherboxx Connection, Blue Hand Mojo, The Blacker the Ink, and Artists Against Police Brutality. With Damian Duffy, he's the co-editor of the celebrated showcases Black Comix and Black Comix Returns.

Jennings is also a professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside, the same institution where Afritopian trailblazer Nalo Hopkinson teaches in the department of Creative Writing.

And now, because of Jennings' mega-success with Kindred, he's starting a whole new career as the founding freelance editor for the Abrams graphic novel imprint Megascope. Megascope will feature works by creators of African, Indigenous, Latin American, Asian, and Oceanic backgrounds, with a special on focus on Africentric stories.

John Jennings spoke with me by web video on October 9, 2018. We discussed:

• The enormous critical, commercial, and academic success of his adaptation of Kindred
• The shocking reaction of Octavia Butler's estate to the graphic novel
• How the book won success despite national under-distribution by Diamond
• Why Marvel and DC aren't mainstream, and who is Who today's underserved comics market is
• The fascinating Africentric story behind the name "Megascope," and
• How, when, and why Abrams have him the chance to found Megascope, and what he plans to do with it

John Jennings interview – New York State University at Buffalo

John Jennings: Why Comic Art is "Brazen"

SUPPORT MF GALAXY ON PATREON

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON iTUNES

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON iHEARTRADIO

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON PLAYER FM

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON STITCHER

FOR MORE INFORMATION + LINKS

Alternative Radio is a concept, sure, but it's also the name of a long-running talk-radio show that in Edmonton airs on CJSR FM88 and also runs around the world. It's a weekly hour of speeches by and interviews with progressive organisers, thinkers, artists, and history-makers that corporate media almost entirely ignores. In these dangerous times, few hours on radio or the web will inform you as effectively as Alternative Radio about who's making the world worse—and how they're doing it.

Alternative Radio show has been running for more than 32 years, and the man behind it is David Barsamian. He altered the independent media landscape with his radio show and with his books featuring his interviews with Noam Chomsky, Eqbal Ahmad, Howard Zinn, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy, and Edward Said.

I spoke by telephone with David Barsmanian on February 25, 2012, just ahead of a speech he was to deliver at the Stanley Milner Library Theatre. As you're listening to Barsamian list a vast number of US atrocities and the hundreds of military bases around the world that are the muscle of its violent global rule, remember that he's speaking with me in 2012 while Barack Obama was US president. That's my way of encouraging you to remember that no matter how evil and deranged Team Trump is, they are not the exception to US power, and that while US Democrats and Republicans rule differently at home on key issues, when it comes to global violence, their victims would have a difficult time telling them apart.

A few months before we spoke, the government of India deported Barsamian for his reporting on Kashmir and other revolts. In our conversation he discusses the sorry state of corporate journalism, the global economic crisis, and rebellions against it.

ALTERNATIVE RADIO

SUPPORT MF GALAXY ON PATREON

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON iTUNES

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON iHEARTRADIO

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON PLAYER FM

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON STITCHER

FOR MORE INFORMATION + LINKS

I'm a lifelong Albertan, and let me tell you, things are always crazy in my home province. We've usually had political dynasties that lasted decades each. The last one was the rule of the Progressive Conservatives, and it lasted more than 40 years.

In 2015 we finally elected the New Democratic Party, the somewhat social-democratic, increasingly centrist party that has delivered on plenty of its social-democratic promises but enraged its environmentalist base and many but not all First Nations supporters by pushing for new pipelines and getting into protracted verbal battles with the NDP government in British Columbia and promising to exit the federal government's climate change plan.

And while all that's happening, the two major right-wing parties in the province have transmogrified into a single, ultra-right-wing entity called the United Conservative Party or UCP, and to make things absolutely clear, many of its candidates are calling for the destruction of public medicare, and many members are connected with White nationalist media and White extremist movements.

To talk about Alberta politics on MF GALAXY, once a year I sit down with David Climenhaga, the "award-winning journalist, author, post-secondary teacher, poet, and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions at the Toronto Globe and Mail and Calgary Herald. He holds a Master's Degree in Journalism from the Carleton University School of Journalism in Ottawa. His 1995 book, A Poke in the Public Eye, explores the relationships among Canadian journalists, public relations people and politicians." Climenhaga blogs at AlbertaPolitics.ca.

Climenhaga and I met to talk about:

• UCP leader Jason Kenney's cavorting in India, and the UCP's not-so-secret agenda to privatise health care
• The ultra-right-wing renegade Maxime Bernier who split from the federal Conservatives to form his own party
• What policy the Alberta NDP should have pursued to bolster its hopes for reelection, or at least a permanent progressive legacy, and
• The strategy that right-wing extremists have used to drag mainstream conservative parties closer and closer to fascism.

Albertapolitics.ca

SUPPORT MF GALAXY ON PATREON

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON iTUNES

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON iHEARTRADIO

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON PLAYER FM

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON STITCHER

FOR MORE INFORMATION + LINKS

Keynote speech excerpts from The Good Fight 2018 Counter-Fascism Training Conference in Edmonton. Speeches by...

Daryle Lamont Jenkins, one of the founders of the antifascist organisation One People's Project, is a former US Air Force man who's spent a lifetime fighting American neo-nazis, and was a pioneer of the early internet with innovative online tactics to fight Whitesupremacists. Today, in service of his cause he speaks across the United States. Liberal and conservative journalists try to smear him; Nazis try to fight him in the courts and lose. Why do they fear him? Because he exposes the Nazis who are hiding in plain sight by investigating them and revealing their nazi identity to the world. But he also helps those people who want to leave the nazi movement. He fearlessly steps up to fascists such as Richard Spencer and Matthew Heimbach and simply mocks them, and even got Spencer thrown out of CPAC, the Conservative Political Affairs Conference which was teeming with Spencer's own fanatics.

Barbara Perry is Professor and Associate Dean of Social Science and Humanities at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. She has written extensively on hate crime, including several books on the topic, among them In the Name of Hate: Understanding Hate Crime; and Hate and Bias Crime: A Reader.

She has also published in the area of Native American victimization and social control, including one book entitled The Silent Victims: Native American Victims of Hate Crime, based on interviews with Native Americans (University of Arizona Press). She has also written a related book on policing Native American communities ­ Policing Race and Place: Under- and Over-enforcement in Indian Country (Lexington Press). She was the General Editor of a five volume set on hate crime (Praeger), and editor of Volume 3: Victims of Hate Crime of that set. Dr. Perry continues to work in the area of hate crime, and has begun to make contributions to the limited scholarship on hate crime in Canada.

Most recently, she has contributed to a scholarly understanding of anti-Muslim violence, hate crime against LGBTQ communities, and the community impacts of hate crime.

Dan David is Mohawk, Bear Clan, based at Kanehsatake Mohawk Territory, near Oka, Quebec. 

After graduating high school, he was turned away from journalism school by Indian Affairs. He spent the next ten years as a construction labourer, a garbageman, and a printer at one of the first Indigenous community colleges in central Quebec, followed by a stint as a civil servant in Ottawa after the federal government closed the college. 

Dan jumped at the chance to leave Ottawa to attend the Program in Journalism for Native Peoples at Western, an intensive one-year diploma course. After graduating top of his class, CBC recruited him for a stint in Whitehorse. After returning south, the CBC picked him up again for the its "Visible Minorities Program" meant to bring diversity to its newsrooms across Canada. 

This led to him becoming one of a handful of CBC trainers invited by South African journalists to help them transform the South African Broadcasting Corporation from a state-controlled propagandist into an independent public broadcaster before their first-ever democratic elections in 1994. 

Dan went back and forth for the next 7 years, working as a producer at TVOntario and Vision-TV before accepting a job at Ryerson University as the first ever Chair of Diversity at any school of journalism in Canada. Back in South Africa, he became the first ever Mohawk to be head of TV training at the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism in Johannesburg, South Africa. Dan's trained TV producers and reporters across Canada, Indonesia, and Azerbaijan.  

He's earned two National Magazine awards writing about his home community before, during and after the 1990 Oka Crisis.  

He's been working too long on a book about his home community, past, present and future. Soon, he plans to launch a literary journalism web site for Indigenous writers and journalists.

Join The Good Fight

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON iTUNES

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON iHEARTRADIO

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON PLAYER FM

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON STITCHER

SUPPORT MF GALAXY ON PATREON

FOR MORE INFORMATION + LINKS

In Canada, the threat posed by fascist, Whitesupremacist, and similar extremist groups is real, and growing.

The proudly Islamophobic Soldiers of Odin are active right here in Edmonton, and even the right-wing Daily Mail newspaper in England describes as them a neo-nazi group. The Proud Boys are also on the march, and the Southern Poverty Law Centre in the United States names them as a hate group. And then there are the Three Percenters, the Ku Klux Klan, and many others like them, supported by extremist Canadian media and aligned with one major federal party.

Alarmed by the rise of fascism in our midst, especially after the election of US president Donald Trump and the Nazi march and terrorist murder in Charlottesville, a group of Edmontonians banded together to produce this weekend's training conference THE GOOD FIGHT.

Unlike far too many rallies, marches, and speeches which lack a specific agenda and any clear and measurable goals, The Good Fight brings together top national and international trainers to instruct participants in proven, peak-performance, innovative, and nonviolent methods to counter fascism and build justice.

Trainers include journalist Daniel David, counter-fascist investigator Daryle Lamont Jenkins who's been a guest on MF GALAXY before, and Canada's leading hate crimes researcher, Barbara Perry.

She's a Professor and Associate Dean of Social Science and Humanities at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, and is the author of In the Name of Hate: Understanding Hate Crime; and Hate and Bias Crime: A Reader, among others.

I spoke by telephone with Barbara Perry on September 11, 2018, and we discussed:

• The two most important reasons to keep opposing Whitesupremacist hate rallies
• The danger that fascist groups pose to safety and democracy in Canada, and their disturbing connections to the Canadian military
• The failure of Canadian media to take the fascist threat seriously, even after the lethal terrorist attack against the Quebec City mosque, and
• Some of the most promising old and new and innovative strategies for helping stop the threat of fascism in Canada

If you'd like to attend The Good Fight this weekend in Edmonton, September 14 – 16, 2018, register here. It's pay what you can, so if you want to go, go! And if you want to donate, hit the donate button!

Southern Poverty Law Centre names Proud Boys a "hate group"

Right-wing UK newspaper the Daily Mail calls Soldiers of Odin "neo-Nazi-led-vigilantes"

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON iTUNES

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON iHEARTRADIO

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON PLAYER FM

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON STITCHER

SUPPORT MF GALAXY ON PATREON

FOR MORE INFORMATION + LINKS

Today, the day I'm recording this, is August 14, 2018. Spike Lee's movie Black Klansmen is new in theatres, released to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the neo-Nazi march on Charlottesville in which one Nazi terrorist used his car to kill anti-fascist activist Heather Heyer.

The nazis who marched, the same people who accuse humans with compassion of being "snowflakes," brought their hateful temper tantrum to Charlottesville because they opposed the removal of monuments in honour of those who used violence to defend the racist colonial dictatorship that presided over a continent-wide rape gulag.

Those nazis said they were simply honouring their culture, the culture of the American South. But if they truly wanted to honour southern heroes, they could easily have honoured Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, Maria W. Stewart, Charles Osborn, or any of the 106 anti-slavery societies in the US South. But these people don't honour history. They honour racial supremacy and genocide. 

On August 12, 2018, just two days ago, US nazis marched on Washington to celebrate the anniversary of murdering Heather Heyer. The man who convened last year's riot and this year's event was Jason Kessler (whose own father denounced yelled at him to "Get out of my room!" during a livestream because the 34-year-old Aryan warrior had moved back home with his folks). Yet with a full year to prepare, they could muster only two dozen Whitesupremacists, according to The Atlantic. Black Lives Matter, anti-fascist, and other demonstrators vastly outnumbered them. According to The Atlantic, media alone outnumbered the nazis three to one.

But don't be fooled. Just because their rally fizzled, their movement isn't doomed. After all, White identity extremists hold power at every level of the US economy, military, media, educational system, and political structure, right up to the Oval Office. Those who ignore their power and their growth are doomed to follow in the train tracks of victims of Nazis past.

Enter Mike Stuchbery. He's a Twitter commentator, popular historian, writer, and broadcaster based in Luton, England. He uses history and humour to challenge fascists online, delving into topics from Africans in Ancient Rome to George Orwell and why so many right-wingers love to claim that the Nazis of Germany were socialists, despite their deadly attacks on unionists, socialists, and communists in defense of Germany's wealthiest people and corporations.

Mike Stuchbery spoke with me on April 13, 2018 by web video from his home in Luton. We discussed: 

• Why right-wingers like to claim Nazism was socialist
• What fascism is according to Umberto Eco
• How and why German fascists co-opted certain socialist icons and principles while attacking socialism and socialists at every turn
• How Stuchbery began his online fight with right wing extremists, how they targeted him for threats and abuse, and who routinely gets far, far worse than he did, and
• Why the number one enemy of fascist women is fascist men

Just before I asked my first question, Stuchbery told me that while he was born in Australia, he's lived in England and for a while lived in Germany, raising intriguing questions for me about his motivation for risking so much online to define what fascism is, and what it isn't.

Mike-stuchbery.org

Mike Stuchbery's Patreon Page

Umberto Eco's Fourteen Aspects of Fascism

Michael Parenti on fascism

Michael Parenti on fascism as a false revolution

Michael Parenti: The Functions of Fascism

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON iTUNES

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON iHEARTRADIO

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON PLAYER FM

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON STITCHER

SUPPORT MF GALAXY ON PATREON

FOR MORE INFORMATION + LINKS

If you're an artist, it's almost a guarantee you've experienced the difficulty of getting your work noticed. No matter how much you care, it seems too many other people just don't. Being ignored that way is always frustrating, but it's worse when it's in your hometown, and even more so when you've worked to promote the work of other artists around you and even get them work.

That's been the experience of Matt Alden Dykes. He's an outstanding actor and improvisor, with decades on the job, and he's also an executive producer, writer, and actor on the sketch comedy show Caution: May Contain Nuts. And if that weren't enough, he's worked on the TV shows Tiny Plastic Men and Delmer & Marta, and is a long-time member of Edmonton's Rapid Fire Theatre, the live improvised soap opera Die-Nasty, and the comedy troupe Blacklisted.

On May 1, 2018, we met at Simply Done Café in Edmonton's Gallery District and discussed:

• How difficult it's been to get local artists and journalists to support his TV productions despite appearances from Canadian comedy legends
• Repeatedly dealing with the condescending question, "So when are you moving to Toronto or Vancouver?"
• Trying to get people to watch TV when new media including Netflix is changing how, when, why, and what people watch
• The future of Caution: May Contain Nuts, and
• How he's bringing Star Wars to Edmonton

Cautiontv.com – Matt Alden

Rapid Fire Theatre – Matt Alden

Kanucks Cantina

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON iTUNES

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON iHEARTRADIO

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON PLAYER FM

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON STITCHER

SUPPORT MF GALAXY ON PATREON

FOR MORE INFORMATION + LINKS

I taught junior high and high school English in Edmonton for a decade. I loved it; the job was demanding, but getting to know so many remarkable young people was a joy, and poring over stories, poems, and plays with them and exploring how to write about them and create their own was a blessing.

That being said, I was trained in a specific mode that hasn't changed much in a long time. When I left public school teaching more than a decade ago, my distance from the classroom made me more capable of seeing my previous blindspots and the deficiencies of a traditional classroom.

In my experience since then, the most electrifying development in education has been gamification. You can find plenty of internet articles telling you why it's a bad idea, claiming it amounts to bribing kids. Those people clearly don't know what gamification is or can be, especially in the context of fantasy role playing games. It's not simply handing out prizes for completion of tasks kids don't care about—many parents and teachers have been doing that for ages even though research proves that doing so decreases enjoyment of the rewarded task.

Gamification is applying the process of games—what makes them fun, engaging, and addictive—to the experience of learning. Add in the aesthetics and imaginative story worlds and characters of role-play games, and you can create an immersive learning adventure that kids can't wait to re-engage and which gives them reasons to learn content and skills that might otherwise bore them into failure. Gaming is a core human drive. While some other life forms play, we're the only ones who make games, and we do so in every culture. Why not harness that essential drive?

To discuss how to gamify your classroom to help students learn more and love learning, I spoke with Scott Hebert. He's the author of Press Play to Begin, a manual for teachers on how to implement game principles into their classes. He teaches at Our Lady of Angels in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, north-east of Edmonton. The Alberta Excellence in Teaching Awards named him a Top 20 Teacher in Alberta in 2013, and the World Gamification Congress honoured his work with its Best Gamification in Education Project Award in 2015. His website, mrhebert.org, contains videos and articles on gamification, and a link to buy Press Start to Begin.

We spoke by web video on May 22, 2018. We discussed:

• What he learned about student disengagement by asking students to tell him what they hated about school
• What his research into gamification revealed about core human drives
• What business and the pharmaceutical industry taught him about how to motivate people
• Why theme is a far more important motivator than points, badges, or leaderboards
• Why students learn more when teachers emphasise process over product
• Why kids need what looks like chaos and why teachers need to let them experience conflict in group work
• And how he created his immersive medieval fantasy classroom and what it looks like

Scott Hebert Homepage

Scott Hebert TEDx Talk on Gamifying Education

Yu-kai Chou: Gamification & Behavioral Design

Yu-kai Chou: Octalysis – the complete gamification framework with free Udemy course

Four Ways to Bring Games to Your Classroom

Gamifying Education: Think Differently, Start Small

Classcraft

Gamifying Your World Language Classes

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON iTUNES

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON iHEARTRADIO

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON PLAYER FM

SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON STITCHER

SUPPORT MF GALAXY ON PATREON

FOR MORE INFORMATION + LINKS

So many people dream of being a children's author, yet few take the plunge. Of those who do, far fewer decide the way to go is writing about a Muslim Somali girl and her family. Of the remainder, how many get national newspaper and CBC radio coverage? To my knowledge, only one, and she's my guest today for the amazing success of her debut book, Muhiima's Quest.

Rahma Rodaah came to Canada with her family from Somalia when she was eight years old. She's lived in Quebec and Ottawa, and she now lives in Edmonton. Her path to children's authorship was far from obvious: her degree is in international business, and she works for the Government of Alberta's Ministry of Community and Social Services in Social Work and Income Support. While she grew up loving Anne of Green Gables, after she became a mother she grew concerned that most images aimed at girls pushed European standards of beauty, and no stories she could find embraced either her Somali heritage or Islamic faith. And taking a page from her business education, she saw a need and decided to fill that need herself.

The result was Muhiima's Quest, illustrated by Daria Horb, the indie-published story about ten-year-old Muhiima and her delightful birthday bicycle adventure of self-discovery.  After coverage on Omni TV's Somali programme, the story of Muhiima's Quest went national in the pages of the Toronto Star. Now a traditional publisher is courting Rodaah, and her second book, Little Brother for Sale, is already complete and just about to debut.

I spoke with Rahma Rodaah on June 26, 2018 at Simply Done Café in Edmonton's Gallery District. We discussed: 

• How she fell in love with reading, which Can-Lit classic was her early favourite, and why she knew that could never be enough for her own children
• The challenges of finding the right illustrator for her book about a Somali-Canadian Muslim girl
• The multiple meanings of hijab and the role it plays in Muhiima's Quest
• And how Rodaah achieved national arts coverage for her indie-published debut book

RahmaRodaah.com

African-Canadian Children's Authors + Illustrators

Tololwa Mollel

African-Canadian children's story books

49th Shelf's list including African Canadian children's books

Zetta Elliot's list of books featuring African Canadian children, some by African authors + illustrators