MF GALAXY

A few months back I shared with you a panel convened by comix creator, TV writer, documentarian, and filmmaker Brandon Easton from the 2016 San Diego Comic Con Writers' Journey panel full of the specific how-to advice become a professional writer in comics, TV, and film.

In today's episode of MF GALAXY, Brandon Easton is back from the 2015 WonderCon Anaheim Writers' Journey Panel, and this time with actor, television writer, and comix writer Erika Alexander, with screenwriter and comix creator Tony Puryear, with comix critic and writer Hannibal Tabu, and with author, television writer, and indie filmmaker Marc Scott Zicree.

In today's episode of MF GALAXY, they discuss:

• The single most important procedural and psychological step to take as a writer
• The value of job-shadowing Rod Serling from beyond the grave
• How and where you can find the right mentor and why you must
• Where to find the awful and excellent scripts you need to read
• The importance of writing your bio right, and
• The surprising early failure of one of the most successful writers in US history

Many thanks to DeWayne Copeland who recorded the video for this conversation. You can find the complete video online at MFGALAXY.org and a link to Copeland's work, which includes my MF GALAXY conversation with him about his superhero web TV series CV Nation.

Thanks also to Brandon Easton for permission to use the audio; check my many conversations with him in the show archive, and watch for his upcoming film DDX: Department of Disclosure debuting August 18, 2017, starring Anthony Montgomery from Star Trek: Enterprise and Rene Rosado from Major Crimes.

Brandon Easton Twitter

Brandon Easton IMDb

Creative Screenwriting.com

Fools' Crusade blog

WonderCon 2015 Writers' Journey panel

Erika Alexander's & Tony Puryear's Concrete Park

Hannibal Tabu.com

Marc Scott Zicree IMDb

Marc Scott Zicree's crowdfunded Space Command

DeWayne Copeland's CV Nation

MF GALAXY interview with DeWayne Copeland on CV Nation

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How many times have you seen pictures of so-called development workers, who heroically and selflessly leave their privileged homes in the West to travel to any one of 54 countries on the African continent—although they'll usually just say "Africa" as if it were a country?

They go to build houses or schools or work in a clinic, sometimes saying that they're there to "save" people or even "save Africa," all one billion of us, despite what is usually zero knowledge of any of the continent's 3000 or more languages, more than 5000 years of civilisations and ancient literatures, its countless cultures, religions, and philosophies, or its contemporary arts, industry, and politics.

They also usually do not question why, in the case of the often barely-qualified "voluntourists" who build houses or schools, it is better for them to give airlines and hotels hundreds or even thousands of dollars than it is to pay local citizens of those countries to do the work their countries need. Nor do they ask the effects of spending tens of thousands of dollars to pay the salaries of foreign doctors, while also transporting, housing, and feeding them, instead of paying doctors from those countries so they can serve the communities that produced them.

But, so long as they pose for photos holding one of our babies and surrounding themselves with our children so they look like saints in shining skin, everything's great, right?

Those are some of the concerns that Dr. Geoffrey Anguyo shared with me. He wasn't interested in being sucked down the brain drain to grab the riches of practicing medicine abroad. He wanted to build his community, and so he created and headed the Kigezi Healthcare Foundation, KIHEFO, in Uganda.

Years ago he was touring Canada to raise awareness about and funds for his organisation which holistically assists people in Uganda's Kigezi highlands to address hunger, HIV-AIDS, and entrepreneurship. I met him during that tour in Edmonton on June 1, 2011, and we spoke at the office of Change for Children which sponsors KIHEFO's work. We discussed a range of topics, including:

• How his childhood led him to study medicine and serve Uganda's most needy citizens
• How Uganda's medical establishment is failing the people it's supposed to serve
• Why medical organisations must educate people and fight poverty if they're going to win the fight against disease
• The high personal profits some people get from the not-for-profit sector, and the high price that sector exacts on countries such as Uganda
• Why international funders will fight aids but ignore malaria
• Why Uganda needs investment and access to capital instead of aid, and
• How investing in KIHEFO can earn you money while funding KIHEFO's medical work, in other words, how getting paid is better than giving aid.

He began by explaining how he rose from deprivation to become a doctor for his nation. 

facebook.com/KIHEFO

kihefoblog.wordpress.com

twitter.com/KIHEFO

kihefo.org

kigezitours.com

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If you're an expert on parenting, chances are you're not a parent. And if you are a parent and you think you're an expert, you're probably not an expert either. Being a parent means constant worrying about getting it wrong and wondering if you'll ever get it right. But at least that's better than being totally sure you're right because that's a really bad sign.

That being said, a few things are starting to become clearer in the 21st century, and one is that trying too hard to be the perfect parent is counter-productive. And another is that if your goal is trophy children instead of happy children with the every-expanding wisdom to chart their own course, your kids probably won't be happy or able to chart their own course.

Canadian author Carl Honore hit the big time with his 2004 book In Praise of Slow, arguing that people need to, well, chill out. In 2008 he released Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting. While he was born in Scotland he spent much of his childhood in Edmonton, and that's where I met him way back in 2008 when Under Pressure was a brand-new book, Facebook was only four years old, YouTube was only three, and my first daughter was not yet two. He discussed his views on:

• Why kids shouldn't be outsourced to gadgets, and what toys should and should not do for kids
• What it takes to create well-rounded and creative children
• Why he agrees with George Lucas about education
• Just how widespread over-scheduling is
• How much time children need per day to be free of adult-structured and screen-focused activities
• How to tell if you're trying to turn your children into trophies, and
• Why he disapproves of the movement to teach sign language to babies who can hear

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I met John Gallagher so long ago I don't even remember it, but we were both members of the same fannish club called ESFCAS, the Edmonton Science Fiction and Comic Arts Society at the University of Alberta. A bunch of us there wanted to be professional artists—including Adrian Kleinbergen and Nigel Tully who found work in comics, Jaemi Hardy who became a fine artist, and Marc Taro Holmes who worked in video games and Hollywood and has published instructional books on art—and you can hear my conversation with him on MF GALAXY.

But John Gallagher is a particularly amazing success story. After training at the Alberta College of Art and Design, he went to work at Edmonton's BioWare studio as a production illustrator. Later he broke into Hollywood, and has worked on Riverdale, the 2017 Power Rangers film, Supergirl, The Flash, The Man in the High Castle, Once Upon a Time, Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome, and X-Men: The Last Stand, among many other productions.

On April 27, 2017 Gallagher spoke with me by Skype from his home in Vancouver. He discussed:

• How he began his career in television—but not where or how you'd think
• How he joined BioWare in its earliest days
• The myth and reality about ageism in Hollywood when it comes to production illustrators, and where older artists have an advantage
• The amazing digital tools he'd like to see invented and which ones are only a few years away
• What young illustrators need to understand about themselves in order to succeed, and
• The number one illustration skill your portfolio must demonstrate if you want to get hired by a game or film studio tomorrow

Along the way several names bubbled up, including Ray and Greg, who are Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, two of the founders of BioWare, and Trent Oster, another founder and now the owner of BeamDog. Gallagher also cited SUB which is the Student Union Building, and HUB Mall, both at the University of Alberta campus in Edmonton. And we talked about "crunch," the video game industry term for the predictable, long stretches of overtime at the end of any project. And now on MF GALAXY, my conversation with John Gallagher.

John Gallagher

John Gallagher IMDB

SFCAS Facebook

Jaemi Hardy

Marc Taro Holmes homepage

Marc Taro Holmes MF GALAXY interview

Adrian Kleinbergen

Nigel Tully

Photogrammetry

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Saladin Ahmed is a fascinating cat. He's best known as the Arab and Muslim American fantasy novelist who crafted Throne of the Crescent Moon which was nominated for the Hugo and won the Locus Award for best first novel. But his ethnicity also includes Polish and Irish, and his writing also includes short stories, articles, a stunning number of Tweets, and the new Marvel Comics series Black Bolt about the king of the Inhumans.

We met at the Science Fiction Research Association conference in Detroit in 2012, and he was as fun and down to earth in person as he is online. When I learned that he was writing for Marvel I just knew I had to find out what it was like for him as a novelist to leap into the world of comics, and was delighted to learn that like me, he was a lifelong comics fan who'd always wanted to create comics, too.

In today's episode of MF GALAXY, Saladin Ahmed discusses:

• Which influential editors and which groundbreaking comics writer helped him get the gig
• How his shot at turning a D-list Marvel character such as Black Bolt into A-list potential gave him the chance to write one of his favourite Z-list characters into the story, and why
• What aspects of real-world politics about alienation and prison he wants to address with Black Bolt, and which others he won't touch and why
• His personal connections to prison and knowledge of the secret life of prisoners, and why they matter
• How writing comics helps keep him safe from what he called a "good old-fashioned nervous breakdown" and liberated him from the soul-crushing and intimidating solitary grind of novel-writing

Ahmed spoke with me by Skype from his home near Detroit on June 02, 2017.

Saladin Ahmed's Patreon

Christian Ward

CBR - Black Bolt sent to cosmic prison

Marvel editor Sana Amanat

Marvel's Sana Amanat page

Sana Amanat's TEDx talk

Sana Amanat Talks Ms. Marvel - Late Night with Seth Meyers

Off Panel #52: A Day in the Life with Marvel Editor Wil Moss

The Inhumans

Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe

Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual

Crusher Creel, the Absorbing Man

5 Ways The U.S. Prison Industrial Complex Mimics Slavery

Angela Davis on the Prison-Industrial Complex

Inhumans coming to TV + debut on IMAX

Arabian Knight

How one 31-year-old paid off $220,000 in student loans in 3 years

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Remember when the Chinese, Saudi Arabian, and Nigerian governments invaded Canada and occupied it and it seemed like they would never leave? Remember how every province and territory fell like dominoes even after heroic military struggles against them, and so the invaders jailed or killed our resistance leaders after labelling them terrorists and savages?

Remember how they made trillions of dollars in profit for the Chinese communist party, the Saudi monarchy, and the Nigerian government, by stealing our whole country, and then they mocked us for being poor?

Remember how they destroyed and outlawed all our cultural institutions, suppressed all our languages, forced us to take Mandarin, Arabic, and Yoruba names, and forcibly converted some of us to communism, Islam, or the Yoruba religion—and punished us if we stayed faithful to our own beliefs?

Remember how they sent all our children to their schools where they tortured, starved, and even raped thousands of them, where they tolerated up to a 50 per cent death rate for our kids they jailed there, and often didn't inform us when our kids died and they buried them in unmarked graves?

Remember all the trauma and addiction we experienced and passed on because of what they did to us, and how even after all that horror, for over three decades they kidnapped 20,000 more of our children and sent them to live with Chinese, Saudi, and Nigerian families who were occupying our land, and prevented them from learning their heritage languages and cultures and even knowing their real families?

Well, of course you don't remember any of that because that never happened. But that is exactly what English and French invaders did to the hundreds of Indigenous nations of what is now called Canada. And the rest of us whose families arrived later became settlers on all that conquered territory—the second-largest country on earth—which means our families collaborated with that colossally destructive regime, whether we knew it or not. Every dime of Canadian GDP since 1867 has arisen from the cultural and even physical genocide that we don't even call genocide—we call it "confederation."

But because we as settlers teach ourselves to see the people we've conquered as beneath us, we can sleep easily and pat ourselves on the back as being the politest and most civilised people on earth, especially as compared to those nasty Americans. Because if we did see First Nations people as being just like us, and if we reflected on how we would feel and what we would do if anyone had committed such crimes against us, we would never sing "O Canada" proudly again.

But hopefully, we would commit our lives to righting the wrongs that earn our society trillions of dollars and make us among the most comfortable people on the planet.

Well, regardless of our collaboration with genocide, many of the people our regime targeted survived and many have even thrived. Award-winning filmmaker Tasha Hubbard has created the startling new documentary Birth of a Family. It's co-written by Saskatoon Star-Phoenix reporter Betty Ann Adam, about Adam's successful uniting with her three siblings Rosalie, Esther, and Ben, decades after the Canadian government kidnapped them.

It's not a re-union because while Betty Ann had met each of them, the rest had never been together before the remarkable week of filming when they toured Banff and stayed in the same cabin at the Banff Centre for the Arts.

The director and co-writer behind this unforgettable portrait of intergenerational pain and profound triumph is Tasha Hubbard. She's an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan. She won a Gemini and Golden Sheaf for writing and directing Two Worlds Colliding, and created the animated short Buffalo Calling which screened at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Her short hybrid documentary 7 Minutes won a Golden Sheaf Award in 2016. She's a member of the Cree Nation, and researches and creates projects for Indigenous media on images of the buffalo and the experiences of Indigenous women and children. She also blogs for the Broadbent Institute.

On May 30, 2017, Tasha Hubbard spoke with me by Skype about her new National Film Board documentary. In this episode of MF GALAXY, we discuss:

• How and why the Truth and Reconciliation Commission motivated Betty Ann Adam to make a film about uniting with her siblings
• The strict rules that Hubbard imposed on herself to avoid ruining this pivotal experience in the lives of Betty Ann, Rosalie, Esther, and Ben
• Why settlers continue to use quaint and even cheerful euphemisms such as "the Sixties Scoop" for a three-decade long mass-kidnapping campaign against 20,000 children and their families, and
• How Hubbard ensured that her film conveyed the individuality, dignity, and triumph of the people she was photographing

Along the way, we discussed Write Magazine, which published an editorial that proposed a "cultural appropriation" writers prize to encourage people to write, in the editor's words, what they did not know. I also mentioned a birthday party, which refers to a powerful sequence in the film. And Hubbard talked about being "raised away," which means separated from one's birth family.

National Film Board of Canada website

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Brotherman: Dictator of Discipline is one of the most celebrated indie comics ever to be published in the United States. Brotherman is the creation of two siblings: writer Guy A. Sims and artist-writer Dawud Anyabwile. While Marvel and DC today struggle to sell many of their titles in the low thousands, the original eleven issues of the black-and-white Brotherman comic sold a total of 750,000 copies via indie channels from African-American bookstores to barbershops and Black Expos.

Many credit Brotherman with fueling the growth of African-American comics in the 1990s. Now after a long hiatus, the series is back, not as individual pamphlet comics but in graphic novel form. Brotherman: Revelation – Book One is now out and it's as engaging and gorgeous as ever—maybe even more now that it's in full colour as ebook and trade paperback. When I learned the book was out, I just had to contact the artist, since I'd also loved his and his brother's adaptation of Walter Dean Myers' novel Monster.

In addition to co-creating Brotherman, Dawud Anyabwile worked for the video game company WanderLust Interactive, and on the television shows The Wild Thornberrys and Rugrats, and at Turner Studios as a designer and storyboard artist for Turner channels Cartoon Network, TNT, TBS, and others. He was nominated for the Will Eisner Best Artist Award, and won a 2016 Glyph Award for Brotherman: Revelation – Book One. And he also won a 2008 Emmy for conceptualising a public service announcement for the Dalai Lama, and in 1992 received the Key to the City of Kansas City, Missouri, for "Outstanding Service to Children" for the original run of Brotherman.

Dawud Anyabwile is also a down-to-earth, friendly, and very informative brother. A major reason I produce MF GALAXY is to support artists in various disciplines, including many who don't have close to the creative discipline, sales success, and ability of Anyabwile and so need the publicity. And yet when I ask some of them who as yet have accomplished very little to come on the show, some of them turn up their noses. Not Anyabwile! Even though he's been the subject of countless interviews and even documentaries, and you can find links to some of them on MF GALAXY.org, he was quick to respond, generous with his time, and kind. So, creators of various types, you can learn from this man in many ways.

In today's episode of MF GALAXY, Dawud Anyabwile and I discuss:

• The origins of the groundbreaking indie comic Brotherman
• How his company Big City Entertainment avoided the 1990s American comics industry crash with stunning indie distribution success, and
• The artists who were his best allies in launching his business

We spoke by Skype on May 17, 2017. I began by asking Anyabwile to summarise the story of Brotherman: Revelation - Book One, and what he hoped to accomplish with this volume that he hadn't been able to do before.

brothermancomics.com

Brotherman Movie Intro and Documentary Teaser 2009

Brotherman Forever

Brotherman: Revelation Graphic Novel Book Teaser 2015

Brotherman: Revelation Graphic Novel Crowd Funding

Brotherman Comics on JJ On Atlanta - Peachtree TV - July 2009

Dawud Anyabwile - Self Portrait Speed Painting

Brotherman: Revelation Production Recording by Dawud Anyabwile

Plenty of aspiring writers think writing for children is easy, and getting published that way is even easier. Wrong! As almost any writer will tell you, unless you're a star, the business is never easy and is definitely never a sure thing. On May 20, 2017, a group of children's writers met at the Capital City Press writers conference in Edmonton for a panel called "From Aliens to the Zodiac: The A-Z's of Writing for Kids and Teens."

Who organised the event? Why, the outstanding Katherine Gibson of the Edmonton Public Library and author S.G. Wong who's Capital City Press's featured writer, and they assembled terrific writers to help you learn what you need to break into Kidlit or advance your career there. Those panelists are Marty Chan, Joan Marie Galat, and Tololwa Mollel, and they'll be introducing themselves. The moderator is author Natasha Deen, best known for her Guardian and also Retribution series.

During the panel they discuss:

• Whose advice is worthwhile, and whose is worthless, when it comes to changing your writing—and why
• The surprising reality about just how little publishers know about selling books, and
• Why you shouldn't start writing whatever is hot in the market right now

Many thanks to Katherine Gibson and SG Wong for arranging my recording opportunity. And now on MF GALAXY, Natasha Deen introduces the Capital City Press forum on writing and publishing for children.

http://martychan.com

http://www.natashadeen.com

http://www.joangalat.com

http://www.tololwamollel.com

Jacob Banigan is one impressive cat. He knows more about how to build and refine stories than anyone I've ever met, and I know a lot of writers. And yet Banigan doesn't see himself as a writer and writes only occasionally.

So how and why does he grok story like no one else? Because he's a master improviser who's been studying the craft since 1990 when he joined Rapid Fire Theatre in Edmonton. Sure, he also gained skills in years of creating and performing sketch comedy, including in The 11:02 Show which is where we worked together for a season, and in Gordon's Big Bald Head, where I also worked with him one summer.

But Banigan kept growing in the field, serving as Rapid Fire's Artistic Director from 1995 to 2004, creating news plays, launching improv festivals Nosebowl and the long-form improv show CHiMPROV, and helped make Rapid Fire's reputation go international by winning competition after competition. Now he lives in Austria where he works with Theater Im Bahnhof of Graz and English Lovers of Vienna, and he wanders the planet like David Banner, performing and teaching improv wherever people need him.

In today's episode of MF GALAXY, Jacob Banigan discusses:

• What the fundamental core of improv has to teach writers and all story-tellers
• Why improvisers should never focus on "being funny"
• The most important thing to know about how to get your audience to care about your characters and plot
• Why it's absolutely indispensable to screw up and even fail at your art, and when you should disrupt a system that's working
• How to harness randomness to improve your creativity
• How falling in love with your process can cost you the quality of your product
• How he runs the best critique sessions I've ever seen—which is why I've asked him to advise me on two screenplays—and how to learn his method, and
• How to know if you can trust your fellow creators.

Banigan spoke with me over food at Edmonton's Route 99 diner on August 24, 2016. He begins by introducing himself. I seriously overestimated how well my microphone would pick up my voice and seriously underestimated how much ambient noise it would collect. So sometimes I'll be cutting in to rephrase my question, and at other times I've boosted the gain so you can hear me.

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Today on the show we're talking about 13 Reasons Why, the Netflix series based on the Jay Asher novel. My guests are librarian Ashley Cain and policy manager Jinting Zhao, both of whom attended the high school where I taught for most of my teaching career, and where Cain was one of my English students.

I asked them to come onto MF GALAXY because they each posted insightful and powerful remarks following a Facebook thread I started discussing the series and asking about its accuracy.

In Edmonton, a school principal banned out-of-class discussion of the series. In the following show you'll hear me incorrectly say to Jinting Zhao that the school was a junior high, but Ashley Cain correctly noted that it was an elementary school. The school emailed to parents to state its ban, but failed to encourage parents to discuss the series' issues with their children. However, according to an online CBC news report, many schools across North America did just that. Other sources including The New Yorker magazine have attacked the series, leading series star Katherine Langford to defend it.

In today's MF GALAXY, Zhao and Cain discuss:

• The ethics of how the series depicts sexual assault and suicide, and whether such depictions encourage those actions
• The accuracy or inaccuracy of the series and how its events relate to their own harrowing experiences of junior and senior high school
• How social media harassment can traumatise teens in ways that are totally foreign to their parents' experiences
• Why many teens don't know where sexual boundaries should exist to keep them safe socially and physically, and to prevent them from ruining the lives of their peers
• The responsibilities of peers, teachers, and parents to young people to prevent the worst of what the series dramatises, and how some authorities inadvertently escalate the crises some teens are facing
• How some young people can escape social persecution that could destroy them, and
• Whether teachers and parents should be watching the series with their teens—and what questions they should ask afterward, and how.

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