Child of My Heart: Awards & Fan Faves

I’ve been asked to sing “Child of My Heart” at The Word Guild Awards Gala in Mississauga, Ontario on June 16th. My parents are donating Aeroplan miles for the flight so I can share this song.

In the fall of 2008, I co-wrote this song with Lisa Cornish, Dara Hallett, and my mom, Betty Taylor, for a fundraising banquet for OptionS Pregnancy Centre in Regina.

In January 2009, Dara and I sang it on our Minus 40 Tour. In May 2009, Lisa and I sang it for the Mother’s Day banquet at Arlington Beach Camp.

Last spring we won Award of Merit for song lyrics and this year I’ve been asked to sing it. I hope and pray that this song is used more and more widely for the glory of God and for the freedom of endless women and children!

For the month of May, “Child of My Heart” will be on IndieHeaven’s Fan Faves Chart. Click on www.indieheaven.com/fanfaves, select SONGWRITER in the dropdown box, the click the VIEW button. Add your vote by clicking on a star to rate the song.

Thanks for your support and prayers!

More crisis pregnancy resources:

http://www.capss.com

http://www.lifesitenews.com/gethelp/pregnancysupport/canada.html

getting to Write! Canada

WANTED:

Sponsors to help me get to Write! Canada and the Canadian Christian Writing Awards in June.

Last year, the song “Child of My Heart” (which I co-wrote with Lisa Vanderlip Cornish, Dara Hallett, and Betty Taylor) won Award of Merit for Song Lyrics at the Canadian Christian Writing Awards. This year they have asked me to sing this song at the awards gala.

The song is a duet between a birth mother and an adoptive mother and it’s such an important story to share. Originally we wrote it in support of OptionS, a crisis pregnancy centre in Regina, SK. Dara and I sang it on our Minus 40 Tour in January 2009. I would love to go and sing this song in person in Ontario—help take the message wider.

I would love to go to Ontario a few days early to give concerts and school presentations, and stay a couple of days after for the writers’ conference. I’ll apply for a conference bursary.

My main need is for a flight. I’m looking for friends with flight credits, air miles, and/or dollars to contribute to this trip.

Listen to the song here.

Donate money, click here.

Donate a flight, contact me here.

The gift of the ‘grandmother’

I love Jean Vanier’s practical insights:

A community needs this gift too, especially if their ‘grandmother’ also has a fund of commonsense. We too often tend to dramatise our weariness and anguish. We weep and forget why we are weeping. We identify with the agony of Christ or with the most disadvantaged of the world. An older woman who has experience, who is comfortable with herself, knows that what we really need is a week at the seaside. St. Teresa of Avila advised her sisters who were going through a bad patch to eat a good steak rather than force themselves to pray.

~ Jean Vanier, Community and Growth, p. 255

This is my biological grandmother, Madge Bowes, greeting cousins at my cousin Dustin’s wedding in August 2010. That’s my own mother standing directly behind her.

Grandma is such a treasure. She appears to be leaving us this month. We will miss her terribly when she’s gone.

More at the Bowes Family Blog.

You should know Karine

In September 2008, my friends Dave and Chelle Stearns introduced me to the music of Karine Polwart. They had discovered her while studying for their PhDs in Scotland and suggested that her song Follow the Heron might suit my repertoire. Oh indeed.

Karin’s website bio describes her style this way:

“A former children's rights worker, Karine allows images, narratives, questions and wry comic asides to do much of her work. She tries never to say too much. And whether it's the dilemmas of modern parenthood, the unsettling kindness of lies, or the resilience of hope, she admits most of her songs are an attempt to make sense of the fact that "there are people in this world who don't think like you do" (as she herself sings in 2006 song "Daisy"). All of which is precisely the kind of sideways, allegorical approach to contemporary living that you might expect from someone with a Masters degree in philosophy.”

I recently heard her say in an interview on streaming radio (wish I could remember the source) that her song Daisy was written with her sister’s children in mind, the need to protect, teach, and equip them for life in this world, and avoiding cynicism. Poignant.

But Karine is not a pessimist. Clearly the “restlessly creative” artist is “gonna do it all.”

http://www.karinepolwart.com/

inspiration vs obedience?

Writing is so much less about inspiration than it is about obedience. People say, ‘I don’t write unless I’m inspired,’ and that just makes me annoyed. I don’t think there’s ever been a time when I was inspired. I just open the files and sit there and work until something comes. I’ve written about a hundred poems and I think about two of them ‘just showed up.’

~ conversation with Sue Plett, poet, poetry teacher, blogger 

“Show up every day. The blank page will teach you to write.”

~ conversation with Brooks Williams , singer-songwriter

"I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better."

“The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time's scrawl as a right and your daring as a necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly. . . .”

~ Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

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