mariko tamaki news

Q: How much do I love Toronto’s Scream Literary Festival?

A: A lot.

On Monday I did my Scream reading, which was AMAZING.  Scream rules.  I love that it’s in this giant city park, High Park, with all these twisty wood paths.  To get there you have to park your bike/car/scooter and walk through to the stage, which, for those who do not know and have not Screamed, is the set they use for the Shakespeare Dream in High Park (which runs until August 31st if you’re interested in attending), which is always big and giant and magnificent.

Here’s the dream stage when it’s not all poetry and literary:

It’s so cool to have a reading outside.  Especially when the weather is nice and it WAS on Monday.  Grey in the morning but then all the clouds separated and became 3D pastel.  Yes  yes it was sunny and cool and perfectly lovely.  It was so nice that even my mom braved the mosquitos that chewed her to her bones last time and came to see my reading, yay.  Lots of super chums came to check it out actually.  Thanks guys!

Here’s some pics of me care of the Scream Blog.

Dress from Fairweather.  CHEAP!

I got to go first in the line-up, which is always nice.  It meant I wasn’t huddled backstage for too long with pre-performance jitters.

It also meant I got to see some performances, including Claudia Dey, who is so dreamy, Jacob Wren, who wrote Families are Formed Through Copulation, which rules, and Wade Compton and Jason de Couto, who did this super cool turntable, sampling, hip hop thing about racism and history in Canada.  My favorite part was the signing table, when these two kick ass little kids bought Skim.  I love that.  Clearly I need to start taking my camera to these things more.

Scream should be the last of my summer performances, which is totally happy making because it was a nice send off.  I’ll be back on stage for September and Toronto’s Word On The Street.  Then October is a whirlwind of comic conventions and reading series.  Good times!

Take care all and have an EXCELLENT summer!

mariko

Okay well it’s a bit late but the post is still there.

Check out the piece Jillian and I did about our Grandma Nana, which was published in the Mother’s Day edition of the New York Times!

Being a writer can be a very random thing at times.  I mean, you have a job but you don’t always have work.  You work takes you to strange places to do strange things.

Case in point.

Today I had an appearance for Asian Heritage Month, which was put on by the Toronto Public Library.  Good thing I actually looked up the event on the website or it never would have occurred to me that by TORONTO they actually meant SCARBOROUGH, which, if you live here you know, is FAR.

At some point after glancing at the website I decided that instead of suffering through Scar-bound TTC I would SCOOT over to the library, which is all the way over at Lawrence and Markam  - which I knew because I looked it up.  Probably should have looked up the relative distance between myself and that location too….

So around 2:00 pm I jump on the scoot and head east — which then became the most terrifying ride of my life.  I mean, Lawrence is pretty crazy at the best of times.  With gale type blasts of winds on what is indeed a tiny little scoot it is SCARY.

Right around what looked like a cliff I finally pulled over and called Charissa and freaked out.  Charissa assured me that what looked like a cliff was in fact a bridge over nothing (same difference except it has a definite end).  And she reminded me that I had basically come within 6 blocks of my final destination.  So I should just chill.  And get back on the scoot.  Which I did.

How cute is this library?

There was a bit of a tense moment when I got to the Cumbrae library and no one at the reference desk had any idea what I was talking about.

Me: “Asian Heritage Month?”
Librarian: “Month?”

Fortunately it turned out that Allan, the guy organizing the event, was a HUGE comics fan.  As well as a HUGE fan of a comic illustrated by Emiko Superstar Artist Steve Rolston, Queen & Country !  So we ended up hanging out for a half an hour with this other comic fan just talking about comics.  About that time a huge flock of 9 year old boys came in.  All sly and quiet.  And then as soon as I started passing around the comic THEY started asking all these questions.

My favorites included:

How much money do you make?
What kind of car do you drive?
Why do all comic people look so geeky?
Who inspires and supports you when you are writing?

CAN YOU BELIEVE IT!?!?!!

SO CUTE!!!!

Hopefully next time I do one of these things I’ll remember my camera.  Maybe I’ll even strap it to the front of my scoot!

Until next time comic fans!

mariko

First of all, before it’s too late, if you’re in Toronto go check out Skim at the Beguiling.

It’s an exhibit of Jillian’s sketches and it lets you in on a bit of the creative process that went into making Skim, especially on Jillian’s end. How exactly I will eventually re-create the creative process that went into WRITING Skim, I am not sure. But it will involve coffee and many notebooks. And coffee.

In other news, Skim continues to pop up in the media, hooooray!

We had a review in the Toronto Star and you’re truly even appeared on the cover of Broken Pencil…. with something in my eye.

AND we even got some kudos on Sounds Like Canada on the CBC. If the rumour is right, then, thanks to Michele Landsberg, Shelagh Rogers is possibly reading Skim right now, as we speak/blog.

Looking forward to MoCCA. If you’re around then come and visit the table and get a OOAK Skim BUTTON!

Can you say collector’s item?

I knew that you could.

Well we’ve been all over the place these days.

Skim has been reviewed in the Globe and Mail, Rabble.ca, Fast Forward Weekly and BUST Magazine, plus yours truly appeared on the cover of Xtra, AND we had an interview in The National Post.

As a kind of podcast “cherry on the cake” situation, yesterday we even got our 5 minutes on CBC’s Q. How awesome is that?

To top it all off last night we had an AWESOME launch at the Gladstone Hotel, with a guest appearance by Kiss Machine legend lady Emily Pohl-Weary and an amazing interview by writer Jessica Westhead. TINARS (This is Not a Reading Series) is a creative approach to book launches that seeks to go above and beyond the call of duty when it comes to presenting new books. I think we did a pretty good job (ably assisted by TINARS’s Chris Reed and by Laura Repas and Julie Wilson at Groundwood/Anansi).

Here is a picture of our fabulous window display at Pages — which is 256 Queen St. West in Toronto.

Thanks to everyone who has reviewed the book, supported the book and its creators, and come out our events including last night’s launch.

I am incredibly hung over now but also incredibly happy. Yay.

Holy cow are we all over the papers these days or WHAT?

Since I last posted Skim has been reviewed in (to name a few) Publishers Weekly, the Calgary Herald,

and most recently in Xtra! Toronto.

And Jillian and I are in the midst of preparing for our This Is Not A Reading Series launch, March 26th at the Gladstone, where we will be interviewed by Toronto writer Jessica Westhead, with Brad Mackay introducing.

So exciting!!!

** UPDATE **  NEW REVIEWS!!!!

Gloss Magazine 

Jian Ghomeshi in the National Post 

Metro News  

Slate 

I know I am sooo overdue for an update, so here’s the latest. Skim is officially in stores in Canada, most specifically it’s happily sitting on a shelf at Toronto’s amazing comic store The Beguiling (as you can see from the picture below, there’s a healthy stack in stock!) I will update the Graphic Novels section of the website ASAP with the full 411, but in the meantime here is what Skim looks like all merched up!

Hooray!

Take care all and more soon!

mariko

Friends of Lulu’s (www.friendsoflulu.org) Valerie D’Orazio and Marion Vitus review SKIM!

Check out the audio at http://www.friends-lulu.org/blog/?p=64

The Advance Release Copy has arrived! Yay! My first look at Skim as a book.

Lovely.

So the new Kiss Machine is out.  This issue is a tribute/goodbye issue for the magazine’s founder and creator, Emily Pohl-Weary.  I’ve known Emily for about five years now.  I got to know her particularly well when she and I embarked on a grueling East coast Perpetual Motion tour.  That tour taught me two things.  One, that just because you can physically fit four people and their stuff in your car, does not mean that you will have the psychic space to endure those four people and their things on a 8 day tour.  Two, actually enduring that kind of thing is pretty cool when you look back on it.  There was one night, I remember, we were driving in the rain,  my friend Daniel Justice was at the wheel (who is also an amazing author of science-fiction-fantasy) trying to keep me calm by recounting the last episode of Angel to me scene by scene, Emily was in the back singing to her ipod, my friend Carly was meditating on our survival.  Crazy!  And yet I would not have “Skim” and all it’s amazingness if it weren’t for that trip and if it weren’t for Emily, who gave Jillian and I the space to create and publish “Skim” in it’s original incarnation as part of “Kiss Machine presents”.

I’ll highly recommend you buy/check out the new Kiss Machine “Goodbye” issue - and not just because I happe to have a column in it.

Good luck and best wishes to the supah-cool new editors  Madelaine Lyons and Emma Lawson.

This is what the issue looks like:

Salut!

mariko