Hello again! It has been about eight months since the last update to the site. For much of that time, I have been working on various small projects unrelated to this one, and dabbling on the edges of new big projects without committing to them. However, I have also been following up with publishers. One in particular that I reapproached in the middle of last year expressed interest. I met with him in the fall and we hammered out a new way to organize the material -- most significantly, two books to be published simultaneously instead of one. At his request, I submitted a revised proposal reflecting this new organization. A couple of weeks back, I heard a contract was in the mail, and late last week I signed it. I need to do the work to reorganize the manuscript, then the publisher needs to do their thing, so publication is still a ways a way. For the next while, you probably won't see too many updates here. In fact, this may be the last update on this incarnation of the web site -- I want to put together something snazzier and more useable. And as publication approaches, web and email updates, including generous use of all of the interview material that I collected but was not able to use in the books, will become a frequent thing once more. Stay tuned!

Lots of news since the last update. The biggest piece is that the manuscript is DONE!!! I can't tell you how exciting that is. The final chapter was completed some time in the new year, then I spent a few months doing various sorts of editing work on the entire book. It was completed a couple of weeks ago. I've sent packages to the three publishers with whom I've had interactions over the years who still appear to be open to considering the project, to let them know it is finished. It's still early -- the publishing industry is nothing if not slow -- but since I sent the packages, I've already had a supportive but quite inconclusive interaction with one of the publishers (with the promise of further interaction after they've had a chance to examine what I sent more closely), and am waiting patiently for more definitive responses from all three. At the moment, that is the plan: Wait to hear from those three, then take further steps based on what I hear. In other, and much sadder, news, interview participant Wey Robinson passed away on May 24, 2010. Wey was a long-time anti-poverty activist in Ontario. Perhaps the most visible struggle in which Wey was a core organizer was the winning of rent control in Ontario in the 1970s, but their involvement spanned decades. (Wey was also the only trans person among the 50 that I interviewed, though very little of their collective, public activism focused on those particular experiences -- I'm not sure what pronouns Wey was using at the the time of their death, so I'm using "they/their.") Wey was not only someone I interviewed but someone I worked with for years in activist settings in Hamilton, Ontario, and from whom I learned a great deal. I last saw Wey a couple of years ago when I stopped by for a visit during a trip to southern Ontario. At that point, their mobility was significantly restricted but their commitment and contributions to the struggles of people living in poverty remained sharp and fierce. Wey will be greatly missed.

What? Another update already? Yes! Just wanted to celebrate that I finished the second-to-last chapter yesterday. It uses pieces of the interviews with Kathy Mallett and Roger Obonsawin to examine some of the ways that indigenous communities have struggled against the racist, colonizing environment of Canada's cities. My next task is to go back and fill in a couple of gaping holes I noticed months ago in Chapter One and did the research to fill as I was doing research for the just-completed chapter. Oh...and I also wanted to sadly note the passing of Muriel Duckworth, an amazing activist, a wonderful person, and a participant in this project.

This time I definitely know it's a record between updates. No definite word on a publisher yet, though there are still three independent Canadian publishers that have expressed at least sufficient interest to request more materials from me and have said neither yes nor no, though it has been some time since I've been in communication with them. In terms of the writing, a chapter on anti-psychiatry organizing in Toronto took much, much longer than anticipated but was completed earlier this year, and I'm a few days away from completing a chapter on urban indigenous organizing. That means I have one chapter left to write and then some scattered holes to fill and tidying to do through the rest of the book, and it will be done. That will probably take a few months. At that point I will reapproach those publishers who appear to not yet have made a decision, and will move forward from there.

Hmmm...I think I may have set a record for time between updates, which is something I neither desired nor intended but which somehow happened anyway. But here I am. Things remain very much in progress. The search for a publisher continues. There are currently several publishers that are (still) actively evaluating the full proposal plus sample chapters. On the advice of a friend with much more experience in these matters than myself, I today sent those publishers two chapters that have been completed since the proposals were submitted, as a bit of a reminder of the project and to let them know that work on the book continues. Speaking of which, progress was slower than anticipated between January and April because I was employed part-time -- that may or may not continue in the fall, I'm not sure. I am currently hard at work on Chapter 9, which focuses on feminist activism in the context of Protestant Christianity in Canada. I hesitate to put a timeline on it, but I would expect that it will mostly be done within a month, except for one discrete chunk that will require me to spend a few days poking around an archive. After that is done, I will have only Chapters 5, 11, and 12 to complete, and I will have an entire manuscript, albeit in draft form. Very exciting!

This morning I sent full proposal packages (detailed proposal plus sample chapters) to three publishers. This afternoon when I got home I found a letter from another publisher asking to see a sample chapter, which is ready to send off tomorrow morning. Chapter 7 has come along some but not as quickly as I might have liked in the week and a bit since I last updated this site, mostly due to parenting responsibilities beyond the usual routine but also because I wanted to polish the proposal. Notwithstanding their impact on the pace of production of new text, both were time well spent, I think.

Chapter 6 is written, minus two passages that will require a few days of research that I cannot do in Sudbury. I'll see if I can do that down in Toronto in November. In the meantime, I've moved on to Chapter 7, which should be a fairly quick one to write, and hopefully I'll get Chapter 9 done as well before the end of the year, or close to it. In terms of the search for a publisher, neither of the two agents who had requested a full proposal in the last round of queries were able to take me on. One had serious health issues that mean he will not be doing anything professionally for some time, and the other sent me a very complimentary and supportive "no" -- not sure if that's just SOP, but it was still nice to receive. The next step is to return to approaching publishers directly, which is really a more appropriate strategy for a book of this type. I had thought that I would go back to doing it one publisher at a time, but a response to my last email update from a supportive reader with much more experience in these matters than myself made the point that it makes more sense to do them in parallel rather than in series just because of how long publishers take to respond to such things. Most relevant publishers in Canada accept simultaneous submissions, so this morning I sent off a bunch of query letters. There also appear to be two very relevant publishers that do not require a query first and just want proposals, so when I get the first request back from these queries for a full proposal, I'll print out three copies and submit to those other two as well. I think I may want to tinker a bit more with the proposal, too, and shorten it if I can...we'll see.

Yesterday I sent out full proposals to two agents who had expressed interest in response to the recent round of query letters. As well, I may send out the first email update in awhile later today.

Since the last update, I have continued to tinker occasionally with Chapter 4, but most of my attention has been on writing Chapter 10. I completed it by the end of June and then went away on holidays for two weeks. That means the current status of the project is that the Intro and Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, and 10 are complete, more or less, and Chapters 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, and 12 remain to be written. Along with spending some of the last week finishing a piece of writing unrelated to this project, I have also begun intensive reading and preliminary writing necessary for Chapters 6 and 7. In addition, I have prepared another batch of query letters to be sent to agents later today.

And the months they just fly by...so here's where things are at: In terms of the queries to agents, I got a few responses from people that were not interested in seeing the full proposal and one that was. When I received this expression of interest I spent a little time further refining the proposal and sent it off. I have heard nothing yet, but it is still early. I may send out some more query letters in the near future. Chapter 4 has taken much, much longer than I had hoped, but it is largely done. There are still a few holes -- a paragraph missing here, a sentence there -- that depend on me receiving sources that are not locally available, and I will fill them when I can. And it still will require a bit of polishing I am sure. But it is essentially done and I am moving on. I had originally intended to work on Chapter 5 next, but I think I will jump forward to Chapter 10 because the sources it will require will overlap to a certain extent with the chapter I just completed. I am not far enough into it yet to say for sure, but I would imagine it will go quicker than Chapter 4 did -- 4 was a fairly complicated chapter in terms of the ideas I was presenting, whereas I think 10 will be quite a bit simpler. (An aside: I have occasionally been quite discouraged at the length of time this project is taking, as passionate as I am about it. Partly this is because it has always been something I have been pursuing in the context of other demands that have had to take priority in my life, like full-time paid work or full-time parenting. However, the slow pace of the writing -- and I am not generally a particularly slow writer, at least of non-fiction -- also has to do with the nature of the project. Rather than writing a book about one topic area in which I am already an expert, as most writers of non-fiction books do, I am writing a book that talks about a dozen different areas that I knew very little about when I started and that I hope to cover sufficiently well such that people who have devoted their lives to the areas in question will read what I write and think I have done a decent job. I am very much enjoying the opportunity to do this learning...I just wish it could happen a bit faster. :) )

As I said in my last update, I'm not sure how interested agents might be in the sort of work that this project contains, but last week I sent query letters to several of them. We'll see what happens. Work on Chapter 4 continues.

My mind, it keeps a-changin'. I wrote a sizzling cover letter this afternoon to include with the proposal to send to the publisher I've had in mind as my next destination for quite some time, barring the little abortive detour in late fall. I wrote it, then I looked over their guidelines again, and read through the relevant chapter in a book I have on book proposals, and hemmed and hawed and thought. And I decided that instead I am going to turn it into a query letter. Instead of sending the whole shebang to one publisher, I will send the query to some carefully selected agents. Not sure how interested agents might be in the sort of work that this project contains, but when I decided a few years back that it was not even worth attempting, I was much less sure of my material than I am now. It may go nowhere, but it might just result in results. So after I've had a chance to peruse a copy of the relevant reference book at a bookstore, no later than Saturday, I will send off a bevy of query letters and cross my fingers.

At the time of my last update I was working on a substantial rewrite of Chapter 3 with a rewrite of Chapter 6 next in line. I had hoped to finish both by the beginning of December. However, the work on Chapter 6 involved adding more new material than I had expected, which consequently involved more research, so it was mid-December before they were done. I took printouts of both of those chapters with me when we headed down to southern Ontario for the holidays and had a look over them, and though both need to have a few tweaks and to have a few very specific bits of information added, I am quite happy with them. In reflecting on this past year of work, I realize that I have not produced as much new material as I had hoped because re-visioning and rewriting -- once for some stuff, twice for the rest -- took up so much of my rather limited writing time. Nonetheless, I feel I have moved ahead, because last year at this time I was groping for a cohesive, compelling approach to presenting the material, and I now feel I have found one. I now have an Intro, and Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 6, all in that form and relatively polished, and in the last couple of days I have begun writing Chapter 4. I may be underestimating yet again how long things will take or overestimating how much time parenting will leave me for this work, but I am hoping that this year will see me finish the majority of the writing that remains to be done on this project. As well, I also took time this past year to re-work my book proposal, itself a fairly substantial document, to fit the new vision for the project. I delayed sending it to a new publisher because of another option presented by a friend and ally of the project -- an option which was well worth trying but which has not resulted in any real contact, unfortunately. But that means that my proposal is ready to send off to the destination I previously had in mind, and I will do so some time in the next week. So I think it really is a happy new year for this project!

The proposal, the Introduction, and Chapters One and Two (which are serving as sample material accompanying the proposal) are all completely polished. Initial contact with The Next Destination was made earlier in the week, although I am still waiting for an initial response. I'm hard at work rewriting Chapter 3 -- I took a wrong turn initially, but this week have been back on track. I'm hoping to have that and the other chatper remaining to be rewritten done by the end of November.

Well, not such a big gap since my last update, though still bigger than I'd like. In the last six weeks I have been very much enjoying the time provided by my pre-schooler actually going to pre-school three mornings a week. In that time the 25,000 words of sample material have been almost completely rewritten -- I'm just waiting for my partner to get me her comments, after which I can make changes and then be ready to send it out. Rewriting the proposal itself was a bit of a larger task than I was expecting because some elements in how I theorize this project have changed substantially since I originally wrote it, but it is completely done and ready to go. I have decided who I want to approach next with the proposal and that will happen later this week. I will probably try to do an update email once that has happened. Beyond that, other than doing background reading for the next couple of chapters that will be started from scratch, I have two more existing chapters to transform into the new structure.

Oh dear...once again I have been rather lax in noting project progress on this site, though the project has still been moving along. The summer was, admittedly, rather slow, with frequent trips out of town interrupting my momentum, another writing project taking a chunk of time, and primary attention going to a pre-schooler who is becoming less and less amenable to convenient nap times. However, his first morning of pre-school (three mornings a week for the time being) was today, and I'm looking forward to having reliable, large blocks of time during the day to push this project forward. In any case, after the last update I finally received feedback on the chapters representing my model at that time. This feedback was extremely helpful and allowed me to further clarify my approach, prompting a further refinement of how each chapter will be structured (which of course will require some further rewriting of those three). This should make them flow more smoothly and be more accessible to readers. I wrote a chapter from scratch using this very newest model -- the chapter which will serve as the first chapter of the book, in fact. And just today I finished a draft of the revised book proposal that is sufficiently polished to hand off to my partner for comment. The next step is to tinker with and/or rewrite the sample material from the book itself that will accompany the proposal, and then send it all off. I did have a publisher in mind but a friend and supporter of the project made an interesting suggestion I had not previously considered so I am taking a few days to reflect on where exactly I should send it. In any case, I'm hoping it goes out in a few weeks. And as always, I promise I will do my best to update this site on a more regular basis...hopefully with the more reliable and prime work time at my disposal during the week now, that statement can turn into more than just empty words!

Still waiting for feedback from those who are going to comment on the new model chapters. Sent out an email update today, the first in ages. The next step is to start revamping the book proposal, even if I have to wait a little bit more to get feedback on the sample chapters.

After the longest gap in site updates in the history of the project, we're back. The gap in updates has not meant a lack of work, however. Back in the fall the project received a thumbs down from the publisher I'd been talking to so far -- not exactly happy news, but not exactly uncommon when you're trying to get a book published, either. Much of the time since then has been spent developing a new vision for the book and then trying to put it into practice. This meant about half of what had so far been written as of my last update had to be discarded. The rest plus a bunch of new stuff has been cut, pasted, stitched, and sewn into a new model intro and three new model chapters. This material is out with trusted colleagues and allies and friends for comment on the new structure. Once I have their input I will make decisions about further changes, produce an updated book proposal, and send it off to a different publisher. In the meantime, I am following some advice from my partner and putting thought and effort into thinking about other, smaller and less involved outputs that could be created from all this wonderful interview material -- I'll be sure to post to the site when/if anything comes of those efforts!

The base of operations for this project has been successfully moved from Los Angeles, California to Sudbury, Ontario. In fact, that happened quite some time ago, and I have been rather lax in letting it be known on the site. I have actually been back working on the project for about three weeks now. Much of my time has been taken up by research, and a little by illness (both mine and our toddler's). I though I had all the resources I would need to write the contextual material for the next couple of chapters, but I was wrong; I have now taken steps to obtain what I need, though I may not have it all for another fortnight. Nonetheless, those chapters have advanced since last I wrote, and those which were in unpolished draft form have been refined. As well, steps have been taken to obtain a corrected interview transcript from one wonderful participant who has been held back by health problems -- it involves me making a trip to Montreal as well as getting final versions of some great stories, so I'm happy. I think the next step will be making the next series of difficult editorial decisions about which from the wealth of stories I've been provided I get to include.

Another chapter -- a reasonably substantial one, at that -- is now in the "reasonably stable draft" stage. I think the amount of material at that stage or better is probably in the range of 25,000 to 30,000 words. The remaining research materials that I will need to look at before I can do the writing for the next two chapters are en route to the address we'll be staying at in southern Ontario before we move into our new place in Sudbury in mid-July. I think any time I have for this project between now and our move-out in a week's time will be spent revisiting the ongoing issues of what to include in the book from the wealth of interview material, what other research will be necessary to do so, what order to put it in, and how to structure it.

Work is proceedings as fast as preparing for a major move will allow. A reasonably stable draft of the first chapter of the book is done -- it still needs to have a few small bits and pieces plugged in as I do more reading, but the bulk of the structure, writing, and editing are complete. I will probably get another chapter done before we leave, as the editing and research for it are largely done and just the non-interview bits need to be written. During the weeks (?) of complete hiatus from writing over the period of the move I'll still be putting as much time into research as I can manage, so hopefully the following two chapters will come together rather quickly after that.

I just talked to the publisher to which the proposal has been submitted. Unfortunately, it arrived slightly too late to allow its consideration in the last editorial meeting before the summer, so more definite word on the fate of the project will have to wait until September at the earliest. Work continues at a slow but steady pace. The preliminary reading for the next few chapters is close to done. I hope to do some of the writing and get a more focused idea of what further research is necessary for these chapters before the end of June, at which point the project will be put on hold for a few weeks to allow me to move from my current location in Los Angeles, California, to Sudbury, Ontario.

The proposal has been sent, as has an update to the project email list. In the last few weeks when I haven't been working on the proposal, I have been doing some intensive reading to prepare for a number of the chapters based in the earlier decades covered by the project, as well as editing and structuring some of the material.

April has ended and the proposal is still not gone. I've received feedback on one of the three pieces that I gave to my friend, and will be receiving feedback on the other two tonight. I have made a new version of the sample radio show episode that I will be submitting with the book proposal. The recently published and related book that I needed to read and talk about in the proposal has been dealt with. Unfortunately, upon returning to LA from the recent trip to Ontario I received word about another such book -- not quite so closely related, but close enough. So I am waiting for that book to arrive. I would imagine I will incorporate all of the feedback into the proposal by the time I leave on yet another trip at the end of this coming week, and the book will arrive while I'm gone. The new expected time of submission is mid-May, though it may be later depending on when that book gets here. However, in the last few days I have made the transition to working on chapters not for inclusion in the proposal. Though it is still early, that work feels like it is going well.

I have produced versions of the introduction and both sample chapters that would be, more or less, ready to submit. However, there are still some bits and pieces that need to be done for the book proposal itself, and tomorrow I leave on a nine-day trip to Ontario. While I'm there, whatever time I can steal for this project will be spent reading a recently published book with historical content related to this project. However, I've also had a gracious offer by a friend -- a writer, an activist, and a person whose analysis I greatly respect -- to look over some of what I've written. I declined when she first offered but have since changed my mind, and if she's still interested I'll be taking advantage of my forced break from the work by sending it off to her, and then making further revisions when I get her feedback. I'm still roughly aiming for the end of April to get the revised version of the proposal off to the publisher, but if I've learned anything from this project it is a need to be flexible with expectations for how long the work is going to take. Another piece of good news is that a Canadian activist and author whose work relates to the book has agreed to review the proposal once it is finished and resubmitted and, if she likes what she sees, possibly write an endorsement.

A second draft of the second sample chapter is finished and ready for editing and input by my partner. I've also made corrections on paper to the intro and the first sample chapter, which I now need to make on the electronic versions. Then I'll get to work on revising the book proposal itself.

Today I finished a first draft of the second of the sample chapters required for the revised book proposal being prepared for resubmission to an independent Canadian publisher, at their request. This chapter was the first that I have written that is not so much oral history as using the interviews something like qualitative sociological data -- it is a look at politicization, what it means, and how it happens according to the experiences of the 50 long-time Canadian activists I talked to. Of course it still needs to be cleaned up, taken apart, and put back together again a few times before it will be ready to send, and then I have to actually make the necessary changes to the proposal itself, but this is a significant step. I'd imagine that milestones worth noting on the site will come by a little more frequently in the next few weeks than they have in the last month.

The interview with Roger Obonsawin is now finalized. That means that the current phase of interview processing is close to done. Of the seventeen uncompleted interviews that I had at the start of this stretch of work, back in late January, fourteen have been finalized and the remaining three cannot be for the moment. For one of those, I have made the submitted corrections but need to further clarify the wishes of the paricipant, who is out of the country for a couple of months. For the second, we have arranged for the corrections to be submitted during the week of March 7. For the third, it is not yet clear when the material will be submitted but the participant has been quite firm in expressing a desire to send revisions and I am doing everything I can to be flexible. The final transcripts now need to be bound and mailed -- this means I have a bit more work to do, on things like writing the accompanying letters and addressing envelopes. After that: Revise sample chapter number one and prepare sample chapter number two.

The interview with Brian O'Neill is now finalized. The interview with Lynn Jones is also in the "done" column again, this time for good.

The interview with Fo Niemi is now finalized.

The interviews with Leslie Spillett and Rita Kohli are now finalized.

The interview with Rev. David Murata is now finalized. By coincidence, not too long after finalizing the Jones interview I received an email from her containing some corrections -- thanks Lynn! I have one or two things I need to clarify and then I need to print it out again, so it will be back in the "finalized" column shortly.

The interview with Lynn Jones is now finalized.

The interview with Isabelle and Frank Showler, one of the earliest that was done and definitely the longest transcript, is now finalized.

Lost a couple of days of work because of computer problems, which have now been corrected. The interview with Sadeqa Siddiqui is now finalized.

The Spence interview is now finalized.

The Gajardo interview is now finalized.

The Grey interview is now finalized.

The McCallum interview is now finalized.

In this last major push to finalize interviews, the way I'm going to do it is correct and finalize the content and print them all, and then once that is done take them in bulk to be bound and mailed. The Finson interview is now finalized.

The essay proposal for submission to another book project is done, though not sent -- I want to let it sit for a couple of days then come back to it, make any final adjustments that feel necessary, and then send it. I have been gearing up for the final push in terms of interview processing, now that the deadline for return of corrected draft transcripts from participants has passed. The interview stats are as follows: Of the 47 interviews that I have done (with a total of 50 people), 17 are still not finalized. Of those, 5 participants have sent corrections since I last did any interview processing and 1 has given me an explicit go-ahead to make the corrections I see fit on my own. There are 2 that I am not holding to the deadline, for various reasons. Finally, there are 9 that I am, as I previously warned the participants in writing on multiple occasions, going to presume it is okay for me to go ahead and produce final transcripts for, without corrections from them. I have prepared letters to send to all of these 2 + 9 individuals tomorrow. For the 9, I am being very explicit about being open to receiving corrections for the next few months, even if it means having to redo a finalized transcript or two -- giving people maximum opportunity to shape their words is my top priority. Anyway, I'll start with the ones for which I have corrections and move on from there. I hope it moves quickly!

I finished a first draft of the first sample chapter on Friday and have revised it over the weekend. I am now going to give it to my partner for critique and editorial input and turn my attention to writing a proposal for an essay to submit to a book project that is seeking content related to this work. That should only take a few days, after which I will engage in a final push to get interview material processed. As of when I finished the bulk of the interview processing, there were about 15 interviews not yet finalized (out of 47). I set a deadline for return of the material after which I would prepare a final transcript based on the draft transcript originally sent to participants (except for a couple of special cases). That deadline has passed so I need to do the work to finalize the transcripts for those in this last group who returned corrections as well as those who did not. I'm not looking forward to it, as it is not particularly stimulating work, but it has to be done. I'm afraid it may take a few weeks, though.

It has been almost a month since I last updated this site -- sorry! As explained in the last post, three weeks of that month were spent away from our current home base visiting friends and family for the holidays. Nonetheless, progress has continued. Over that period I received one very exciting positive response to my request for endorsements, which I may or may not add to the site in the future. As well I did some reading for the first of the sample chapters I want to include in the revised book proposal. Since returning home I have started the actual writing for that chapter and the work is going smoothly. Finishing that chapter is my first priority but I need to make some decisions about what to do after that. I have set a date later in January as the deadline for return of corrected interview material from participants (except in two exceptional cases). For those who do not return anything by that date and do not communicate instructions to the contrary, I will proceed to produce final transcripts on my own. I need to decide whether to do that final, unapetizing chunk of interview processing before or after writing the second sample chapter and submitting the revised proposal. As well, a friend forwarded me a call for submissions for a book on activist scholarship -- I want to submit a proposal for an essay because it looks like such a cool project and is relevant to my work but I'm hesitant because if they choose to request a full article from me that's at least a month of work spent on something other than the book. Anyway, overall things feel like they are progressing, which is nice!

Endorsement requests have been sent. The interview retrieval process continues. I took some time to complete another writing project, this one for the purpose of generating some much needed income. Other than those things, much of the last few weeks has been spent in doing research -- I already had a pretty good picture of the lay resources relevant to this work but a much less complete sense of the availability of academic resources. I have a much better sense of that in general, and have assembled resources for preparing the sample chapter on queer rights in Canada. However, as of tomorrow I am on a trip back to Ontario for three weeks. During that time I will not be updating the web site, and the only work related to the project that I will be doing is reading, reading, reading. But in the New Year it will be back to more directly productive work, and I have the sense that at least the first of the sample chapters will come together rather quickly. We'll see.

The current work is not as easily reportable in bite-sized chunks the way the interview processing work was, hence the lack of updates recently. Though only one additional draft interview has been returned so far, progress has been made with respect to a number of the rest, and efforts are ongoing. I have prepared a draft introduction for the book. Initially I intended this to be just an outline to help get my thoughts in order, but I have produced a more polished version to use as part of a package to send to people in search of endorsements, and that has taken longer than I expected. Some more basic decisions about the structure, content, and narrative line of the book have been made in the course of that work. The packages seeking endorsements will be sent later in the week, and I will begin working on the two sample chapters.

The path forward requires two separate streams of work. One has involved developing and now implementing a plan to facilitate the return of corrected transcripts as soon as possible. To that end, I have been in touch with the 17 participants whose transcripts are not finalized by phone, mail, and email over the last several days. Their situations vary so I am taking a number of approaches, and contacts will be continuing as approrpiate. The other path follows on the inventory of interview material and has so far involved making decisions about identifying foci within the material where it is strong enough to make a segment or chapter. This will involve making decisions about the structure of the book, the unified narrative line that I will attempt to create with what is very diverse source material, identifying need for future research, and actually writing the thing. I suspect I will do at least one, perhaps two, very specific supplementary interviews. An important intermediate goal will be preparing a revised book proposal with two new sample chapters. One of the hardest things for me to do in this process will be deciding what to leave out -- when I was doing journalistic articles on a regular basis deciding to leave out great material because it didn't quite fit with the article was one of the most difficult things for me, and given the immense weight of great stories from great people in this project, I know I have my work cut out for me in that regard.

I lost most of last week -- three days to being out of town, two and a half days to another writing project -- but this week should be back to normal. The inventory is complete, at long last. As well, final transcripts for Friesen, Carless, and Weitz are essentially done. They still have to be printed, bound, and sent, and that will probably happen over a few days, but my part of the work is mostly complete. That means the interview rundown is 30 totally finished, 15 in draft form and awaiting participant corrections, and 2 uncertain.

Corrected draft transcripts from Weitz and Friesen arrived in the mail today. In terms of the inventory, I won't quite get it finished today. For various reasons, I am going to hold off on inventorying two of the interviews -- they may or may not end up being included in the end. In addition, there are another two where I have the material to produce a finished transcript, and I want to do that before inventorying them. Those two are Weitz, which just arrived today, and Carless. The interview with Roy Carless was actually done by Randy Kay at the studios of 93.3 FM CFMU, with me doing the teching. It was done before this project began as part of an effort by Randy and I to put together an oral history cd with political cartoonists to go with an art show at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. Because of that the interview takes a somewhat different form than most in this project, but it still fits in. However, when I went to inventory it I realized that the transcript needs to be edited a little to get it into the same form as the rest of these interviews.

Mailed the bound final transcript to Brooks yesterday, and also sent another copy of Duckworth's final transcript because there was a problem with the binding of the original that slipped by me when I sent it. I'm up to 39 interviews inventoried, and hope to finish the process by the end of the week.

I sent out an email update yesterday evening. This morning I received the corrected draft transcript from Lynn Brooks, and the final transcript should be ready to send by the end of the day. Please also note the new weekly article link to an Amnesty International report on violence against Aboriginal women in Canada. Movement history interview participant Leslie Spillet of Winnipeg has been heavily involved in work on this issue in recent years. She is active with Mother of Red Nations.

The final draft transcripts have been prepared and will be sent later today or early tomorrow -- that means Finson, Grey, and O'Brien should soon be receiving transcripts of their interviews for correction and return. I'm going to be sending an email update in the next day or so. I have added a web site on Canadian socialist history to the links section. Thanks to project participant Wey Robinson for the heads up on that! With the time taken to process interview material over the last two weeks the review and inventory of all interview material has slowed down, but I have done 29 of the 47 interviews.

This morning I mailed final transcripts to Vogel & North, Roach, Peterson, Duckworth, Siddiqui, and Harper. In the last couple of days I have received the long-awaited complete initial drafts for the transcripts of Finson and O'Brien, and I am waiting for the last little piece of Grey. These are the last interviews to be transcribed and audited.

Oops...must've gotten out of the habit of doing updates when I didn't have net access and never quite got back into it. In the last couple of weeks I have been hard at work on inventorying the interview material. I started by doing 20 of the 21 interviews that have been completely finished. I had a backlog of half a dozen interviews returned with corrections by participants, and I both produced finished transcripts and inventories those. Some of the long overdue material from the transcription service in Kitchener has arrived and I am in the middle of auditing that -- how much I actually do on that depends on whether the final pieces get to me by the end of the weekend, as promised, or whehter they miss the deadline yet again. And I have to get the six newly finished transcripts bound and then send them out. After that, it is on with inventorying the transcripts stuck in the draft stage.

Just a quick note to let you know that I'm back on the net after multiple screw-ups by our provider and much frustration on my part. The Friesen, McCallum, and Murata interviews have been sent. Corrected interviews have been received from Duckworth and Roach. I have received part of the initial transcript for Grey, but am still having problems with the transcription service back in Kitchener. Oh, and Weitz is audited but not sent because I have misplaced his address, but now that I'm back online I can get that over email. I am busy doing a detailed inventory of the material, in preparation for redoing the book proposal.

Argh. Because of incompetence on the part of the telecom company from whom we requested service (several weeks in advance of our move) there is a good chance we will not have internet access for up to two weeks. There may be few or no site updates in that time, but rest assured that the work will continue moving forward.

Sent the draft transcript for David Murata and the final transcript for Kathy Mallett this morning. Please note that today we move from the place we have been subletting for our first three months in LA to the apartment that will house us for the remainder of our stay. As a consequence, I may not have internet access for a few days.

Argh. Because of incompetence on the part of the telecom company from whom we requested service (several weeks in advance of our move) there is a good chance we will not have internet access for up to two weeks. There may be few or no site updates in that time, but rest assured that the work will continue moving forward.

Sent the draft transcript for Ariel Harper's interview yesterday, and received the corrected transcript from Kathy Mallett.

Late last week I sent the audited draft transcipt for his interview to Charles Roach, and today I mailed the audited draft transcript for Betty Peterson's interview.

Sent the final versions of the Daniel Paul and Theresa Meuse-Dallien transcripts today. Also, in the last week and a bit, I have received initial draft transcripts from the transcription services for the interviews with David Murata, John Friesen, Betty Peterson, Lynn Brooks, and the missing fragments of Charles Roach. Though I have word that a few more are on their way, I currently don't have any corrected draft transcripts waiting to be completed, so it is back to auditing for me.