The Geography of Hope

Well, with the book sitting pretty at No. 2 on the Herald's local bestseller list, it's a good time to be embarking on a series of speaking engagements close to home. If you're in south central Alberta and interested in a narrated slideshow delineating the highlights of The Geography of Hope, here's the itinerary:

Thursday, January 24, 7:30pm:
Banff Mountain Culture Speakers' Series
Max Bell Auditorium, Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff, AB
Admission: $10

Friday, January 25, 12:15pm:
REAP Business Association Luncheon
Bow Valley Square Conference Centre, 205-5th Ave. SW, Calgary
Admission: free (RSVP req'd, contact Stephanie Jackman)

Saturday, January 26, 1pm:
Step It Up Alberta Rally
Eau Claire Market, Calgary
Admission: free (panel discussion; no slideshow)

Thursday, January 31, 7pm:
ReThink Red Deer lecture
Snell Gallery at the Red Deer Public Library, Red Deer
Admission: free

Saturday, February 2, 2pm:
Kairos Day (Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives' Re-Energize 2008 workshop)
St. Anthony's Roman Catholic Church, 5340-4th St.SW, Calgary
Admission: $15 (covers entire day)

Tuesday, February 26, evening:
Second Annual ISEEESA Fundraising Gala
(University of Calgary's Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy Students' Association)
MacEwan Ballroom, University of Calgary
Admission: contact ISEEESA (will include dinner in any case)

That covers Alberta for now. Watch this space for details of The Geography of Hope Montreal-Windsor Whistle-Stop Extravaganza, which will run from Feb 13 to Feb 20 and include stops in Montreal, Kingston, Toronto and Kitchener-Waterloo en route to the main event, hosted by the extraordinarily energetic folks at Scale Down, Windsor!

So a kind soul contacted me recently about putting up and expanding a Wikipedia entry on me. I was happy to oblige and sent him a few autobiographical paragraphs by email, but Wikipedia's rules apparently require that I publish that info here in order for it to be a proper source.

So here it is:

Chris Turner is the author of The Geography of Hope: A Tour of the
World We Need (Random House Canada, 2007) and the international
bestseller Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Documented an Era
and Defined a Generation (Random House Canada, Da Capo Press [USA],
Ebury Press [UK & intl], 2004). He writes a monthly column on
sustainability for the Focus section of The Globe & Mail (Sept
2007-present).

Turner's feature writing has received four Canadian National Magazine
Awards and six honourable mentions. The four awards were all for
stories that appeared in the late, great Shift Magazine from 1999 to
2003; his Shift essay "Why Technology Is Failing Us (And How We Can
Fix It)," a call to arms for the green revolution, was awarded the
President's Medal for General Excellence at the 2001 National Magazine
Awards (the highest honour in Canadian magazine writing). The essay
was included in The Presence of Excellence, a 2002 anthology of the
best Canadian magazine writing of the previous 25 years, and formed
the nucleus for his 2007 book The Geography of Hope. His reporting on
pop culture, technology and the environment has also appeared in The
Independent (UK), The Times (UK), Time Magazine, Utne Reader, Canadian
Geographic, Azure, The Walrus, enRoute, Up!, Maisonneuve and Swerve
(the Calgary Herald's Friday supplement), among others. He has also
published a handful of short stories which very few people have read.

Turner was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, on 25 July 1973, and grew
up a military brat in the Canadian North, the American Midwest, and
the Schwarzwald of southwestern Germany. He holds a history degree
from Queen's University, Kingston (B.A., Hons., 1996), and a
journalism degree from Ryerson University, Toronto (Bachelor of
Applied Arts, 1998). He began his journalism career in Toronto with an
editorial internship at Shift Magazine while still a student at
Ryerson.

Turner launched his freelance writing career with his first Shift
feature, "Flipflops, a Desktop, & One Billion Reasons Never To Leave,"
about the internet gambling boom in Antigua; it ran in the May 1999
issue and was awarded a gold medal for "one-of-a-kind articles" at the
1999 National Magazine Awards. He has been a freelance writer ever
since. His cover essay "The Simpsons Generation" for Shift's 10th
Anniversary issue (Sept/Oct 2002) precipitated the publishing industry
interest that led to the writing of his first book, Planet Simpson.
(Turner still thinks "The Simpsonian Institution" would've been a
better title, but so it goes.) Turner lived for a year in the Indian
Himalaya and another year in the Canadian Rockies, and now resides in
Calgary, Alberta, with his wife, the photographer Ashley Bristowe, and
their daughter, Sloane.

And I didn't even have to accidentally leak a cellphone video of myself eating burgers splayed out drunk on the floor to make my first starring-role leap to Web 2.0.

(Please note I don't meant to chastise David Hasselhoff nor eating burgers off the floor in severely advanced states of inebriation; I just think that sort of YouTubery should be left to professional entertainers.)

Anyway, back in October the web-marketing gang at Random House Canada filmed me being interviewed about my book by my editor, Craig Pyette. The softballs floated in with Larry King-like gentility, and I swatted them around for awhile, and this five-minute video someone had the good grace to post to YouTube is the result.

Tonight's the night! Live from Vancouver, it's me hopefully not stammering too much of my way through an appearance on CBC's The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos. (Airs on your local CBC station at 11pm; those outside Canada can allegedly watch it online.)

Also on the bill (and I would assume headlining) is Donalda, Alberta's own Tricia Helfer, who plays the sexy Cylon on Battlestar Galactica. I can only hope my groupies and hers don't get into a rumble. I also look forward to cornering her at the bar at the wrap party to discuss the potential for introducing renewable fuels to the ion-drive engines of Starhound Class Colonial Vipers, which I'm sure she'll find fascinating.

In any case, every other late-night yakfest is in reruns right now, so if you've got a quiet Thursday evening at home in the works, you should check it out.

Well, if the first couple days of December are any indication, the Holiday Season promises to be quite a good one for my humble tome. It goes without saying, but I will anyway, that a book about hope makes a wonderful Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Festivus gift. Act now, operators are standing by!



The only way to celebrate: dancing for joy like a cartoon dog fused to a jingle bell inside a plastic sheath!

First came Saturday's publication of the Globe & Mail's annual "Globe 100" list of the best books of the year, and The Geography of Hope made the cut.

(As part of the Globe's ongoing effort to actively repel internet users, the list is an unformatted mess of multipage text that'll probably be buried behind a subscriber wall within days. In the interest of maintaining hope, though, here is the introductory page of the list, here's page 8, where The Geography of Hope resides, and here's the whole list in a single webpage. And failing all of that, here's a blog entry that mentions my book, which includes a link to the Globe 100 that seems to work alright.)

Next up was Sunday's Calgary Herald, which brought news that The Geography of Hope had bested all non-fiction comers for the week and was now No. 1 on the Calgary Bestseller list for non-fiction. In your face, Mary-Ann "I Am Hutterite" Kirkby!

And perhaps the biggest news (certainly the news that's got me most excited and mildly terrified):

I will be appearing on this Thursday's episode of The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos, which is live to air from Vancouver all this week. It seems I'll be appearing on the same episode as supermodel, Playboy Playmate and Battlestar Galactica star Tricia Helfer. I don't want to upstage Ms. Helfer or anything, but potential viewers should know that at least one of us won't be wearing a bra, and it probably won't be the sexy Cylon, if you catch my drift.

But wait - there's more news out of Vancouver. Seems The Geography of Hope is one of five titles being given away in the Georgia Straight's "Hottest Non-Fiction for the Holidays!" contest. Not too shabby - maybe they'll even get around to reviewing it in their pages one of these days.

Finally, a blog posting I wrote (and will post here later this week) about a hellish hungover visit to campus radio station CIUT at the University of Toronto back in October is now up at Random House's BookLounge.ca site, and it's attracted the attention of the good people at Quill & Quire (who also might want to think about doing a review sometime). Thanks for the notice, Quillblog dude!

But - dude? - you totally took that last line you quote out of context. I wasn't saying I was going to kill the CIUT monotone-animal-cruely-story broadcaster out of anger at him; I was saying I so desperately needed a glass of water to cut through the cottonmouth revenge of my over-indulgence at my Toronto launch party that I'd have killed the kid to get it. I mean, either way the kid's dead, sure, but it wasn't about him.

Time to get out the vote, people!

Greenpeace International is sponsoring a contest to name one of the humpback whales it's tracking. Far and away the best name on the shortlist - "Mister Splashy Pants" - is off to a commanding lead, but eternal vigilance is the price of democratic freedom. Vote early and vote often! Do your part to combat the environmental movement's longstanding (and sometimes well-earned) reputation for hectoring humourlessness. Let's give this dude a decent name.

So that's what you call me. That, or Splasher. Or His Splashness. Or El Splasherino if, you know, you're not into the whole brevity thing.

I guess I'm officially a hometown favourite: according to this weekend's "Calgary Bestsellers" list in the Calgary Herald, The Geography of Hope is the No. 2 non-fiction bestseller in the city's better bookstores for the week. I'm stuck behind William Marsden's Stupid to the Last Drop, an examination of the Alberta tar-sands megalith that has haunted my book's launch like a dark cloud. (My glowing Globe review was paired with a longer review of Marsden's book.) On the plus side, I'm kicking the ass of Donald Trump's Think Big and Kick Ass.

Now back to haunting the Amazon.ca rankings, trying to figure out how you drop 500 places and then gain 487 of them back over the course of an afternoon . . . and wishing I'd never, ever made the mistake of checking my Amazon.ca ranking in the first place . . .

The hope here at TGOH HQ is that we'll be able to post a handful of digital outtakes from the Tour To Date - close encounters of the bleary-eyed-press-interview kind - but in the meantime, I'll link self-congratulatorily to a lovely review over at Azure Magazine.

It's a biased source - my sometime editor, Catherine Osborne, who published a cover story of mine about solar-architecture pioneer Rolf Disch, wrote it - but still it's fun to see my mug tucked amid pics of avant-garde design and ads for Nienkamper desks.

With apologies for the awful pun (mind's kinda worn out just now), here's a link to a podcast version of my appearance on The Current on CBC Radio this week.

I haven't had a chance (nor the navel-gazing inclination) to listen to it as yet, but I'm told it's a solid interview, and you have to really listen hard to catch the spots where they generously clipped out my occasional gasps. (Golden rule of radio: Remember to stop and breathe once in awhile!)

My first-ever PowerPoint presentation last night at the Ottawa Writers Festival (sponsored by the good folks at Imagine Ottawa) seemed to be fairly well-received by a patient and attentive crowd, so I'm guessing my Nobel Peace Prize nomination is just around the corner.

In the meantime, the publicity tour kicks into high gear next Monday and marches steadily westward to the Pacific for a whirlwind week. There are three public events:

Monday, Oct 22: Toronto
(Unofficial) Launch & Hootenanny
C'est What, 67 Front St. E.
8:30-10:30pm
(sponsored, in the grand tradition of Neil Young, by nobody)

Wednesday, Oct 24: Calgary
Official Launch Party
Broken City, 613-11 Ave SW
7:00-10:00pm
(sponsored by Random House Canada, Pages on Kensington, and Sustainable Calgary)

Monday, Oct 29: Vancouver
Instore Event
Chapters, 2505 Granville St.
7:00-9:00pm
(sponsored by Random House Canada and Chapters)

All are welcome. Hope to see my growing Hopehead army at all three. My freeform late night jams are already a thing of legend in the funkier parts of Brooklyn, Ottawa, and my own mind.