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I've had a craving for documentaries lately.

This week I watched Black Coffee , a three part documentary series about coffee. It is an extremely fascinating series. The first hour looks at the history of coffee, from its discovery to its popularity across the world. The second hour looks at the coffee market in the 20th century, and the creation of the big coffee companies in North America. The third hour looks at fair trade coffee, and coffee's impact on the global world.

I can't recommend this documentary enough. It's a great series, and will teach you lots of weird and wodnerful facts about the bean.

Following this, I watched Lauren Greenfield's documentary "Thin", which was excellent but very disturbing. Greenfield, the photographer behind the excellent book "Girl culture", goes into an eating disorders clinic at Renfrew and follows 4 young women with severe eating disorders. It's a really painful look at a sad disease. I'm really glad this film got made, and hope that it has helped lots of people. Greenfield's website has a forum of posts with some of the girls who were featured in the documentary.

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I also watched "Jindabyne", which is an Australian movie based on a short story by Raymond Carver, one of my favourite short story writers. "So much water so close to home" tells the story of a group of fishermen who find a body in the river where they are fishing. The fishermen are horrified by the discovery, but tie the body to a tree and keep fishing. The movie takes this premise, and develops it further, bringing in a race relations component. The movie stars Laura Linney and Gabriel Byrne, and is a good, but very sad film.
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Today I watched Alfred Hitchcock's "Lifeboat", which I thought was absolutely brilliant.

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This Tuesday, I'll be a guest speaker to two Grade 6 classes at Avondale school in Grande Prairie. My friend James, who is an old friend from Saskatoon, is a Grade 6 teacher at the school, and he asked me to come in to visit the kids and do some activities with them for their poetry unit.

I really love visiting with school classes. I usually read some work, and then answer lots of questions from the kids. Part of the reason why I love doing these visits is because I remember how important they were for me. I absolutely loved it when authors came to visit me in school, because I wanted to be a writer more than anything and was always ready and willing to soak up any information I could about the profession. I hope that my visits help encourage the closet writers in the classroom. I like to tell kids that it's okay to love books, words and writing. :)

(I don't tell them how difficult the writing life is, though. They have lots of time to learn that.)