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Nino Ricci

Award-winning Author

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Eden Mills 2011

Eden Mills Writers’ Festival

Sunday, 18 September 2011

The 23rd Eden Mills Writers’ Festival takes place this September in lovely Eden Mills, Ontario, with events that run from September 16th to 19th. On Sunday, September 18th, join Nino and more than thirty other authors reading from their work, signing their books, and being generally witty and entertaining, in a bucolic setting reminiscent of the world as it was before Google and social media. A good time is promised for all.

Filed Under: Past Events Tagged With: Eden Mills, Eden MIlls Writers' Festival, event, linkedin, public reading

York River Festival – Bancroft, Ontario

Join Nino for “Where the Words Are,” part of the York River Festival in Bancroft, Ontario. Saturday, September 17th, 2011 at 7 PM or thereabouts at Bancroft’s Village Playhouse. For more information, call 613.332.0873.

Filed Under: Past Events Tagged With: Events, linkedin, public reading, York River Festival

Humber School for Writers


Registration is now open for the Summer Workshop in Creative Writing at the Humber School for Writers, running July 9 – 15, 2011 in Toronto at Humber’s Lakeshore Campus.

Since 1992, the Humber School for Writers has distinguished itself as a leading centre for the study of creative writing. Our track record speaks for itself: more than 275 of our graduates have been published, including placements by our in-house agency. Several have been nominated for literary awards, and a few have gone on to win. Alumna Angie Abdou’s The Bone Cage, for instance, was chosen for a prestigious list – one of the five books on this year’s Canada Reads. Sarah Selecky’s This Cake is for the Party was shortlisted for the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Robert Rotenberg had bidding wars in New York, London, and Toronto for his first novel, Old City Hall, and Cathy Marie Buchanan’s The Day the Falls Stood Still sold in Italy, the USA, the UK, and made The New York Times Best Sellers list.
– Antanas Silieka, director of the Humber School for Writers and author of Underground

“One of the best programs of its kind in North America.”
– The Globe and Mail

Filed Under: Past Events Tagged With: Humber School for Writers, linkedin, writing workshop

Order Up!

OTTAWA – Nino Ricci was among the 50 new appointments to the Order of Canada announced on June 30th by Governor General David Johnston. Rumours that the inclusion was an administrative oversight have so far proved unfounded. As a Member of the Order, Ricci will receive a lapel pin as well as the right to include the initials C.M. after his name. He will also have the right to be addressed by the honorific “Mister,” commonly abbreviated as “Mr.”

Recipients will be invited to accept their lapel pins at a ceremony to be held in the nation’s capital. A request by Mr. Ricci for a public reading at the event of the Open Letter he addressed to Stephen Harper during the recent election campaign has so far gone unanswered.

The Order of Canada, one of our country’s highest civilian honours, was established to recognize a lifetime of outstanding achievement, dedication to community and service to the nation. Ricci expressed hopes that his appointment did not constitute a departure from those aims.

Filed Under: News Archive Tagged With: Governor General, linkedin, Member of the Order of Canada, Order of Canada, Stephen Harper

Open Letter to Globe & Mail – For those who missed it

The following is an open letter addressed to The Globe and Mail‘s editor-in-chief, John Stackhouse, and its publisher, Phillip Crawley, regarding the serious financial crisis the newspaper is apparently currently weathering.

22 March 2011

John Stackhouse, Editor-in-Chief
Phillip Crawley, Publisher
The Globe and Mail

Dear Sirs:

I am writing to express my deep concern at the troubling and increasingly inescapable evidences that Canada’s august and historic national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, has fallen on hard times, and, further, to offer my apologies if I myself have been in any way responsible for the newspaper’s present difficulties.

Allow me to explain.

Last September I was commissioned to write a travel article for the special relaunch edition of The Globe and Mail that appeared on newsstands on October 2nd, 2010. (Let me just add as a sidenote: Love the gloss!) To my delight, I was able to negotiate a fee for the article that was well in excess of the frugal freelance rates The Globe is normally obliged to pay in the digital age, and indeed was nearly at the level of the premium rates that used to be in effect when I first started freelancing twenty years ago. At The Globe’s insistence I was also allowed to put all my expenses on my own credit card rather than on The Globe’s, thus accumulating points toward eventual free travel. Since my expenses included international flights, the points I was able to rack up were considerable, enough, say, for round-trip business class travel between Toronto’s island airport—were it not that political considerations make using that facility awkward—and the airport at Buttonville (had it not closed).

I had cause to regret exacting such onerous conditions from your newspaper, however, when, nearly two months after I submitted an invoice, I had yet to receive any payment or reimbursement. Enquiries to The Globe soon made clear where the problem lay: Due to cutbacks, I was told, the accounting office that dealt with payments to freelancers had suffered numerous layoffs, by that point reduced to a single secondary school student logging the community service hours she needed in order to graduate. I became concerned, on learning this, that it had been unduly selfish of me to have negotiated a fee increase or indeed to have insisted on reimbursement of my expenses, given the travel points I had accumulated. This concern grew to alarm when, after four months had passed and still no payment was forthcoming, The Globe was unable to provide any new explanation for the delay, which suggested that not only had its accounts office been gutted, but its public relations office as well. Now nearly six months have elapsed and my enquiries have ceased to receive a response of any sort, leading me to fear that despite the hope expressed in The Globe’s October relaunch, of which I was proud to be a part, whole wings of the newspaper’s offices now stand abandoned, victims of the unreasonable demands of greedy freelancers like myself.

My intention in writing to you, then, is not to lament my own fate but to express my fear and regret for yours. As a writer, I am accustomed to living frugally, and have come to believe I am a better person for it. We all know writers who through one fluke or another have come into sums of money approximating a living wage only to descend at once into profligacy, indulging in Mexican all-inclusives or brand-name clothing or, worse, allowing a distasteful optimism and joy of life to creep into their work. I have no desire to be among that class. Nor, indeed, is the carrying of debt of any great concern to me, since for the past number of years I and my wife, also a writer, have lived almost exclusively on the line of credit afforded to us by the unreasonable rise in real estate values in our city over the past decade. Unlike our unhappy neighbours to the south, whose economy was laid low by credit line excesses, we Canadians seem to have managed to limit our use of credit to the sort of bridge financing that recessions or the non-payment of fees sometimes make necessary. For writers, the arrangement is especially propitious, and indeed may represent the solution to every problem of arts funding that has ever plagued this country. Here is how it works: Every month my wife and I borrow as much money as we need to maintain the lifestyle we have grown accustomed to, our only obligation being that we make a monthly interest payment that can itself, wonder of wonders, be borrowed from our credit line. The added bonus is that should we ever reach our credit limit—which at current rates is not likely to happen before the fall, or even later, should we decide to suspend the university educations of our two eldest children—we need only turn over our home to our bank, and our entire debt is expunged.

So my concern here, as I say, is not for myself, but for your venerable newspaper, and, more particularly, for your own situations, given that people on fixed incomes like yourselves often have much less leeway in organizing their finances than those of us who are self-employed. Should it be then, that my unreasonable demands for payment have in any way compromised your newspaper’s finances or interfered with the speedy processing of your own paycheques, please let me know and I will at once cease and desist in those demands.

Yours sincerely,

Nino Ricci

Filed Under: News Archive Tagged With: credit line, financial crisis, Globe and Mail, invoice, linkedin, open letter, profligacy

An Open Letter to Stephen Harper

18 April 2011

The Right Hon. Stephen Joseph Harper, P.C., M.P.
Prime Minister of Canada
Langevin Building
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A6

Dear Prime Minister,

I am writing today, in the midst of what is quickly developing into the most exciting federal election this country has seen in months, to commend you for your own excellent campaign and to apologize for any slights that I or any of my fellow fiction writers might have directed against you in the past. Many of us fictionists had initially assumed that Mr. Ignatieff, as a novelist in his own right, would be our man in this election, but what your campaign has amply shown is that where fiction is concerned, the Harper Conservatives are without rivals.

Nowhere is your mastery of fiction more evident than in your decision to run on your economic record when you don’t actually have one. Smart of you to take credit for Canada’s financial stability in the current global recession when it was exactly neoconservative policies like yours that unraveled the economy south of the border, and shamefacedly socialist ones, put in place before your party even existed, that protected our own. (I don’t know if you remember, for instance, a certain Liberal decision back in 1998 to pull the plug on some major bank mergers.) Then, instead of decrying the blatantly Keynesian stimulus package your minority government was forced into passing, one that has racked up deficits not seen since the days of that notorious closet Trotskyite Brian Mulroney, you have brilliantly managed to embrace this left-wing travesty, one that betrayed every principle for which your party stands, as a triumph of neo-conservatism.

Perhaps I misspeak myself, however, when I talk about a betrayal of principle. That is to imply the existence of an actual principle to betray, and hence to overlook how deeply fiction informs every aspect of your political project. Your Keynesian flip on deficit spending, for instance—and this from a finance minister who once swore he would rather spend a month on a desert island with Jack Layton than run a deficit—takes on a Proustian elegance when seen in the light of the fiction of policy that has marked your party since its inception. We all remember your boldness in throwing out years of work on setting up a national childcare program of the sort they have in developed countries and instead offering families cash for their kiddies to let the grandparents look after them or the unlicensed pedophile down the street. “Family values,” you said, with your smile (okay, the smile still needs work), cleverly suggesting the fiction of social policy for what was actually vote-buying on a scale even Sir John A. Macdonald would have envied. And of course the great beauty of a fictional policy as opposed to a real one—a point the other parties do not seem to have cottoned onto—is that it requires absolutely no effort on the government’s part, and entails absolutely no risk. Instead, every year families send money into the government in the form of taxes, and every month the government sends a tiny bit of it back, the only cost being the massive bureaucracy required to keep all this machinery in motion.

Over the past five years you have employed strategies of this sort on every front. For vote-buying-masquerading-as-policy, nothing has beaten your GST reduction—why don’t the other parties think of these things? why are they always going on boring rants about health care and the environment and education as if these mattered more than extra cash for a new flat screen TV?—while your law and order campaign has taken fiction to heights even Dan Brown has not dreamed of, employing tax dollars you don’t have in amounts you don’t know to achieve results that are unproven against a threat that doesn’t exist.

A recent study into corporate tax cuts showed that, contrary to your party’s view, corporations tend to hoard tax savings rather than create jobs with them. Confronted with these facts, your finance minister, Mr. Flaherty, admitted they made your tax policy a “tough sell,” but said he would stick with it because corporations and the experts liked it, and, “most importantly, because it’s a confidence builder in Canada, and a way of branding Canada.” Clearly, Mr. Flaherty has studied the art of fiction at the feet of a master, showing, here, how even logic is no obstacle to the expert fictionist. Branding, indeed: I can almost feel the pleasant burn of those cuts in my flesh, along with the pride of knowing that in Canada, at least, fiction reigns, and what matters is not whether a policy works but only if people believe in it, or at least believe that they can make others believe.

Politics is nothing if not the art of making others believe. So kudos to you, Mr. Harper for sparing us in this campaign any view of the real Stephen Harper, in all his nakedness—and the mind balks at such a notion even as mere metaphor—and giving us the fictional one, infinitely more complex and convincing. In so doing you have given inspiration to all of us for whom fiction is a way of life. Let me end, then, with my own fiction, namely my hope that on May 2nd you get the majority we all believe you believe you deserve, and we can look forward to the spectacle of five more glorious years of the Harper Government (formerly known as the Government of Canada).

Sincerely,

Nino Ricci

Watch the video on YouTube.

Filed Under: News Archive Tagged With: Canada, Election 2011, Jim Flaherty, linkedin, Michael Ignatieff, Stephen Harper

Nino Ricci

About Nino

Nino Ricci is the author of award-winning novel The Origin of Species and of the Lives of the Saints trilogy, adapted as a miniseries starring Sophia Loren. For more on Nino's life and work, including his acclaimed biography of Pierre Trudeau, contact Nino's parole officer. Or you can also poke around this nifty … Read more.

News

Librissimi

Lino Rufo, Dom Fiore, Andrea Ramolo and Nino Ricci open this year's Librissimi, Toronto's Italian book festival, with a tribute in music and spoken word to the … [Read More...]

I Migliori Awards

Nino Ricci has been named one of the recipients of the Pirandello Lyceum's 2025 I Migliori Awards. This year marks the 40th anniversary of an award that Boston … [Read More...]

Write on the French River

From May 25th to the 30th Nino Ricci will be joining writers Don Gillmor and Alison Wearing at the 12th annual Write on the French River Creative Writing … [Read More...]

Amnesty International Book Club

Check out the Amnesty International Book Club, the largest free book club in Canada. Members enjoy lots of perks, including free signed books, invitations to author events, and free merchandise. You'll also get discussion guides and a chance to share the authors' own insights on their work.

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