THE GALLEY

The Media Club of Ottawa
"Penning the Future"

March 2008

Next Event

 April 10, 2008
Library and Archives Canada
6 p.m.

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The  Executive:of the Media CLub of Ottawa
March 2007 - June 2008
President: Susan Korah (on sabbatical); Acting President: Shannon Lee Mannion;
Immediate Past President: Rosemary Tayler; Treasurer:
Iris ten Holder;  Program Director: June Coxon;
Publicity Committee: Mike Heenan and Saema Nasir;
Advisors: Rosaleen Dickson, Wayne Kines, and Deva Marie Beck


Executrive2007/08
From left to right: June Coxon, Jessica Goodfellow, Susan Korah, Iris ten Holder, Rosemary Tayler and Past Pesident Margaret Virany (standing at right). 


About our student volunteers

Students from the University of Ottawa have taken course assignments that involved volunteering for the Media Club of Ottawa.  Meet some of them here.


Jenn Dumoulin is a fourth year student at the University of Ottawa. and will be graduating in April with an Honours Bachelor of Arts with a major in Communications and minor in business administration. Jenn grew up primarily in Ottawa, and currently resides in Westboro.

Jenn is  interested in pursuing a career in either advertising or policy analysis. Throughout her time at the University of Ottawa, she has developed an interest in marketing, from both an academic and practical perspective, and in national security policy analysis. volunteered to be team leader for a survey design, implementation, and analysis project in the course CMN3102: Quantitative Methods. The course focuses on survey design, implementation, and analysis.  Jenn has chosen  the Media CLub of Ottawa for this survey.

Part of the program is learning to use a statistical software program which will assist in the analysis portion of the survey assignment. The  team consists of seven other students, most of whom are also Communications students.




Frances Itani
The Skeleton Behind The Bones

On March 12, 2008,  Frances Itani,  a multi- award winning writer, spent an evening with the Media Club of Ottawa members and guests to talk about her recent novel,  Remembering the Bones.

Frances really lives her stories and lives among her characters.  She goes to extreme efforts in her research to know all about her characters.  She even  learned sign language because she wanted to know what it would be like to be deaf.  She still donates part of her speaking fees to charities benefiting the deaf..

The many questions asked showed how she was able to involve her audience and share with them her commitment to an honest writing experience. For some of her books the research materials can fill a small room, but she was proud to show that  the research material for her latest book fitted between the finger and thumb of one hand.

She also pointed out that although some characters may tend to want to take over, it is imperative that the writer maintain control.  .Yet     she admitted that the transition from one book to another would have to be mastered, this again being part of the writer needing to maintain control over the process.

Clearly Frances  was a true inspiration for the fiction writers in her audience.The fact that it is all right, and even desirable, that a character starts to leads its own 
life was a comfort to one first-time author.

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