By Hari Menon and Heather Park

Africa, what a great continent. I'm talking about wildlife, but what many people here forget about is the people. Anne Tapler White is a superb photographer who is a very interesting. I mean, why would anybody take photos of African culture over animals, right? Anna Tapler White is a photographer who cares deeply about African culture and interviewing her was a great experience. 

What inspired you to start a project on Africa?

Even though we are separated by many thousands of miles, were basically the same people. We all want the same things in life. I want my viewers to see how difficult it is for people in third world countries to achieve what we take for granted. How hard they have to work, and in some cases, they don't achieve it at all. 

Why did you take photos of people and not animals? 

Because I find that people are part of humanity. So many people go to Africa and that’s all they take. There is so much more that we can say about Africa than just animals. 

What was your first photograph and what significance does it have to you? 

You mean on this trip? You mean my very first photograph? I don't know because you know there are some photographs that I don't even remember taking. I can get into that about the photographic process... in a vehicle travelling you're still looking and you’re still photographing. You take them... This photograph I don't remember because I was in a vehicle and I took them instantaneously. It was just a boom, sometimes that happens, that you just see something and you take it very quickly. Because if you don't take it, it's gone. 

Where did you learn photography? 

My major was in college was printmaking, so I consider myself multidisciplinary. I do photography such as this or I will do a diorama where I would set up a situation. Like I did the Trump Motel and I got a little building which had quick pieces from a shop and I had a little figure that I coloured that looked like Trump. I do things like that photographically, and also do a three-dimensional panel. One of them is called Books Fly Away so I get little books with wings that are flying away. So I consider myself not necessarily a photographer but I am multidisciplinary and I use photography as a tool. When travelling excites me, I have really come into travelling as an element for photography.


What inspired you to start a project in Africa?

When I first went to Africa was 2013 and we went from Ghana to Benin and I started to document the people. To me it was so important that I just continued. From Accra all the way up to Saint Louis in Senegal and Accra to Capetown. There were three separate trips over, I would say, six years and 24 thousand kilometers, in that time. 


How long were you in Africa?

Three months. So these photos were three months of camp, we did have some guest houses and I think when our leaders felt sorry for us so we did stay in one really nice hotel. But it was sixty five percent camping. And we cooked our own food, we went into villages we bought; meat that had a lot of flies on it. And then we bought vegetables and whatever we could get to cook…. This is the end of my project… this was nineteen, we just came back last April. So about ten months ago

Did you find anything surprising, interesting that was unknown to you at first?

I think when I went to Africa my eyes were open, I knew what I was going to encounter. I think what really overwhelmed me was the fact that people were just so overwhelmed to see us. And it was one place and I think it was in Lubanga? Angola? And we left our hotel and we were in our truck and we drove towards the main street and it was like we were in a parade and everyone on the side of the street were cheering and waving and it was overwhelming. So I was overwhelmed with just the people and how welcoming they were. 

What about African culture stood out to you during your stay there?

There is always something beneath the surface that we never see. Like in Cameroon what they do to young girls is they iron their breast so that the men don’t look at them a certain way. So they iron them with hot stones and irons so they flatten them. It doesn’t always work but you know there are things like that.

Why are all your photos black and white?

From the very beginning I just found black and white simply finds the subject. It was a more artistic statement. And I love black and white. I get very consumed with the color. When I see an image, I look at blue and green and yellow and I know that it relates to the image. I get more involved in the colors. Whereas black and white you are just dealing with the subject.

Kristina Lanuza interviewed Robert Scott from CALL, the Calgary Association of Lifelong Learners, to find out why this photographer and retired architect decided to keep on learning. 

​T​Tell us what CALL is.
Sure. the letters C-A-L-L stand for Calgary Association of Lifelong Learners.


What do the people do that are in CALL?
It's like a little mini university. We have lecturers. guest speakers. We also go on field trips. one I went on last year focused on the geomorphology and landforms around Calgary and into Banff. we went with a geologist, who was also a member of CALL.   He travelled with us to the mountains stopping at key spots along the way, explaining what was going on.. When I was at university, I took courses, going on field trips up to the mountains doing all kinds of fun things and and those experiences are available to us again.

What courses have you taken?
A course on sketching and drawing ... we meet twice a month and a course on digital photography.  also twice a month. in that course, we're working with digital cameras and Photoshop,bringing images together mixing things and making neat stuff. I also took a course on democracy. It was offered by a CALL member who was a former  retired provincial political candidate . The course was on world events and the events leading up to the past federal and provincial elections. So we've got a whole variety of things. There's a course on genealogy where we research our ancestors and family trees. We also had a conference on climate change. So we have all these opportunities to learn new things and just do the fun things that we used to do when we were at university.
Many of us are retired teachers…. and we look after the administration of this whole organization.   We are all volunteers. So we do everything ourselves. And in this day and age of really expensive education and high tuition … our tuition is $50 a year   for as many courses as you can take. And we make a profit because everybody is volunteering. Yeah so we're learning for the joy of learning.

So what inspired you to join CALL?
A friend of mine who who I have known for years and is also a member of CALL, said it was fun. I was pleased and I convinced my wife that was a good thing too. so we both joined.

What's your favourite thing about being in the CALL?
Probably meeting with all the people., there's always new   folks you haven't come across before. I enjoy just being with all  all of them.

Do you have a goal that you want to achieve by joining CALL?
We take courses and have educational experiences. But we don't have assignments  and we don't have marks. We don't have grades. So we've taken that aspect of school away and just learn for the sheer joy of learning... Our group has been going since 2011. And we're still sort of in the formative stages of the organization and I guess my biggest goal would be that it's successful as an organization  and that it continues on into the future and it's still here in 50 years.


What do you do for a career? What do you do for a living?
I have fun for a living I'm a retired architect and also educator. I worked as an architect for most of my career and taught for the last 17 years..

You are also a photographer. What inspired you to start taking photographs?
I like doing art and I do sketching as well. And photography is another art form, and I like the experience of being able to capture images and feelings and always looking for the most perfect shot  I also enjoy working with Photoshop, messing around with the colours, doing fun things

What do you hope to capture through the photos that you take?
Ideally,  I like to takea photo that tells a story and means something to the person looking at the picture, capturing a feeling or sense, or weather, or something. It's difficult though, so the fun is just doing it.

When did you know that photography is something that you wanted to pursue?
Oh, when I was a 10 year old little kid I saved my money and bought a camera  Since then I've always had a camera and have been interested in taking pictures. Pictures  mostly of my dog to start with and our family. I really enjoy using digital cameras now because you can take so pictures and try so many different things..

Are there any movies books or documentaries that you'd recommend for people that wanted to start photography?
Parasite just was an amazing film ... a Korean film that just won the Academy Award for the Best Picture, the photography is really quite good and amazing... A photographer that I quite impressed with is George Weber, he and I  worked together at SAIT when I was teaching and he was in the photography department. He's since gone freelance and had photography shows,and has published a number of books as well. He's a photographer who can capture the personality of a person. 

If you could tell aspiring photographers one thing, what would it be?
To take lots of pictures and look for that special personality or event or something special about  the life that you're experiencing and try to capture it on film. Try to express that special feeling.

​Kristina Lanuza interviews Laurie Anne Fuhr, a poet and musician for the website Birdheat, to discover how and why she pursued these arts.

What do you do for a living? 
Well, I always feel like I’m living the most when I’m doing what I love. Right now, I do a combination of things that I love and extra things to make enough money for rent and bills. But years ago, I mainly did things I didn’t like to make money and fit what I love in the margins, on weekends and evenings. So, I’m pleased that now, some of the things I love also help pay the bills. Although love of poetry and music can get you pretty far, working hard at it can make the difference between having it help you to make your income or just doing it on the sidelines. I’ve been working hard.

How long have you been writing poetry and music? 
Well, it started when I was a teenager. I lived in Ottawa as a military brat, my dad was in the air force. I met some poets and realized that there was a poetry community, and that’s what really compelled me to write more, to make friends with these really interesting people. It became part of my identity and I’ve been writing ever since. In 2018 I finally had a book out called night flying with Frontenac House in Calgary, and I’ve done quite a bit of publishing and editing in journals and volunteering in the meantime. I’ve had a lot of fun as a volunteer involved with the literary community, helping run a literary reading series, and also now as an instructor at the Alexandra Writers’ Centre in poetry.

What do poetry and music mean to you?
If I’m writing and making music actively, it means that I’m looking at what’s going on in my life and the world through a creative lens. I’m looking for what is meaningful, what is interesting, what is weird, what is fantastic, not just to write about it but to experience it more fully. Creativity is good for the soul and good for everybody. That’s why I try to encourage others to expand their creativity.

When did you figure out you wanted to pursue writing and music as a passion?
I feel that I knew from a very early age. I was sort of distracted by my initial goal of being an Olympic figure skater. It turned out that I have a bad hip which made me prohibited from it. I was an avid reader and listener, and then I started with my own writing and learned guitar and thought, well if nothing physical is going to stop me like a bum hip, the sky’s the limit. I felt empowered to go for it, and maybe I
still have a little bit of competitive spirit, not against others, but against myself to try to write a better poem than last time, write a better song than last time. So I started when I was a teenager and I’ve been writing ever since.

Do you have someone that you look up to or inspires you?
Definitely. I’m constantly looking for people that inspire me. Friends and mentors in poetry not just locally, but in Canada, having lived different places growing up with a military dad. I’ve had rob mclennan in Ottawa, he was a big inspiration early on. He was running a lot of reading series and publishing people with his micro-press, that’s the little paper booklets stapled, and he started a small press as well which is the more of the nicer paper-bound books that you’ll see on the bookshelves in bookstores. Along with rob mclennan, a number of others in Ottawa – Stephen Brockwell is a fantastic poet, Pearl Pirie, jwcurry. And then I moved to Winnipeg for a while, I was inspired by some poets in Winnipeg like George Amabile and Colin Smith, and then when I came to Calgary, the ones that have inspired me here include some of the people I work with on the board at the writer’s centre. 

Colin Martin is the Board president, he’s a poet and he was involved with filling Station Magazine. I ended up getting involved with that crowd, and we helped to get other people’s work published from poetry to fiction to creative nonfiction, and I’ve sort of been running with that group of people in a way. But also the Single Onion Poetry Society has been really big for me, I got involved when I first came to town. They are a non-profit that’s turning 20 this year in fact, and they’re gonna have a big party on April 18 th at Eau Claire Market. They bring poets to town from other places and put them on the bill with local poets through their regular series on the third Thursday of each month at Shelf Life Books. They always get funding to pay the featured poets so they can do what they love and pay a bill or two at the same time, which is fantastic and encouraging, and they try to help emerging writers get involved with the community as well. One of the best local poets that I know is Kirk Miles, and he continues to inspire me with the things that he writes and his go-getter attitude.

Did you face any struggles throughout your career? How did you overcome these struggles?
 I think the main struggle is not to get discouraged and to always keep going, and I’ve heard this from people like Robert Kroetsch who was a much-loved and widely-published poetry and fiction author. I heard Gary Barwin echo the same thing at his book launch at Shelf Life the other day. To ‘keep going’ is just the idea that even though you’re going to get more rejections than acceptances when you submit to magazines and contests, you will get acceptances eventually -- you just have to find it within yourself to keep going. You should put yourself out there, but write because you truly love it and want to best yourself. So the main struggle I think is just to not get worried when it feels like you have too many rejections in a row, or if you feel like you might not have the same privileges as other people have had. People that can afford to be career students for example vs. people that haven’t had a lot of support from their families. Whatever your talent is, if you love it, go for it.

What sets poetry apart from other types of prose or writing?
Well fundamentally, poetry has line breaks, so you can tell when you’re looking at a poem usually when the lines don’t do that word wrap around to the next line. The line breaks have a purpose, they often put emphasis on words that are on the end of a line, but that’s a little technical. I really love that poetry allows for allegory and metaphor and simile and all these really great poetic devices to help us to describe our world in new and exciting, beautiful and sometimes scary ways. I love using hyperbole in my work; I’m a bit of a surrealist and I like using what they call lyric narrative poetry and mixing it up with elements of postmodern poetry which is experimental. Another thing that sets poetry apart from other types of prose is there’s all these different types of poetry – spoken word and slam poetry are very popular, but there are still a lot of poets in Calgary that are writing poems for the page and poems for the eye and the heart in hopes that that readers can find something in it that can help them through their struggles in life.

Do you feel that your military background has influenced any of your work? 
I really think so, and I didn’t realise it until I had to do the work of putting the book together, figuring out how all this work works together. And I realized it was a book of military brat poems, that I was the common thread in all of these experiences and if I hadn’t moved around so much when I was younger, I don’t think I would’ve longed for belonging and for long term friends and the kind of themes that ended up defining that book.  

All my friends as I were sent back to Canada from Germany when I was a kid. The Berlin Wall fell and they saw no need for the base that we were on, and we were all scattered across Canada. We didn’t have social media, it just felt like you lost all your friends and the place that you grew up. With my book night flying, I feel like I’ve gotten that out of my system, and books to come will be less focused on loss and more focused on what there still is to gain and enjoy in life.

What is birdheat?
birdheat was the name I came up with for my music as a solo musician. My real name has always felt a little unwieldy to me, and of my last name… I once had a Jewish poet friend say, “Whether you like it or not, your name is going to remind people of an unfortunate part of our history.” That said, my family came over before the World Wars and fought on the side of the Allies in both of them, so I have no shame about my family name. But when I chose the name birdheat for my music, I was also getting into kind of this indie folk rock where solo musicians were often giving themselves band names, and when I wanted to have a website, primarily it was going to be for music, so I chose birdheat as the domain name. It’s also a place where I can host my poetry, so it now feels like a publishing name or a record label name, and those are often pretty creative. On the plus side, as a compound word that’s made up, birdheat doesn’t have a ton of competition when you look it up in a web search. It’s a little strange but at least it’s original. Oh – and also, I remember I came across the concept when I was looking up little-known facts about birds. Birds have adapted to winter using what’s called a counter-current heat exchange in their legs. It gave me hope that I could some day adapt to winter, or whatever else is bothering me.

Out of all the songs that you play, what is your personal favourite?
There’s one that I wrote that’s a little more lighthearted and fun and has a kind of a rockabilly feel called ‘The Breakup Blues’. When I play it, I feel like other women can relate to it. It’s about when you’ve just gone through a breakup, and somebody else is kind of sweet on you that may be a friend. You don’t want to jump into anything, but you don’t want them to give up on you just because you’re not ready yet, because there might be something there. So the song is from the perspective of a women addressing that person, saying please “Hold out for me”. It was actually a semi-finalist in the South Country Fair song contest in Lethbridge a couple years back, and I got to go down there with some friends and play the song for people on stage at The Slice, so there’s also good memories of performing it too.

Is there any advice you would give to anyone that wants to pursue poetry or musicianship?
I’d say sort of what I said before, just keep going and don’t give up. Look for friends that are interested in the same thing too so you can support each other, and I think it’s great to look for opportunities to study those things. It doesn’t necessarily have to be post-secondary, although if it is, that’s great. But, you can also find instruction in places like the Alexandra Writers Centre here at c-Space where you can take specific classes on topics that interest you. So whether your budget allows you to go full hog, or whether you just take a course here and there, there’s something for everybody. And more than that, just keep learning, keep reading and listening to music. 

I love CKUA Radio because they play so many independent artists, Canadian songwriters and artists and it’s free, and I also love the Calgary Public Library because there are so many wonderful books that come out every year. I do support writers by buying books, and I love the independent bookstores like Shelf Life Books and Pages Books in Kensington, they both have a wonderful selection. But for the rest of the books that I can’t afford to buy, I have a library card.

Check out Laurie Anne Fuhr at:
@MultimodalPoet on Facebook and Instagram
@birdheatmusic on Instagram and Twitter
https://birdheat.com