Simon Vigneault's Blog

Wired Monk Richard Levangie has just won first prize in the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia’s young adult/juvenile novel category. A well deserved win. It was a real pleasure hearing chapter after excellent chapter unfold at our meetings.

http://writers.ns.ca/blog/wfns-reveals-winners-35th-awc.html

Fellow Wired Monk Scott Fotheringham has an award-winning first novel out, The Rest is Silence:

http://www.gooselane.com/books.php?ean=9780864926562

Globe and Mail Review:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/the-rest-is-silence-by-scott-fotheringham/article2430006/

Fellow Wired Monk Chris Benjamin has a new book, Eco-Innovators, Sustainability in Atlantic Canada:

http://www.chrisbenjaminwriting.com/

It has also just one an Atlantic Book Award:

http://ow.ly/i/DloZ

I and four other members of The Wired Monks, Chris Benjamin, Dina Desveaux, Michael Ungar, and Elizabeth Peirce, will be reading at the Spring Garden Rd Halifax Regional Library on Tuesday Nov 22nd, starting at 7:00 PM. All are welcome : )

Fellow Wired Monk writers Richard Levangie and Chris Benjamin exchange a few well chosen words at this link (Richard’s blog):

http://richardlevangie.com/blog/2011/10/04/author-chris-benjamin-answers-25-questions/

A recent addition to our Wired Monks writers’ group, Elizabeth Peirce, has just won the Best Atlantic-Published Book Award for her book Grow Organic.

That makes her the third Wired Monk who has received an Atlantic Book Award, in that Chris Benjamin and Scott Fotheringham each won the award for best unpublished novel. Scott’s book will be out soon (see his website in the Creative Sites section of this blog), and Chris Benjamin’s book Drive-By Saviours is out and doing well.

My friend and teacher Amin Nasr, writing under his teaching name Sensei Yula, has just published a book coauthored by his fellow teacher Becca Mukti.
Here is a link to the book order page of their site:
http://www.centrefortheways.com/books.html

Amin is a master of martial arts and of eastern energy arts, dietary science, meditation, and physical fitness regimens, whose great teaching style, real knowledge, and potent energy, had a very positive and pragmatic effect on myself and many others I know. Amin is much influenced by early exposure to the Sufi way.

Though he has for a long time now been based in Toronto, some know him from Halifax as the man who started the health food hangout, Khyber Cafe (where I and my pal Chris Lowe worked as teenagers), which used to be on the ground floor of the Barrington St. building still known to Halifax locals as The Khyber Building, which is the centre of a thriving arts community. To my knowledge at that time Amin also started Halifax’s first health food store, The Bean Sprout*.

*As can be seen from the exchange below Amin actually started a health food store called Supernatural Foods, probably not quite the first–which still appears to be The Bean Sprout, started by a couple met by the person who posted, Marie. Going into this topic has caused me to reflect and recall how big a deal ‘health food’ used to be, like it was from another planet–things like veggie burgers and felafels were still strange novelties in the eighties, at least in Halifax.