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Interviews & Profiles...
Fitting Into Canada Matt Galloway, host of the CBC Radio One program Metro Morning, speaks with Teresa Toten about her book, Piece by Piece: Stories about Fitting into Canada.
Escape from the Beige People "Teresa Toten is as colourful as the lipstick that stars in her picture book, Bright Red Kisses. Sitting in my living room in Toronto, she electrifies the space with her full-body gestures. And she recalls that as a teenager, she felt no connection with the "beige" people in the Canadian fiction she read, that the characters - "muted, reserved" - were nothing like the operatic people who made up her Croatian-Canadian communit.y. As an adult, she realised that other children also have trouble relating to unemotional WASP characters, and so she set out to create stories that would reflect other experiences."
Fitting in was Toten's teen test: "Like many of her teen readers, Teresa Toten knows what it means to fit in. "The idea is probably in all of my books," says Toten. "The feeling of being left out is something I really respond to."
Writing for children 'magical" says author "When her writing for children instructor encouraged the class to draw on their childhoods and write about the child they knew best, Teresa Toten knew she had to tell the story of moving from the Jewish markets to the suburbs."
Teresa Toten: Annick Press Profile "In the very first of very many moves, Teresa Toten arrived in Canada from Zagreb, Croatia, when she was just 13 days old. Although she mainly grew up in Toronto, Ontario, Teresa and her mother (Mama) moved around a whole lot. Throughout all of the new neighborhoods, new schools, and new friends, the only constants in Teresa's life were Mama, books, and a burning career ambition to grow up and become a mermaid." Read the complete article
Teresa Toten: Canadian Materials Profile "Although Teresa was born on October 13, 1955, in Zagreb, then Yugoslavia, now Croatia, she left the country on the very day she was born. "It was communist Yugoslavia in those days, and my mother's family were landowners. Because no one in the family turned communist, they were constantly picked on by the government." |
Photo: Matthew Wiley |
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