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SOA may have seemed the savior of bad software architecture and poor development project planning, but the reality is that it's a complex and difficult venture. Thus, the number of failed SOA projects is about equal to the successful ones. In other words, you have a 50 percent chance of failing, and the odds of failure are even greater if you work within a larger Global 2000 organization or within the government.
But key patterns are emerging from the successful SOA efforts, patterns that can help you determine whether your SOA is a failure or a success.
[ Follow SOA technology and best practices in David Linthicum's Real World SOA blog and in InfoWorld's SOA Center. ]
The most important lesson from these patterns is that SOA is as much about old-school IT disciplines as it is about new, inventive technology. Moreover, it's about changing an organization from the people down to the technology, driving a systemic and valuable change. The patterns of success likewise follow that change from the people on down to the technology.
People: From leadership to staff, the right aptitude and commitment is critical
The fundamental cause of SOA failure is the lack of good people working the architecture, from leadership to staff. This lack is not of numbers, but of knowledge and the vision to drive change.
People-based SOA failure begins at the top. A recent Burton Group study determined that the arrival of a new CIO typically spelled success for SOA. In essence, innovative leadership and the ability to change the culture and then the architecture is a clear critical success factor.
Moreover, critical to SOA success is the presence of a leadership team that values an investment in infrastructure and understands the long-term value of being more agile and efficient, and, better yet, is willing to make the investment. SOA is not cheap. Indeed, it's a huge systemic change in how you build, deploy, design, test, and architect your information technology. It's an investment that goes well beyond the millions of dollars required to acquire the necessary training, consulting, and then the technology required to make the changes.
The SOA investment cannot be treated as a one-time "transformation" project. Instead, you need to consider SOA as a journey, not a project, and -- for the purposes of budgeting -- treat it as a series of projects that make up the journey. The SOA effort does need its value clearly defined, and the investment and commitment to achieve that value made up front.
Because SOA is really about a journey, not a project, enterprises need to take a long-term view of SOA. It's a multiyear and typically multi-million-dollar commitment to drive a systemic change to the core IT mechanism. But most SOA "projects" are stopped at some point, typically due to budget issues or to the need to redirect resources at some tactical short-term need. Thus, the SOA never had a chance; there was no follow-through. Executive and IT management must not allow this.
SOA also involves two fundamental business changes that IT historically doesn't have the clout to make happen: One is the sharing of processes across political fiefdoms that fear loss of control. The other is that SOA requires a rethinking of fundamental processes, which is not only hard but also challenges established practices, resource allocations, political power, and so on.
[ Follow InfoWorld's 10 steps to SOA success. | Then discover how to break through SOA bottlenecks. ]
At the management and staff levels, the people requirements for successful SOA are even more fundamental. Although many would love to have the existing team drive them to the new world of SOA, the harsh truth is that many in that team won't have the skills or the aptitude. You need to make some hard decisions up front as to who will take you forward. This means you must replace people or you must augment staff. Either approach is costly.
Many companies employ mentors or consultants to help learn the new ways of SOA. Others invest in SOA training, or even bring in entirely new teams as either consultants or employees to assist in "the change."
No matter what you do, never, ever try to drive SOA with the wrong people; it just won't work.
Processes: SOA requires a change in how you develop, manage, and test applications
Approaching SOA means changing how you approach architecture and systems development. In the past, many companies have approached systems by dragging whatever seemed cool at the time into the enterprise to solve a tactical problem. Of course, tactical problems lead to other tactical problems, and these companies kept digging a deeper hole in terms of architectural complexity and efficiency.
Thus, you need to approach SOA using a well-thought-out, practical process that lets you break the architectural domain down to a functional primitive, then build it back up again as a SOA. Unless you're the smallest of enterprises, you also need to break these domains into achievable chunks that can be worked on in sequence, or later in parallel.
Then it's time to do some real work, including looking at the information within the problem domain, meaning application semantics and metadata. This takes a ton of work, because most enterprises typically don't have a good semantic-level understanding of their enterprise systems. Thus, this effort is usually not a process of reviewing common artifacts, but of creating new ones. Many SOA efforts skip this step, which cripples what they end up delivering.
From the information step, you move to the services: defining existing and new services that will make up your SOA. This is all about figuring out what you have, determining what you need, and then normalizing the services into a usable and well-defined grid. You need to make sure you define and document the services, and then link them back to the metadata model you've created.
Keep in mind that most of your services will be existing services, externalized through some sort of middleware mechanism. Most people think SOA is about building all-new services, but that's almost never the case. Many SOA efforts fail because they become excuses to reinvent the wheel, not solve pressing business needs.
You then need to define and create processes that bind the services together into business solutions. There are three approaches here you can use. First, you can create service-oriented business applications, a way to programmatically bind services together into processes or applications. Second, you can leverage an orchestration layer, such BPEL, to bind services together to form business solutions. Third, you can leverage traditional process integration tools to bind services into solutions. No matter what approach you use, you need to make sure to include requirements as well as design.
Of course, there are other process things to do, including the creation of test plans and selection of testing tools for the services. Also, you need to create a SOA governance strategy, determine the governance process based on that strategy, and select tools to support the creation and enforcement of governance policies.
Architecture: The core of SOA is usually given short shrift
The "A" in "SOA" is "architecture." Most people forget that, opting instead to jump right into the technology. Why? Because architecture requires a huge effort and is boring, whereas playing with cool technology is fun and fast. Unfortunately, you really have to spend the time to plan and lead the enterprise in the right directions. Create a strategy, processes, architecture, links to business realities, budgets, and then -- the most important action -- lead the technology teams in the proper directions.
Although architecture is fundamental to SOA, it is often neglected in so-called SOA efforts. That's because most enterprise architects within the larger enterprises don't have the authority and reach they need to drive the technology in the right directions. In most cases, they try only to influence and inform, and are more "ivory tower" guys when you get right down to it. This disrespected, powerless approach to architecture won't drive change in the long term unless there is true dynamic leadership to back them up.
What typically happens due to the low respect and profile of most enterprise architects is that tactical short-term needs trump any long-term strategy, as people try to run their business from one technology fire drill to another, dragging in all sorts of technology into the company with no clear plan as to how all of this stuff will work together.
What are called enterprise architectures are often no more than layers upon layers of these disjointed tactical efforts. Those kinds of "architectures" are too complex and too difficult to change as new business needs arise.
But if you focus on the "A" in SOA, you are much likelier to succeed. Being architecture-focused does require driving changes in how the IT department thinks about technology -- having it do so in the context of architecture, and never with the technology being the de facto architecture. This is a significant cultural shift that most IT staff won't make unless forced to. Making this change happen comes down to the leadership within the company and its support of the strategic activities. Here's why management should support the change: The current approaches waste millions of dollars a month right now. The challenge is that this waste has become the normal way of operating, so its costs are hidden within the "standard" overhead and lost opportunity costs.
Technology: Your technology should follow the requirements, not drive them
There is no one-size-fits-all SOA technology solution for all enterprises. You have to understand your requirements and match the requirements with the right technology. It's that simple.
But most companies that build SOA mistakenly lead with technology. They go out and purchase an ESB or some other SOA-in-a-box solution with the hopes that it will solve all their problems. The end result is a technology solution that's mismatched to their real issues and thus does not work. The SOA effort fails.
The process of matching the right technology with the problems that need to be solved is very simple, but it's also time-consuming. The process is to list your requirements down one side of the page, and the candidate technology down the other. From there, create a short list of technology that's practical to test. Next, work with the vendors to bring the technology in and test its form and function. Does it do what it should do and under the stresses that the SOA will place upon it?
Sure, it's tempting to call one of the big stack players and just leverage everything they have in their portfolio. Whereas some portions of such a technology suite will indeed be a good fit for your SOA, the rest of the stack will be the wrong match for your requirements. Accepting wrong technology for the convenience of a suite or single vendor relationship leads to SOA failure. Instead, in most cases the right technology solution for SOA will be a mix-and-match kind of exercise with many different vendors and technologies.
Make sure your architecture is technology-independent. It might sound easier to build architecture around a particular technology, as some vendors promote, but remember that technology is always in a state of change, whereas the core notion of the architecture needs to remain fairly consistent. You need to work the architecture out first, and then be concerned with the technology that supports it, understanding that the technology will change.
The bottom line for SOA success
SOA success is not rocket science; it's really a matter of good old IT disciplines that focus on all dimensions, including the people, processes, technology, and the business. Organizations that fail did not resist the temptation to chase the "quick and easy" technology-oriented solutions, and they did not consider the fundamentals.
The issue in most failed SOA development efforts is not having a clear understanding of the systemic change that SOA requires. It touches many parts of the organization, and therefore touches many political fiefdoms within enterprises, and turf issues come up quickly. Strong leadership is required to counter these issues, and most enterprises don't seem to have that leadership at the IT levels. Thus the project/movement founders and dies.
The core pattern of SOA success is around new, innovative thinking within the company among leaders who have the ability to drive enterprise-wide change based on that new thinking. Although some enterprises can step up to the requirements of SOA, most will need new leadership, management, and even staffers to pull SOA off. The ROI is real and significant, but it requires making the sacrifices at the very beginning.


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She writes of turkey gutting and fox farming, of trees felled in the Ontario wilderness, of harsh country schools and lingering illnesses, of familiar violence and obscure shame, and above all, of the lives of girls and women. And while these things have perhaps made her less well known than she should be, and the predictable sods have been flung - that her concerns are domestic, narrow, regional, dated, that she only writes short stories - hers is a story of triumph over such petty assumptions. For a long time Alice Munro has been compared with Chekhov; John Updike would add Tolstoy, and AS Byatt would say Guy de Maupassant and Flaubert. Munro is often called the best living writer of short stories in English; the words "short story" are frequently dropped.
People tend to be surprised at how normal Munro is in person. "Writers often feel obliged to adopt some sort of public appearance. But she's quite self-effacing physically," says Claire Tomalin, who, as a Booker judge in 1980, made it a personal crusade that Munro should be shortlisted and met her then. But in life she is true to the voice of her fiction - restrained, observant, unpretentious, valuing directness and honesty. Then there is her laughter, frequent and joyous and subversive.
Alice Laidlaw was born on July 10, 1931, just outside Wingham, Ontario; the town and its surroundings have been a constant in her work (renamed Jubilee, or perhaps Hanratty). "I am intoxicated by this landscape, by the almost flat fields, the swamps, the hardwood bush, by the continental climate with its extravagant winters," she wrote, introducing the Selected Stories (1996). "I am at home with the brick houses, the falling-down barns, the occasional farms that have swimming pools and airplanes, the trailer parks, burdensome old churches, Wal-Mart, and Canadian Tire. I speak the language." But they have also provided a very particular emotional landscape. "I really grew up in the 19th century," she says. "The ways lives were lived, their values, were very 19th century and things hadn't changed for a long time. So there was a kind of stability, and something about that life that a writer could grasp pretty easily." Western Ontario, only settled in the 1800s, was steeped in the religions the settlers brought with them - Scottish Presbyterianism, English Methodism (known to render entire towns ostensibly dry, in the temperance sense), Anglicanism, Irish Catholicism - or subsequently developed from unions and subdivisions of the originals. Belief ossified into simple obedience and hard work, a threadbare, suspicious probity. It was "really terribly conservative, just a stranglehold, when I think about it".
Munro's father, Robert Laidlaw - a direct descendant of James Hogg, author of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner - was a solitary, a hunter and trapper, and, by the time Alice, the oldest of his three children, was born, a farmer of silver foxes. But he had started too late, with too little capital, and in the depression the farm failed.
Her mother, of Irish extraction and from eastern Ontario, was quite different; genteel, socially ambitious but oblivious to the subtle, tyrannical shadings of class and expectation in a town where the Laidlaws were felt to hail from the wrong side of the tracks. "We didn't live in the town and we didn't live in the country. We lived in this kind of ghetto where all the bootleggers and prostitutes and hangers-on lived," as Munro later wrote. Desperate to fit in, she was embarrassed by her mother. "I had a lot of conflict with her," she says, "from the time I was a very young child, because she had an ideal of good behaviour. She wanted her daughters to be successful, but also she wanted us to be sexually very pure. And ladylike; being a lady was very important. She wanted me to shine in a way I was not prepared to." When Alice was 10, her mother was diagnosed with an unusual form of Parkinson's, "and then of course the whole struggle became terribly difficult, because you were struggling with a sick person who, emotionally, holds all the cards ".
Alice's first escape was into reading. "Books seem to me to be magic, and I wanted to be part of the magic." She read and reread favourites, especially Wuthering Heights. "And after a while it wasn't enough, and I started making up a very imitative type of story, set in Canada - which was kind of odd, but it didn't bother me. It was a kind of recompense for not being able to get right into the world of the book. Books were so important to me. They were far more important than life." But in Wingham, such tendencies "didn't add to my status as a normal person or as an attractive woman. I learned to try to be a different person on the surface, though this never really worked. People saw there was something wrong."
The next escape was to the University of Western Ontario; there, wishing to disguise her intent to write fic tion, she enrolled in journalism (rather blowing her cover by publishing her first short story, "Dimensions of a Shadow", in the university magazine). A scholarship student, she eked out the money as best she could, selling her blood, picking suckers from tobacco, working as a librarian, but after two years there was no more and she was faced with a stark choice: marry - the candidate was a fellow student - or do the expected: go home and care for her mother. Self-preservation prevailed, but at the price of an abiding guilt. "My mother's life was very sad, and if I had been a different person I could have made it quite a bit better. I mean, I have to realise that always. If I had been a different kind of woman, with more immediate warmth, instead of this inner fire, I could have been very helpful to her - not in physical terms, but in day to day communication, instead of leaving her all alone."
Alice and Jim Munro moved to Vancouver, where Jim worked as a manager at Eaton's, a department store, and Alice became a good 50s housewife, on the surface at least, she says. They had three children in quick succession (the second, Catherine, born without kidneys, died two days after birth); a fourth daughter was born nine years later. Sheila, the eldest, writes; Jenny is an artist, and the youngest, Andrea, is a yoga instructor. There are four grandchildren. The faultlines in the marriage were there from the beginning, and can be traced to an extent through Alice's stories: the Jim figure is from a privileged family, snobbish and class-conscious, right-leaning where she tends left, proper in a way she could not be, sometimes overbearing in a way she could not stand. But he also gave her absolute love and support, emotional and material; their donning of traditional roles meant "a great pressure was off me, because I didn't have to earn money".
And she was reading "everything I had ever heard of, all the big books of the 20th century, almost", discovering William Maxwell, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Sherwood Anderson, Ethel Wilson, Willa Cather; "I guess when I began to read American writers I learned a kind of directness in the voice." But she was also intimidated. "My writing simply distressed me, it was so bad." She feared the fug of maternity, and clung to what she called her "double life" - scribbling when the children took naps; keeping pieces short because it was too hard to concentrate for long; guilty that time spent writing was time taken from her family - and hated the Vancouver suburbs, where she felt isolated from any kind of writing culture.
Though in Canada, at that time, there was really no such thing anyway; those who wanted to write - Mavis Gallant, Mordecai Richler, Margaret Laurence - left. "You cannot begin to imagine how much nothing there was, how difficult it was," says Margaret Atwood, a longstanding friend. "We all started, of course, publishing on a radio programme, Anthology, put together by Robert Weaver." Munro credits Weaver with being her lifeline, keeping her going when she might have given up. He wrote encouragingly even when she had nothing to send, and when in town took her to parties, where, Weaver noticed, "she wasn't entirely admired or beloved", especially by women writers. She was from eastern Canada (historically much resented by the west), beautiful, and, of course, talented. "I think they were jealous of her." Told this nearly 50 years later, Munro laughs wickedly. "Oh good!"
The other problem was the scale of her ambition. "I went through about a year - I think when I was 29 - when I couldn't finish a sentence. It was a time of terrible depression, about what I could do measured against what I wanted to do." And what she wanted to do was write a great novel. A masterpiece, hopefully, to rival The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Sons and Lovers. "I can't do it yet. And believe me, I'm always trying. Between every book" - there are 10 volumes of short stories, 12 with the Selected and an anthology published in Canada this year - "I think, well now, it's time to get down to the serious stuff. Sometimes I look at novels and see how short people can make them. If I can string a story out to 60 pages ["The Love of a Good Woman", 1998] surely it can't be too hard. It doesn't work." It's a sore point, and her agent and editors don't mention it.
But then, in 1959, her mother died. Munro wrote a story called "The Peace of Utrecht", about a woman returning home after her mother's death from a Parkinson's-like disease and guiltily, defiantly facing the sister who stayed (in reality Munro's sister also left, for art school). It was a breakthrough: confronting the fact of her mother freed her into autobiographical fiction (or "personal stories", as she calls them), into her particular voice and material - though it did not free her from her mother, who remained a fraught presence. "The problem, the only problem, is my mother," she wrote in "The Ottawa Valley", more than a decade later. "And she is the one of course that I am trying to get; it is to reach her that this whole journey has been undertaken. To what purpose? To mark her off, to describe, to illumine, to celebrate, to get rid, of her; and it did not work, for she looms too close, just as she always did." (In 2001, Sheila published a graceful, affectionate memoir/biography, Lives of Mothers and Daughters. But it too contained the odd outburst. "There is something so out-of-proportion about having Alice Munro as my mother," she wrote. "[She is] an icon ... What is there to do with an icon besides worshipping it, or ignoring it, or smashing it to pieces?")
By 1963 Jim had quit his managerial job and they moved to the smaller, prettier coastal town of Victoria in British Columbia, where he started a bookshop, Munro's Books. Now housed in a beautiful, airy heritage building downtown, it has become a Canadian literary landmark, renowned for its quality and tenacity in the face of the big chains. Alice worked in the shop, and somehow, being out of the house and in the world also helped. In 1968 she published 15 years' worth of stories, including "The Peace of Utrecht". Atwood, who bought the book as soon as it came out, remembers the title story, "Dance of the Happy Shades", "made me cry. Because it's so well done". The book won Canada's highest accolade, the Governor General's award.
"They called her a shy housewife when she won. It made her really mad," says Jim Munro, who found himself congratulated for bearing up well. "She's tried to live that down ever since, I think." She soon discovered it was not just in Wingham that achievement and bookishness were viewed askance. "[Being] a woman writer," says Atwood, "was still sort of like being a freak." But Munro has always determinedly held on to her femininity as well as her ambition.
Munro's next book, Lives of Girls and Women (1971), is called a novel, yet isn't quite; it began as a straightforward coming-of-age story but despite Munro's best efforts, "it didn't have life. It didn't have punch. Something about it was flabby." So she split it up into linked stories about a girl called Del, coming of age in a town called Jubilee. "I read Lives as an exploration of the boundaries between fiction and reality," says Atwood, "because in each of the stories the young girl takes up a certain kind of fiction or a story - sometimes it's a novel she gets from the library, sometimes it's the lurid National Enquirer type of newspapers, in one instance it's a relative who's writing an interminable history of the region. She takes each of these views of life and compares them to what she herself has observed and experienced and tries to fit them together - without success - and when she finally gets to the end it's about her own attempts to write. It's the education of an artist - the portrait of the short-story writer as a young girl."
This last section is also something of a manifesto - or the closest Munro, a totally undogmatic writer, can get to one. "People's lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, unfathomable - deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum. It did not occur to me then that one day I would be so greedy for Jubilee ... what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together - radiant, everlasting." Her subjects - or those who believed they were her subjects, the residents of Wingham - were not appreciative. They wrote wounded editorials and angry letters; attempted to ban her in schools; there was even a death threat.
But finally she was a published, and, in Canada, a fêted, writer. The family had moved, to "the last and grandest house, which I entered with premonitions of disaster", as she put it in Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), a collection which, she told Sheila, "mined a shallower vein". Munro was restless. And she was resonating to a broader restlessness, the promise of women's liberation. Her conversation often circles back to the choices women have, the difficulties of reconciling nurture and ambition, marriage and independence, what has been achieved and what has not. "Neither situation is totally satisfactory," she says regretfully. "But there was a time in the mid-70s when it was thought that with goodwill - from men - and strength in ourselves, we could do it. We could have both these worlds." She and her daughters took to calling a (still-resentful) Jim an MCP (male chauvinist pig); they dressed in miniskirts, smoked joints; and in 1973 her 22-year marriage was one of the many 50s unions that ended, heralding five crucial years of change.
The first and most immediate effect, says Robert Thacker, an American academic who is writing Munro's biography, was that "using the writing to support herself was more urgent". Munro took jobs teaching creative writing, in British Columbia and then back in Ontario. There, she met a man she had known at university, Gerry Fremlin, a geographer, and over three martinis - or so the story goes - they decided to stay together. His mother was ill and needed nursing, so they moved to Clinton, Ontario, not far from Wingham.
She had meant never to come back. Wingham, 2,600 miles, 22 years away, had developed the hermetic clarity of memory. And "I have written about it and used it up", she wrote in an uncollected autobiographical story, "Home" (1973). "There are the same banks and barber shops and town hall tower, but all their secret, plentiful messages drained away." Her return, argues Thacker, forced a re-engagement with the place, and with the adult she had become. One of the furious letters from Wingham had asked, "Who do you think you are?" and subsequent stories obliquely answer the question. (Although this is not her usual technique, Who Do You Think You Are? (1978) is, like Lives of Girls and Women, a series of stories linked by a central character.) "[Rose] is an actor," says Atwood. "So she's moved into the life of art. And Munro also takes her further into a certain age - she's grown up and married, and then it doesn't work, and all of it is bounced off the Flo character, who has this extremely cynical and ironic and small-town Ontario view of her and of life and of everything else. So it's about the attempt to dramatise, if you like, the tendency to overblow played against the tendency to undercut. Rose is the overblowing in the "Royal Beatings" story for instance, and Flo is the undercutting."
"Royal Beatings", in which tensions between a daughter (Rose) and step-mother (Flo) find a kind of release when the father whips Rose for presumptuousness, was another breakthrough story. Based on beatings she received from her father, and only written after his death, it also marked a shift in Munro's reach. She had been taken on by an American agent, Virginia Barber, and "Royal Beatings" was sold to the New Yorker. William Maxwell, fiction editor for 40 years, had just left, and the New Yorker was looking for younger, fresher voices. "We wanted to be sure we weren't getting stuck," says Charles McGrath, then a young fiction editor at the magazine, now editor of the New York Times Book Review, "and Munro was certainly a good place to start. She dealt with emotion on a kind of raw and immediate level that I don't think we had seen before."
Since then Munro has published dozens of increasingly long, increasingly complex stories in the New Yorker, as well as in other magazines, and a collection every three or four years. "I think she has evolved into a much more interesting writer," says McGrath. "I think her late stuff - and I don't mean this in a kind of dumb, postmodern way - is often about the very nature of storytelling." Daniel Menaker, who succeeded McGrath as the New Yorker's fiction editor and is now editor-in-chief at Random House US, agrees. "She's a very modern and experimental writer in the clothing of a classical writer. Like William Trevor, she penetrates through various narratives, sometimes about exactly the same events or subjects, and she keeps on parting the curtains for you until you get to the heart of what she's doing. You get the feeling she's trying to help you get at some true emotional psychological insight, but that often takes the form of a kind of philosophical surrender to the unknowability of people's motives and characters, a dark existential uncertainty about what makes people tick. And this, it seems to me, is very important and very abstract - but doesn't do justice to the liveliness and richness of her characters."
In "The Children Stay" (The Love of a Good Woman , 1998) a woman leaves a stable, if uninteresting, marriage for an excitable theatre director. "So her life was falling forwards," she thinks. "She was becoming one of those people who ran away. A woman who shockingly and incomprehensibly gave everything up. For love, observers would say wryly. Meaning, for sex."
"Alice is the only writer I can think of," says the novelist Audrey Thomas, a close friend, "who really, truly, examines women's sexuality. And that's one of her great strengths. I don't think you come across it very often." Sexual infatuation, especially, is "a very difficult subject", says Tomalin. "She doesn't write pruriently. She just writes it - I think any woman reading the stories which deal with that recognises them as truthful." Carefully, directly, Munro conveys ecstasy and self-forgetting, mortification and benediction; and necessity, adds Thomas. "Now that may sound like a very old-fashioned statement, and a non-feminist statement - but I'm not sure that it is. I think everybody needs relationships. Men and women make arrangements."
Munro "should probably be required reading for all men", says McGrath. But, he hastens to add, "I think you can overdo the sexual politics. I would argue that she also writes very well about families, and relationships, and insofar as she's doing that, men are implicated. At various points in the Munro universe men are the oppressors, or have tried to hold the female characters back - one certainly sees that. But she's not a political writer, and she's not tendentious."
Munro has said women narrate their lives differently from men, and AS Byatt has argued that her stories enact the shifts and eddies, the switchbacks and sudden revelations of memory. "What are those times that stand out, clear patches in your life - what do they have to do with it?" wonders Trudy, the protagonist of "Circle of Prayer" (1985). "They aren't exactly promises. Breathing places. Is that all?" Trudy is thinking of two points: her honeymoon, and the morning her husband left her; such moments - of leaving, as Munro did, of infidelity, of irrevocable choice - keep recurring, and are key. In "What is Remembered" (2001), for example, a woman is unfaithful, yet decides to stay, to use what she has done not as a destructive, or a dramatic force, but - as Munro puts it in "Oh What Avails" (1990) - as a "sustaining secret", a way of surviving. And that secret is also, of course, the difficult, fragile, fiercely protected fact of being an artist.
Although more recently Munro and Fremlin have spent the winters in Comox, British Columbia (where he skis), Munro has lived in Clinton for nearly 30 years now, in a modest house with a huge backyard sloping down to railway tracks, writing for two or three hours every morning, before "real life hauls me away". She and Fremlin walk for miles through Ontario woodland - which Munro passionately wants protected against the expansion of corporate farms - but she is also social ("we scream with laughter" when we go out for dinner, says Atwood. "We're a public nuisance."). "One of the things about Alice that I have really liked," says Thomas, "is that she doesn't change. She doesn't put on any side."
But Munro is becoming increasingly aware of encroaching mortality. In October 2001 she underwent bypass surgery (her father died in 1976, after a heart operation), and when she is not smiling she looks greyer than one expects, more tired. "I feel some diminishment of power. But I'm not sure about this. Perhaps because I've been ill in the last few years. Or perhaps it is real. You can compensate, if you feel weaknesses, you can compensate in a way.
"After I wrote the last book, I thought I wouldn't write any more, because I had the idea that I was going to become a real woman at last". Which involves? "Having a lot of people to dinner," she answers, laughing again. "I would be a regular nice person. The first thing I did was redecorate the condo where we live, and I enjoyed that - but here I am, drifting into writing things again, and wondering, is this the right thing to do at my age?"
Her agent and publishers may wear her down, but "I've decided there isn't going to be a next book. I think there'll be posthumous stuff, but I'm not sure that I will publish again. Before I had heart surgery I rewrote everything that hadn't been published, so it would be around in a better version, and now I've rewritten some of it again. I'm really working out what will be here when I'm not here. As if that mattered! - but it does. It does to some extent."
At the end of "Home" she paints a loving scene of the father in the story milking a cow, sitting in a pool of light but surrounded by "the dark circle of these country nights ... You can see this scene, can't you, you can see it quietly made, that magic and prosaic safety briefly held for us, the camera moving out and out, that spot shrinking, darkness. Yes. That is effective. I don't want any more effects, I tell you, lying. I don't know what I want. I want to do this with honour, if I possibly can."
Alice Munro
Born: July 10 1931, Wingham, Ontario.
Educated: 1949-51 University of Western Ontario.
Married: 1951 James Munro, div. 76 (three daughters, '53 Sheila, '57 Jenny, '66 Andrea); '76 Gerald Fremlin.
Books: 1968 Dance of the Happy Shades, '71 Lives of Girls and Women, '74 Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, '78 Who Do You Think You Are?, '83 The Moons of Jupiter, '86 The Progress of Love, '90 Friend of My Youth, '94 Open Secrets, '96 Selected Stories, '98 The Love of a Good Woman, 2001 Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.
Awards: 1968, '78 and '86 Governor General's Award; '72 Canadian Booksellers Award; '77 Canada-Australia Literary Prize; '95 WH Smith Award; '99 National Book Critics Circle Award and Giller Prize.

subset: commoncrawl


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Art Mina
Canvas Tote Bag "Carrot Bunny " [FREE SHIPPING]
"Carrot Bunny - All carrots are mine!" Tote Bag
Eco-friendly Cotton Tote Bag was Illustrated and hand-printed on Silk Screen by Mina Wilcox with joy from her small Art Studio in California. This Art Mina heavy canvas shopping tote bag will hold multiple gifts or groceries.
DETAILS: One Heavy Canvas Tote Bag
100% cotton canvas
Printed with non-toxic water-based inks that are safe.
Care: Machine wash cold or Spot clean, hang dry
*We took two processes for fixing ink.
+ Book Tote $15
Size: 15"W x 15"H x 4"D (W38cm x H38cm x D10cm)
Full side and bottom gusset: 4" (D10cm)
Self Fabric handles: 24" (61cm)
+ zippered Tote $24.98 [FREE SHIPPING]
Size: 18"W x 14"H x 4"D (W46cm x H56.5cm x D10cm)
Full side and bottom gusset: 4" (D10cm)
Self Fabric handles: 24" (61cm)
+ Jumbo Tote $20
Size: 20"W x 16"H x 5"D (W50cm x H40.5cm x D12.5cm)
Full side and bottom gusset: 5" (D12.5cm)
Self Fabric handles: 24" (61cm)
* Items are hand printed so color unevenness and pattern placement may vary from stock photo. If you want to see a pattern of yours, please let me know it. I will send you a picture. Colors may vary slightly on your computer screen.
Thanks for taking a look at our Art Mina shop! Please feel free to contact us if you have a question.
We love this bag becomes part of your happy life!
< Mina Wilcox's Art >
The images captured in Mina Wilcox's art are from the imaginary "Poe Poe island" of the Hawaiian Islands and Polynesian culture. They are her travel journal about the scenic beauty of Poe Poe island and the Peo Ple's relaxed lifestyle.
Welcome to her deeply tropical and humorous world!
U.S. and International Copyright laws fully protect the artwork.
Copyright ©Art Mina. All Rights Reserved.


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By Haley Lavergne, a member of the Interact Club of West Feliciana High School in St. Francisville, Louisiana, USA.
I was delighted to attend the Rotary Global Peace Forum in Honolulu, Hawaii, 25-27 January, with my mother as the winner of the grand prize in the Interact Peace Through Service Postcard Contest. The most powerful moment for me was to hear Aung San Suu Kyi speak about the power of individual kindness and compassion.
Personally, at times I feel overwhelmed how much need and suffering is in the world. Suu Kyi empowered her audience to be agents of kindness. She emphasized the power of compassion and in doing so helped me to see that as we strive to serve one another and work towards peace, small acts count. Small acts accumulate and grow to be great things.
The forum was a phenomenal experience. I got to attend various workshops, learn about Hawaiian culture, and even had the opportunity to meet the current RI President, Sakuji Tanaka, and Sylvia Whitlock, who in 1987 became the first female president of a Rotary club. I met Rotarians from around the world and had great conversations about the service projects they were passionate and involved with.
Thank you Interact for this wonderful opportunity. I am honored to have been able to attend and know that the lessons and experiences from this forum will stay with me forever.
Editor's note: Haley and her mother received round trip airfare to the Rotary Global Peace Forum as the grand prize winner of the Interact Peace Through Service Postcard Contest. View Haley's winning design or all the postcard entries.
- Read more about the peace forum in Honolulu, Hawaii
- Read more blog posts from the peace forums


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While all those volumes of Where's Waldo books sit in a dusty cardboard box in your attic, the spirit of Waldo lives on in a remarkable bit of GIFage by Redditor Swiftapple. Waldo is alive and well. And bobbing.
The simple joy of spotting Waldo's red-and-white cap in motion instantly brought me back to the days of those oversized hardcovers. Perhaps this will foreshadow a new age of a digital Waldo. Just imagine every single person in a Waldo illustration moving and interacting. Utopia.
Click for full-size animated GIF.
Let's just promise right here and now that we'll never use this power for evil. Like, say, a Waldo Harlem Shake. [Reddit]


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It's that day again — Thriller Thursday! I'm pleased to introduce a very talented author Stephen Woodfin with his exciting thriller Last One Chosen. Let us now take a look inside a high-octane thriller and see how good versus evil pans out.
Book Blurb:
Homeland Security agents raid a small East Texas town and arrest a humble blue-collar worker for domestic terrorism and espionage. When two country lawyers take on his defense and fight to prevent their client's execution, they learn that he holds the secret of a doomsday device, a secret he will not divulge, even under torture. At the trial's astonishing conclusion, they realize for the first time that their struggle was not only about justice, but also redemption.
LAST ONE CHOSEN chronicles what can happen when one person motivated purely by the desire to do good for his fellow human beings is willing to give his life to oppose the forces of evil.
Jennifer Chase: If your main character was trapped in an elevator with three other people, how would your hero devise a plan to escape? Would they take any of the people with them?
Stephen Woodfin: He's an air conditioning and heating repair man as well as a brilliant scientist. So he would improvise a chute made of the prisoners' clothing. Anyone who was too good to strip to save his fellow elevator detainees would have to remain behind.
Jennifer chase: How do you get inside your main character's head when writing?
Stephen Woodfin: This is a tough one because it is just a matter of feel for me. I have a conception of the things that make a character tick, the things that are inviolate for him or her. I try to put the character in an impossible situation where he has never been and let him work his way out. It is usually as much of a surprise for me as it is for the reader. So, I suppose I go at from the perspective of what I know she won't do and then let her figure out what she will do.
Jennifer Chase: What's your specific genre? If you could write in any other genre, what would it be and why?
Stephen Woodfin: Legal thrillers. These come naturally for me because I have spent twenty-five years trying cases in the courtroom. Recently, I took a break from it and, on a dare wrote a 5,000 word satirical, fictional memoir about a lawyer turned vampire who faced a moral dilemma when he became a born-again Christian. I had more fun writing that than anything I have done in a while. However, the title has yet to catch on: God's Love Sucks: A Brief Memoir of a Born-Again Vampire.
Jennifer Chase: So why should readers pick up Last One Chosen?
Stephen Woodfin: Because it is a fun read that also carries a powerful message about how we should treat each other. The characters are the sort of people no one expects to be heroic, who nevertheless show how the power of love and loyalty can conquer anything.
Jennifer Chase: What types of emotions will readers experience when they read your book?
Stephen Woodfin: I hope they laugh and cry and get mad. Most of the reviewers expressed that they found it exciting, but also heart-warming. Although it has tragic elements, in essence it is about friendship and the human values that drive us to help each other and to sacrifice to do the right thing. It is also a cautionary tale about the brute power of government and how it attempts to crush anyone who gets in its way.
Jennifer Chase: Now, please bear with me, it's time to play word association with your main character. Please respond with one word that comes to mind (in your main character's voice) to the words listed below.
Stephen Woodfin:
Plot Conspiracy
Predator Politician
Giggles Friends
Rural Home
Omnipresence Love
Thank you so much Stephen! I appreciate you dropping by today to chat about Last One Chosen. Congratulations on being a Finalist for Best 2012 Mystery/Thriller at The Kindle Book Review!
Stephen Woodfin holds a BA in religion from Dallas Baptist University, graduating magna cum laude in 1974, as well as a Master of Divinity Degree from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, NC (1979) where he received the Cullen Midler Theology Award for the best paper submitted in Systematic Theology. In 1985, he graduated from Baylor Law School with a JD and gained admittance to the State Bar of Texas. He has practiced law for the last twenty-six years. He often tells juries that he went to seminary to get the Lord on his side and to law school to get the Devil on his side.
Woodfin has appeared as a featured speaker at state and national legal seminars, authoring papers for these appearances and for the Texas Paralegal Journal. His presentation at the American Bar Association Annual Seminar on Class Actions was one of the highest ranked of the seminar.
In 2008, Woodfin's courtroom short story, The Promiscuity Defense, appeared in the Northeast Texas Writers' Organization (NETWO) Anthology. Also in 2008, Writer's Digest published his story, He Ain't Leaving; He's Gone, in its 2008 Short Short Story Collection. The story, which features a protagonist suffering from Alzheimer's disease, ranked 15th out of over 7,000 submissions.
Woodfin is the author of five legal thrillers, a collection of short stories and standalone satirical five thousand word piece about a lawyer turned vampire who faces an ethical dilemma when he becomes a born-again Christian.
For more information:


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Poison Prevention Awareness
As November settles in, our thoughts turn to turkey, pie, and other holiday treats. Our...
As November settles in, our thoughts turn to turkey, pie, and other holiday treats. Our...
"Dr. Hartmann has been wonderful caring for this boy of ours who almost died in December 2017. She continues to work diligently to optimize his health and is always willing to listen, support, and make decisions together in regards to his ongoing care needs. We highly recommend this clinic for ALL of the amazing, kind, caring, compassionate souls who work here!!!."
"We recently had to put our cat down after almost 15 years . It's always an extremely difficult thing to do . After doing everything they could for us to try and save him the day did come when we had to do the right thing . The staff at Klein couldn't have been anymore accommodating and took our loss as there loss . I can't thank them enough for making our situation as good as it could be"
Klein has taken great care of my pets so far and go above and beyond to help diagnose a problem. I recently got a dog from the shelter and she has a couple medical problems that we needed medicine to treat. That was almost a week ago.
Today, they called me just to check in and see how my dog was feeling/doing. I am so thrilled that they called just to check up on her. Makes me a happy dog mom and I will definitely be returning. Thank you for loving my fur baby!
I originally started my Yorkie Daisy, with a different vet. She is now six years old. I'd heard so many good things about Dr. Hartman from many friends, I just knew I had to take my third daughter to her. When Dr. Hartman diagnosed her with Diabetes, I was so relieved to know she would help me through this and was going to be her Doctor. I've seen plenty of Vets with plenty of animals throughout my 72 years..Dr. Hartman cares, and you'd be blessed to have her as your fur babies Doctor…I wish I'd found her six years ago..I am so welcomed by Cindy, and Heather is a blessing. Always kind, and helpful.Thank you So much for taking care of my Daisy
Very friendly and knowledgeable staff. If you desire Veterinarians that treat your pets like family then this is the clinic to go to. They will go above and beyond to care for your pets needs and restore their health


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Welcome to Pier42
Pier 42 was created from the complete renovation of an existing disused property & great care has been taken to minimize our impact on the natural environment, existing structures have been retained and re-styled with recycled hardwood floors, reclaimed doors & windows and locally handcrafted encaustic and terra cotta tiles.
The guest rooms and public areas feature restored teak wood furniture in both retro & classic Thai designs, ornaments & carvings + contemporary paintings & photography from local artists. The overall result is singular & satisfying. The creation of an attractive, peaceful & pleasing place, which we hope, you will appreciate & enjoy.
Within Pier 42, you will find our café which serves Thai and International cuisine, coffee, beer & cocktails; The Siam Organic Spa where you can enjoy hours and hours spoiling yourself with body massage or beauty treatments safe in the knowledge that everything is 100% Natural; The Siam Botanicals Store which stocks a full range of 100% Natural skin & body care products (& also supplies our in room amenities) & The Ocean store where a full range of dive & water sports equipment is on offer from Market leaders such as Mares, Coltri Sub & Ocean Dynamics.
Pier 42 is a diver-friendly resort, and is surrounded by dozens of diving and snorkeling businesses we are happy to advise on dive sites & local operators.
... we hope to see you soon


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Sony has just released an 18MB update to their Tablet S that improves Wi-fi connectivity, GPS and notifications. It also finally adds official support for using a PS3 wireless controller, a vast improvement to playing games using on-screen controls.
But, there's a catch—and a rather annoying one at that. Once your tablet is updated you can't just sync your PS3 controller and instantly turn it into a portable PSone. You'll first need to get your hands on a $14 USB adapter cable that's also used for transferring files to your tablet. Once the controller is synced you'll be wireless for life, but the cable is still kind of an annoying inconvenience that should really have been included with the tablet in the first place. [XDA-Developers via The Verge]


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As a graphic designer here at LACMA, I was excited to see the works of Lester Beall—in my opinion one of the U.S.' greatest graphic designers—go on view through May 31.
Beall was someone I call a true modernist—with a twist. On the one hand he lived by the credo "form follows function." On the other, he allowed himself the joy of working with color and pattern. He spurned symmetry, which in his mind contradicted the dynamism of contemporary life, and was well known for bold, imaginative, and yet always radically simple graphics.
He once said that a graphic designer "must work with one goal in mind—to integrate the elements in such a manner that they will combine to produce a result that will convey not merely a static commercial message, but an emotional reaction as well." This oneness of message is apparent in the series on display at LACMA. Here concept meets form in the most exquisite way.
To me, Beall was also a great translator of European avant-garde graphic design into American modernism. I love the boldness and simple complexity of his posters that always look as if they have designed themselves. I also love his use of pattern and contrast that make his work full of life yet never overdone.
What amazes me, and what I think visitors will discover in this installation, is the timelessness of his pieces and how much we can all still learn from them. By "we," I mean graphic designers as well as the public and potential clients, who so often don't understand the importance and power of visual communication.
Maja Blazejewska, Graphic Designer


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Musician John Warren Geils Jr. dies in Massachusetts at 71
GROTON, Mass. (AP) - Musician John Warren Geils Jr., founder of The J. Geils Band, has died in his Massachusetts home. He was 71.
Groton police confirmed Geils' death Tuesday night. They say it does not appear to be suspicious.
The J. Geils Band was founded in 1967 in Worcester, Massachusetts, while Geils was studying at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
The band's first big hit "Love Stinks," a rant against unrequited love, was the title song on their 1980 album.
Their song "Centerfold," from the album "Freeze Frame" was released in 1981 and eventually charted at No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 in February 1982. It stayed there for six weeks and was featured on MTV.


text: Keepon, the adorable bot meant to help autistic kids with its jovial dance moves, seems to finally be getting a cheaper version. The original cost $30,000 and did a lot more than dance. Actually, we got to play with it a little bit at CES a couple years ago. The commercial version most likely won't have facial recognition or any of the other fancy features of the first one, but we hope it can dance well. We've actually seen a couple home made versions and we're hoping that the new one has some major hacking potential. The temptation to have one of these cute little bots around is made even stronger when you see that some of the money is going back into autism research.