y mother knew her entire adult life what was coming. Confirmation arrived the day she shuffled into the kitchen, swung open a cupboard door, then turned to me and asked, “Where are the singing noodles?” On that day, I stopped leaning on Mum and started extending a protective hand. Before long, pots began appearing in the oven and car keys in the fridge, while Post-it Notes with basic English words multiplied across every surface of the house—all quirks of the onset of Alzheimer’s, the disease that took her mother 30 years earlier.

Nothing deletes one’s individuality so completely as Alzheimer’s. Its imprint is the same in everyone who gets the diagnosis; they all disappear down the same path, exhibiting more or less the same set of behaviours. Most go from unique citizens of the world to nervous fusspots crying “No! No! No!” (the last word in their drained vocabulary), and then to silent bodies with gaping mouths and fixed stares. That’s why I prefer to think about what made my mother unforgettable, before age flicked a switch and unleashed this great leveller.

For someone born before the Crash of ’29, my mother had a remarkably liberal view of a woman’s place in the world. She honoured the individuality of every soul she met, so unconventional choices—like making art full-time, or not having kids—never sent her into a tailspin, unlike some women in the neighbourhood. In her day, women attached themselves to men like the stateless to lifeboats, their fortunes rising and sinking with their rescuers. All too often, you married the man you wanted to be: aspiring novelists teamed up with writers (becoming their typists, first readers, editors, even ghostwriters), while nurses said “I do” to doctors and vowed to always pass the scalpel but never perform with it. Mum believed in developing a person’s potential, not denying it.

Catherine, new bride, Summer of 1951.

When I grew up and decided that filling a blank page with words constituted a large chunk of my identity, she was right beside me. During that formative period, she didn’t interrupt my progress to tutor me about men. I now see that was deliberate. Back then, I had no interest in integrating my personal and creative lives. What were guys to books? When we did talk men, she just smiled, looked me straight in the eye and said, “You’ll have to figure that one out on your own.” Confounding, but true.

All the while, she kept feeding my individuality. Every time I came home at Christmas, there was a new book on the end of my bed, touching on one of my interests: painting, history, biography. Those volumes have moved with me to every place I’ve lived in since university: There’s the doorstopper, Paintings in the Musée d’Orsay, the elegant Chinese Brush Painting Techniques and Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea, an ode to the forces that shape a woman’s life. Mum owned about five editions of Lindbergh’s book, some with line drawings of shells, others with thick, creamy, deckle-edged pages. When it was revealed several years ago that the author’s husband, Charles, had fathered two families—his famous one with Anne and a secret one with a German hat maker more than 20 years his junior—Mum was too sick to know. But I think I can guess what she would have said, or not said. She wouldn’t have rolled her eyes like a know-it-all or uttered something cynical about men. I’m positive she detected it in Anne’s lucid and compelling writing. Like Anne, pain only increased my mother’s grace.

I don’t know if, as a young woman, Mum fretted about her marital destiny. I never asked. Clever and capable, she could have supported herself teaching piano or assisting a company president. And yet she had a charm and grace that deserved an outlet and some focused attention. When she spread red Max Factor on her lips, she dazzled enough to startle her future mother-in-law to the point of distrust. And more than once, during her younger days in London, England, she tripped up the men she passed on the way to her secretarial job near the city’s Marble Arch. Teasing wasn’t her style, but I’m sure times like that, when she distanced herself from the starched-wimple set, pleased her. I said she reminded me of a young Princess Elizabeth: efficient and sensible most of the time, but stunning when you least expected it. It was hard not to do a double take of my mother when she stained her lips and stood with a drink under a sparkling chandelier, smiling and talking about the things she cared about. Her natural vivacity pulled everyone toward her.

No one knows what Alzheimer’s looks like from the inside out, but Mum gave us a hint. She was acutely aware of everything she was losing and the declarations just poured out in the end. “I want you to be happy,” she said, still not serving up a prescription for how I should get there. “I love that guy,” she stated, smiling and pointing to my dad, sitting next to her in his La-Z-Boy watching the Golf Channel. She must have said “I love you” to him more times in her last year of speech than in the final two decades of their 60-plus years of marriage. Most times, he was too busy staring at the TV—wincing at a missed putt—to hear. But he knew, and we knew, because she was telling the whole world. I’m glad I witnessed this as an adult. The romantic in me wants to believe in love’s power to cut through chaos, disappointment and change.

A few months before we handed Mum over to the care of a team of nurses, she called and left a message on my answering machine. Something in me said, This will be the last time she picks up the phone and dials my number. My hunch proved true. I played her message over and over that week, then popped a blank tape in my boom box and pushed “record,” so I’d have her voice with me forever.

It’s been 12 years since she left that message and I haven’t listened to it since. I can’t. At that moment in time, she put aside her doubt and fear for herself, and with a shaky, lilting voice she said: “I miss you, Alison. I just wanted to let you know I think about you every day and hope that everything’s going well in Toronto. I love you.” From the commotion, I could tell she missed placing the receiver in the carriage on the first try. That vulnerability makes my knees buckle every time I think about it.

Catherine Garwood-Jones died on Dec. 9, 2012, one year after her husband, Trevor.

Catherine and Alison hugging (a common pose for us).  1993.

Drop cap by Jessica Hische

The 5-Minute Freelancer Q&A #8 – Alison Garwood-Jones

In this regular feature, Story Board asks Canadian writers to share a few details about their work habits and their strategies for navigating the ups and downs of freelance life.

1. What’s your strategy for generating story ideas?

A lot of it is just looking at the landscape and seeing what inspires me, what enrages me and seeing if I can respond to it in an engaging way. It comes from everything. I flit around from the computer to magazines, from print to digital, just trying to stay aware and trying to stay engaged myself and then seeing if I can spin it through my own sensibility on my blog. It’s everywhere. It’s based on what I see when I go to the AGO, it’s based on what I experience when I’m hanging out with friends at a restaurant, what are they talking about? What’s the latest app they’re using? My blog covers a wide range of topics, I put it under the umbrella of human nature, but I think what’s happening in the digital world is a good example of how human nature responds to new toys and new forms of communication.

And I’ve had several blog posts turn into pieces because editors have gotten in touch with me saying “that was really moving or really interesting, do you want to expand on that into a print piece?” I’ve always found that if something really gets me going, I’m probably not the only one.

2. What’s the most important thing you’ve done over the years to develop your writing skills?

Probably start blogging. I was reluctant in the beginning. I got into journalism late in my career. I had a whole other life as an art historian. And then I decided I wanted to be less of an academic and get into journalism and write for a broader audience. Write for the common reader, as Virginia Woolf said. I just wanted to engage on a more sort of visceral level with people through writing. The nice thing about getting into journalism in 2005 is that I was right on the tail end of the golden age of journalism. So adapting to a new environment in social media and web 2.0 wasn’t as hard for me. I wasn’t as invested in the old way. I hadn’t been in it long enough. A quote I put up above my desk was “I’d better flee into the future as fast as I can.” So the smartest thing I did was build a website, start blogging. I wouldn’t say getting on Facebook was necessarily a smart thing! But Facebook and all the social media platforms like Twitter and Pinterest are great for alerting people when you’ve got a new blog post and that’s how you drive traffic, obviously, back to your homepage.

I’m finding now that blogging… whereas before I was a little wary, like “what’s this all about, it’s devaluing the work of print journalists,” now I feel more like, wow, this is the biggest revolution for writers in I don’t know how long. And I’m really in agreement with Craig Silverman when he wrote last year on Facebook in a comment, he said “I see my blog emerging as the primary focus of my work, with the print column representing a unique extension and opportunity.” And when I read that I instinctively knew that’s exactly how I’m feeling as well. I honestly feel like my blog and my website is a sandbox for me. It’s where I workshop ideas and really work on my craft.

3. Do you think there’s ever a situation when it makes sense for a writer to write for free, and if so, when?

For me it makes sense on my blog, obviously. The fact that I haven’t entertained any advertisers is important. That’s deliberate. I want complete freedom. With my own work, I don’t have an attitude that every word I write is worth so much. Now outside of that it is a little more complicated. I definitely don’t think writers should undersell themselves. I think we’re at a watershed period where what’s happening right now with contracts – the all-rights grabs – is definitely an opportunity for writers to step back and say “no, this is unacceptable.” And it’s a scary step to take and a lot of people have shown an enormous amount of courage, Amber Nasrulla and Jay Teitel, and they speak for so many of us and they have my full moral support. This is a time where you almost have to live your life as a writer assuming that all publishers will go this route and will try and grab all moral and digital rights. So it means that we have to be really smart about looking for ways to pay our bills that don’t necessarily involve writing for magazines. Hopefully we can continue to do that and not all publishers will go with these kinds of contracts.

But I think you have to, as a businessperson, be really smart and say “okay because I refuse to sign that, let’s figure out how I can create a patchwork income doing a whole bunch of other different things so I can continue to write.” It may mean only continuing to write on your blog, who knows. But right now we’re going through such a transition period with so many interesting possibilities. Derek Finkle’s brought this up: self-publishing is becoming a really interesting and, as he said, a subversive tool for writers. A writer can take a larger cut of the royalties through self-publishing than they can through the traditional route. And that’s never happened before. There’s never been that much opportunity for writers to have control over their content and their royalties. So it’s a big transitional period, I find it really exciting.

Would I write service journalism for free? No, because I’ve already been on staff and you get to a point in your career where you know you have a certain skill level and it would be so regressive. Like the old saying goes “you can’t eat exposure.” At some point you don’t need more exposure. That’s not your goal. It’s about a business relationship and a respectful one on both sides. It’s tough. And I think it’s something they need to teach. They need to have these hard business-type discussions with students. It’s not all about crafting stories and narrative arcs. It needs to be, okay, you have to think about how long you’ll accept writing for free and at some point know that you can up the ante and start negotiating. And it needs to be earlier than I think what people have been doing. It’s amazing what you can get if you just ask for it. And not enough writers are doing that.

4. Work can take over your life when you’re a freelancer. What do you do to try and maintain a healthy work-life balance?

I walk a lot. I go out in the sunshine. I have a part time job at a bar downtown and that takes me outside of my head, helps me pay my bills and is a complete change of pace for me from the solitary life of writing. I think it’s important to mix up the kind of work and play that you do so that it’s not all surrounding writing or talking about writing. I just try and do things that are the polar opposite of what I might do at my desk. And that’s a good mental break.

• Alison Garwood-Jones is a Toronto-based writer and blogger. Her writing appears in the current issues of Glow, Azure, and House and Home and her blog, Society Pages was nominated for a 2013 Canadian Weblog Award. You can follow her on Twitter at @AlisonGJ.

I’ve been covering music, and especially music and the internet, a fair bit lately. Here’s a piece I published last year that tackles the mystery of singing and accents. Enjoy!

In 1981, Sheena Easton was a 22-year old club kid with a glossy pout and a Lady Di shag when she burst onto the American music scene with a finger-snapping tune called “Morning Train.” The song went all the way to Number One on Billboard Magazine‘s adult contemporary chart. But when Easton sat down for her first interview with Entertainment Tonight, the production control room had to post subtitles across her bare shoulders to translate the singer’s accent — a Glaswegian cant so thick it strained Mary Hart’s smile and made TV viewers adjust the antennae on their sets.

The disconnect between Easton’s clear and powerful singing voice and her conversational brogue may have come as a surprise to the viewing public, but it makes perfect sense to voice experts who cite Easton, Liverpool’s Fab Four (that’s right, The Beatles), Sweden’s Ace of Base and Céline Dion, the chanteuse of Charlemagne, Québec, as good examples of strong regional accents that have been neutralized (or Americanized) by song. Diction lessons, mimicry and whip-snapping managers with US dollar signs in their eyes only partially explain this vocal transformation. That’s when I started digging for an answer.

“I’ve heard Chinese school kids with minimal English language skills sing songs in English with almost perfect American accents,” Randy Wong, a Boston-based professional musician and educator, told me in an email when I recounted the Easton story. And that’s because when children sing they rarely act self conscious about forming this mouths into big O’s, says Dr. Brian Hands, weighing in on this mystery. Hands is  a Toronto-based laryngologist and voice care specialist who tends to the voices of COC opera singers, Stratford actors and visiting rocks stars. “You can mask any accent with a large articulator and resonator,” he says.

  My reinterpretation of a greeting card, since lost.

Here’s what he means: go on YouTube and watch your favourite singer — pop or classical — and you’ll find, says Hands, that “the best ones open their mouths like they’re going to swallow the stage.” They inhale using their diaphragm and when they exhale into song they promptly drop their tongue, their jaw (the articulator) and their voice box (the resonator), creating as wide a chamber as possible. “Such a large space means they can lengthen the time they hold their vowels, and it’s the vowels that are responsible for carrying the melody and the sound.”

Take Céline Dion. In person, she’s a fast talker with a pronounced nasality (Quebecois vowels are closed and nasal, wah, wah, wah).

When Céline belts out one of her anthems — oh, like, “My Heart Will Go On” — she changes the shape of her vocal tract and stops letting air escape through her nose. “All that extra space and breath goes into managing an open-toned singing voice,” says Lorna MacDonald, a fiery soprano who is a colleague and patient of Doc Hands. “The expanded vowel space in her mouth leads to changes in pronunciation and a greater warmth and back-roundedness more typical of English speech patterns,” she explains. In other words, that process of stretching, rounding out and amplifying the vowels is what anglicizes most regional accents.

When she’s not on stage or in the studio making recordings for the CBC, MacDonald heads up the voice pedagogy program in the music department at The University of Toronto. I met with her at her office which is packed with books, music scores and anatomical models of human heads and chest cavities with brightly-coloured voice boxes caught in the throats.

But there’s one more consideration: accents are also about timing. At least, that’s what Marla Roth, a Toronto speech pathologist told me. “The same thing happens with people who stutter. We’ve found that when they sing, they don’t stall and trip over their words as much.” Everything in normal speech is about timing; you have to hit the right points in your mouth at the right moment. “In singing,” says Roth, the timing and intonation are off from normal speech, and that can result in a new speech characteristic.”

That leaves us, then, with only one mystery to solve. Mick Jagger (below). How is it that the biggest mouth in rock and roll turned an East London accent into a stuttering southern drawl?

P.S. Steven Tyler, another big mouth, doesn’t work in this story. Despite being from Boston he has a standard American accent with a slight tinge of surfer dude, so not much to overcome.

Here’s the PDF: AACE Student – Petra Cuschieri.

Catherine Lucy Garwood-Jones (1928-2012), Hamiltonian extraordinaire, died on Sunday, Dec. 9 after a ten-year battle with Alzheimer’s. Pre-deceased by her husband Trevor in 2011, Team “Cath and Trev” changed the face of the city they loved so much — he through architecture and she through her commitment to health care, education, music and family.

Catherine’s efforts to secure more funding and improved care for mental health patients across the province gets first billing here. Where others saw stigma, Catherine showed compassion, openness and a determination to see widespread attitudinal change towards mental health, and greater support for families. Volunteering on the Hamilton Wentworth District Health Council (HWDHC) from1976-80, and later with the Hamilton Program for Schizophrenia, Catherine was assigned to head up a community-based board to oversee funding for the first Community Mental Health Program in the province. Colleagues, including Dr. Stan Dermer, remember Catherine storming up the steps of Queen’s Park to lobby provincial Health Minister Dennis Timbrell for more funding. She got it. The “Catherine Garwood-Jones Lecture in Schizophrenia,” part of the Hamilton Program for Schizophrenia (HPS), is a testament to her commitment. This annual event, which kicked off in 1984, attracts leading scholars from around the world to McMaster University every fall.

Catherine did all this while raising three kids and working as the office manager and receptionist at Trevor Garwood-Jones Architects. Her flying fingers typed out the correspondence and specifications for every major design by her husband, including Hamilton Place, The Hamilton Convention Centre, The Art Gallery of Hamilton, and St. Peter’s Hospital.

Born October 22, 1928 in Cape Town, South Africa, the only girl in a family of five boys, Catherine moved with her parents and brothers to London, England after the war. In 1948, while attending the Royal College of Music, a dashing architecture student caught her eye at the Leytonstone Salvation Army Hall in Central London. She was standing on a ladder hanging a poster. They married in 1951 at the hall and moved to Hamilton in 1959 to begin a new life, which was soon to include three children, Peter, Richard and Alison, and years later, a cherished daughter-in-law, Doreen.

Over the years Catherine’s love of music, especially in a venue with great acoustics (like Hamilton Place), was something she shared with Trevor. A longtime member of the Women’s Committee of the Hamilton Philharmonic, Catherine and her husband were regular attendees at concerts and were huge supporters of the arts in all their forms, especially when made by their children.

The family would like to thank their friends and extended relatives for sharing their favourite memories. Special thanks go out to Dr. Kanwal Shankardass and the entire staff at the St. Peter’s Residence at Chedoke for years of loving care. Donations can be made to the Alzheimer’s Society of Hamilton and Halton. Visitation between 10:00 am and 2:00 pm on Friday, Dec 14 at St. Peter’s Residence at Chedoke, 125 Redfern Ave. Hamilton. Private service to follow.

UPDATE: In June 2013, Emma-Lee’s album “Backseat Heroine” was the winner of Best Adult Contemporary album at the 2013 Independent Music Awards.

I was propositioned by a guitar picker this summer. Or, rather, the writer in me was. And that’s “ghitaahr pick’r,” if you say it like you’re June Carter Cash, as I’m wont to do. Music biopics, especially Walk The Line, and classics in rock journalism by the likes of Al Aronowitz and Nick Hornby have been casting a romantic spell over my storytelling skills for years, even occasionally messing with my flat Canadian accent. But, until a few months ago, I’d been paying my bills writing for other beats and not going to clubs, which made covering the music scene next to impossible.

My fortunes changed when a comet flew into my inbox in early September. A Toronto-based bluesy alt-country singer wanted to meet me, it read. I crunched down hard on my pencil.

The comet and I met at a downtown Second Cup on a Saturday afternoon last month. Her name is Emma-Lee, and she gave off a trail of sparks in her vintage leopard print coat, cowboy boots and old time Hollywood turban (in fuchsia). “I’m a crazy psychic Vegas cowgirl today,” she smiled, still covered in October air and enveloping me in a hug. Everyone turned to look, and an hour into our conversation a crusty old guy from the back of the shop forgot about his setbacks, pulled himself up, and came over to meet the woman he probably thought was Hedy Lamarr (it was the turban).

“Nice look,” he said, shuffling his feet like he’d crossed over to the girls’ side of a school dance. Emma-Lee acknowledged him as only a pretty woman could: with a pitch-perfect “thank you” that transitioned from boppy to stern in two beats. It had its intended effect. He left. For the rest of our interview, the entire shop sipped and stared. They all felt the presence of The X-Factor.

Turn and face the strange ch-ch-changes

Emma-Lee is a singer-songwriter navigating the music scene in the “bass ackwards” fashion now standard for Generation Y’s best and brightest. These kids don’t sit in the waiting rooms of record labels, clasping their demos and planning their dash past the president’s secretary. In the ultimate powerflip, the Old Guard pursues them (online) and make them offers they can’t refuse (you’d think). But these kids are questioning if it’s really worth it signing on with a big label? To them, the gift horse is looking a little long in the tooth.

“The level of development with artists from an early stage is not an area labels are doing anymore,” says David “Click” Cox, a former A&R man with Universal Music. “They aren’t discovering artists before the masses anymore, or introducing them. The playing field is wide open with technology ,” he adds, “and artists can be heard on a larger scale and discovered by everyone at the same time.”

If you need another sign how times are changing, Gen Y musicians also don’t beg DJs or TV programming directors to play their music the way that Johnny Cash and Jon Bon Jovi did in their day. Only a generation ago, an aspiring singer would have bought free rounds of shots for everyone at the discovery their videos had achieved heavy rotation on national TV. Not Emma-Lee. She’s missed her airplay on MuchMusic. Like most digital natives — nearly one-third, according to a recent report — Emma-Lee doesn’t own a TV and has no plans to buy one. “I’ve only watched my stuff on YouTube,” she says.

The old Dire Straights line about “Playing the guitar on MTV” is as foreign to Emma-Lee as Al Jolson on shellac would have been to Mark Knopfler in 1985 when “Money for Nothing” topped the charts.

In the last decade, because of the internet effect, all-music stations like MTV have become portals for reality TV and the odd music video, while staffing at record labels has dropped 60 percent. With little support from the usual suspects, talented and determined newcomers have taken hold of their music careers and mined the internet for almost all of their needs.

Photography by Emma-Lee

Emma-Lee, 29, cobbled together her first band mates through Craig’s List — “How else would I find them?” — and released her first album, 2008’s Never Just a Dream, an ethereal mix of pop, doo-wop and blues, on iTunes, MySpace and YouTube. She had no management backing her up, no booking agent, publicist or record label. Never Just a Dream was financed by a series of day jobs and a line of credit that Emma-Lee only just paid off.“I know this will be a marathon, not a sprint,” she told her Facebook fans, who have been following and supporting her every step of the way.

Myspace was a year old in 2004 when Emma-Lee began sharing her songs. She built the foundation of her social media following on this platform while working as a receptionist at the Rolls Royce dealership in downtown Toronto. “I had nothing else to do,” she says without apology. “The dealership had two cars on the floor, each worth half a million dollars, and there were only 8 people in Canada who could afford them. And they didn’t call me.”

Sitting at her desk next to the sedans, Emma-Lee logged in seven hours a day pushing her name and her music out onto Myspace. “I personally messaged people and asked them to check out my songs,” she says. “The positive feedback from total strangers fed my drive even more. I soon set a goal of getting 100 people to know about me every week.” Before long Emma-Lee had 21,000 followers. “There was first mover advantage, for sure,” she says. “At the time, nothing else like Myspace existed. People were actually interested in discovering new music.” Not long after, she booked her first live show at Healey’s in Toronto. Two hundred people come out and it was largely due to her outreach efforts on Myspace.

Emma-Lee later refocused her energy on Facebook when Myspace lost its mojo, and began tweeting up a storm when micro-blogging became de rigueur. The importance of building a top-notch website on WordPress was a no-brainer. Emma-Lee is also one of the few musicians who still send out a regular e-newsletter to all the followers who leave their e-mail addresses after live performances. Some would call that a quaint Web 1.0 strategy, but it came in handy when the singer needed to raise funds for her second album, 2012’s Backseat Heroine. “My fans,” she said, “donated almost $10,000 in presales through kapipal.com,” the site that allows you to “raise money for your dreams.” She thanked each and every one of them by mailing out signed CD’s, handwritten lyric sheets, and she even did a live house concert for one fan who donated $1000.

The star treatment

Eventually, Emma-Lee decided to let traditional media know what she was up to. Only after her first album was released online and she had been declared one of 2008’s best singer-songwriters by iTunes, Emma-Lee sent copies of the CD to music critics at The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail and every newsstand rag she could think of. “I spent $600 on my first mail out.”

Again, with no agent or publicist, she took on the roles herself. “I called myself Dale Cole and became a man in all my emails and cover letters.” Her new identity was a combination of the names of two characters from her favourite TV show, Twin Peaks: special agent Dale Cooper and regional bureau chief Gordon Cole. “I never called anybody, I just emailed them as dalecolepublicist@specialagentrecords.com.” She started her own record label too, Special Agent Records, which she still maintains. “I felt this strange power as a man,” she says, looking back. “Besides, I thought it would be weird e-mailing publications as myself and begging them to listen to me.”

When Ashante Infantry, the music critic at The Toronto Star, received her CD, she raved in her review and gave it four out of four stars. A week later Brad Wheeler at The Globe and Mail made Never Just a Dream the “Disc of the Week.”

The publicity helped. It led directly to Emma-Lee being noticed the old-fashioned way. Larry Wanagas, the veteran talent manager who discovered and turned kd lang into an international singing sensation, saw The Star review and offered to manage Emma-Lee pretty much on the spot. She said yes and Wanagas re-released Never Just a Dream on his label, Bumstead Records. David “Click” Cox, mentioned earlier, also became interested in managing Emma-Lee and the three struck a “co-management” deal.

“It was a redo with support and marketing,” says Emma-Lee, explaining how pairing with the label made it possible for the public to buy her CD at HMV and other brick-and-mortar music chains. “I didn’t have any offline distribution before that.” iTunes and Myspace were her only storefronts. Physical distribution wasn’t something Emma-Lee had even thought of until a desk clerk at the flagship Toronto HMV called her after the newspapers had reviewed her album and asked, “How do we get your CD in here? People are asking for it.” When Larry Wanagas made contact a few days later, she had her answer.

But in what’s becoming the order of the day, Emma-Lee chose to cut ties with Wanagas while working on the songs for her second album. “We had a falling out over different business philosophies and decided to part ways,” she says. David Cox stayed on as her manager. “I really wanted to be more hands on with developing artists,” says Cox. “And Emma-Lee is a creative visionary and very active online.” That’s why he left the labels and went independent to manage Emma-Lee and a second artist, Saidah Baba Talibah, through his company CLK Creative Works.

Photograph by Emma-Lee

All by myself

What’s clear is that the web has given artists greater leverage in the age-old struggle for creative control. That wasn’t possible for big voices a dozen years ago. Christina Aguilera peaked just before the internet rearranged the music industry forever. She bristled, rebelled and starved herself in the late nineties in response to the heavy-handed marketing tactics and vocal choices forced upon her by record execs.

“Free to be you and me” is practically the motto of the internet generation of artists. Emma-Lee art directs many of her own videos, chooses her own clothes, eats what she wants, and shoots most of her still photography (yet another talent). She gives away a lot of songs and pictures online because she’s learned that she can generate substantial revenue in other areas.

“Right now,” she says, “unless you have a huge audience to tour for, the only place to make money is in songwriting — for yourself and other people. Then getting those songs cut by other artists or getting them placed in TV and film.” Her songs have been featured on Beauty & The Beast, Degrassi, Dance Moms, Wilfred, Tyler Perry’s: Why Did I Get Married Too, Saving Hope and MTV’s Teen Wolf.

Last year she experienced a flurry of attention online when her song “Shot in the Dark” was featured on Dance Moms. “Basically, these two girls did a dance routine to my song and it went pretty viral.” As a result, she charted on the iTunes USA jazz chart and sold nearly 5000 singles from that exposure. If you search YouTube for “Emma-Lee Shot In The Dark” you will pull up dozens of young girls doing dance routines in their basements to her song.

In the past few months, the show Saving Hope has been pulling together ‘The Saving Hope Sessions,’and asking artists who’ve contributed music to the show to create live acoustic performances for the iPhone, which they’ll in turn promote. “They need the content, and we need the free publicity, so it’s amazing for us,” says Emma-Lee. One placement, she says, can be worth a tour in term of how much it equates to new fans who will follow her back on Facebook and Twitter. “Not to mention, a tour can leave you thousands of dollars in the hole and completely exhausted by the end of it.”

With no big production budgets or middlemen to report to, Emma-Lee has been producing and directing a stream of YouTube videos for the past several years. They all focus on what really matters: her voice. The “Backseat Sessions” are impromptu serenades that show a hitchhiking Emma-Lee singing for her ride in the back of cars and rickshaws. “I had a my friend director Hank Devos tag along.” This one’s a song Emma-Lee wrote called, “Just Looking,” and it ended up being the fourth track on her second album.

On another occasion, Emma-Lee created and posted this video of an off-the-floor acoustic recording of a song she wrote called, “Magical Flying Bathtub Machine.” “It’s just two of us. My friend Devrim [Eldelekli] on a nylon string guitar and me singing very gently and jazzy.” It became an iTunes bonus track later attached to her first album.

When you publicly post to YouTube, it’s anyone’s guess who will see your video and what they’ll do with it. Most of us hold our breath for a few shares or likes and move on when we get none. In Emma-Lee’s case, her iPhone lit up: “Hi, Emma-Lee, this is Jesse Cook. Could you give me a call?”

Cook, an internationally-acclaimed guitarist based in Toronto, stumbled upon Emma-Lee’s bathtub song and thought she had the perfect voice for his new project. Then he called and invited her to join him for a recording session at his west end studio. Planning his eighth studio album, he explained that he wanted to do a “blue mood” album with the emotional punch of Adele’s mega-seller 21, but he needed a singer to demo a couple of songs he was thinking of pitching to kd lang or Madeleine Peyroux. “He handed me Screamin’ Jay Hawkins classic tune, ‘I Put a Spell on You,’” recalls Emma-Lee. She sang, he listened, then called her again a few weeks later. “Hey listen, I’ve played the demos to a bunch of people and we just like you. Do you want to come and record some songs for the album?” She said yes. The album she is featured on is Jesse Cook: The Blue Guitar Sessions.

Cook and Emma-Lee did their first live performance together for a television taping of a concert special now airing on PBS. And as I write this, she is traveling with Cook on his “Blue Guitar Tour” which will make stops at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and Toronto’s Massey Hall before wrapping up in mid-December. Emma-Lee took the photos for this blog post from her hotel room in Fredericton, NB, their second stop.

The parade of veteran musicians knocking at Emma-Lee’s door didn’t stop here. Two weeks before she left to go on tour with Cook, Emma-Lee sent her followers a note stating, “Chris Isaak [the rockabilly heartthrob] has selected me to open for his Toronto appearance at Massey Hall. Let’s all take a moment and reflect on the awesomeness of “Wicked Game” and “Baby Did A Bad Bad Thing.” Emma-Lee also couldn’t help noting that the singer she was opening for had a role as special agent Chester Desmond from Twin Peaks, the show that has played such a key role in her inspiration.

Sitting dead centre twelve rows back, I watched Emma-Lee under a single spotlight at Massey Hall do a half hour set. It was just a girl, her guitar and a stomp box to set the beat. Even the airborne dust caught in the glare of the spotlight moved at a mesmerized pace during her set. The whole time, all I could think was, “Boy, does she own that stage.” The sell-out crowd agreed.

Backstage, Chris Isaak removed his sequined jacket and placed it over Emma-Lee’s shoulders. “The first concert I ever attended was Bonnie Raitt at the CNE Grandstand, and you opened for her,” she told him. Isaak predicted that one day he would be opening for her. She posted the picture of them together on Facebook and the thumbs-up multiplied.

Chris Isaak and Emma-Lee backstage at Massey Hall, Toronto.

Skipping graduation

As Emma-Lee tells it, her journey to now did not involve endless rounds of vocal training while she was still in pigtails, or overnight trips with the high school band. “I left school for a good three months before the end of grade 10,” says the Toronto-born, Markham-raised singer. “I had to get out. School made me feel really depressed and alienated.” This perplexed her parents. But when they realized they couldn’t force their daughter to go, they helped her escape. “I got a note from my psychologist excusing me from the remainder of the 10th grade,” the singer recalls. “I couldn’t focus on my work, and I can’t even recall what the note said. That time of my life is still a mystery even to me.”

Like any good Canadian girl, Emma-Lee got a job at the local Tim Horton’s, never suspecting a decade later that she’d be singing the “Time for Tim’s” jingle. Her parents (again, much to their credit) didn’t kick her out of the house after she dropped out. They circled the wagons, encouraging their daughter’s budding interest in music. “I got it from them,” she says.

Emma-Lee’s dad taught her to play the acoustic guitar and introduced her to his Beatles records and a stream of old jazz standards. Her mother shared her stories of singing in a large city choir in Toronto. Meanwhile, Emma-Lee tried on a number of vocal styles, including singing along to Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and all the pop divas with the huge voices. “But most of those singers didn’t write their own songs,” she noted. “When I discovered women who did both, like Joni Mitchell and Fiona Apple, that inspired something new in me.” The strumming and writing on her bed increased.

Photography by Emma-Lee

Soon after, with the money she made ringing up coffee and donuts, Emma-Lee bought a pink Fender Stratocaster and a small amp and announced to her family, “I’m going to be a rock star!” She was no-nonsense about it. What’s more, it felt true.

The big smoke

While Emma-Lee was still working at Tim’s, the teenager started making more frequent train trips to Toronto. “I got into the electronic, jungle, techno and house music scene and would go to big city raves on weekends.” She was way too young to be doing any of the things she was doing and getting into all kinds of trouble. So much trouble, in fact, that pursuing her music took a back seat. “My guitar collected dust and the writing just stopped.”

Moving with her family to East York, Emma-Lee, now 20, fell in with a pack of drum-and-bass DJs and producers she met on the club scene. When one of them found out she could carry a tune, he invited her to his studio. “ I ended up writing a bunch of lyrics on the spot and recording them. That was the first time I’d ever heard my voice professionally recorded. And that was it for me. Finding my sound and realizing I had ideas to contribute made me feel like I had some kind of a purpose in life,” she says. “From that moment on, I became completely addicted to recording and performing live.”

After that, it didn’t take Emma-Lee long to pull together enough original material for her first album.

Sophomore follow-up

By the time she got around to her second album, Emma-Lee was once again without the financial support of a big record label. “This time I applied for a grant from Factor. You’d be shocked to discover who uses this program — big name artists you’d think have enough money. You have to be good to get one, but you don’t necessarily have to have a distributor.” Emma-Lee won the $25,000 grant/loan and recorded with producers Marc Rogers and Karen Kosowski in February of 2011. This money, combined with pre-orders from fans allowed her to make the album of her dreams. After its completion, with the help of Cox she sent the album out to a number of labels and performed showcases to gain interest. This resulted in an artist-friendly offer from eOne Music Canada in the form of a single-album deal. “I’m still in control of everything creatively,” she explains, “but they help me market and distribute it which is fantastic.”

For her third album Emma-Lee is seriously considering going completely solo again. ”I still have my label, Special Agent Records,” she muses, “and I freakishly enjoy a lot of the business side of music. I can do all the marketing through social media and my own strategies I’ve learned from watching others over the years.” She pauses and stares off into the distance. “When I think about what it must have been like to be a musician in the seventies. So, wait, you mean you have to go out into the street and put up posters on walls and telephone poles and count on old-fashioned word of mouth …”

She slumps with exhaustion at the thought of old-school promotional tactics. Social media’s demands, by comparison, feel like a walk in the park.

In one of my recent assignments, I interviewed a young woman who beat a “triple negative” diagnosis a year ago. Sarah Lucero lives in Los Angeles and is the Global Artistic Director for Stila Cosmetics. Through humour and tears she told me her story. (Photo by Winny Au)

It first occurred to me that something was off in the summer of 2010. I was on a plane headed to Australia for a Stila press event, and when I lifted my makeup kit into the overhead bin I felt a pain in my right breast. My kit weighs a ton, so I figured I had pulled a muscle. I took an Advil and didn’t think anything of it. Two weeks into my trip, I was still popping pain pills.

When I got back to L.A., the pain hadn’t subsided, so I decided to go to the doctor. I had convinced myself I had a cyst that needed draining—it couldn’t be cancer. I was only 34.

The first doctor I saw didn’t think it was cancer either. “Breast cancer doesn’t hurt,” she said. A Google search by my husband returned similar results. Boy, were we relieved. I love my job and was way too busy to get sick.

Thankfully, the doctor who examined me advised me to get a mammogram. Her tone didn’t imply any sense of urgency, so I went in for a second appointment about a month later. After one mammogram and an ultrasound, I found out I had Stage 2 Ductal Breast Cancer.

I got that second opinion and all my treatments from Dr. Kristi Funk. When I told her what the first doctor had said (“Breast cancer doesn’t hurt”), she replied, “Yeah, but six per cent of breast cancers do hurt.” I was in that six per cent. It just goes to show that you have to trust your body, not the Internet. Also, always get a second opinion.

My first thought when I started chemotherapy was, “Oh, no. I’m going to lose my hair.” I had super-long bohemian beach hair that I’ve had since 10th grade. It had been a part of my identity for so long, and I cried when I lost it. So you can imagine how overjoyed I was when my client and friend Victoria Beckham and her hairstylist Ken Paves surprised me with a wig Ken had made. It looked better than my real hair! I got so many likes on Facebook from unsuspecting friends that I wanted to say, “Enough about the hair, people.”

My lashes fell out next, then my Brooke Shields brows. I cried some more. Finally, for peace of mind, I chose to lose both breasts and have all of my breast tissue surgically removed. I couldn’t face a relapse.

Breast cancer takes away all of your feminine attributes: your hair, your curves, your facial accents, your period. For a long time, the mirror is not your friend. Staring into it, you don’t even see you. I especially avoided looking at myself on days when I felt good. I wanted the feeling to last. And on bad days, I adopted the mantra: “I’m going to be rebuilt by my doctors, and when I am, I’ll be healthy and more beautiful than ever.” That brought me a level of acceptance I never knew I could achieve.

As women, we all lose something along the way— whether it’s colour or lustre — from age or sickness. To me makeup is not just for vanity; it’s to make us feel good about who we are at every stage of life. That attitude gives us so much more mileage than trying to look a certain way or wasting energy fighting change. To me, self-acceptance is the true definition of beauty.

For an entire year, I used every ounce of strength, willpower and positivity to fight this disease, but doctors couldn’t tell me why I had cancer. Dr. Funk sequenced my genes to see if my cancer was genetic because that would determine the best treatment for me. The results showed I wasn’t remotely at risk for the disease — despite my grandmother dying from breast cancer, I didn’t carry the genes — nor was estrogen feeding my tumour. The origin of my cancer is still a mystery

I didn’t tell many people about my health crisis. However, I did confide in one or two people at Stila, including the wonderful Deanna Kangas, our CEO, who introduced me to Dr. Funk. I’m sure others suspected something was up because my schedule and my appearance changed.

To protect my positive energy, I chose to keep my cancer largely private. I found it difficult to tell those close to me because I didn’t want them to worry. Also, I didn’t want to answer questions each day about how I was doing. Most of the time, I didn’t know how I felt or even what to say. Some people asked me whether I was going to freeze my eggs or if I planned on having children someday; those things were especially hard to hear and process. I insisted on going to work most days with my game face on.

Cancer is such an isolating disease. It messes with everything: your chemistry, memory, emotions and physical strength. I slowly learned to accept my limitations—my “new normal,” as I called it. I drew strength from my husband and my mom. They were my rocks. They sat with me through every chemo session and came to every appointment, and watched movies on the iPad while I slept.

When I went to work, like I said, I kept quiet about everything because I didn’t want to be put under a spotlight. My job as a makeup artist is to make others shine. Every day, I help women feel beautiful on the outside and the inside, whether it’s by recommending a product or showing them a quick tip. That, in turn, helped me to accept that I looked different and that I should use makeup to enhance what I had, instead of mourning what I’d lost.

I may work in an industry that’s all about surfaces, but I learned that it’s not what you see in the mirror that matters; it’s more, so much more. In the mirror, I see resilience.♦

(A version of this was published in the September 2012 issue of Glow Magazine).

Mayor Rob Ford

Some day this will be funny.

Robert Wong was born in Hong Kong and moved to The Netherlands with his family before they all finally settled in Scarborough, Ontario. Well, they settled but Robert didn’t. At first he tried to play the “good son,” sporting an ill-fitting accountant’s suit in downtown Toronto. It wasn’t long before he threw his hands up in the air and moved to New York with his sketch pad and an incoherent sense of more.

Today Robert lives in New York City with his wife and daughters and travels back and forth between Google’s Manhattan office in the Meatpacking District and the company’s HQ in Mountain View, California. Now when Robert walks into the offices of his colleagues, Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, he’s still throwing his hands up in the air — but out of excitement, not frustration. Here is an edited and condensed version of our chat:

AGJ: So you went to Sir John A. MacDonald Collegiate in Scarborough …

RW: Yup, right after Mike Myers and Eric McCormack.

AGJ: After high school you enrolled in accounting at the University of Waterloo. Why? That sounds so painful.

RW: Well, that’s how type-A geeky I was. Not that I chose that. It was a co-op program where you work for 12 months and go to school for 12 months. I was trying to make my parents proud. We didn’t come to North America until I was ten and I was the first in my family — of any generation — to go beyond high school. There was a lot of pressure on me, my brother and sister to be a doctor, lawyer, accountant.

AGJ: What changed that?

RW: I had to put toothpicks in my eyes to stay awake in accounting class. I realized after my first year that life is short and I didn’t want my work box and my life box to be separate. But before I could say anything, my co-op director sent me to work in a top accounting firm in downtown Toronto. I went down there with my little briefcase and suit. It was on the 25th floor of one of the “black towers.” [the TD Tower]. Within three months I knew I was kidding myself. I’d been studying accounting for all the wrong reasons: the money, the security, the career, for my family. It didn’t help that I was getting scholarship offers to enroll in MBA programs. I had to break it to my parents that I just couldn’t go through with accounting, not even an undergrad. I didn’t tell them I was dropping out. I asked them, and they were totally supportive.

AGJ: After the toothpicks snapped, what did you do next?

RW: In between all of those accounting and math classes, I drew. But for the longest time, I’d been telling myself that I couldn’t seriously pursue drawing because that was for people who didn’t get good grades. Thankfully, I got over that. After I dropped out of Waterloo, I moved to New York to enrol in graphic design at Parsons. [Yes, he got good grades, earning the  "President's Award" at graduation]. At the time, I thought I was going to be a fashion designer.

AGJ: Instead, you got into advertising. [Here is Robert's résumé on Madison Avenue]:

AGJ: Was becoming an ad man always a goal of yours?

RW: No. I hated most advertising. But the very best stuff made me feel so amazing. I thought a good ad campaign shaped culture in a way that design couldn’t because the megaphone is so big in advertising.

AGJ: Some would say now we’ve invented an even bigger megaphone with the internet.

RW: Right. And when things are open and there are no walled gardens innovation and the shaping of culture happens faster and more people benefit. It’s about the democratization of everything. Information should not be in ivory towers. The Google home page isn’t done as a big sexy Flash site, it’s optimized so everyone with a connection — even dial up — can access it. We believe in freedom of expression where you don’t take sides.

AGJ: Google doesn’t strike me as having to advertise itself offline through traditional means like billboards, print, TV spots or even on a JumboTron. The product is free. But every so often the company releases a spot on TV. Why?

RW: The Creative Lab [which Wong co-founded] and the commercials we create exist to remind the world what it is they love about Google. That phrase actually came out of Eric Schmidt’s mouth one day and we all jotted it down quickly. I think everyone who works here has a mission: to do good things that matter. The computer scientists, designers, writers and creative coders are all about, ‘How can I impact the world as positively as I possibly can with the skills I have?’ That’s in the DNA of the culture at Google. It’s certainly what the Google Chrome campaign of TV ads has been about, starting with “Parisian Love,” then “Dear Sophie” and followed up with the “It Gets Better” campaign with Dan Savage.

AGJ: Tell me about “Dear Sophie.”

RW: That came about when Daniel Lee, one of the engineers at Google, set up a Gmail account before his first child was born. He wanted to write to his daughter while his wife was pregnant, before she was born and as she was growing up. One day he’ll present her with the whole thing: the emails, the family photographs, home videos and maps he created of where they lived. I thought it was brilliant hack! And the point of the ad was that old browsers were made for viewing and browsing web pages, but nothing more. The Chrome browser features applications and plug-ins like Gmail, YouTube, Picasa and MOV files as well as Google Docs and Maps … so it’s so much richer and stronger.  The ad also celebrates all the people in and outside of Google who are using the tools to do amazing stuff.

AGJ: I liked it the Chrome ad for “It Gets Better.” I thought it fit in with your belief that the internet can build a better world and inspire a life with better results.

RW: That’s what we we wake up to do. If you want to make a difference, it starts with doing things for others. Sure, we pump out technology but it’s never about the technology itself, it’s about the genius of what people do with the stuff. We followed that up with a two more Chrome ads with Lady Gaga and Johnny Cash. But those ads and the search piece on love at the Superbowl are the only ads we’ve done.

AGJ: What other initiatives has the Lab turned out?

RW: Last month we launched the World Wonders Projects which takes users on tours of castles, parks and archaeological sites around the world, things like the Palace of Versailles. In the same way we went into museums with our Street View cameras, we’ve filmed the Wonders of the World. It fits in with our theme of making good stuff accessible to more people. Another one of our goals is to make heroes out of people who make and use art. We launched the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, which is made up of 101 musicians from 33 countries all chosen on YouTube. We also launched YouTube Play to give video artists a chance to showcase their stuff with the Guggenheim Museums. Anyone from around the world can submit a creative video for the chance to become part of the Guggenheim’s permanent collection. It’s a biannual thing. Let’s see, what else have we done? Oh! How can I forget? We spearheaded Life In a Day, an online movie that collects 4500 videos taken by people in 192 countries around the world and it documents the happenings from one day on earth: July 24, 2010. Ridley Scott produced it.

AGJ: When you were on Madison Avenue working as an ad man, you said once, “There needs to be more listening, less talking, more feeling, less thinking, more doing, less promising, more inventing, less polishing.”

RW: [Laughs] I still feel that way. I’m always trying to find the shortest distance between an idea and the magic and inspiration a person in the real world will be able to feel and see and touch. To do that you have to skip a lot of unnecessary steps. For example — and I don’t know if you’ve ever done any consulting — but one of the things you have to do, and we skip, is building multiple page decks to justify your fees. No one has the patience for that stuff here and no one would ever read it. Our founders certainly don’t have the patience for it. They always say, ‘Just show me.’ When we present our ideas to them, we do everything in either the form of a poster or a video where all you have to do is press “Play.” It has to be a prototype you can interact with. That’s it! That’s where the rubber meets the road. There’s no one giving commentary in real life. It has to be brilliant and move and touch people with all the thinking built-in. It you have to explain it, it probably isn’t very good.AGJ: What old-school habits as a graphic designer have you carried forward to working at Google?

RW: Certain things should never change. I keep coming back to qualities like empathy: think of the user and leave your body so you can really experience it from the other side. And storytelling. Everything is a story, not just words on a page or moving images with sound, but we all learned and got motivated by stories, stories of someone’s life or the story behind a certain product and how it went on to change the world. Everything in life is a narrative with a protagonist and a goal and motivation. Having all the work come from that place is important, and also very, very hard to do. And one more thing, less of anything wins. So stripping an idea down to its pure essential. That’s a big one.

AGJ: Does graphic designer even feel like the right description for you now?

RW: You know what? I still put it as my profession on my business card and passport. I like the idea of trade schools, of learning how to make stuff as opposed to doing lots of abstract thinking. Making is the cool thing now. Other than graphic designer, I don’t know what else to call myself? I have an engineer friend who before he worked here at Google he was in a job that tried to promote him to “Chief Innovation Officer.” That’s when he knew he had to quit, meaning that if innovation wasn’t carried through the core business everywhere, that was a big problem!

“In Conversation” is a popular Q&A Segment on “Society Pages” that features interviews with creative risk takers. Other people I’ve profiled include Bruce Mau, an industrial designer turned global thinker, Maureen Judge, a Genie Award-winning filmmaker whose real life docs focus on family dynamics, mezzo-soprano Erin Cooper Gay, and Evan Jones, a pioneer in Alternate Reality Games. Evan’s computer feats have forever changed our relationship to our phones, TVs and computers and have won him not one, but two Emmy Awards.

Here’s an excerpt from my profile of Spencer in the Summer issue of Glow magazine. If you want a peek into the photography shoot with Spencer that I attended at the Toronto New Girls Boxing Club, click here. Copyright prohibits me from posting the full article, but I thought I’d post a teaser because by the time the issue comes off the newsstand the Olympics will have come and gone.

Photo by Arkan Zakharov

When Mary Spencer reaches for her BlackBerry during breaks from her daily workout session — a 13-kilometre run at dawn, multiple sets of push-ups on her knuckles and enough consecutive chin-ups to make most grown men collapse in a heap … and that’s before breakfast — the exhilaration of this three-time world boxing champion from Windsor, Ont., is barely concealed. Tight hand wraps and the steady drip of sweat won’t slow down her action on Twitter. Social media offers a window into the disciplined world of an athlete. “My life isn’t really boring,” Spencer (@CanadianBoxer) posted on Twitter in March, right around the time she dreamed about Olympic competition for the first time and began counting down the days. “I just tell myself [it's boring] so I don’t get overwhelmed with excitement!”

Until this summer, boxing had been the only Summer Olympic sport to exclude women, but come London, it’s game on. There, Spencer hopes to throw some of the biggest bombs of her life in the 75-kilogram middleweight category. And with the stadium gates now open to female fighters, Spencer is free to visualize herself ducking beneath the ropes and standing up inside the ring as the first Aboriginal contestant — man or woman — to compete for Canada in boxing. Frankly, her timing couldn’t be better.

Years before Malcolm Gladwell published his 10,000-hour rule in Outliers — it takes approximately 10,000 hours, or 10 years, of deliberate practice to master to a skill — Spencer was told something similar. Her coach impressed upon her at age 17 (the year she tried on her first pair of boxing gloves) that she could own the podium if she put in 10,000 hours of training for three hours a day, seven days a week for 10 years. She’s 27 now, and by those calculations, Lady Luck should be on Spencer’s side as preparedness meets the opportunity of a lifetime in London.

Spencer’s talent never matched this timetable or prediction. Ten thousand hours shrank considerably when just after three years of training, at the age of 20, she won her first world boxing title. Not bad for a gal who had no discernible talents in high school. “I failed gym class,” says Spencer (she cut too many classes). She was also suspended for a period for beating up a classmate — a boy, no less. “I got the best of him,” Spencer told a reporter at Global News’ 16 by 9, an admission that makes most people who meet her do a double take.

Mary Spencer is no bully. She’s poised, soft-spoken and tall (five foot 11), not to mention a much loved mentor to dozens of kids who jump up and down on the spot when she pulls up in her white Camaro for her visits to Cape Croker, a reserve five hours from Windsor and the community where her dad, Cliff, used to be a minister. “I have some of the girls on my BBM so no matter where I am in the world, they can text me,” says Spencer. Her commitment and quiet self-possession are a reflection of someone who’s understanding of hard work and sacrifice runs deep.

The road to the Olympics is tough for anyone, but for Spencer it was tougher because she had to face her close friend Ariane Fortin, a two-time world champion from Quebec, in the final qualifying round. The two boxers are teammates and had always fought in different weight classes, but when the Olympic Committee announced there would only be three weight classes for women, Spencer had to bulk up and move into the category Fortin had dominated. “There’s no hate; it’s just taking care of business,” Fortin told the press before their deciding fight in January at the national boxing championship. But when Spencer raised her glove in victory after four rounds, it severed the friendship. “It’s a bittersweet victory for me right now,” Spencer told reporters after the fight. “I just defeated my toughest opponent in the world, and my friend’s dream is crushed.” Not long after, Fortin accused the judges of fixing the result. The rivalry between the two fighters will soon be featured in Last Woman Standing, a documentary being produced by Prospector Films for release on the film-festival circuit in 2013 and set to air on the CBC’s Documentary Channel. …(end of excerpt)