Morva Bowman and Alan Pollard
for Concert at FilkOntario 22
www.pollard.ca/filk/
Morva is a retired professional organizer, Alan is an almost retired electrical engineer. They have been attending their local SFF convention in Winnipeg for 20+ years, but only really got into filk music about 8-10 years ago. As with so many things filk related, blame Decadent Dave Clement! However, once hooked, they were committed, and now it seems to be their joint retirement project. They started making music together in choir back in high school, but now devote their energies to parodies and original songs on books and movies and cats and…well…whatever. It’s filk! They are beyond thrilled to be nominated for the Fan Filk Aurora, in such amazing & talented company.
Debs and Errol
(Deborah Linden and Errol Elumir)
Songs in the Key of Geek, CD
http://debsanderrol.com/
Debs & Errol is a Toronto-based musical comedy duo with a penchant for phở, cuddly tree spirits and starships.
After meeting through their local chapter of National Novel Writing Month, the two joined forces in 2011 after a mutual friend put out a call for geeky musical acts and have been entertaining audiences with nerdy showtunes and ridiculous on-stage banter ever since. Feedback from their shows has ranged from “cleverness and wit mixed with a healthy dose of cute” and “awesome music talent, fun artistry and accessible geek humor” to simply “adorable.”
Brooke Lunderville
International Guest of Honour Concert at Consonance
brookelunderville.bandcamp.com
Brooke Lunderville is a filking banjo-playing pharmacist from Vancouver, BC. Her poignant, serious songwriting oeuvre ranges from dry-cleaning to livejournal to the giant squid, and her energetic live concerts have the subtlety of a traffic cone and the fun of a carnival ride.
Brooke has appeared at conventions all over North America, including as Interfilk Guest at Concertino in Massachusetts, Toastmaster at Conflikt in Seattle, and International Guest of Honour at Confluence in San Jose. She will be the Filk Guest of Honour at Confluence in Pittsburgh this summer. Brooke loves carrying the torch of Canadian filk weirdness to new conventions, and especially loves trying to get Americans to spell Honour with a u. She is deeply honoured and pretty darned excited to be a nominee for this year’s Aurora award for fan filk.
Kari Maaren
Body of Work
karimaaren.com/
Kari Maaren is a university English instructor who currently lives in Toronto. When she isn’t frantically marking huge piles of assignments, she is writing, drawing, or playing various musical instruments. She has been composing her own music for a long time, but until recently, she has mostly kept it to herself. In 2009, she and her collaborator Ben Fortescue co-wrote and produced a musical, Cross Purposes, for the Calgary Fringe Festival. In late 2011, she began to perform original music regularly at the monthly Chiaroscuro Reading Series. In the spring of 2013, she produced two albums. One, Beowulf Pulled My Arm Off, collects fourteen songs she wrote and performed in 2012; the other, Pirate Elves in Space, is a collaboration with Devin Melanson and Leslie Hudson. She also started a YouTube channel in early 2013; it collects many of her songs from 2012 and 2013. She primarily performs with the ukulele, though she plays several other instruments as well.
Peggi Warner-Lalonde
Concert at NEFilk 22 ConCertino 2012
A life-long SF fan, Peggi edged her way into the shallows of fandom, and then fell into the deep end around 1990. Since then she’s been on innumerable concoms. Notably she served in multiple capacities with Toronto Trek/Polaris. Then one memorable year she served as guest liaison for TT’s Filk Guest. She found filk, and filk found her.
Since around 1996 she’s been on the concom for FilKONtario, Canada’s first and Ontario’s only science fiction folk music festival. Mostly she has headed up Dealers, but she’s also served as chair or co-chair. Her piece de resistance was in 2007 when FKO brought the 16 member n’Early Music Consort from England. Peggi has also worked on the filk tracks for Chicon (2000), Torcon 3 (2003) and Anticipation.
Peggi and her husband Ken Lalonde founded USB Studios, and took over recording filk music at FilKONtario. They have released several collections from FKO, Chicon, and several studio albums. Peggi also deals in filk music, and founded “C to C” the only Canadian filk ‘zine.
After pretending for quite some time that she didn’t want to sing, Peggi was finally forced to take ownership of her soprano voice, and actually perform. Singing comes to her as naturally as breathing, and it’s a dilemma as to whether she prefers to lead or harmonise.
In her other lives, she is mom to many cats, quilts, reads, and works in IT for money to go to support her other habits.