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Memoir of a Good Death
$19.95This is a story of family, of death, and of the art of living. It is also the story of the ties that bind a mother to a daughter and the dynamics that govern their love. Shaped as a memoir, shared by Sarah Flett and her daughter Rhegan, the narrative begins with the death of Sarah’s husband and builds in complexity with the untimely and sudden death of Rhegan.
Are life and death at their core intertwined? As Rhegan speaks from beyond the grave, her life is revealed in unexpected ways to her mother. And as Rhegan reconstructs her past and her memories of the last six months of her life, their impact and energy become one with her mother’s own remembering. This unheralded reconnection forms the nexus of the novel. It becomes their shared memoir. Through it the reader is invited into the intricacies of grieving and the irreducible nature of motherdaughter love.
Sorbie’s steady hand meshes the dual narrative perspectives using land and water imagery. Within this narrative frame, the balance that grieving and celebrating, and holding on and letting go require is carefully constructed. Rhegan’s and Sarah’s lives become meaningful because we share in their heartbreak and their joy. Their lives intertwine and together become the memoir of a good death.
“When the dead speak we must listen. Anne Sorbie’s dead and eloquent narrator is full of wild humour, pain, rebellion, compassion, wisdom. And she tells a wickedly good story. How can we know heaven from hell?” – Robert Kroetsch
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Memoirs of a Noble Man
$19.95Jack Brown lost both his parents at a young age but continued to grow up understanding the meaning of respect and hard work thanks to a close family friend, Sam. Life for Jack is simple until a dangerous man comes to town seeking a high stakes poker game. Sam’s lust for gambling leads the stranger to take Sam’s money and his life. While collecting Sam’s body, he learns that the stranger has also kidnapped a young woman. With nothing left to go home to, Jack decides to save the young woman, whom he finds himself growing attracted to and avenge his old friend’s death. Despite his lack of life experience, Jack finds it increasingly difficult to do what he thinks is noble. Will Jack Brown find purpose in life or succumb to his fears and emotions?
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Memoirs of an Alias
$16.95In this debut collection, Jason Heroux describes the atmosphere of a world that is both realistic and bizarre. His simple, clear poems capture the strange and mysterious absurdity of everyday life. The world becomes a place where shadows are kept in jars, where a frightened spoon begs for its life, and a man falls in love with the contents of his briefcase. Paradoxically, it is also a place where everything feels oddly at home, with ‘clear-headed raindrops rushing full speed into this one and only world.’ A poet of keen observation and unusual imagery, Jason Heroux writes spare, haunting poems that exist in the intersection of reality and dreams.
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Memories of You
$15.95Memories of You is a play about the triumph and freedom of the spirit. It validates a woman’s right to chose the shape of her own life, in the full knowledge and understanding of the lasting consequences of her desire, her imagination and her actions. In its rejection of sentiment and any search for approval outside the self, it is an intense affirmation of the humanist spirit. It defines heroism as the ability to always embrace the world as it is, and never to make do with the way it ‘should be.’ The life of Elizabeth Smart pivoted on a turbulent affair that produced four children and her one book By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Yet the dramatic strength of Wendy Lill’s play resides in her clear-eyed portrayal of Elizabeth Smart’s life not as a sacrifice to one great literary work, but of the book as a mere record of one great life lived.
When her resentful, drug-dependent daughter Rose comes to visit, mother and daughter confront each other with their own distinctly different visions of the past. Rose remembers that her father used her mother; Elizabeth remembers that she chose the father of her children, and that she did not regret that choice.
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Memory Serves
$24.95Winner of the Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award at the 2016 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!Memory Serves gathers together the oratories award-winning author Lee Maracle has delivered and performed over a twenty-year period. Revised for publication, the lectures hold the features and style of oratory intrinsic to the Salish people in general and the Sto: lo in particular. From her Coast Salish perspective and with great eloquence, Maracle shares her knowledge of Sto: lo history, memory, philosophy, law, spirituality, feminism and the colonial condition of her people.Powerful and inspiring, Memory Serves is an extremely timely book, not only because it is the first collection of oratories by one of the most important Indigenous authors in Canada, but also because it offers all Canadians, in Maracle’s own words, “another way to be, to think, to know,” a way that holds the promise of a “journey toward a common consciousness.”
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Memory’s Shadow
$22.95In the tumultuous 1970s while women, African Americans, and the gay and lesbian communities march for equality, three sisters wrestle with the legacy of their family’s Holocaust past. Memory’s Shadow is a compelling story of sisterly conflict and loyalty, the broader politics of sisterhood, and the power of the human spirit to rise when faced with the unimaginable recurrence of tragedy.
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Memphis Mayhem
$21.95Memphis gave birth to music that changed the world — Memphis Mayhem is a fascinating history of how music and culture collided to change the state of music forever
“David Less has captured the essence of the Memphis music experience on these pages in no uncertain terms. There’s truly no place like Memphis and this is the story of why that is. HAVE MERCY!” — Billy F Gibbons, ZZ Top
Foreword by renowned music historian Peter Guralnick
Memphis Mayhem weaves the tale of the racial collision that led to a cultural, sociological, and musical revolution. David Less constructs a fascinating narrative of the city that has produced a startling array of talent, including Elvis Presley, B.B. King, Al Green, Otis Redding, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Justin Timberlake, and so many more.
Beginning with the 1870s yellow fever epidemics that created racial imbalance as wealthy whites fled the city, David Less moves from W.C. Handy’s codification of blues in 1909 to the mid-century advent of interracial musical acts like Booker T. & the M.G.’s, the birth of punk, and finally to the growth of a music tourism industry.
Memphis Mayhem explores the city’s entire musical ecosystem, which includes studios, high school band instructors, clubs, record companies, family bands, pressing plants, instrument factories, and retail record outlets. Lively and comprehensive, this is a provocative story of finding common ground through music and creating a sound that would change the world.
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Men of Action
$14.95After his father, Saul, undergoes brain surgery and slips into a coma, Howard Akler begins to reflect on Saul’s life, the complicated texture of consciousness, and Akler’s struggles with writing and his own unpredictable mind. With echoes of Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude and Philip Roth’s Patrimony, Men of Action treads the line between memoir and meditation, and is at once elegiac, spare, and profoundly intimate.
‘Like Harley J. Spiller’s Keep the Change, Howard Akler’s Men of Action similarly compresses a great deal – whole lives – into a very few pages … As might be expected, Men of Action delves into the father-son relationship, while also encompassing the father’s life, the parents’ marriage and the son’s youth in Toronto, where Mr. Akler still lives. But its more submerged subject is the act of writing itself, which is demonstrated with the carefully observed, resonant economy of poetry.’
– The New York Times Holiday 2015 Gift Guide
‘What makes someone who they are? What details and actions explain their inner thoughts? What moments matter in the telling of a life? These are futile questions, but what matters is that Akler is asking them in a way we haven’t previously seen. Men of Action not only gracefully succeeds in depicting the nature of human tragedy, but the inherent failures of language to capture it. The book’s brevity is its strength – a genuine testament to the writer’s talent that he is able to take us so far with so little.’
– Stacey May Fowles, The Globe and Mail
‘Men of Action is an insightful and heartbreaking exploration of consciousness, familial relationships, and the sense of self. As he and his family stand a restless vigil through his father’s post-operative coma, Howard Akler explores and reorganizes the past, present, and future of his relationship with his father. Immensely relatable, this collection of essays delves fearlessly into loss, grief, and the understanding that often the moments in which we choose to be completely still are when we take the most important actions.’
– 2016 Toronto Book Awards Jury Citation
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Mend the Living
$19.95Mend the Living is the story of a heart transplant, centred around Simon Limbeau, the boy whose heart is given, and his family.
Taking place within exactly twenty-four hours, the novel traces the thrill of an early-morning winter surf session, the terrible accident that follows, and all the urgency and compassion of the hospital workers, and shock and grief of Simon’s family as they negotiate the question of organ donation. Maylis de Kerangal offers glimpses into the thoughts and affective lives of each of the characters: Simon, at the core of the novel; Marianne and Sean, his parents, who have been estranged for some months; Revol, the chief surgeon, music enthusiast, and studier of hallucinogenic plants; Cordelia Owl, the capable new nurse who is reeling from a night spent with her former lover; Thomas Rémige, the hospital coordinator, an opera singer, and aficionado of goldfinches; Virgilio, the silvertongued, light-fingered surgeon; Juliette, Simon’s girlfriend, who is building a labyrinth inside a Plexiglass case, waiting for Simon’s call.
The novel also touches upon Claire, the recipient of the heart, whose life has been limited by her condition, who reflects philosophically on what it means to have someone else’s heart beating inside you.
Weaving from hospital corridors to the wild waves of the Atlantic, from the narrow streets of Paris to the countryside in Algeria where goldfinches still sing, from the most intimate details of grief within a car in Le Havre to universal considerations of science, compassion, and humanity, Mend the Living is a powerful and vast-ranging book. In her trademark masterful use of language, playing with pacing and tension and a vibrant vocabulary, Maylis de Kerangal gives us a metaphysical adventure that is at once both collective and intimate.
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Meniscus
$17.95In the middle of his life, Robert Lowell wrote “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” a poem that reflected on Lowell’s recurrent manias and included the lines “My manic statement.” This is Shane Neilson’s manic statement, arching backwards through his personal histories (rural, difficult) and then into the current scale of illness: how it prophecizes and destroys. But this is not a book solely given over to a state; Neilson gives most of the book over to love, how it moves him, the disaster of chasing it, and how it settles all the accounts in his life.
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Menno Moto
$22.95On a motorcycle trip from Manitoba to southern Chile, Cameron Dueck seeks out isolated enclaves of Mennonites—and himself.
“An engrossing account of an unusual adventure, beautifully written and full of much insight about the nature of identity in our ever-changing world, but also the constants that hold us together.”—Adam Shoalts, national best-seller author of Beyond the Trees: A Journey Alone Across Canada’s Arctic and A History of Canada in 10 Maps
Across Latin America, from the plains of Mexico to the jungles of Paraguay, live a cloistered Germanic people. For nearly a century, they have kept their doors and their minds closed, separating their communities from a secular world they view as sinful.
The story of their search for religious and social independence began generations ago in Europe and led them, in the late 1800s, to Canada, where they enjoyed the freedoms they sought under the protection of a nascent government. Yet in the 1920s, when the country many still consider their motherland began to take shape as a nation and their separatism came under scrutiny, groups of Mennonites left for the promises of Latin America: unbroken land and new guarantees of freedom to create autonomous, ethnically pure colonies. There they live as if time stands still—an isolation with dark consequences.
In this memoir of an eight-month, 45,000 kilometre motorcycle journey across the Americas, Mennonite writer Cameron Dueck searches for common ground within his cultural diaspora. From skirmishes with secular neighbours over water rights in Mexico, to a mass-rape scandal in Bolivia, to the Green Hell of Paraguay and the wheat fields of Argentina, Dueck follows his ancestors south, finding reasons to both love and loathe his culture—and, in the process, finding himself.
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Mercy
$17.00Expanding breathlessly in the magnitude of loss, Shirley Camia’s fourth collection, Mercy, confronts despair to emerge anew with a bright offering of elegy. Beginning at her mother’s hospital bed, Camia invites readers to keep vigil while she journeys through seasons of bereavement, from the wake to the graveside, and into a year of processing, searching, and healing. Ethereal and elegant, Camia’s reflections are grounded in grief as they do the aching, earth-shattering work of mourning and moving forward.
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Mercy Gene
$22.95Think Maggie Nelson meets Hannah Gadsby.
Told in kaleidoscopic bursts of erratic recollections, daydreams, poetry, and lists, Mercy Gene is the powerful, genre-smashing debut work of auto-fiction by acclaimed writer, playwright, and comedian JD Derbyshire. Inspired by Derbyshire’s critically acclaimed and award-winning stage play, Certified, and anchored by protagonist Janice/Jan/JD, Mercy Gene is a beautiful, humorous, and sometimes brutal look at queerness, gender confusion, institutionalization, addiction, and abuse.
Through flashes of memory and imaginings, Derbyshire illustrates the intense and invisible “side effects” of psychiatric treatment and the unreliability of memory. In a stream-of-conscious narrative that provokes and consoles, eliciting tears and laughter at equal pace, Derbyshire re-examines a life of unspoken and repressed trauma. Between devastating bouts of depression, hilarious side-quests into the author’s dryly sardonic inner monologue, helpless moments at the mercy of their own psyche, and tour-de-force appearances by fictional versions of Miriam Toews and the late, great Margot Kidder, Derbyshire leads readers through a non-linear narrative to treatment, forgiveness, and acceptance.
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Mercy of St. Jude
$19.95At times irreverent and darkly humorous, Mercy of St. Jude is a story of profound loss, and the unforeseen effects that secrets can have on those we love. When Mercedes Hann dies, her great-niece, Annie Byrne, returns to Newfoundland for the funeral. With the family gathered to say goodbye, Annie searches for the truth by trying to unravel the secrets that shaped Mercedes’ life, and, ultimately, her own. As Annie delves into her aunt’s tangled history, however, she soon realizes that she must come to terms with her own past in order to face a future in which Mercedes is no longer available to shoulder the blame. But can Annie trust the truth? And, in the end, whose truth is it?
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Mere Extinction
$19.95“Christie’s audacious writing pulses with life and, yes, movement.” — Globe and Mail
In Evie Christie’s third book mothers nurse babies as the world comes to an end, fathers hustle or drift, the pastoral and the present collide, violence, love, and death gently fill the space and time they have been given. As surreal as they are domestic, Christie’s poems navigate the world they are in, struggle with history, the immediate, and what Richard Polt’s investigation of Heidegger would describe as “the emergency being.”
Bog Girl
After Seamus Heaney
I waited too long, was left waiting
and here I am in my fruit-white youth,
too young to go untouched, a balmy small-town dream
touched up with pink where it mattered.Remember the ways you wanted to touch and did not
and finally broke in through the window and did
until I got smart and found their sophistication: loveless bliss,
made over and over ’til the earth packed under my nails
was gone. Find me here, waiting, gone blue and winter cold,
make out my parts from the windowsill,
not gleaming, all the same, the same as ever. -
Mermaid
$31.95First established in response to the need for live theatre in rural areas, Mermaid Theatrebased in Windsor, Nova Scotiaswiftly rose to international acclaim. Author Alice Walsh uses Mermaid’s productions, from The Happy Prince to Guess How Much I Love You, to tell the story of the company’s evolution in the history of Canadian theatre. Walsh describes the first steps taken by its founders and provides an extensive look at the development of each production, as well as the creative trends and decisions that have contributed to Mermaid’s stellar reputation amongst children, parents, educators and directors.
Founded in 1972 by Evelyn Garbary, Lee Lewis and Tom Miller, Mermaid Theatre, over the course of 30 years, has incorporated the work of many actors, collaborating authors, educators, youth, reviewers, designers and audiences worldwide. Beginning with the group’s first seasons touring Nova Scotia with adaptations of fairy tales and fables, Walsh tells the story of Mermaid’s development, going behind the scenes and into the audiences, capturing the spirit of its success.
In the early 1970s, Mermaid’s dramatizations of Mi’kmaq legends laid the foundation for its innovative design. This era, remembered by many of today’s parents, is described from the ground up. Walsh brings us into the company’s workshop and its early experiments with the masks and giant puppets that would become synonymous with the theatre’s name. What followed was a boldly creative approach to local literature, which integrated an astonishing variety of traditions, including Bunraku, Kathakali, black light, collage and mummers.
Walsh takes a critical look at the personalities and influences that have shaped Mermaid’s evolving style and management as a company. Highlighting key playersGarbary, Lewis and Miller, along with Jim Morrow, Graham Whitehead, Chris Heide, Stephen Naylor and othersshe examines the theatre’s growth from a garage in Wolfville to the current multi-storeyed headquarters and full-time staff based in Windsor. For decades now, the company’s adventurous and amibitous approach to children’s theatre has proved successful both on stage and off, with hits like The Very Hungry Caterpillar, When Dinosaurs Dine by Moonlight, Borrowed Black, Gulliver’s Travels, Peter & the Wolf and Sam Slick.
Mermaid provides insight into the business and politics of managing a theatre company, as well as the creative energy and raw materials involved in building and touring productions around the world. In 30 years, Mermaid has become known for its dramatizations of fairy tales, legends, contemporary literature, and most recently, stories for very young audiences. Recreating productions from their inception, through the design and rehearsal phases, to opening night at children’s festivals, cultural exchanges and school gymnasiums at home and abroad, Walsh captures the magic of Mermaid. Photographs, quotes and reviews, coupled with Walsh’s clarity and comprehensive telling, bring the theatre’s history of inspiring designs to life on the page.
This book measures 5.75 x 8.5 inches and is a smyth-sewn paperback bound in an offset-printed cover. The text is printed offset on laid paper. Included are 32 pages of black & white and colour photo reproductions.