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This latest volume of Cecelia Frey’s poems published by Bayeux Arts contains some of her best poetry, with startling and exquisite imagery, mixing memory and loss, joy and its transience.
These articles, stories and poems are selected from ten years’ worth of work by the Prince Rupert Writers’ Group. Some of the contributors have since moved away from Prince Rupert; others are as deeply rooted in the North Coast as lily pads in a creek bed; still others roam. The contributions to this anthology come from as far away as the Queen Charlottes and the Bulkley Valley. But all members of the group were at one time or another profoundly affected in their life and in their writing by their experiences in the magical North Coast region. And all write from the edge – small, isolated northern communities, where experience is unique, but universal. Contributors include Joan Skogan, Ken Campbell, Jean Rysstad, Andrew Wreggitt, George Stanley, Dorothy Spiller and Nancy Robertson.
In North East, Wendy McGrath expands on the story she began with Santa Rosa, as a working class couple living in 1960s Edmonton drift further apart while their young daughter tries to understand something she senses is hiding under the surface of her family and her neighbourhood. A visit to her grandparents’ farm in the country reveals the abject poverty the couple came to the city to escape, and the internecine marital strife that threatens to be born anew.
McGrath’s crystalline, evocative prose conjures an image of the past that defies nostalgia, conjuring images of a city that is in the midst of rewriting its own history. Through the all-seeing eyes of her child protagonist McGrath conjures indelible scenes of harsh domesticity and small victories, of endless summertime days spent around the home and evenings at the drive-in theatre.
In 1974, Terry Milos moved to rural northern Canada, to pursue her dream of homesteading. Following the seventies trend of the back-to-landers, she and her partner left the city life for what they imagined would be a simpler existence. Sometimes humorous and often insightful, North of Familiar is the story of a woman who learned to hunt, fish, and live off the land in what most would consider an utterly hostile and unbelievably cold environment.
After a few months of cobbling together a living, Terry reluctantly leaves the north to further her education but with a dream of returning as a teacher. A year later Terry accepts a job in the small town of Atlin where she grows to expect the unexpected. Terry’s adventures in the north push her beyond the familiar as she tries to apply her street savvy skills to negotiate a desolate mountain trail, or mush her dogs to school when the deep cold renders her car useless. But there are also times when unfamiliar becomes pure fear, such as when the pilot of a bush plane on which she is the only passenger falls asleep, sending the plane on a downward descent, or when a strange man is repeatedly seen lurking in the woods by Terry’s cabin after a trapper mysteriously goes missing.
North of Familiar is about coming to grips with life in the bush far away from the luxuries of the city. In Carcross, Carmacks, Dawson City and Old Crow, Terry navigates the cultural differences between her urban upbringing and the communities of Canada’s Indigenous north. In spite of the harsh country, Terry survives and thrives, while raising a family and becoming a part of a strong and unique community. This story is not only entertaining and inspiring, it is also a story of joy, friendship, and change.
Donna and Raymond would be the first to admit their 25-year union wasn’t perfect. But despite all its various blemishes, their life together works, or at least it did until, one frigid November night, in a field just a few miles from their home, one reckless act throws their lives into a tailspin. Donna is willing to follow a winding path to peace, and turns to her friends and community for help. Raymond, on the other hand, takes a more bare-knuckled approach to life, and believes he’ll solve his own problems, one punch or elbow at a time. North of Here is a story of courtship, marriage, grief, joy, and a skewed hope for the future.
Journey to the southernmost tip of the territories held by Canada. North of Middle Island opens with a collection of individual poems that
capture the spirit of the relatively isolated, sparsely populated community of
Pelee Island. The pieces explore contemporary Indigenous experience in the
natural and built environments of the island and surrounding waters. The book concludes with an epic, “rarely true” narrative of modern-day warriors, told in traditional Anglo-Saxon style—a new Lenape myth of how Deerwoman (Ahtuhxkwe) comes to Pelee Island. The events of this epic tale are loosely based on the infamous professional wrestler and actor Rowdy Roddy Piper’s time on the island and Wrestlemania XII, Piper’s notorious “Backlot Brawl” with fellow wrestler Goldust (Nkuli Punkw). Follow acclaimed Moravian of the Thames First Nation poet D.A. Lockhart on this lyrical, epic journey into the unique culture and landscapes that lie just North of Middle Island.
In Northern Exposures we have attempted to represent the sentiment of life in this “true north strong and free.” These photographs will take you on a journey to where there are no boundaries. Place yourself into the gleaming sunset, frosty twilight, onto the graceful dance of the water, or into the silent forest where the young doe forages. Imagine you are the explorer, taking in the sights and sounds of the boreal forest, Canadian Shield, and the wildlife in this place of wonder.
“What goes on in this house stays in this house.” That was the rule when author Michelle Willms was growing up, and she abided out of loyalty — until now. In the care of a single, working mother who uses alcohol to quiet her childhood memories, Michelle and her siblings are often left without a responsible parental figure to care for them, and more often than not find themselves alone or in danger. They learn to appease, negotiate with, or physically fight off the abusive men who track through their home. Their mother?s absence sends a clear message: You can count on each other as siblings for protection and you can count on the family cat for comfort, but you cannot count on me.
Brave, engaging and electric, Northern Girls is a collection of true stories about the fractured legacy of growing up in rural northern Ontario. Exploring themes of generational trauma, parental addictions, and domestic violence, Willms confronts a past replete with both fragility and resilience.
A pioneer of sound, visual and performance poetry—eschewing the artificial hierarchies of meaning and the privileging of things (“proper” nouns) over actions imposed on language by capital letters; the metric limitations imposed on the possibilities of expression by punctuation; and the illusion of formal transparency imposed on the written word by standard (rather than phonetic) spelling—bissett composes his poems as scripts for pure performance.
His primal rejection of all the limiting conventions of written language has allowed him to both maintain and foreground the appearance of any linguistic event as a living performance rather than backgrounding it(s breath [spirit]) as a “dead letter” in all of his work.
Here, bissett reminds us (based on the latest neurological research) that:
langwage centrs ar all ovr th brain
northern wild roses dansing can stall deth postal parts uv speech arts uv each sylabul a liter sentens thn thot wud happn
What is it that you are, Rhys?
In a land of magic and myth, Rhys awakens on the shore of Lanilia with mysterious wounds on his back and no memory of his life before. Disoriented, he stumbles on the Mernese estuary protected by the mermaid Delia, who is quickly intrigued by this male who doesn’t smell like any Lanilian she’s ever met and who is unable to answer questions about himself. Determined to figure out his past, Rhys convinces Delia to help, and begins a dangerous journey to discover who he is, or was, and who he might become as they hunt for the truth beneath story and prophecy.
David Ly brings readers a fascinating and fresh take on dragons and destiny in this captivating debut novel.
Boy meets Girl, Boy marries Girl, and years later Boy mysteriously disappears in this Gordon Lish–style novel.
The boy and the girl have been married for decades, mostly getting along as they go about their lives. But one day, like thousands of people around the world, the boy vanishes, and the girl is left to wait, wonder, and worry. Will he return? Who might she be if she moves on without him?
This is a world where every morning the cat gets fed and the coffee gets made, but also one in which God sometimes lives in the garage – she likes to sleep on the freezer – and gigantic words can fall from the sky. Not Anywhere, Just Not cracks open the small dramas of our lives to show the dread and wonder inside all of us.
“Ken Sparling is a brilliant writer and this book, like all his books, is a beauty. Sparling chronicles the times I fear most—the moments of loneliness, of loss, of ennui—and somehow makes them seem worthwhile, even wondrous, and often flat-out funny. His work makes life look livable, which makes him a wizard to me.” – Derek McCormack, author of Castle Faggot
“A gorgeous rendition of the domestic uncanny, Not Anywhere, Just Not is an ostensibly quiet book that slowly and carefully unnerves and unsettles you–both because of its precise swapping out of reality and because of just how familiar it so often seems. All of us, Sparling seems to say, are on the verge of vanishing at any moment.” – Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unravelling of the World
Rutledge, an aging, divorced man, has treated himself to a Cruise on the Mariola. The Cruise is not just any cruise. It’s the whole shebang. It’s around the world. It’s a lifestyle change: G & Ts and tuxedos and cigars and cognac galore. The service is top-rate. And Rutledge’s steward, Raoul, is a good kid.
But then a day trip to a Caribbean port ends in commotion. Some people don’t make it back onto the ship. Rutledge, nonplussed, makes use of the vacant machines in the Fitness Room and the unoccupied loungers on deck. But soon, crew members seem few and far between, and the menu in the Captain’s Mess significantly diminished. Rutledge gets the feeling that something is amiss. And that’s just unacceptable.
Welcome aboard Esme Keith’s debut dystopic novel, a cunning parody of modern day luxury and the coveted all-inclusive vacation, from the refreshingly blunt point of view of a man unable to see beyond his own needs, with hilarious results.
Not Even the Sound of a River is a moving tale of love’s phantom pains as shared through the relationships between three generations of mothers and daughters.
Hanna drives down the St. Lawrence River to her late mother’s hometown, hoping to find out more about the distant woman who began to reveal herself only through notebooks discovered in her effects. As the river widens, so does Hanna’s understanding of the matriarchs in her family. She learns that her mother’s one true love, Antoine, died on the St. Lawrence when she was twenty, and that her grandmother also lost a young love to the same water. Both women remained shipwrecked after these tragedies, their tales mirroring other survivors’—such as the few who did not perish in the Empress of Ireland sinking when more than a thousand people lost their lives on the river in 1914.
Told through multiple perspectives, newspaper accounts, and historical documents, Dorion’s narrative exquisitely describes the depths of love, the reality of living when dreams have failed us, and the complex nuance of blood ties. Not Even the Sound of a River is a tender and profound story that defies time or place.