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These are the Stories is a memoir presented in short chapters, comprising the life of a survivor of the Sixties Scoop. Christine Miskonoodinkwe Smith reveals her experiences in the child welfare system and her journey towards healing in various stages of her life. As an adult, she was able to reconnect with her birth mother. Though her mother passed shortly afterwards, that reconnection allowed the author to finally feel “complete, whole, and home.” The memoir details some of the author’s travels across Canada as she eventually made a connection with the Peguis First Nation in Manitoba.
A memoir in the vein of Colleen Hele Cardinal’s Raised Somewhere Else and Alicia Elliot’s A Mind Spread Out On the Ground, These are the Stories is an inspirational and courageous telling of a life story.
Brent MacLaine’s poems, like the poet himself, are rooted in the history and landscape of Prince Edward Island. Yet, MacLaine possesses a remarkable ability to graft rural values to contemporary culture, with its urban habits and popular entertainments, its scientific theories and technological mythologies.
MacLaine belongs to the first generation of Islanders not farming the land, and his poems explore his uneasy relationship with the patch of earth where he lives. He follows the island contours in an expansive sweep across the fields and into the woods; he also shares an islander’s sense of confinement, bound into a small place by the sea and the red cliffs. The island before human existence, the coming of European settlers, or the stubbled ground tilled by his father are as readily available to his fertile imagination as meteorological patterns, modern art, or The Odyssey.
Using his Maritime home as template for larger universal concerns, MacLaine offers clear-headed insight into the natural world — and into human nature — in an astonishing range of poems shaped by his nimble attention to his quotidian world.
Finalist for the 2024 Big Other Book Award for Fiction
Married and divorced in her 20s, looking for friendship in her 30s, and contemplating pregnancy at 40, our narrator wonders if she’s going through life out of order. But Alice, The Turtle, The Kid, and other beloveds show her that motherhood is more than giving birth, art is never finished, and love is not linear.
Through a three-day canoe trip, chance encounters, fierce female friendship, step-parenting, IVF, pandemic isolation, and quiet moments between humans, These Songs I Know By Heart weaves vignettes of everyday mythology into an absorbing and honest meditation on the connections in our lives. With razor-sharp reflection, humour, and most of all love, we are reminded that there’s no formula to life and that instead, we must celebrate what makes the small moments of our lives extraordinary.
“This is a book of truth, difficult truth, real truth, beautiful truth.” ?Norma Dunning, Canadian Poetries?
In this collection of poetry, powerhouse author David Groulx uses his deft and forceful wordplay. These Threads Become a Thinner Light?takes readers into blisteringly honest reflections of survival and momentary redemptions of a hidden Indigenous world in the underbellies of Canada’s major metropolises and small towns.
The value of Theseus is as much about its pedigree as the writing itself. The collaboration for this new book began in the autumn of 1966. bpNichol and Wayne Clifford had worked together early in their literary careers; in fact, Clifford had been the editor of Nichol’s first trade book, published with The Coach House Press. To begin, Nichol had also wanted to include two West Coast poets in the writing process. This didn’t work out, so Nichol and Clifford rewrote a section to produce Part One of the present text. Part Two was composed over many years of revisiting and revising. These long gestation periods allowed the writers the space and time to re/consider, knowing the text would always be there to augment. After Nichol’s death, Clifford completed the work, adding Part Three – composed of elements of Nichol’s Martyrology – as a means of tribute, eulogy, acceptance and lie. Thematically, the text focuses on the Theseus-Ariadne-Minotaur cycle: in Part One, the authors were young enough to “re=verb=erate” when struck with the myth; Part Two allowed Nichol and Clifford the space to step back in order to devise a way to say “love” more acutely; finally, Part Three presents a stunning example of one man’s grief for a lost friend and collaborator. All told, Theseus is an important text that adds considerable gravitas to Nichol’s poetic legacy, and the unique partnership between the two authors allows Nichol’s words to be extended beyond the grave.
A CBC BOOKS MUST-READ NONFICTION BOOK FOR BLACK HISTORY MONTH
Nominated for the Toronto Book Award
Smartly dressed and smiling, Canada’s black train porters were a familiar sight to the average passenger—yet their minority status rendered them politically invisible, second-class in the social imagination that determined who was and who was not considered Canadian. Subjected to grueling shifts and unreasonable standards—a passenger missing his stop was a dismissible offense—the so-called Pullmen of the country’s rail lines were denied secure positions and prohibited from bringing their families to Canada, and it was their struggle against the racist Dominion that laid the groundwork for the multicultural nation we know today. Drawing on the experiences of these influential black Canadians, Cecil Foster’s They Call Me George demonstrates the power of individuals and minority groups in the fight for social justice and shows how a country can change for the better.
Peter “Pete” Maloff was born in Saskatchewan in 1900, the year after the first Doukhobors, including his parents, immigrated to Canada. Living through the eras of WWI and WWII in a Doukhobor community strengthened his deep-rooted belief in pacifism and, at a young age, he dedicated himself completely to the idea that there must be another way to solve conflicts. This quest, as well as Maloff’s status as an ‘outsider,’ was not always welcomed—judges and wardens considered him a radical and his influence a threat, and his outspokenness and peaceful protests resulted in house arrest and years in Canadian jails. Maloff was not deterred, and his perseverance garnered him many followers, including some who had formerly worked against him or had helped to incarcerate him.
Today, his granddaughter Vera Maloff remembers Pete as a tall, strong, charismatic man. Growing up, she worked beside him in the family’s gardens, and at the local markets where they sold produce, she recalls that he would be regularly surrounded by people wanting to hear him speak. He was a kind, caring man, and the time spent incarcerated, forced away from his family, did not seem to have dulled his spirit. He was an avid reader, who taught his family to consider all aspects and perspectives, instilling an awareness of other people and cultures and an eagerness to learn.
In They Called Him a Radical: The Memoirs of Pete Maloff and The Making of a Doukhobor Pacifist, Vera revisits her grandfather’s memoirs, written while under house arrest and covering the formative years from his birth to his late twenties, during which Pete’s resolve to live as a pacifist was cemented. Here, Pete writes of growing up in the new Canadian Doukhobor community at the turn of the century, meeting influential figures in the pacifist movement in California, his time in a cooperative freedom colony in Oregon, and his turning to writing, as he truly believed that the pen could be mightier than the sword.
No horror film is truly mainstream, David Cronenberg has said, and it is for this reason that even the lowliest of them may be worth consideration. In this tenth anniversary revised and updated edition of They Came From Within, Caelum Vatnsdal adjusts the focus in Canadian horror films, and unwinds the history of this neglected genre to learn “why we fear what we fear and how it came to be that way.” From the early Canadian infiltration of Hollywood in the thirties, to the flowering of Canuck horror films in the sixties and seventies, to the surreal products of the “tax-shelter” eighties and beyond, Vatnsdal shows how the Canadian horror film industry has, unwittingly or not, created a complex social, economic, and political portrait of a nation. Engagingly written, extensively researched, and lavishly illustrated with rare stills and poster art, They Came From Within is an invaluable addition of Canadian film criticism.
They Don`t Wanna Wait
The dramatic story of nine-year-old Evelyn’s survival through the determination and bravery of her mother and grandmother as they hid in the dense forests of Belarus.
Evelyn is a cherished only child in a loving Jewish family in a small shtetl in Eastern Poland. With rich detail of rituals and food, she evokes her early childhood. But this idyll is shattered by the eruption of World War II, thrusting Evelyn and her family into a brutal eight-year struggle for survival.
Fleeing to Zhetel, Belarus, Evelyn’s father is rounded up and murdered leaving Evelyn, her mother, and grandmother to navigate the escalating horrors of the Holocaust on their own. Together they endured brutal ghetto liquidations, a terrifying week hidden beneath a kitchen floor and two relentless years in the unforgiving forests of Belarus battling starvation, illness, bitter cold and the ever-present shadow of capture.
This powerful, moving memoir is a testament to the indomitable will and profound courage of women, without whom Evelyn would not have survived to bear witness for all victims of the Holocaust.
In sparkling, clear prose, understated yet unflinching, Open Season probes deep into the fissures of caste, class, religion, and gender in our world. Located mostly in India and Canada, the stories describe a world of global flows where a woman returns to India after her two daughters are killed in a school shooting in the US; in the title story a Muslim young man is lynched in an Indian town on the false charges that his fridge contains beef; “Light as a Butterfly” draws our attention to the ongoing degradation of the environment; in “All Cut Up,” set in a suburb of Toronto, seven-year-old Zoya is heroically protected by her mother Zarina from her community’s demand that she be circumcised. The stories speak of a world familiar and yet all too elusive, of a gentler, mellower, more hopeful time; they explore the charms and constraints of life in a small town and question assumptions and beliefs and dreams.
Thick Skin: Field Notes from a Sister In The Brotherhood, is a deep dive into the secret language and hidden culture of one of the most esoteric heavy construction trades: Boilermaking.
For more than two decades, Hilary Peach worked as a transient welder – and one of the only women – in the Boilermakers Union. Distilled from a vast cache of journals, notes, and keen observations, Thick Skin follows Peach from the West Coast shipyards and pulp mills of British Columbia, through the Alberta tar sands and the Ontario rust belt, to the colossal power generating stations of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. At times edging up to the surreal, Thick Skin is a collection of strange stories carefully told, in tenderness and ferocity, for anyone who has spent time in a trade, or is curious about the unseen world of industrial construction.
“Some peoples call you misisahk. It means horsefly. You fly with the horses . . . you’re small, with a big bite.”
Raised on a ranch in Saskatchewan’s rugged Thickwood Hills, where the prairie transitions to forest, Willomena Swift, home from playing for the Rockford Peaches of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, finds a precious foal killed by a rogue stallion.
The stallion’s owner, once Willo’s baseball coach, now chairs the committee heading up the new cooperative pasture-a pasture that is set to swallow her family lease, where she grew up, learned to love and understand horses, and dreamed of returning to raise them.
Facing numerous challenges with both the stallion and his owner, Willo remembers her past years playing professional baseball as she struggles to realize her dreams in the present.
Amid romance and tragedy, Willo must find a way to stand on her own and assert her rightful place in her beloved Thickwood.
Births mark beginnings, while funerals toll in endings. Yet there resides so much in-between drama in the timeline of an extended family: moments of intense joy, times of heart-wrenching grief, and the day-to-day plodding of ups and downs that color the struggle with loss in all of human existence. In a series of linked short stories that superbly capture the emotions her characters’ experience, the author deftly chronicles the personal episodes that transform the lives of five Italian-American cousins during the final years before the death of one of the family patriarchs.