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John Armstrong has worked as a paperboy, a caddy, and a Bible camp counsellor; as a janitor at the Regal Theatre, a shipper of video porn, and a real live punk rock star. As if those jobs weren’t punishment enough, at the tender age of thirty he entered the trenches of journalism. Armstrong’s first job — a slave-labour gig shovelling rabbit shit from a gigantic barn — teaches him a valuable lesson. Every subsequent working experience, he learns, will contain the following unavoidable and mind-numbing elements. “Get up, get dressed so you can hurry to a place you don’t want to be, and do things you don’t want to do for people you don’t like, all for very little money at some far distant point in the future.” Armstrong doesn’t let it get him down. Whether he’s writing about the Bobbsey Twins, a pair of strippers who really love their vegetables, the Golden Road personal fulfillment seminar, where you learn that you choose your own cancer, or the literal bowels of hometown paper the Picayune-Standard, Armstrong simultaneously excoriates and delights. Wages is a laugh-til-you-cry account of one man’s remarkable working life or attempt at a lack thereof. This eccentric, irreverent, and witty chronicle is vintage John Armstrong.
In Wait, relationship and reflection are drawn on to free emotion and understanding from fear, whether it would grow in praise of passion or cooling love, or arise from being trapped by power or lost to indulgence. The poems in Wait seek to cut through the dishonesty and abuse that skew life.
From lost siblings to the horrors of war to tales of selkie wives, Wait Softly Brother is filled with questions about memory, reality and the truths hidden in family lore.
After twenty years of looping frustrations Kathryn walks out of her marriage and washes up in her childhood home determined to write her way to a new life. There she is put to work by her aging parents sorting generations of memories and mementos as biblical rains fall steadily and the house is slowly cut off from the rest of the world. Lured away from the story she is determined to write – that of her stillborn brother, Wulf – by her mother’s gift of crumbling letters, Kathryn instead begins to piece together the strange tale of an earlier ancestor, Russell Boyt, who fought as a substitute soldier in the American Civil War. As the water rises, and more truths come to the surface, the two stories begin to mingle in unexpected and beautiful ways. In this elegantly written novel Kuitenbrouwer deftly unravels the stories we are told to believe by society and shows the reader how to weave new tales of hope and possibility.
Wah interprets memory–a journey to China and Japan, his father’s experience as a Chinese immigrant in small Canadian towns, images from childhood–to locate the influence of genealogy. The procession of narrative reveals Wah’s own attempts to find “the relief of exotic identity.””Fred Wah searches for his father within various literary forms and embraces. This is a beautiful book and we are in the muscle and limbs of rough cut clear language–live bright fish slapping on the table.”–Michael Ondaatje
A surreal journey of a man who is searching for purpose and for happiness
Joe, a 36-year-old advertising copywriter for a slick New York agency, feels disillusioned with his life. He starts dreaming of a mysterious man, seeing him on the street, and hearing his voice. Joe decides to listen to the Man and so he waits on his stoop, day and night, for instructions. A local reporter takes notice, and soon Joe has become a story, a media sensation, the centre of a storm. When the Man tells Joe to “go west,” he does, in search of meaning.
Waiting for the Man is a compelling and visceral story about the struggle to find something more in life, told in two interwoven threads — Joe at the beginning of his journey in Manhattan, and at the end of it as he finds new purpose on a ranch in Montana under the endless sky
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Giller-longlisted fiction — now in trade paper
Joe, a 36-year-old advertising copywriter for a slick New York agency, feels disillusioned with his life. He starts dreaming of a mysterious man, seeing him on the street, and hearing his voice. Joe decides to listen to the Man and so he waits on his stoop, day and night, for instructions. A local reporter takes notice, and soon Joe has become a media sensation, the centre of a storm. When the Man tells Joe to “go west,” he does, in search of meaning.
A surreal journey of a man who is searching for purpose and for happiness, Waiting for the Man is about the struggle to find something more in life. The paperback edition includes a bonus BackLit section with a reader’s guide, Q&A with the author, and more.
Waiting for the Parade is John Murrell’s play, set in Calgary during World War II, in which five women gather to work for the war effort while their men are away. Waiting for the Parade was first performed by Alberta Theatre Projects, Calgary. Subsequently, it has been performed by Northern Light Theatre, Edmonton; Bastion Theatre, Victoria; Tarragon Theatre, Toronto; the National Art Centre, Ottawa; Centaur Theatre, Montreal; and at the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre in London, England.
In this memoir, Lamees Al Ethari traces her transition from an idyllic childhood in a large extended Iraqi family to the relative stability of an exilic family life in Canada. Through memory fragments, flights of poetry, diary entries, and her own art, the author reveals the trauma suffered by Iraqis, caused by three senseless wars, dehumanizing sanctions, a brutal dictatorship, and a foreign occupation. Finely observed, highly personal, and intensely moving, this account also gives testimony to the Iraqi people’s resilience and the humanity they manage to preserve in the face of adversity. It is the other voice, behind the news flashes.
The award-winning sequel to Random Passage. Waiting for Time, the sequel to the best-selling Random Passage, completes the epic saga of the inhabitants of Cape Random. Here, Bernice Morgan tells the story of the strong-willed and enigmatic Mary Bundle, one of the most beloved characters in Newfoundland fiction, and introduces us to Lav Andrews, a descendant of the Andrews family living in contemporary Newfoundland—a place where the past shapes the future. In this beautifully imagined historical narrative, Morgan weaves a story of loss and of courage—a story of how we discover where we are by understanding where we’ve been.
Duty, desire, love, and purpose. Who we want to be and whom we want in our lives. As Susan prepares for the birth of her first child, she contemplates her role as a mother, wife, and partner on the family farm through the lives of the women closest to her. In a world of wanting and waiting, is fulfillment always beyond reach?
Praise for The Waiting Place
Lust and despair rival hard work and family in Sharron Arksey’s exploration of women in a modern rural landscape, simultaneously shattering old-fashioned ideas of farm life and detailing the very real challenges and rewards of cattle ranching.
With the pain of childbirth as backdrop, The Waiting Place gives voice to the nuanced and sometimes secret lives of individual women bound together by family duty, revealing their stories with humour, compassion, and an unflinching honesty.
–Anne Lazurko, author of Dollybird
The Waiting Place is a subtle blend of sly, disarming humour, heartbreak, and poignancy. In its farming world populated by animals, every moment is human. That’s the secret and triumph of this book.
–Terry Jordan, author of It’s a Hard Cow and Beneath That Starry Place
Set in a small northern town, under the mythical shadow of the Sleeping Giant, Wake the Stone Man follows the complicated friendship of two girls coming of age in the 1960s. Molly meets Nakina, who is Ojibwe and a survivor of the residential school system, in high school, and they form a strong friendship. As the bond between them grows, Molly, who is not native, finds herself a silent witness to the racism and abuse her friend must face each day.
In this time of political awakening, Molly turns to her camera to try to make sense of the intolerance she sees in the world around her. Her photos become a way to freeze time and observe the complex human politics of her hometown. Her search for understanding uncovers some hard truths about Nakina’s past and leaves Molly with a growing sense of guilt over her own silence.
When personal tragedy tears them apart, Molly must travel a long hard road in search of forgiveness and friendship.
A series of long poems that offer a wry look at personal politics and passions. Keahey pays particular attention to soul- and body-shaping experiences common in life but marginalized in published literature: female desire, depression, divorce, pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding.