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Writing the Okanagan
$24.95George Bowering was born in Penticton, where his great-grandfather Willis Brinson lived, and Bowering has never been all that far from the Okanagan Valley in his heart and imagination. Early in the twenty-first century, he was made a permanent citizen of Oliver. Bowering has family up and down the Valley, and he goes there as often as he can. He has been asked during his many visits to Okanagan bookstores over the years to publish a collection of his writing about the Valley.
Writing the Okanagan draws on forty books Bowering has published since 1960 – poetry, fiction, history, and some forms he may have invented. Selections from Delsing (1961) and Sticks & Stones (1962) are here, as is “Driving to Kelowna” from The Silver Wire (1966). Other Okanagan towns, among them Rock Creek, Peachland, Vernon, Kamloops, Princeton, and Osoyoos, inspire selections from work published through the 1970s and on to 2013. Fairview, the old mining site near Oliver, is the focus of an excerpt from Caprice (1987, 2010), one volume in Bowering’s trilogy of historical novels. “Desert Elm” takes as its two main subjects the Okanagan Valley and his father, who, as Bowering did, grew up there. With the addition of some previously unpublished works, the reader will find the wonder of the Okanagan here, in both prose and poetry.
Writing with Our Feet
$10.95Writing With Our Feet, a finalist for the Governor-General’s award, is a black comedy for agoraphobics about the creative impulse and the need to fling open one’s garage door and join the world.
Written in Stone
$24.95Paul Prescot’s desire to catalogue and comprehend the aboriginal rock paintings of the Canadian Shield is told through the eyes of the woman he loves, and who, for her own reasons, accompanies him on his travels to the deep north. Her journeys with her husband, and then alone, returning to the north shore of Lake Superior to commend his ashes to the water, draw her deeper into a history that, while foreign to them both, seems to offer a meaningful alternative to a world that has gone wrong.
Peter Unwin turns his unique talents to a story that lies at the heart of this country and to the crucial issue of our times. Written in Stone maps the exhilarating and ultimately tragic consequences of one man’s commitment to the land of his birth, a land whose deep and unwritten past is outside the reach of his understanding. Written in Stone goes beyond the surface acknowledgments of settler impacts, and exists on the border of two solitudes, where the known and unknown cannot be separated, where mythology and reality are one, and where an old and inaccessible knowledge holds the means to a possible reconciliation.
Written on Water
$15.95Torrential rains have descended upon a small isolated village, and the overflowing river has washed away everything in its path. The mudslide has gutted the writing room, the place where a group of senior citizens used to meet to record their memories. It was after the exodus of their children that they began to commit to paper the events, large and small, that had marked their lives. Now their papers—fragments of life, scraps of memory—are strewn around the countryside, along with the fragments of their community structures, habitations and memorials. To reverse this devastation, they have to put everything back in order, they have to remember, restore and rewrite, while a group of strangers, young volunteers, pull down the physical remains of what is left standing.
But what words can capture their lives? And for whom are they writing? In his determination to save the images of who they were, Samuel, the elderly leader of the group, is blind to the new reality around him. For some of his old companions, the flood represents an opportunity to make an unspoken dream come true; for others, it is an opportunity to confess secret loves, and to talk about the future. Assisted by Danny-the-Lonely-Child, the only child who never left the village, Samuel begins to realize that these fragments can never be restored—they can only be recombined into a narrative as fresh and new and real as the hopes and dreams of their original authors.
Cast of 3 women and 3 men.
WROL (Without Rule of Law)
$18.95Convinced the world at large can’t be trusted to prioritize the well-being of adolescent girls in the event of a cataclysmic event (or just in general), a determined troupe of preteen “doomers” commit to preparing for survival in the post-collapse society they anticipate inheriting.
When Maureen, Jo, Sarah, Vic, and Robbie sneak out at night to investigate an ominous hidden lair in the woods, they believe they have stumbled onto proof of what happened to a mysterious local cult that vanished over a decade ago. As they search for vital clues, examining small bones and dusty cans of food for signs of life, they fight to be understood in a world that seems to reject them. What they discover changes everything—eighth grade will never be the same.
Part Judy Blume, part Rambo, this darkly comic coming-of-age story for complicated times is for any young woman who has ever been told that she is “too much,” or that what she fears is illegitimate, or that what she has to say is less important than keeping the peace.
Wyrwood
$12.95The Sevenfold Council stands firm against Dreydmaster Vald’s treaty terms–they will not surrender the Everland. Their will is strong, but there is a traitor in their midst, and Vald intends to win this struggle…by any means necessary. As the Everland is torn apart by invasion and the threat of civil war, the young warrior-Wielder, Tarsa’deshae, and the little Tetawa Leafspeaker, Tobhi Burrows, travel to Eromar City, the centre of Vald’s influence, in hopes of rescuing the diplomats who have long languished in the shadows of Gorthac Hall. But only one remains alive, and he knows too well the price for fighting the Dreydmaster’s will. It will take all their strength, courage, and good fortune to escape with their lives. Whether they have a home to return to is another matter entirely….
X
$18.95One of the first lines of X, Shane Rhodes’ sixth book of poetry, is a warning: “this book of verse demands more of verse, this book demands perversity.” He goes on to write:
“This book is about where I live, a place still settling, still making the land—law by law, arrest by arrest, jail by jail—its own snow blown”
Heed this warning. In X, Rhodes takes poetry from the comfortable land of the expected to places it has seldom been. Writing through the detritus of Canada’s colonization and settlement, Rhodes writes poems to and with Canada’s original documents of finding and keeping. He writes a poem to each of the eleven numbered treaties (the Post Confederation Treaties between many of Canada’s First Nations and the Queen of England)—he writes to the fonts he finds in Treaty 5, the river he finds in Treaty 6, and the chemicals he finds in Treaty 8. Rhodes writes poems to and with the Indian Act.
Beyond the treaties, Rhodes writes formal poetry using Indian status registration forms. He writes to the memory of Oka. He writes to the Government of Canada’s Apology for the Indian Residential School System. He writes to the procreating beavers he finds in the Royal Charter of the Hudson Bay Company. X culminates in “White Noise,” a long poem grown from Canada’s collective rants, threats, cries and shouts in response to the Idle No More protests and the hunger strike of Chief Theresa Spence.
Through out the book, Rhodes surprises with what poetry and art can actually do with the seemingly unsalvageable and un-poetic that surrounds us. The design of X is also exhilarating. Not only is the book reversible–it must be read in two directions—but every page bursts with design, interference and thought.
X sings a new national anthem for Canada, an anthem stripped of patriotic fervor that truly sings of the past many would rather forget and the current state of Indigenous/settler race relations in Canada, an anthem fit for “a land held by therefores, herebys and hereinafters.”
XEclogue
$16.00First issued by Tsunami Editions in 1993, XEclogue is an exploration of the pleasures of the pastoral poetry from a late-twentieth-century feminist perspective. Robertson, the Governor General’s Award finalist, plays in a neo-classical landscape with equal doses of iconoclasm and erudition. This new and revised edition is sure to win new devotees for her rich and exuberant work. XEclogue was a Poetry in Transit selection for 2000/01.
Y
$19.95J. Robert Oppenheimer: reluctant father of the atomic bomb, enthusiastic lover of books, devoted husband and philanderer. Engaging with the books he voraciously read, and especially the Bhagavad Gita, his moral compass, this lyrical novel takes us through his story, from his tumultuous youth to his marriage with a radical communist and the two secret, consuming affairs he carried on, all the while bringing us deep inside the mind of the man behind the Manhattan Project. With the stunning backdrop of Los Alamos, New Mexico, Oppenheimer’s spiritual home, and using progressively shorter chapters that shape into an inward spiral, Y brings us deep inside the passions and moral qualms of this man with pacifist, communist leanings as he created and tested the world’s first weapon of mass destruction? and, in the process, changed the world we live in immeasurably.
Yaffle’s Journey
$12.95Yaffle the seagull is fed up with the rain, drizzle, and fog in his home province of Newfoundland. He dreams of flying down south to the sunshine, but saddens at the thought of leaving all that he loves behind. So, one day Yaffle comes up with a surprising plan he thinks will solve his dilemma!
Yaga
$18.95She’s more than just a wicked old witch. Baba Yaga is a legend, usually known as that elderly woman who lives alone in the woods and grinds the bones of the wicked. But what if she was actually a sexy, smart, modern woman operating off of morally ambiguous motives?
A detective finds himself in a small, isolated town asking, what does the disappearance of the young heir to a yogurt empire have to do with some random lore about an old witch? Matched by an apprehensive local sheriff, a university professor with a taste for younger men, and a whole cast of curious characters, the Slavic myth of Baba Yaga twists into a new labyrinth of secret lives, ancient magic, and multiple suspects.
This genre-bending comedic fairy tale meets thrilling whodunit gives voice to an antihero of epic proportions while interrogating how her story has historically been told by men. From now on, you’ll remember the name Baba Yaga for the right reasons.
Yahrzeit
$14.95Meyer Jacobs wants grandchildren, but God has conspired against him. Meyer has had a stroke and lost the use of one hand, so the entire world must suffer with him, including his pro-Palestinian son, his Serbian caregiver, and his absent, lesbian daughter. Entrenched in his opinions, Meyer knows how everything should be regardless of what everyone else thinks. Beset by guilt, however, he lights Yahrzeit candles in memory of his late wife and is secretly sending money to Israel to plant a forest for her. Meanwhile, his son’s marriage is collapsing, his caregiver is giving him tsuris, his missing daughter shows up with only a bus ticket, and a boy scout is on the loose in his building. Sooner or later, something’s going to crack and when it does, Meyer will find that life has a few surprises left in store. Alex Poch-Goldin’s moving, funny, and brilliant play explores conflict in the family against a backdrop of global conflict. With peace as the ultimate destination, there’s a long journey to get there.
Yamoria the Lawmaker
$24.95Dene Elder George Blondin creates a spiritual guidebook that weaves together oral stories with the recounting of how the northern Canadian Dene came to depend on the European fur traders. The result is a magical journey for readers of any heritage.
Yara
$23.95FEATURED IN QUILL & QUIRE‘S 2023 FALL PREVIEW
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From the author of Maidenhead, a reverse cautionary tale about a young woman exploring the boundaries of sex and belonging in the early 2000s
Distraught that her teenage daughter is in love with a woman a decade older, Yara’s mother sends her away from their home in Brazil to Israel, on a Birthright trip for Jewish youth. Freed from her increasingly controlling and jealous girlfriend, Yara is determined to forge her own path and follow her desires.
But Birthright takes a debaucherous turn, and Yara flees Israel for Toronto and then California. As she wanders, Yara is forced to reframe her relationship and her ideas around consent. Set in the sex-tape-panicked early 2000s, Yara is a reverse cautionary tale about what the body can teach us.
“Tamara Faith Berger is one of our best writers of the body, capturing in sharp, red-hot prose its raw animal urges, its often confused and contradictory desires, and the way our search for pleasure can be both liberatory and self-annihilating. Like Israel, bodies are contested territories, and in Berger’s revelatory new novel, Yara seeks to wrest control and meaning from the forces that seek to instrumentalize hers: nationalism, capitalism, pornography, and lovers.” – Jordan Tannahill, author of The Listeners
“Yara is a complicated novel about the confusions of consent and kinship, the way love makes victims of us all, told with cool, epigrammatic verve. As raw, destabilizing and searching as its titular protagonist, it’s Berger’s best book yet.” – Jason McBride, author of Eat Your Mind
“Canada’s finest and boldest writer. Tamara Faith Berger is my favourite ball buster.” – Anakana Schofield, author of Bina: A Novel in Warnings
Yardwork
$20.00Daniel Coleman is looking to find a home. After a childhood that left him feeling placeless, he ended up in Hamilton, Ontario, one of Canada’s most polluted cities at the time. Yardwork is his attempt to put down roots in a place he never expected to be. Coleman decided he wanted to truly know and belong to a small piece of land, his patch of garden on the edge of the Niagara Escarpment, to deeply understand its ecology, landscape and history. Starting with the creation myths and geology, moving through the settler era and up to the present, Coleman pours his considerable talents into learning, and sharing, as much of the story of the land as possible. Most books on ecology focus either on protecting the wilderness or analyzing a toxic dump. Most books on gardens focus on plant health or landscape design. Most books on Indigenous-settler relations focus on politics or social inequities. Yardwork meditates on the sedimentary layers of ecological, cultural and political stories that make up Hamilton, the escarpment city at the Head of the Lake. Along the way Coleman strives to build a new awareness of the place where he lives as sacred land.
Yasmeen Haddad Loves Joanasi Maqaittik
$24.95A 23-year-old woman enters a whole new world of attraction in a community struggling with generations of loss of land and culture. Yasmeen’s tradition-bound mother wants her to stay in Montreal, get married, and have babies. But the young Syrian-Canadian wants more. Her appetite for adventure leads her to a teaching job in the northern Quebec village of Saqijuvik. Eager to adopt her new home and its Inuit inhabitants, Yasmeen embraces every experience that comes her way: camping on the tundra, hunting for ptarmigan, sewing with the local ladies. She plunges into her northern adventure, no holds barred. But it’s 1983 and instead of the ideal, pristine Arctic Yasmeen imagined, she uncovers a contradictory world of igloos and pool halls, Sedna and Jesus, raw caribou and alcohol. In the middle of everything is Joanasi, a beautiful but volatile man who leads her into territory that is almost as unsettling as the land itself.