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All Books in this Collection
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When Days Are Long
$24.95When Amy Wilson accepted the job of field nurse for the Indigenous Peoples in the Yukon and Northern British Columbia in 1949, she was told that the north was a fine country for men and dogs but that it killed women and horses. Undaunted, Wilson travelled the Alaska Highway from Whitehorse (Mile 916) to Mile Zero. She served Indigenous Peoples in tents, shacks and on the trapline, travelling by dog team, car, plane, snowshoe, horseback and boat. She was the first to respond when a half-frozen man came stumbling into a ham radio operator’s shack with a story of epidemic and starvation at Halfway River. With five doses of antitoxin pinned inside her sweater to keep them warm, she made her way through forty-below temperatures to the camp where Indigenous Peoples were still living in summer tents. Four people had died of the “choking sickness” before Wilson’s arrival, but she brought immediate help, and shortly thereafter supplies began to arrive by sleigh and by air. The details of the diphtheria epidemic are both tragic and dramatic and just one of many such incidents in the busy life of the “Indian Nurse,” as she was called.
Wilson’s territory spanned 518,000 square kilometres. She was responsible for the health of 3,000 Indigenous Peoples, but Wilson was more than just a health care provider: over time, she became an advocate, partner and friend for the community with whom she shared mutual respect, music, medicine, tea from tobacco tins and, most of all, with whom she shared her heart.
Originally published as No Man Stands Alone in 1965 by Gray’s Publishing LTD., this new edition, When Days Are Long: Nurse in the North, includes an introduction by Wilson’s grandniece, Laurel Deedrick-Mayne, which brings crucial insights to this important figure in BC’s history.
A percentage of proceeds from When Days Are Long will be donated to the Canadian Indigenous Nurses Association’s Jean Goodwill Scholarship.
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When Earth Leaps Up
$18.00“…one of Canada’s major poets. The audacity — the courage — of her imagination teaches us, gives us our better selves.” — Tim Lilburn
This posthumous collection will be a delightful surprise for readers who thought they had heard the last of Anne Szumigalski’s nimble, sideslipping, otherworldly voice. Szumigalski’s poetic universe is as beguiling and unpredictable as dreams and myth, and like them, her universe can be enchanting, visually lush, and suddenly dangerous.
Untitled (“glory to the queen…”)
glory to the queen whoever she is
wherever she finds herself as she moves
up and down round and round
all the spaces that are hersonce she was a young thing and jumped
easily over any fence any line
now she’s an old woman thick and earthyby tomorrow she hopes to leap
out of this skin and into a new one
a skin like petals like leavesThe poems deal with ultimate questions. What is time? What is memory? Is it invented or real? Is death a kind of dream? Is life? Is God a man, a woman, or a Sacred Reptile? The imaginative leaps in When Earth Leaps Up are as easy as looking up at the prairie sky, as simple as turning your head to the side to catch a glimpse of an idea as it skips past you in the form of an interesting stranger, a passing cloud, the face of a loved one, long dead.
Szumigalski immigrated to Canada from England in 1951, and lived in Saskatoon from 1956 until her death in 1999. The author of 15 books, she received the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1995 for Voice, a collaboration with the visual artist Marie Elyse St. George.
Mark Abley is the editor or author of 10 books, including the internationally acclaimed Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages. Abley is the literary executor for Anne Szumigalski.
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When Fenelon Falls
$21.95A spaceship hurtles towards the moon, hippies gather at Woodstock, Charles Manson leads a cult into murder and a Kennedy drives off a Chappaquiddick dock: it’s the summer of 1969. And as mankind takes its giant leap, Jordan May March, disabled bastard and genius, age fourteen, limps and schemes her way towards adulthood. Trapped at the March family’s cottage, she spends her days memorizing Top 40 lists, avoiding her adoptive cousins, catching frogs and plottingto save Yogi, the bullied, buttertart-eating bear caged at the top of March Road. In her diary, reworking the scant facts of her adoption, Jordan visions and revisions a hundred different scenarios for her conception on that night in 1954 when Hurricane Hazel tore Toronto to shreds, imagining her conception at the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital or the CNE horse palace, and such parents as JFK, Louisa May Alcott, Perry Mason and the Queen of England.
But when bear-baiting cousin Derwood finds the diary and learns everything that the family will not face, the target of his torture shifts from Yogi the Bear to his disabled and haunted adopted cousin. As caged as Yogi, Jordan is drawn to desperate measures.
With its soundtrack of sixties pop songs, swamp creatures, motor boats and the rapid-fire punning of the family’s Marchspeak, When Fenelon Falls will take you to a time and place that was never as idyllic as it seemed, where not belonging turns the Summer of Love into a summer of loss.
‘The meta-fictional aspect of the novel provides a generous extra layer of storytelling that is both funny and wise. The writing is strong and complex and the subject matter, unique, important and emotionally moving.’
– Lisa Moore, author of February
‘The story is full of humour, surprises and a refreshingly unsentimental depiction of family relations. A boldand challenging undercurrent of darkness drives the plot forward … Palmer is a talented writer with an original voice and a marvellous ear for the nuance (and fun) of language.’
– Quill and Quire
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When is a Man
$19.95Paul Rasmussen is a young ethnographer and academic recovering from prostate cancer. Broken, he retreats to the remote forests and towns of the Immitoin Valley. As an outsider, he discovers how difficult it is to know a place, let alone become a part of it. Then, a drowned man and a series of encounters with the locals force him to confront the valley’s troubled past and his own uncertain future. As Paul turns his attention to the families displaced forty years earlier by the flooding of the valley to create a hydroelectric dam, his desire to reinvent himself runs up against the bitter emotions and mysterious connections that linger in the community in the aftermath of the flood.
An original debut novel that is meditative, raw, and exuberant in tone, Aaron Shepard’s When is a Man offers a fresh perspective on landscape and masculinity.
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When it Rains
$15.95When it Rains is the story of four people, two marriages, and one increasingly improbable series of events. As misfortune mounts, communication fractures, relationships crumble, behaviour becomes absurd. People sing, get naked, give up, lose control, have sex with strangers. Some kind of God intervenes. Or observes. Or something. Or nothing. When it Rains is by turns blackly funny social satire, heartbreaking drama, existentialist graphic novel, and post-modern Job story.
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When it Rains: A Mystery
$14.95Restless and bored with the lightweight stories she continues to be assigned, reporter Cait Whyte seizes upon the opportunity to cover the gruesome murder of a fifteen-year-old girl in her own neighbourhood. When her story is later found at the scene of another murder Cait becomes convinced that the two murders are connected and takes it upon herself to track down the killer. Against the advice of herfriends, and her own better judgement, shefollows the murderer’s trail deep into Vancouver’s dark pornography subculture–a painful secret from her own past compelling her forward.
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When the Bottom Falls Out
$22.95The past sits uneasily on the characters of these stories, whether on their native Isabella Island or in Montreal, where some of them now live. Life is ultimately lived according to the choices that were made, and retribution does not always go where it belongs. The wealthy and proper Higginsons have lived a lie that eventually must come out. Jen and Edwin are passionately in love, but can they shake off the shadow that hangs over their lives? In his quiet and subtle way, Thomas continues to bring alive a Caribbean island, giving depth and complexity to its characters.
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When the Dikes Breached
$19.95For sixteen-year-old Klara, a devastating flood reveals a dark family secret.
It is February 1953 in the Netherlands and Klara is expected to marry the son of a prominent farmer. In this small island community, steeped in tradition, the Church controls the lives of its citizens but Klara longs to escape for adventure on far away shores. When a spring tide merges with a brutal northwestern storm it causes the dikes to breach, unleashing death and destruction that will expose a dark family secret. -
When the Great Red Dawn Is Shining
$19.95On their march towards the Somme, and Beaumont Hamel, the young men of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment raised their voices to sing “When the Great Red Dawn is Shining,” a song about returning home to the people they love. Howard Morry was one of the young men who managed to make it back. And now, one hundred years after the events that changed his life, we hear Morry’s voice, in these pages, rising from the silence to recount his days with the famed Regiment. In memoirs expertly selected and contextualized by Christopher Morry, When the Great Red Dawn Is Shining offers a rare first-hand account of life on the front lines as told by a soldier preserving his memories for generations to come.
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When the Sky Comes Looking For You
$21.00Come along for another trip down Thunder Road. Since Ted Callan’s fateful encounter with a roomful of Dwarves his world has exploded with Gods and monsters, Giants, Witches, and more.
When the Sky Comes Looking for You expands upon the Thunder Road trilogy with a series of short stories, both loved and brand new, from acclaimed author Chadwick Ginther.
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When the Spirits Dance
$16.95When Lawrence’s father goes overseas with the Canadian Army during the Second World War, the young Cree boy struggles to grow up while wrestling with the meaning of war. With Papa gone, Mama raises the children alone. Traditional foods such as wild meat and fish are scarce, and many other foods are rationed.
Angry about the changes and confused about the future, Lawrence misses his father and his teachings about their natural way of life. When army runaways threaten the family, Lawrence’s courage and knowledge of traditional skills are called upon to keep them safe. With guidance from his grandfather and encouragement from his grandmother, Lawrence faces his challenges, becomes wiser and stronger, and earns the respect of his Elders.
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When the World Is Not Our Home
$16.95When the World is Not Our Home includes nearly fifty poems by one of Canada’s most distinctive literary voices. Selected from titles published between 1985 and 2000, these poems illustrate an agile poet sifting the everyday through a fine mythical screen. They reveal a woman with multiple roles, and her emergence as a highly sought-after Canadian poet.
Known for her rebellious voice, Musgrave knots sensual with mischief, girlhood with ritual, and parental with horrific. Cacophonous imagery engages through an exquisite language and what it describes: family faltering into drug addiction, infidelity, and death. Musgrave positions the reader in “the thin membrane between self and world”, and it is in this space that she provokes us with her gripping imagination.
“Musgrave approaches her subject in the manner of Salvador Dali – she distorts reality until it approximates her bizarre vision of the world.”
– The Globe and Mail“Tapping into fears and subconscious yearnings has been Susan Musgrave’s trademark from her earliest work, Songs of the Sea Witch, where she found inspiration and direction in classical and aboriginal mythology. Now she is able to locate the mythic element anywhere, in a death, a ferry ride, a failed photographic expedition, even in reading someone else’s collected poems! ” – BC Bookworld
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When Things Get Back to Normal
$16.95One Friday, Walter Dohaney, novelist M.T. (Jean) Dohaney’s husband, went out as usual to play hockey with his friends. She never saw him alive again. Without warning, Jean was plunged into the most painful and disorienting experience of her life. Faced with a tumult of emotions and sudden responsibilities, she turned to her writing for solace and began a journal. In her journal, Dohaney’s sharp sense of humour and her impatience with conventional pieties lay bare the depth of her bereavement, yet at the same time they express the life force within her. She is frank about her anger at Walt for playing hockey despite his heart condition and for not being there to take care of the house and family; she faces her annoyance at sincere well-wishers who say exactly the wrong thing; and she exposes her distressing loneliness.
When Things Get Back to Normal is a compassionate yet bracing companion for those struck down by loss, which indirectly gives practical advice about the changes that come with widowhood. Two years after her husband’s death, Jean agreed to publish her journal. When Things Get Back to Normal gained critical acclaim when it was first published in 1989, but its finest praise came from the dozens of people who wrote and called to tell the author how it had helped them through their own grief. When Jean’s novel A Fit Month for Dying was released in 2000, the publicity surrounding the book prompted a flurry of phone calls to the publisher from people seeking copies of When Things Get Back to Normal.
During the next year Goose Lane Editions sought out and acquired the book and the new edition was released, due in no small part to the many readers who took the book, and Jean Dohaney, into their hearts. Author Helen Fogwill Porter was one of the many that found strength in When Things Get Back to Normal when her husband died, and her introduction to this new edition offers her own experience of “normalcy.” Jean Dohaney’s new afterword tells where she is now, fifteen years after Walt’s death.
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When This World Comes to an End
$20.00Poems that journey through a tapestry of myths, archetypes and fables; of histories invented and revisited.
Kate Cayley’s is a mind both studious and curious, deeply attuned to the question “what if?” What if Nick Drake and Emily Dickinson met in the afterlife? What if a respected physician suddenly shrank to the size of a pea? What if the blind twins in a Victorian photograph could speak to us? What if we found another Earth orbiting another sun?
Cayley draws on her experience as a playwright to create vividly engaging voices and characters ranging from the famous to the infamous to the all-but-anonymous. With exquisite pacing and striking imagery she draws us into the gaps in history, invites us to survey its wonders, both real and imaginary.Ê
Be the horse. Be patient and simple, blind
to anything beyond this moment, step out
on trembling legs toward the lake, knowing that
there is something behind this, something
that sustains, propels, repeats.
(from “The White Horse Divers, Lake Ontario, 1908”) -
When Tish Happens
$19.95?In the early 1960s, a group of students at UBC started a magazine called Tish. The name was purposefully an anagram of shit, in order to demonstrate their youthful and iconoclastic attitude. In many ways, Tish, and its editors, became the clear break from older Canadian poets and styles. At the heart of the magazine, and the “movement,” was Frank Davey. And it is Davey who has written this definitive history.
Davey has organized the material as a memoir, starting from his own early days in Abbotsford, B.C., and gradually introducing the other poets, including George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, and Fred Wah, despite the fact that Davey doesn’t meet them until they all arrive at UBC. Much of the theory of the Tish poets derives from the Black Mountain poets, an American movement that incorporated the writings of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan — who suggested the name itself. The Black Mountain poets believed that writing should be locally based and should grow out of the author’s own breathing patterns. The more specific to a locale, the better.
The poets are introduced as characters in a play, and when Fred Wah says, “Let’s start a magazine,” things happen. The first 19 issues became the calling card for a new type of poetry, but inevitably the writers began to go their own way. It is Davey’s commitment that holds the group together, despite their geographical separation.
The Tish movement provided the impetus to create a new, more contemporary Canadian poetry. And here, Frank Davey reveals how it started, grew, and became a lasting force.
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When Variety Was King
$17.95A television producer’s fascinating memoir of the golden age of the variety show
“Full of behind-the-scenes stories . . . For fans of TV history, there’s a gold mine here.” — Booklist
A humble Canadian boy who grew up to create iconic American TV shows featuring the Hollywood celebrities of the day, Frank Peppiatt made his breakthrough by developing the rock TV show Hullabuloo with his partner, John Aylesworth. That led to a writing gig for Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé — and then to the long-running smash hit Hee Haw.
In this autobiography, he recounts a career that spanned from the 1950s to the 1980s, writing comedy and turning entertainers into household names on variety shows hosted by Jackie Gleason, Andy Williams, Judy Garland, Julie Andrews, Sonny and Cher, and Perry Como. This anecdote-filled memoir of a bygone era will enthrall anyone interested in the early decades of television.