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Books for Women’s History Month
We honour Women’s History Month in Canada with stellar fiction, poetry, drama, memoirs, and more by women.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 17–32 of 106 results
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Cautiously Pessimistic
$22.95An intimate and enlightening no-holds-barred memoir that uncovers the many unexpected details of dying, Cautiously Pessimistic is one woman’s personal account of her husband’s death and what it means to die in the public eye.
Cautiously Pessimistic is both deeply moving and funny, as it recounts McGee’s husband’s diagnosis of brain cancer and the eight months leading up to his death. It is told in the first person and through posts from Facebook and Twitter, text exchanges, and email. Alternating chapters tell the story of McGee and her husband’s tumultuous early relationship, through the use of excerpts from journals and letters. Throughout the narrative the presence of the tightly knit St. John’s arts community is strongly felt. The etiquette of offering condolences on social media is examined in an afterword by the author.
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Children of Fire
$24.95In 2018, Shahrzad Arshadi and Anna Chatterton travelled to the Qandil Mountains of Kurdistan, where they were hosted by a group of Kurdish female freedom fighters. After living with and gathering accounts of these extraordinary women, they returned home to create a searing piece of theatre that not only amplifies their voices but also deftly examines privilege, feminism, and the nature of courage. With contributions from the authors and the resistance fighters, Children of Fire is a unique, genre-blurring collection that includes the original play script, an interview, photographs, candid personal essays, letters, poems, and testimonials.
This vital hybrid work examines how the freedom fighters’ struggle is in aid of peace and the protection of the environment, as well as the Kurdish people and women everywhere. During these anxious and turbulent times, it can feel easy to give up hope. Children of Fire offers a wake-up call to connection and change, emphasizing that we are all part of this critical fight, and that together, we can create a better world for everyone.
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Chimeras
$19.95In her debut poetry book, Tegan Zimmerman recuperates and (re)conceives the mythical figure of the chimera to explore maternity, monstrosity, labour, and reproduction. Conceiving chimeras as the maternal and in the plural, not the singular, Chimeras engages repetition and mimicry to critique the western philosophical-literary canon?s paternal roots, grappling with Marx, Plato, Shakespeare, and Nietzsche.
Chimeras brilliantly explores the fragility of identity categories, the slipperiness between the contradictory roles assigned to the maternal: goddess-lover-wife-mother-crone-monster.
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Dancing in Small Spaces
$22.00An unstintingly honest and surprisingly humorous memoir that charts a couple’s parallel diagnoses of Parkinson’s and Lewy body dementia.
In 2011, Leslie Davidson and her husband Lincoln Ford were enjoying retired life to the fullest as ardent outdoor enthusiasts, energetic travellers, and soon-to-be grandparents. But when Lincoln’s confusion became a concern and Leslie began to experience a hesitant leg and uncontrollable tremors in one arm, a devastating double diagnosis completely changed their life.
In this personal and unstintingly honest memoir, Leslie recounts the years that follow the diagnoses—her Parkinson’s and Lincoln’s Lewy body dementia—charting physical changes, mastering medications (and sometimes flubbing it), the logistical puzzles of caregiving, and the steady support of their close-knit community in the small town of Grand Forks in south central British Columbia.
She describes her struggle to maintain perspective while questioning what having perspective even means, and the work of being an advocate while needing an advocate. And she explains how, amid all the challenges and tears, shared laughter remained all-important to their survival, especially in times when Lincoln saw her as an imposter. She shares powerful lessons in love, courage, and grace from the man who had always led the way and who, despite the ravages of his illness, in many ways, still did.
At once poignant and unflinchingly frank Dancing in Small Spaces is the story of a long and adventurous marriage, of deep gratitude, and, ultimately, of writing one’s way toward understanding and acceptance.
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Dayboil
$18.95With razor-sharp acuity and snappy language, Dayboil centres on a community in crisis––a kitchen-table comedy that quickly takes a dark turn.
Four middle-aged women meet at Kathy’s house in rural Newfoundland for their weekly cup of tea and gossip when tragic news disrupts their usual banter: Kathy’s husband has killed himself. Abruptly, the threads that hold their comfortable community life together begin to snap, and they find themselves exposed by the unravelling of their social fabric.
Darkly funny and deeply touching, Dayboil explores the rigidity of gender roles that prevent men from seeking help and lock women into caretaking positions, as well as the emotional and physical fallout that can result.
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Doubles
$22.95Doubles takes place in 1968 in an institution for troubled youth, and is told from the perspective of a brilliant, spunky, 12-year-old girl who is obsessed with math. Engagingly written and often funny, this novella explores how a sensitive young teenager changes over a six-month period from a polite, quiet “good girl” into a delinquent. Although set in the past, Doubles has direct relevance to today, with our recently heightened awareness of the harsh reality in some of our residential institutions during that era (including for Indigenous children, but not only).
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Echo Chamber
$19.95>p> Echo Chamber is a follow-up on Norman and Leggo’s Hearing Echoes, which was a collection of poetry that moved between two strong voices?a man and a woman?focusing
on family relationships in all their intersections and differences.
Echo Chamber releases following the death of co-author Carl Leggo and serves as a love
letter to him from surviving author, Renee Norman, remembering his love and their previous
work together. -
Emily & Elspeth
$20.00Emily & Elspeth follows two women and their unique paths to love… and each other. Catherine McNeil’s latest collection is a delightful romp through Mexico, the imagined inner-workings of Frida Kahlo’s relationship(s), and Vancouver bedrooms. Through poems that flirt with the intersections of desire, art, and commitment, she pieces together Emily and Elspeth’s relationship as playfully as she takes it apart.
Along the way, Emily & Elspeth brings you to places both intimate and unexpected: a belly where a uterus used to be; a girl matador facing off against a bull; and “fat, honeyed days, swollen with desire” that risk being destroyed by the nefarious aims of a government spy.
Weird, wonderful, and slightly dangerous, this is a queer love story that’s anything but typical.
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Erica Rutherford
$50.00Winner, APMA Best Atlantic-Published Book Award
Winner, PEI Book Award (Non-Fiction)“The struggle to realize and to express my nature is my life’s meaning.” — Erica Rutherford
Erica Rutherford: Her Lives and Works accompanies a career-spanning retrospective exhibition of this multidisciplinary Canadian artist and transgender pioneer.
An artist, actor, filmmaker, farmer, teacher, and writer, Erica Rutherford’s remarkably multifaceted career took her across several countries and continents before settling on Prince Edward Island in the 1970s. There she established herself as a painter and printmaker, using art to engage in a reflection on gender construction and agency.
This remarkable retrospective includes reproductions of more than 60 paintings, prints, and drawings, as well as personal photographs. An interview with Rutherford’s widow, artist Gail Rutherford, accompanies critical essays by scholars and curators examining Rutherford’s stylistic evolution from dark semi-abstract collages to hard-edged Pop Art. Says editor and curator Pan Wendt, “In retrospect, Rutherford’s work represents a courageous and often solitary mission of working through questions that are only now part of the mainstream public discourse.”
Ma vie trouve son sens dans le combat que je mène pour comprendre et exprimer ma vraie nature.
— Erica RutherfordErica Rutherford : sa vie, son œuvres accompagne la rétrospective consacrée à la carrière de cette artiste canadienne multidisciplinaire, pionnière parmi les personnes trans.
Art pictural, arts de la scène, production cinématographique, agriculture, enseignement, littérature : autant de disciplines qui ont mené Erica Rutherford dans de nombreux pays et sur plusieurs continents avant son installation à l’Île-du-Prince-Édouard dans les années 1970. Rutherford privilégie finalement la peinture, qui lui permet de s’engager dans une réflexion complexe sur la construction du genre et la puissance d’agir.
Outre la reproduction des 75 peintures, estampes, dessins et photographies personnelles qui composent la rétrospective, cet ouvrage remarquable propose une entrevue avec l’artiste Gail Rutherford, partenaire d’Erica Rutherford, des essais critiques au fil desquels universitaires et conservateurs relatent l’évolution stylistique d’Erica Rutherford depuis de sombres collages semi-abstraits jusqu’à l’association hard edge et pop art. Pour Pan Wendt, commissaire de l’exposition, « il apparaît maintenant que l’œuvre d’Erica Rutherford est l’expression d’une mission poursuivie avec courage et souvent dans la solitude : celle de sonder des questions qui se font à peine jour sur la place publique ».
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Everyone Can’t Be Wrong
$24.95Payal has spent her life trying to meet her parents’ checklist of expectations: Marriage, check. Working for her father, check. House in the suburbs, kids with perfect husband?. well, she’s working on that part, but infertility treatment is putting a strain on her marriage. She?s waiting to be happy, or at least, not be a disappointment – unlike her brother Amit, who became an actor and yet seems to still be beloved no matter what he does, and her perfect little sister Shruti, who has just announced her own pregnancy. When Payal’s mother announces a surprise trip to India, the strain in Payal’s marriage increases as her husband refuses to miss his own family Christmas for her family’s wedding in suburban Mumbai, leaving Payal to maintain the façade of a happy marriage alone.
Increasingly scrutinized and isolated in her uncle’s flat in loud, crowded Mumbai, Payal desperately tries to reconcile with Bryan. Meanwhile, her father announces plans to retire and make the unqualified Amit a co-owner, and her mother decides to single-handedly fix Payal’s baby problem by picking out an egg donor whether Payal wants one or not.Everyone but Payal seems to know exactly how to fix her marriage, solve her problems, and make her happy. Surely everyone can’t be wrong?
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Fire Never Dies
What is the purpose of art in the face of fascism? Can art serve the poor? And what is the personal cost of militancy?
In Fire Never Dies: The Tina Modotti Project, bestselling author and Electric Company Core Artist Carmen Aguirre explores the intersection of art and revolution through the life of Italian photographer and activist Tina Modotti.
Modotti’s story begins in 1920s Mexico City, where her art flourished and she encountered other icons of the day, including Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. However, after seven years she abandoned photography to join the antifascist cause, ultimately running the Red Aid Hospital during the Spanish Civil War. Through a dynamic blend of styles and theatrical forms, the play mirrors Modotti’s struggle to reconcile passion, creativity, and political conviction as it unfolds across twenty episodes, all recalled in Modotti’s final moments during a fatal heart attack in a taxi at age forty-five.
Cast of 7 diverse actors
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Flyway
$18.00This Meditation on the impact of human and ecological trauma explores the cost of survival for three generations of women living between empires. Writing from within the disappearing tallgrass prairie, Sarah Ens follows connections between the Russian Mennonite diaspora and the disrupted migratory patterns of grassland birds. Drawing on family history, eco-poetics, and the rich tradition of the Canadian long poem, Flyway migrates along pathways of geography and the heart to grapple with complexities of home.
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Fuse
$20.00Drawing on her own experiences as a woman of Iranian and British Isle descent, writer Hollay Ghadery dives into conflicts and uncertainty surrounding the bi-racial female body and identity, especially as it butts up against the disparate expectations of each culture. Painfully and at times, reluctantly, Fuse probes and explores the documented prevalence of mental health issues in bi-racial women.
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Girl Gangs, Zines, and Powerslides
$26.95“All thriller, no filler.”— Dr. Indigo Willing, sociologist and lead researcher of Skate, Create, Educate and Regenerate and co-author of Skateboarding, Power and Change
A vibrant, meticulously researched celebration of the women and non-binary skateboarders who defied a hostile industry and redefined skateboarding around the world
With enthusiasm and empathy, Girl Gangs, Zines, and Powerslides celebrates the relentless participation of women in skateboarding from the 1960s onward who defied a hostile industry to carve out their own space through underground networks. Skater librarian Natalie Porter presents interviews and meticulous research, including the DIY zines created by female and non-binary skaters as a means of communication, to expose this unacknowledged story while offering a personal narrative about the importance of community-building and validation, with or without your own video game.
Girl Gangs, Zines, and Powerslides disrupts the image of skateboarding as an exclusive male domain, offering historical context for the seemingly rapid progress of female skaters today seen competing on the Olympic stage. Discover how the collective action of a grassroots movement in the 1980s established meaningful change, building a foundation that has led to greater inclusion and diversity, which has inspired women, girls, and non-binary youth worldwide to roll on a skateboard for the first time or rediscover their youthful obsession as an adult and feel inspired to drop once again.
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Hag Dances
$24.95To change and heal takes great courage. To reconcile is to truly face yourself and ask the questions: Why am I angry, shameful, hateful and prejudiced? Why does fear have control of me so profoundly? Why is it so easy to move to prejudice, to be manipulative, to think of myself as better than? Susan Wismer’s new collection of astounding poetry reconciles identity and truth, if truth can even be found.
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Heartlines
A riveting new play on the extraordinary love, art, and resistance of gender pioneers Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore and a finalist for the 2026 Lambda Award in LGBTQ+ Drama
Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore shared an astonishing life grounded in love, nourished by art, and motivated by justice. Using a play-within-a-play structure and epic storytelling, Heartlines takes the audience through the dizzying romance of their early life together in the Parisian avant-garde – and the subsequent fracturing of that life with the rise of nazism. Identities of all kinds are explored, suppressed, and liberated as their love withstands oppression, violence, and time itself.
Cast of 2 actors and 1 musician of any gender and any ethnicity