Measure of the Year

Reflections on Home, Family, and a Life Fully Lived

by Roderick Haig-Brown, foreword by Brian Brett

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Description

Roderick L. Haig-Brown welcomes us onto his lush farm for a year of insights and observations. In this eloquently written account, Haig-Brown, his wife Ann and their four children tour us through each season, and teach us the ways in which the Earth governs the events in our lives. Haig-Brown observes salmon, blue grouse, blacktail deer and robins, with a soft eye and gentle appreciation for their trials. He discerns how the weather interacts with the land, and how the land interacts with our attempts at civilization. Haig-Brown also discusses his work at a magistrate, and the challenges of marriage, amateur book collecting, the craft of the writer, and the meaning of community. A snap shot of rural BC in the 1950s, Measure of the Year is a country story, told by a man happy in his chosen way of life.

About the Authors

Roderick Haig-Brown

Roderick L. Haig-Brown was born in England but lived all his adult life on Vancouver Island, along the banks of the Campbell River. His books include A River Never Sleeps, To Know a River, Measure of the Year, and a dozen other important books that together form the finest achievement in angling prose in North America. Haig-Brown died in 1976.

Brian Brett was born in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1950 and studied literature at Simon Fraser University. He has been associated with several firms as an editor and publisher and has been a reviewer for many publications and newspapers. In the early seventies, he began working as a freelance journalist and critic for various publications and newspapers, including The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Vancouver Sun, The New Reader, Books in Canada, the Victoria Times-Colonist and theVancouver Province — where he was the poetry critic for two years, and had his own column. His journalism has appeared in almost every major newspaper in Canada, and his essays in most of the major magazines. Brett inaugurated the BC Poetry-in-the-Schools program, introducing children in schools to world poetry for a period of several years, and has taught or given workshops on writing across Canada. He has been a member of organizations ranging from P.E.N. International, the League of Canadian Poets, the Federation of BC Writers, to the Writers' Union of Canada. While a member of the League of Canadian Poets he performed a national reading tour under their auspices. He has also given readings on CBC Radio and various other media as well as public performances funded by private organizations, universities, Harbourfront, Vancouver International Writers Festival, Saltwater Festival, Sechelt Writers’ Festival, Wordfest: Banff Calgary International Writers Festival, the Winnipeg International Writers Festival, National Book Festival, and the Canada Council. Brett is the author of several books of fiction and poetry, including, Tanganyika (Thistledown Press, 1991), The Fungus Garden (Thistledown Press, 1988) Coyote (Thistledown 2003), and Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life (2009) for which he won the Writers Trust Non-Fiction Prize. He lives on a farm on Salt Spring Island.

Editorial Review

Although dated in its masculine language, the book remains startlingly contemporary. Its reflections on conservation, community, compassionate justice, and the mistreatment of Aboriginal populations are, sadly, every bit as relevant today as they were six decades ago. By John Ruskin's measure, this is not a book of the hour but a book of all time. — BC Studies

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