When author Kay Johnston first met Mazie Baker, she came to know her as the reigning queen of bannock, selling out batch after batch of fluffy, light frybread at local powwows. She soon learned that Mazie, a matriarch and an activist, had been nurturing and fiercely protecting her community for a lifetime.

In 1931, Mazie Antone was born into the Squ …

On September 3, 2010, the RCMP in Grande Prairie, Alberta, received a 911 call from Mat Crichton about a shooting on a local farm. Seconds later, miles from home, Holly Crichton got a shocking call from her son. "I just shot Dad," Mat told her. The violent end to a violent situation came as no surprise to the community; Holly and her sons had been …

In the decade since the publication of the first edition of In Fine Form, there has been a resurgence of Canadian poets writing in "form" - in sonnets and ghazals, triolets and ballads, villanelles and palindromes - and formal poetry has become more visible in books, literary journals and classrooms. The first edition of this anthology was called " …

Gently to Nagasaki is a spiritual pilgrimage, an exploration both communal and intensely personal. Set in Vancouver and Toronto, the outposts of Slocan and Coaldale, the streets of Nagasaki and the high mountains of Shikoku, Japan, it is also an account of a remarkable life. As a child during WWII, Joy Kogawa was interned with her family and thousa …

In 1945, Alfred Adams, a respected Haida elder and founding president of the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia (NBBC), was dying of cancer. After decades of fighting to increase the rights and recognition of First Nations people, he implored Maisie Hurley to help his people by telling others about their struggle. Hurley took his request to bot …

In 1858, gold was discovered in the Fraser River. News of this discovery travelled to the Pearl River Delta, where, in the aftermath of the Opium Wars, many Chinese sought to escape the poverty, overcrowding, political unrest and even slavery—invaders from western Asia captured and shipped many Chinese to South America as “piglets.” This tumu …

"Wanted: lesbian couple to foster wonderful eleven-year-old African American boy with gender identity issues."

Meet Antwan. Not only has he got gender issues, he's severely emotionally disturbed, severely demanding and, as he puts it, "born to argue."

In the late nineties, Nicola Harwood and her girlfriend moved to San Francisco in order to be at the …

At turns heartbreaking and hilarious, BOOBS is a diverse collection of stories about the burdens, expectations and pleasures of having breasts. From the agony of puberty and angst of adolescence to the anxiety of aging, these stories and poems go beyond the usual images of breasts found in fashion magazines and movie posters, instead offering dynam …

At the age of sixteen, Ernest Lamarque travelled from England to North America, to begin a life as a Victorian adventurer. Born in 1879 and orphaned at age twelve, he would go on to become an artist, a writer and a surveyor, creating some of the earliest visual records of the people of remote regions of Canada. At seventeen, Lamarque started workin …

The 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Vancouver changed both the city and world sport forever. The Games will always be remembered for the "Miracle Mile," the much-anticipated showdown between the first two men to break the four-minute barrier, England's Roger Bannister and Australia's John Landy. But as the press focused the world's at …

The poems in The Dirty Knees of Prayer are hot and dark as night rain. The new Honeywell fan blows whips of simmered air against Shay's glistening back. He suspects a dystopian future and apparently it has arrived. These poems shrug at death. A tide of smoke rises and hovers over the city. Shay's picture is taken for his collection of grief and apo …

It’s 1965. Twenty-two-year-old Linda Wise despairs of escaping her overprotective parents and her hometown, where far too many know she was sexually assaulted as a teenager. Deliverance arrives in the form of marriage to the charismatic, twenty-six-year-old Ronald Brunson, a newly ordained Methodist minister who ignites her passion for social jus …

In 2007, at the age of sixty, Betsy Warland finds herself single and without a sense of family. On an impulse, she decides to travel to London to celebrate her birthday, where she experiences an odd compulsion to see an exhibit on the invention of military camouflage. Within the first five minutes of her visit, her lifelong feeling of being aberran …

Growing up in the 1930s, Adeline Beale knows little of the outside world or the looming shadows of a second world war. Addie—as her grandfather Chauncey Beynon Beale affectionately calls her—believes that everything she could ever want or need is to be found on Chauncey’s cattle ranch, the place her family calls home, or in the little town tw …

When thirty-two women were hired as mounted police officers in 1974, it was a media sensation. After all, these were not the brawny heroes of Canadian history, or the dashing and handsome Mounties portrayed in over two hundred Hollywood movies. Women were thought to be afraid of guns and incapable of protecting themselves. Training officers at the …

In 1922 a lone woman arrives in a filthy frontier mining town in the Pacific Northwest. Her goal: to resurrect her dead uncle’s newspaper. Within two days a naked man is shot dead, a famous man is rumoured to be heading their way and the only man capable of fixing her broken-down press so that she might spread this news is a Chinese printer from …

Covering Rough Ground, Kate Braid’s first book, was published in 1991 and awarded the Pat Lowther Award for Best Book of Poetry by a Canadian Woman. Since then Kate has written extensively in prose, poetry and on CBC Radio about her and other women’s experiences in the construction trades. Her work has been highly praised by women in almost eve …

After Sonia Cornwall's father died in 1939, her mother inherited the Onward Ranch and a huge debt. To make the ranch viable, a twenty-year-old Sonia traded paintbrush for pitchfork, labouring alongside the male ranch hands. But after marrying Hugh Cornwall in 1947, Sonia had time for painting once again. She learned techniques from some of Canada's …

In 1922 a lone woman arrives in a filthy frontier mining town in the Pacific Northwest. Her goal: to resurrect her dead uncle's newspaper. Within two days a naked man is shot dead, a famous man is rumoured to be heading their way and the only man capable of fixing her broken-down press so that she might spread this news is a Chinese printer from th …

An elegy to and celebration of British Columbia's second-longest river, one at the centre of contemporary conversations about resource extraction and northern geographies, Skeena is an assemblage of voices, stories and histories both about the river and from the river's perspective. As a single poetic narrative spanning more than ninety pages, this …

Ruth Bowers had a dream of becoming a professional violinist. In 1910, when traditional careers for women included nursing or teaching, Ruth joined the chautauqua and lyceum tour circuit and hit the road.
In the first part of the twentieth century, these popular tours brought music, education and entertainment to millions of people in rural North …

He Leaves His Face in the Funeral Car is elegiac, lyrical, ironic; a series of reflections, recollections; a collection about relationships-to family, clocks, water, trees, ungulates, endings-recognizing that not all relationships are straightforward: a mother's secret false teeth, a teakettle riddled with bullet holes, pears and small knives. To l …

As an ecologist, Alejandro Frid is haunted by the irrevocable changes that humans are forcing upon Earth-the loss of ancient forests, the demise of large predators, shifts in the chemistry and circulation patterns of the atmosphere and more. Feeling completely discouraged by his research on endangered species and various forms of ecological meltdow …

When thirty-two women were hired as mounted police officers in 1974, it was a media sensation. After all, these were not the brawny heroes of Canadian history, or the dashing and handsome Mounties portrayed in over two hundred Hollywood movies. Women were thought to be afraid of guns and incapable of protecting themselves. Training officers at the …

Sometimes tragic, sometimes uproariously funny, This Place a Stranger is a diverse collection of Canadian women writing about their experiences of travelling alone. From the deceptiveness of the everyday to the extremes of geography, weather and violence, these stories go beyond the usual tales of intrepid male explorers and reveal the varied and u …

Gerry Bracewell has lived in the Chilcotin Valley for over seventy-five years. She helped pioneer the valley's early school system and was an advocate for the school district until 1974. Gerry worked and wrote for the Williams Lake Tribune for many years while continuing to run her ranch and raise four children. For five decades, Gerry was a sought …

Sometimes tragic, sometimes uproariously funny, THIS PLACE A STRANGER is a diverse collection of Canadian women writing about their experiences of travelling alone. From the deceptiveness of the everyday to the extremes of geography, weather and violence, these stories go beyond the usual tales of intrepid male explorers and reveal the varied and u …

In 2008, a small-scale flour miller from British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast created a handmade bike mill to attract a dedicated farmers’ market following. Chris Hergesheimer wanted to challenge the belief that there is only one way—the big way—to grow, process and market grain and flour. For Chris and his family, it wasn’t about profit, bu …

Derrick Stacey Denholm has spent twenty-five years as a forestry field worker, planting trees, marking cutblock boundaries and timber-cruising. In Ground-Truthing, he combines this experience with his perspective as a poet and artist to guide us through the tangle of social, ecological and economic slash piles that dominate BC’s North Coast. Scie …

Since 1977, people have asked Jane Hall over and over what it was like to have been among the first few female members of the RCMP, and, like so so many of her peers, she has avoided answering the questions. How could one sentence do the question justice? To truly tell the complete story, Hall needed to tell some of the good as well as some of the …

When Tania Millen began doing horse pack trips in western Canada, she had trouble deciding where to go - not because there were so many options, but because information was so hard to come by. Riding the trails was the only way she could gain information about particular routes, and she is now sharing her knowledge with readers and riders. Millen p …

The poems in Average Height of Flight are founded in the landscape of coastal BC, built on the losses within the narrator's life in counterpoint to her walks in the natural world. In forests with her dog, along watersheds and hill climbs, Beth Kope goes off trail to find inspiration and time for meditation. She observes as the landscapes change wit …

In the canon of contemporary feminist and lesbian poetry, For Your Own Good breaks silence. A fictionalized autobiography, the poems in this collection illustrate the narrator's survival of a domestic and sexual violence in a lesbian relationship. There is magic in this work: the symbolism of the Tarot and the roots of Jewish heritage, but also the …

In Keith Billington’s The Last Patrol, he shares one of the most tragic stories of the far north.

It was a quiet December morning in 1910 when Inspector Fitzgerald and his crew left Fort McPherson, Northwest Territories, on a dog team patrol to Dawson City, Yukon. Their departure was without fanfare, and after a brief handshake and a salute, the m …

A diminutive cowboy with a full beard and a Texas drawl stands onstage at Expo 86 in Vancouver telling wild and woolly stories of life in the Chilcotin backcountry. The audience is mesmerized by his poetic ballad of an alcoholic dog that rode on the back of his saddle in Anahim Lake. The performer is Luther Corky Williams.

Originally from Texas, Cor …

On a foggy evening in November 1905, 48-year-old Thomas Jackson returned to his home on Melville Street in Vancouver after nine months of prospecting north of the Skeena. Jackson was happy because he had made an important gold strike. Four days later he was dead from strychnine poisoning. Any of the other four people living in the house on Melville …

When 25-year-old Jo climbed down the ramp of the freighter Canadian Star to set foot in Vancouver, BC, in the summer of 1967, she’d never heard of log salvaging. But within two and a half years, the immigrant from England would quit her teaching job and join forces with one of the most enigmatic salvagers of the Sunshine Coast. Dick and Jo Hammon …

On September 27, 1986, pilot Theresa Bond and five passengers took off on a routine flight from Atlin, BC, in her beloved de Havilland Beaver. The Taku Air passenger list that day included local politician Al Passarell, his wife, and three of Atlin’s most prominent citizens–including larger-than-life Atlin Inn owner Joe Florence. After an uneve …

Julia Hoop, a twenty-five-year-old counselling psych student, is working on her thesis, exploring an idea which makes her graduate supervisor squirm. She is conducting interview after interview with a group of women she affectionately calls the Molestas - women whose experience of childhood sexual abuse did not cause physical trauma. Julia is the e …

Born Out of This follows Christine Lowther’s journey from the unutterable loss of her mother to the discovery of her own poetic voice through deep reflection and her intimate connection to the coastal rainforest. She looks back on her mother’s poetry and activism. She recalls the day the police arrested her father, and the indifferent beauty su …

Lasqueti Island has a rowdy and divided reputation. Between the 1970s and early 80s, the island attracted a flood of counter-culture seekers - communards, hippies, utopians, revolutionaries and other exotic characters looking for an alternative lifestyle. Today many perceive it as a romantic fantasy: an existence of bucolic peace, surrounded by iso …