The twenty contemporary writers featured in this anthology have one thing in common: a connection to British Columbia, to a specific time, landscape, or community in BC. Their essays and memoirs have been inspired by, or are in some way affected by, the particular "sense of place" that sets that left-hand corner of the country apart from other prov …

Evocative of writers Patrick Califia-Rice and Kate Bornstein, whose best works explore gender and sexuality through personal memoir, queersexlife is a frank and intimate collection of responses to theories of queer sexuality and identity as viewed through the author's own experiences. By turns insightful and elegant, Terry Goldie delves into contem …

This collection of over thirty essays by both well-known and emerging writers explores what it means to “be at home” on Canada’s West Coast. Here the rainforest and the wild, stormy cost dominate one’s sense of identity, a humbling perspective shared in memoirs by individuals who come to see themselves as part of a larger ecological communi …

"People go north for a variety of reasons, some stay for a lifetime, while others can't wait to leave at the end of whatever term they have signed on for. The north tends to be either loved or hated with equal passion." These are the words of Keith Billington, who with his wife Muriel, arrived in the Northwest Territories outpost of Fort McPherson, …

A celebration of a Victoria landmark, The Empress Hotel, in honour of its one-hundredth birthday.

Based on archival records, memoirs, reminiscences, newspaper accounts and over a hundred interviews, this book is the first full account of the glorious life and times of one the world's legendary hotels: Victoria's Fairmont Empress. Like its famous sib …

The Angels of Light were more than a seminal performance troupe in the 1970s; growing out of the equally legendary Cockettes in San Francisco (led by the charismatic Hibiscus, and subject of the award-winning documentary The Cockettes), the Angels were a way of life, putting on trashy, fantastical fairy tales come to life in a city and an era that …

After suffering gut-wrenching experiences during the Bosnian war, a soldier is left to struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder.

When Canadian soldier Fred Doucette was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina as a UN peacekeeper in 1995, he had a premonition that this tour of duty would be different. He had been posted to Cyprus in the 1970s and 1980s, b …

"Put aside the fact that it ended my playing career, punched holes in my memory and put life as I knew it on indefinite hold, it wasn't that tough a hit."

Thus begins Goin' Deep, Matt Dunigan's gritty, often startling memoir of his 14-year journey as a Canadian Football League quarterback, a career brought to a shattering halt on an afternoon in Ham …

Widely recognized as a classic of northern-exploration literature, A Journey to the Northern Ocean is Samuel Hearne's story of his three-year trek to seek a trade route across the Barrens in the Northwest Territories. Hearne was a superb reporter, from his anguished description of the massacre of helpless Eskimos by his Indian companions to his met …

Doreen Armitage, author of the bestselling From the Wheelhouse: Tugboaters Tell their own Stories, is back with a fresh collection of salty tales from a varied collection of men who earn their living in, on or beside the sea. A former DFO skipper tells a heartrending story of trying to rescue the crew of a fish boat foundering off the west coast of …

British Columbia's Jedediah Island is now a popular marine park, 640 acres of natural splendour tucked in between Texada and Lasqueti islands in the Strait of Georgia. But when Mary Palmer and her husband purchased the island half a century ago, they found out it could be challenging indeed to live in an isolated coastal paradise.

Jedediah Days is a …

Best known for his original series of Arthurian novels, A Dream of Eagles (called The Camulod Chronicles in the US), and his more recent Knights Templar trilogy, Jack Whyte has authored 10 international bestsellers in the past 15 years. Jack's imagination and his passion for observing human nature shine through in both his prose and his verse in th …

To celebrate her 50th birthday and face the challenges of mid-life, Jane Christmas joins 14 women to hike the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. Despite a psychic’s warning of catfights, death, and a sexy, fair-haired man, Christmas soldiers on. After a week of squabbles, the group splinters and the real adventure begins. In vivid, witty style, sh …

Assorted Candies for the Theatre is a stage adaptation of Michel Tremblay’s fourth book of autobiographical sketches, Bonbons Assortis / Assorted Candies, offering a rich and colourful cast of characters in this exquisite remembrance of childhood past in Montreal’s Plateau Mont-Royal neighbourhood. Much more than a mere adaptation of a prose me …

Somewhere between joyous affirmation of British Columbia's splendour and momentous grief for the destruction of a once thriving salmon culture comes the newest work from acclaimed poet and novelist Tim Bowling. The Lost Coast is a lyrical, impassioned lament for the home Bowling once knew and for the river and creatures that continue to haunt his i …

From the Introduction by Brian Fawcett "A first clue to how this book is going to work lies in the book's title: Topic Sentence. In the title story, written in 1970, Persky took on the two questions that dog every artist in the post-modern: What is the subject matter, and how can it be articulated? Since both questions are unanswerable, Persky twis …

"My mother loved the wild roses that bloomed along the side of the dirt roads and made every trip a fragrant journey.” Artist and author dutchie Rutledge-Mathison has gathered her memories of growing up on a remote northern homestead and transformed them into works of art, both visual and narrative. Using vivid colors and a primitive style, dutch …

John Armstrong has worked as a paperboy, a caddy, and a Bible camp counsellor; as a janitor at the Regal Theatre, a shipper of video porn, and a real live punk rock star. As if those jobs weren't punishment enough, at the tender age of thirty he entered the trenches of journalism. Armstrong's first job — a slave-labour gig shovelling rabbit shit …

Finalist,The Golden Crown Literary Award, Lesbian Short Story Essay Collection
Winner, Independent Publisher Award (SILVER), Autobiography/Memoir
Winner, ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award (GOLD), Autobiography/Memoir
Finalist, Lambda Literary Award, Women's Memoir/Biography
Shortlisted for the Kobzar Literary Award
One of Quill & Quire's …

In this unusual Holocaust memoir, Rhodea Shandler gives a woman's view of life under the Nazis in Holland. She begins by describing her early life in a closely knit Jewish family in northern Holland. There was anti-Semitism, she explains, but it was of a low level, and the Jews with their strong ties to community managed to live relatively normal l …

Earle Birney (1904-1995), the father of modern Canadian poetry, was one of Canada's finest writers and the author of "David," arguably the most popular Canadian poem of all time. One Muddy Hand: Selected Poems features Birney's best work, spanning his entire writing career from 1926 to 1987.

Born in Calgary, Birney grew up in different parts of Alb …

Born in 1889, Anna Porter's grandfather, Vili Racz, was a patriot and Olympic athlete, a magician and a lawyer, a publisher and a prisoner, a philanderer and a devoted family man. On long walks through the once-grand European capital of Budapest, in confidences whispered in splendid fin-de-siecle coffee houses, Vili shared his stories of heroes and …

Bernie Rothman wrote popular, classic TV shows like "My Three Sons" and produced career-defining specials for stars like Judy Garland, George Burns, Diana Ross, Burt Reynolds, and Rudolf Nureyev. In this memoir, Rothman wittily describes his dealings with these male and female divas, from witnessing Peggy Lee trashing the Andrews Sisters to draggin …

At once a memoir, a work of philosophy, a story of European immigration to Canada's dark places of the earth, and an exploration of the roots and effects of colonialism, The Wolves At Evelyn: Journeys Through a Dark Century is a stylistic and rhetorical tour de force from one of Canada's master prose stylists.

Dissident communists fleeing 1920s Germ …

With new material from Susan Cheever, Molly Jong-Fast, and Rick Whitaker. What is this craving that overpowers all else? What is it like to be addicted, and what does it take to get straight or sober? In this new and expanded edition of a widely praised collection, an outstanding roster of courageous writers present vivid renderings of the addictio …

Having written books in practically every genre, George Bowering is often introduced as someone who adores baseball, yet ironically he did not begin this book about the game until he was appointed Canada’s first Poet Laureate for 2002–04. This picaresque memoir of a road trip with his fiancée through the storied ballparks of a poet’s youthf …

This warm-hearted memoir tells the story of the dream of many North Americans: to throw up a dull job and journey into the wilderness to live off the land. Sunny Wright does exactly that when she decides at age twenty-eight to quit working at a "man-sized job for a female wage" in a Vancouver sawmill. With her young daughter Lisa and friend Betty, …

In British Columbia's remote and exotic Cariboo Plateau, "Everything is slow. Everything is happening at the same speed, which is no speed at all." Harold Rhenisch has spent eleven years watching birds every day from his house on the shore of 108 Lake—at this speed, but you wouldn’t know it from reading Winging Home. Known as "one of Canada's m …

In the late 1980s, Chris Czajkowski left her truck at the end of a logging road 300 kilometres north of Vancouver and hiked for two days on unmarked wilderness trails to the site of what would become her home. This is her account of building three log cabins, an eco-tourism business and a life beside an unnamed lake 5,000 feet high in the Coast Ran …

In this moving autobiography, Daniel Gawthrop writes about the politics and pleasures of being a self-identified "rice queen": a gay man who is attracted to Asians. Navigating through the urban jungles of Western cities like Vancouver and London, as well as the humid streets of Bangkok and Saigon, Daniel explores the multicultural minefields of sex …

At nightfall on June 22, 1965, a soldier walked in from the outskirts of a small town in the Dominican Republic and reported that he had just shot and killed two policemen and an outspoken Canadian Catholic priest. It was the opening scene in a mystery that, forty years later, compels J.B. MacKinnon, a nephew of the murdered missionary, to investig …

There are many books about the processes people go through when they discover they have cancer. What makes Flying Crooked different is the way in which Jan Michael accepts the disease and its consequences. She continues to enjoy life, refuses radiotherapy, and rejects the idea of even wearing a prosthesis after one of her breasts has been removed. …

In 1907, Laura Beatrice Berton, a 29-year-old kindergarten teacher, left her comfortable life in Toronto Ontario to teach in a Yukon mining town. She fell in love with the North--and with a northerner--and made Dawson City her home for the next 25 years. I Married the Klondike is her classic and enduring memoir.

When she first arrived by steamboat …

Experience life as a park warden in Canada's national parks with Close Calls on High Walls, a moving memoir from a former warden.

The mountains beckon from behind their mantle of clouds.... So pick up your pack and take the Alpenstock in hand. Who knows, in one of those quiet valleys we may even find those candle-flame blazes, where that old Guard …

In this beautifully written and deeply moving book, Rita Moir draws strength from her father's words as she deals with a relationship with an abusive man, the challenges of living on her own in the country, and the disappointment of another thwarted romance. In turn, she offers the same strength to her father when he must confront his own illness, …

Best Books of 2005, Ottawa Xpress

Writer's Trust of Canada's "Warm Weather Reads Recommended by Writers" list (recommended by Robert Hough)

Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer is equal parts literary memoir, advice for the emerging writer, and reckless tirade. Ross has been active in the Canadian literary underground for a quarter of a century: he …

Italy out of Hand is not a traditional guidebook with hotel addresses and hours of operation. Rather, it is an idiosyncratic tour of a sometimes overwhelming and extravagant country. Seething below Italy's wonderfully civilized surface is a mass of macabre stories, salacious goings-on, and decidedly strange personalities and bizarre behavior. There …

A true account of a working lifetime spent in the woods of coastal BC. Filled with life and death stories, and larger-than-life characters. Loggers of the B.C. Coast is a blend of history and autobiography set against the primitive background of post-war logging camps and populated by a bygone breed of crude, philosophical, charming, and inveterate …

The Raven and the Mountaineer is the most significant contribution toward the history of the St. Elias Mountain Range -- the Himalayas of Canada. To introduce this mountain range to the reader the author has chosen the aboriginal emblem and traditionally sacred bird the Raven to make the introductory statement to each chapter. It is the Raven, the …

The Kwakwakawakw people and their culture have been the subject of more anthropological writings than any other ethnic group on the Northwest Coast. Until now, however, no biography had been written by or about a Kwakwakawakw woman. Paddling to Where I Stand presents the memoirs of Agnes Alfred (c.1890-1992), a non-literate noble Qwiqwasutinuxw wom …

In I Am a Red Dress, acclaimed writer and performer Anna Camilleri confronts the ghosts of her past as she seeks to find her rightful place in the world. Part memoir, part storytelling, Anna writes with passion and conviction about family and identity, and how the wounds of personal history can be healed through the imagination.

These eloquent stori …

For much of the legendary BC politician-cum-hotliner's career, calling him a socialist would have risked a scorching riposte if not a punch in the nose, but in his latest book that is the label he gives himself. Has the old warrior gone over to the other side? Well, not exactly. Rafe Mair has dominated the British Columbia airwaves for years, pulli …

An evening at the opera spills out onto the street and into an odyssey through Montreal by night. The narrator, both innocent and cynical, rushes headlong down what appears to be the road to ruin—or perhaps merely to the loss of his virginity. We follow him from a café called El Cortijo (spanish for a country house with a farm building attached) …

Evicted from his Tofino pyramid for the last time, writer Andrew Struthers has the solution: buy an old fishing boat going cheap via the federal government's Mifflin Plan. He takes up residence onboard with his nine-year-old daughter Pasheabel, and his perennial housing problems are solved. Or are they? The Last Voyage of the Loch Ryan picks up whe …