Nikki van Schyndel is not your typical grizzled survivalist. She is a contemporary, urban young woman who threw off modern comforts to spend nineteen months in a remote rainforest with her housecat and a virtual stranger.

Set in the Broughton Archipelago—a maze of isolated islands near northern Vancouver Island—Becoming Wild is a story of surviv …

How does one go from English villager to wilderness dweller?

Chris Czajkowski was born and raised at the edge of a large village in England, until she abandoned the company of others to roam the countryside in search of the natural world. As a young adult she studied dairy farming and travelled to Uganda to teach at a farm school. Returning to Engla …

In 1974 Lorne Dufour moved to Alkali Lake Reserve, a Shuswap community near Williams Lake in British Columbia, to help reopen the local elementary school. Like many First Nation communities across Canada, Alkali Lake had been ravaged by decades of residential schools and forced religion. Colonialism had robbed them of their language and culture and …

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 …

In the early 1980s, Yvonne Maximchuk, a single mother of two, was living in Whiterock, BC, and making a living as a working artist and art instructor. Then she fell in love with Albert, a crab fisherman who fished the waters of Boundary Bay. Drawn to his seemingly idyllic life and her desire for connection with the natural world, Yvonne and her chi …

Since women started working in the trades in the 1970s, very little has been published about their experiences. In this provocative and important book, Kate Braid tells the story of how she became a carpenter in the face of skepticism and discouragement.

In 1977 when Braid was broke and out of work, her male friends encouraged her to apply as a labo …

As a schoolteacher in Redding, California, in the late 1940s, Doris Lee (née Pope) had a satisfying career, creature comforts, and a fashionable wardrobe. Then she fell in love with John Lee, a kind-hearted rancher who grew up on horseback and hunted for food.

Doris and John were married in 1949, and two years later migrated from the world they kn …

A proud son of Bella Coola's Norwegian settlers, Lorne Greenaway grew up in the Okanagan in a time when kids left home after breakfast to face the day's adventures (and misadventures) armed with only an uncomplicated faith in their own youthful immortality. When Lorne won a pony in the Red River Cereal contest, a lifelong love of animals was born. …

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 uneven …

Annie Garland Foster was born in Fredericton, NB, in 1875. She was an educator, nurse, politician, social reformer, journalist and biographer of Pauline Johnson. But she was also a bit of a mystery.

In 1939, Annie wrote an autobiography titled "Passing Through" in which she described the challenges and adventures of her earlier life: as a co-ed at U …

In Wake-Up Call, Sterling Haynes shares the humorous and sometimes tragic tales of his life as a frontier doctor: a man shoots off his big toe in a drunken binge and then begs the doc to get him to Sunday Mass on time, an inmate swallows a spoon to avoid solitary confinement, an accident with a Murphy bed leaves a man hanging for more than ten hour …

In 1926, Lillian Alling, a European immigrant, set out on a journey home from New York. She had little money and no transportation, but plenty of determination. In the three years that followed, Alling walked all the way to Dawson City, Yukon, crossing the North American continent on foot. She walked across the Canadian landscape, weathering the ba …

She grew up playing on log booms and living in float houses, and at nine years old she learned to shoot a rifle and hunt game. Strong-willed and independent, Betty Frank always had a difficult time following the rules laid down by others. Rather than sit in a classroom and learn the times tables, she preferred to be out roaming the hills with her . …

Life has always been a bit of a gamble for Darcy Christensen. Born in Ocean Falls in 1929, he was raised in Bella Coola Valley and Anahim Lake on the Chilcotin Plateau. The Christensen family were among the earliest white settlers on the Central Coast and West Chilcotin and his maternal grandfather, John Clayton, was the Hudson's Bay Company's last …

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 Hammond …

Starting with his first patient, a horse, Ben Dlin discovered that rural doctors are called upon to do things that he never dreamed of when he was an intern.

"I learned that I had to be prepared to do anything, any time and any place, without regard for the hour, the inconvenience, the exhaustion and the absence of assistance."

Set in the post-war pe …

It began in childhood, when Bruce was a little distant, and progressed into adolescence when Bruce was withdrawn and aggressive but it wasn't until he attempted suicide that the root of Bruce's behaviour was discovered--schizophrenia. After years of successful and unsuccessful treatments, setbacks and progressions, institutionalization and independ …

Sparked by a trip 'home' decades later, Paul Jones begins to remember growing up on the Pembina River, just west of Edmonton. The result is Pembina Country -- a gentle but perceptive look at what it was like to grow up on a hard scrabble farm in the 1930s dust bowl. His finely crafted story recreates the delights and hardships of childhood, no matt …

Escaping from Communist Czechoslovakia on skis with his family in 1948, Jan Drabek's experience of World War II was anything but ordinary. Thirteen follows a young Drabek growing up in tumultuous Prague where Nazi propaganda, clandestine BBC radio broadcasts, conspiratorial talk at home and escapist comedies in the theatres provided an unconvention …