What strange gravity draws two people together? What pulls them apart?

In THE SMALL WAY, a woman re-evaluates herself and her marriage as she comes to terms with a spouse's transition. Intimate and powerful, the poems celebrate the courage of a partner coming out as a trans woman and records the confusion in facing a partner's changing gender ident …

Growing up during the 50s and 60s in small town Alberta, Pam was keenly aware, by the age of nine, that she was a lesbian. And she also knew well to hide this about herself. Pam would search for books on the "The Island of Lesbos", only to return from the library with a copy of Little Women. In between the vast spaces of dust and dugouts, she grows …

After plans to live in Africa shatter, young journalist Laurie Sarkadi moves to the Subarctic city of Yellowknife seeking wilderness and adventure. She covers the changing socio-political worlds of Dene and Inuit in the late '80s-catching glimpses of their traditional, animal-dependent ways-before settling into her own off-grid existence in the bor …

Eileen MacPherson is a child of eight when her beloved sixteen-year-old brother, Francis, leaves home after a violent family episode. Over the next 25 years, everything she understands to be true changes but she never wavers in her yearning to understand the forces that have torn her family apart. The Light a Body Radiates tells the story of Eileen …

Unflinching and heart-stopping stories that evoke a respect for nature both in its fragility and its power. Wild Fierce Life is a heart-stopping collection of true stories from the Pacific Coast that build a vivid portrait of life on the continental edge and one woman's evolving place within it. Author Joanna Streetly arrived on the west coast of V …

Third book by de facto expert on Chinese Immigration to BC reveals never-before-told stories relevant to food, politics and national heritage. In this long awaited third book, author Lily Chow further explores Chinese settlement in BC. In the nineteenth century, thousands of Chinese immigrants arrived in British Columbia to work as labourers. After …

Usually, we take for granted or plain ignore the Earth we walk on, the Sky above, the Water we drink and bathe in or that falls as rain, the Fire we assume for heat, and the Wood that makes up our landscape and building materials. But over fifteen years as a construction carpenter, Kate Braid began to pay more attention to the materials she worked …

A hilarious and captivating novel that challenges expectations and assumptions about women's sexuality and living with disability. Hilarious, captivating and sexy, this new novel by Kim Clark challenges expectations and assumptions about women's sexuality and living with disability.

When Melanie Farrell visits the neurologist she is told her multipl …

A life story sure to inspire a new movement of self-discovery and soul-searching for years to come. A story that captures a life richly lived, celebrating fantasy, passion and the ideals that lie within our soul. Who is to say that the outer stories of our lives are more important than the images that haunt our imagination? What if memoir could cap …

Modern love confessions and reflections just in time for Valentines Day, written by award-winning writers like Lorna Crozier, Susan Olding, Yasuko Thanh, Samra Zafar, and Michael Crummey. What keeps us together? What breaks us apart? In Love Me True, 27 creative nonfiction writers and 16 poets explore how marriage and committed relationships have c …

The emotional unravelling of a mind, body and soul -- a remarkably new and original take on surviving the Holocaust three generations later. Imprint is a profound and courageous exploration of trauma, family, and the importance of breaking silence and telling stories. This book is a fresh and startling combination of history and personal revelation …

From "enemy alien" internment camps to WWI disillusionment - these are the five pivotal years that shaped Fernie, BC, a city instrumental to the national identity of Canada. Fernie, a small community located in BC's Kootenay region, entered the First World War in 1914 with optimism and a sense of national pride-it emerged five years later having ex …

In the same vein of tree planters and lighthouse keepers, Mary Kelly flips the over-romanticized lifestyle of fire observers made popular by Jack Kerouac and shows us how lonely freedom really is. When Mary meets Daniel, a handsome quirky potter, sarod-player, and fire lookout observer, she falls in with a tribe of young people who earn a living by …

First in new photobook series geared to surveying buffs from prolific author and historian, Jay Sherwood. In 1917 Canada commemorated its 50th anniversary against the backdrop of World War I. Although the war effort was the main focus of the federal and provincial governments, some important projects continued. The Alberta-BC boundary survey, which …

The hidden life of Howe Sound and the transformative power of Coast Salish culture and environmental science. An exhilarating mix of natural history and personal exploration Whale in the Door is a passionate account of a woman's transformative experience of her adopted home. For thousands of years, Howe Sound, an inlet in the Salish Sea provided ab …

The posthumous poetry journal of Rani Rivera, Toronto's champion of mental health advocacy and harm reduction. In All Violet, a young woman chronicles the experience of living on the margins, in spaces and places where body and mind are flayed by guilt, disappointments and betrayals. Her poems record the shattering trauma of struggling to survive t …

New poetry written by prize-winning BC poets, musicians, and artists such as Bruce Cockburn, Brian Brett and Lorna Crozier, anthologized by Victoria's city poet-laureate. While in the world of politics there are still climate change deniers, the poets watch the warming seas, the dying birds slicked in oil, the whales, the jellies, the sea otters an …

On the day that Lou James finds her father dead on the garage floor, she leaves her small hometown and heads for Toronto on a Greyhound, initiating a series of events that will reshape her life. Lou moves in with her brother and begins a new existence all the while trying to make sense of her father's unexpected death and the sudden loss of her pla …

On the 120th anniversary of Amelia Earhart's birth and the 80th anniversary of her disappearance, award-winning poet, Heidi Greco revitalizes what we know about the iconic aviator through uplifting and historically mesmerizing verse. If most people were asked what they know about Amelia Earhart, they'd probably respond with something like "Wasn't s …

Adventure, family, and the wild — one woman's story of starting a family on the border of BC, the Yukon, and any semblance of human settlement. In 1974, Terry Milos moved to rural northern Canada, to pursue her dream of homesteading. Following the seventies trend of the back-to-landers, she and her partner left the city life for what they imagine …

Legendary tales of pioneers and adventurers cultivating BC's Cariboo Plateau in between the 19th and 20th century. The romantic backwoods landscape known as the North Bonaparte, stretches east from 70 Mile House to Bridge Lake and is full of small remote ranches, hidden abandoned homesteads, and rutted roads leading to graves in forgotten meadows. …

Compelling and honest life of a stubborn BC rancher living tenaciously in the face of her Multiple Sclerosis condition. The devastating diagnosis of an incurable, debilitating disease does not ordinarily form the starting point of a triumphant story. This, however, is a triumphant story. Heidi Redl was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2004 and …

Butch: Not Like the Other Girls is a photographic exploration of the liminal spaces occupied by female masculinity in contemporary communities. Its first incarnation exhibited as a public art project in transit shelters around Vancouver in March-April 2013, with a simultaneous gallery show at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre (the Cultch). Accordi …

An anthology of Canadian immigrant women and their experiences of being caught between the world of their past and the world of their future. In this third anthology in the Canadian women series by Caitlin Press, Canadian immigrant women from a variety of ethnicities and intersecting identities share their diverse and personal stories.

A woman takes …

A coming-of-age novel contrasting a daughter's disappointment in her mother's abandonment with the generational differences around feminist values. Summer 1971. While women demand equality, protests erupt over the Vietnam War, and peace activists march, adolescent Maybe Collins' life in quiet Oak Bay is upended by the appearance of her mother, who …

A collection of historical stories about the early indigenous people, settlers, trappers, and adventurers of BC's Cariboo Chilcotin. A compilation of stories that meld both culture and bloodlines, Chilcotin Chronicles by Sage Birchwater is set in the wild and untamed country of central British Columbia's Chilcotin Plateau. West of the Fraser River, …

Curious about the previous inhabitants of the lake where her family has spent the summer for over one hundred years, author Shelley O'Callaghan starts researching and writing about the area. But what begins as a personal journey of one woman's relationship to the land and her desire to uncover the history of her family's remote cabin turns into an …

The redefinition of family values as seen from the eyes of a polyamorous, queer Italian Canadian obsessed with food.

This mouthwatering, intimate, and sensual memoir traces Monica Meneghetti's unique life journey through her relationship with food, family and love. As the youngest child of a traditional Italian-Catholic immigrant family, Monica lear …

Beautifully illustrated children's story about Canadian wildlife by famed Canadian conservationist and Governor General Award-winning author, Roderick Haig-Brown. First published as a limited edition in 1980 by Colophon Books, ALISON'S FISHING BIRDS by BC's acclaimed author and conservationist Roderick Haig-Brown is the story of a young girl's enco …

Star-studded collection of CanLit's most notable and diverse women authors to be published in Canada's oldest literary journal by and about women. Making Room: Forty Years of Room Magazine celebrates the history and evolution of Canadian literature and feminism with some of the most exciting and thought-provoking fiction, poetry, and essays the mag …

From the 1920s to 1952, George and Else Seel lived about sixty kilometres south of Burns Lake near the small farming settlement of Wistaria on the western shore of Ootsa Lake. Like many early twentieth century settlers who migrated to BC's Central Interior, the Seels came in search of opportunity and prosperity, but the harsh environment posed chal …

Josephine Caplin (Jo) was born into a world marred by maternal abandonment, alcoholism and traumatic epileptic seizures. In grade three, she was apprehended by child services and separated from her protective brother and her early caregivers, her father and uncle, who were kind men with drinking problems. Placed into many alienating and lonely fost …

Jane Byers' Acquired Community is both a collection of narrative poems about seminal moments in North American lesbian and gay history, mostly post-World War II, and a series of first person poems that act as a touchstone to compare the narrator's coming out experience within the larger context of the gay liberation movement.

The "parade" poems such …

The Day of the Dead: Sliver Fictions, Short Stories & An Homage is a series of collisions between genders in the realms of sexuality, relationships, art and grief in three sections: Men & Women, Muses and The Dead. Owen explores secrecies, abject pasts, misunderstood desires, the urgency to create and the horrors of loss. The Day of the Dead takes …

Kara-lee MacDonald is a survivor. The poems in Eating Matters are sophisticated explorations of anorexia and bulimia, from within and in retrospect, as the semiautobiographical narrator faces and overcomes her complex drives and compulsions. Through a variety of poetic forms, she explores the deep structures of body images and societal pressures th …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 justi …

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 …

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 …

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 his cattle ranch, the place her family calls home, or in the little town twelve bush mi …