For many, the Doukhobor story is a sensational one: arson, nudity and civil disobedience once made headlines. But it isn't the whole story. Our Backs Warmed by the Sun: Memories of a Doukhobor Life is an intricately woven, richly textured memoir of a family's determination to live in peace and community in the face of controversy and unrest.

When au …

In her debut poetry collection, Shannon McConnell explores the fraught history of New Westminster's Woodlands School, a former "lunatic asylum" opened in 1878 which later became a custodial training school for children with disabilities before its closure in 1996. Partially set in the 1960s and 70s, The Burden of Gravity uses personas to imagine re …

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 …

The German word zugunruhe translates as the “stirring before moving.” It’s used to describe birds and herds of animals, like wildebeests, before the great migration. Though Jules Torti is neither German nor a wildebeest, she understands this marrow-deep anxiousness all too well; she is just someone looking for a home.

Free to a Good Home is ev …

In the early days of British Columbia, pack trains of horses or mules were a lifeline for the early pioneer population. Explorers, trappers, traders, miners, merchants, workers and settlers and relied on them for the materials needed to live and work. Packers were also vital to the building of railways, roads, and telegraph lines. Pack mule train d …

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 abundant food, shelter, and stories, for the Squamish Nation. After a century of contamination from pulp mills, …

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 t …

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.

When her son almost died at birth and her grandmother passed away, something inside of Claire Sicherman snapped. Her body, which had always …

Pop culture stereotypes, shopping frustrations, fat jokes and misconceptions about health are all ways society systemically rejects large bodies. BIG is a collection of personal and intimate experiences of plus-sized women, non-binary and trans people in a society obsessed with thinness. Revealing insights that are both funny and traumatic, surpris …

Andy and Phyllis Chelsea met during their years spent at the St. Joseph’s Mission School in Williams Lake, BC. Like the thousands of others forced into the church-run residential school system, Andy and Phyllis are no strangers to the ongoing difficulties experienced by most Indigenous peoples in Canada. The couple married in 1964 but brought the …

In her debut collection of poetry, Lisa Baird explores themes of trauma and recovery, everyday violence and queerness from a personal point of view as well as a wider political scope. These poems bear witness to the resilience of bodies and sexualities and are grounded in an earthy humour. Baird's poetic style shifts from lyric to deeply personal t …

Francine Cunningham lives with constant reminders that she doesn't fit the desired expectations of the world: she is a white-passing, city-raised Indigenous woman with mental illness who has lost her mother. In her debut poetry collection on/me, Cunningham explores, with keen attention and poise, what it means to be forced to exist within the margi …

Surveying the 120th Meridian and the Great Divide is the second book of a two-part series describing the initial Alberta/BC boundary survey undertaken between 1913-1924. Surveying the 120th Meridian focuses on the years 1918-1924, when the Alberta crew continued the survey of the 120th meridian while the BC crew split off to continue mapping the Gr …

Born of Indigenous grandmothers and white grandfathers, Irene Kelleher lived all her life in the shadow of her heritage. Her local community in British Columbia's Fraser Valley treated her as if she was invisible. The combination of white and Indigenous descent was beyond the bounds of acceptability by a dominant white society. To be mixed was to n …

Life was one big adventure for Hiram Cody Tegart. At times unbelievable and others just downright impressive, Mountain Man is the celebration of a legend of a man and a legendary way of life that is quickly disappearing.

Cody was born in 1950 on a ranch in BC's Columbia Valley. The bush that surrounded his family's farm was the best playground any k …

How do you establish trust and meaningful connection with a sibling who suffers from schizophrenia? In an attempt to rekindle her relationship with her estranged brother Steve, Joan meets him at the Art Studios in Vancouver, where he takes part in art classes for individuals with a mental illness in a safe, supportive environment. This marks the be …

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 …

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 …

Take a delightful journey through BC's extraordinary bounty and explore the secrets of locally grown fruits and vegetables. In Jane Reid's new book, FRESHLY PICKED, foodies, locavores and gardeners will discover fascinating information about the plentiful harvests that BC farmers produce every year. In this beautiful colour edition, Reid shares val …

When a brain tumour takes the life of Becky Livingston's twenty-three-year-old daughter Rachel, her life makes an unconventional turn. Rachel, an avid traveller, had one wish: to keep exploring the world.

So, for twenty-six months Livingston travels -- untethered and alone -- to Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Australia, India, England, Ireland and Nort …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 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 …

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 …

Curious about the previous inhabitants of the lake community where her family has vacationed 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, soo …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 " …

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 …

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 …

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 …