Fiction

Delivery / Betty Jane Hegerat

ISBN 978-088982-257-3 • pb • 306 pp • $19.95 • Novel • October 2009

Lynn Howard has just begun to appreciate the freedom of the empty nest when Heather, her acerbic, self-centered twenty-year-old daughter announces that she is pregnant. Heather decides that adoption is the practical solution. After the baby is born, stunned and furious to find her heart at war with her head, she declares that she needs more time and she and her baby come home to stay with Lynn. Three weeks later, Heather suddenly insists that Lynn deliver the baby to her adoptive parents before that resolve weakens again.

And this is where the novel begins. Lynn can no more make that delivery than she could give away her own first child, so she stows Beegee in a laundry basket, straps her into the back of the car and drives west out of Calgary.

Alternating between Lynn’s story and Heather’s, the novel explores the burden of too many choices, the indescribable emotional maelstrom of birth and motherhood, and the tangled threads that tie a child to a family.

Betty Jane Hegerat has been a social worker, a teacher, and a serious student of fiction. She has studied at the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, Sage Hill, the Banff Centre, and the University of British Columbia where she completed an MFA in Creative Writing. An avid gardener, she has learned that the challenges of growing food and flowers in an unpredictable climate bear striking resemblance to those of raising children. Domesticity, the messy dynamics of family, the search for “home”, and a deep-rooted love of the Alberta landscape underpin her stories and her obsession with finding truth through examining the secrets and lies in ordinary lives.

Betty Jane Hegerat teaches creative writing for Continuing Education at the University of Calgary, and the Alexandra Writers Centre and is the 2009 Writer in Residence at the Memorial Park Library.

Scrabble Lessons / Leslie Vryenhoek

ISBN 978-088982-259-7 • pb • 192 pp • $18.95 • Short Stories • October 2009

In Scrabble Lessons, characters who have confined themselves to comfortable patterns are suddenly thrown off their games. A young woman trying to control her impulses won’t slice the pricey tomato her lover left on the windowsill, but can’t stop dissecting the relationship. A successful radio personality turns up on her brother’s doorstep carrying all the old family baggage and a terrible new secret. A poetry chapbook with an unusual cover reawakens passion in a lonely insurance broker, while the ordered pattern of a Scrabble game—225 squares, 100 wooden tiles—becomes an anchor in a world tossed by grief and uncertainty.

In this debut collection, set in Winnipeg, Leslie Vryenhoek draws us into the desires of those who are easily overlooked: the chary cook at a home for pregnant women who grieves the transition from nuns to social workers; a down-on-his-luck labourer in Winnipeg’s inner city who wants to ride a stolen bicycle; the middle-aged woman, demoralized by family obligations, who lets a fast-talking chocolate salesman in the door.

These are stories about the longing that gnaws at our most ordinary days, and about those rare moments of acute certainty, even joy, on which whole lives can pivot and change course.

Leslie Vryenhoek is a writer, poet and communications consultant whose work has appeared in magazines and journals across Canada and internationally.

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, she learned to play Scrabble on her mother’s knee. As a teenager, she fell in love with the prairies and moved to Manitoba, where she completed a bachelor of arts at the University of Manitoba, raised two daughters and worked in communications and public relations for the University of Winnipeg and the Canadian Red Cross.

In 2005, Leslie relocated to St. John’s, Newfoundland, where she runs a communications consulting company and is pursuing a diploma in creative writing from Memorial University of Newfoundland.

She won the 2007 Eden Mills Festival Literary Competition, the inaugural Cahoots fiction competition, and the 2003 Dalton Camp Award, and placed third in The Antigonish Review’s Sheldon Currie Fiction Contest in 2005. She has also won several awards for poetry.

Scrabble Lessons is her first book.

Poetry

Harbour / Miranda Pearson

ISBN 978-088982-261-0 • pb • 144 pp • $17.95 • Poetry • October 2009

Miranda Pearson’s latest collection of poetry, Harbour, looks at ways humans are driven to construct territory in whatever space is available, however borrowed or makeshift. In the first section, "Asylum," Pearson turns, for the first time in her writing, to her experience of working in psychiatry. We hear the voices of both caregivers and patients, and flit back and forth between these two roles, contrasting and unraveling their meaning.

Moving from hospitals to museums, the poems explore the tensions between antiquity and modernity, and how we collect and display artifacts, preserving life in frozen morgue-like containment. Ideas on hoarding are touched upon, how even assembling a collection of poetry is a type of acquisition—of imagery, words, ideas, and other texts.

In the final section, "This Liminal Home," lovers hastily improvise make-believe homes in hotel rooms, temporary harbours that provide a fleeting freedom within their anonymous settings. Other poems are situated in airplanes—the quintessential "no-man’s land" betwixt and between time and territory. Architectural imagery recurs throughout the collection, linking the themes of shelter and refuge with bridges, stairs, and corridors. Harbour—the noun and the verb are interchangeable—illuminates the human drive to nest, gathering together ideas on how we seek refuge, a sanctuary, a keep. How we harbour.

Miranda Pearson is the author of two previous books of poetry, Prime and The Aviary. Her poems have also appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals. A graduate of the University of British Columbia’s MFA program, Miranda lives in Vancouver, where she works as a freelance editor, teaches poetry workshops at Simon Fraser University’s Writing and Publishing program, and works in Community Mental Health Care.

Morbidity and Ornament /Steve Noyes

ISBN 978-088982-260-3 • pb • 144 pp • $17.95 • Poetry • October 2009

In his fourth book of poetry, Morbidity and Ornament, Steve Noyes departs from a previous preoccupation with the narrative sequence that he mined in Ghost Country to explore a range of styles and subjects: basketball, Islam, the dissonance and resonance of Chinese culture, the mating habits of slugs, the first year of marriage in a new house, ciagerette smoking and love poems that animals, strangely, inhabit. There are Petrarchan sonnets, poems in mock-Chaucerian middle English, a couple of surreal, winding, anxiety dreams, and a remarkable sequence that intersperses lyrics with homages to the Tang and Song dynasty poets, in Chinese and English. The book is a cornucopia that defies thematic arrangement.

Steve Noyes is the author of five books of fiction and poetry, the most recent of which is Ghost Country. He has won writing grants from the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council. His poems, fictions and book reviews appear regularly in such magazines and newspapers as the Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, Event, The Globe and Mail, Queen’s Quarterly, and the Vancouver Sun.

He has lived three of the past ten years in China, and returns to his home in Victoria, where he writes and works for the BC Ministry of Health.

Children's Titles

The Sky Tree / P. K. Page and Kristi Bridgeman

ISBN 978-088982-258-0 • hc • 112 pp • $19.95 • A Trilogy of Children’s Fables • Full colour illustrations • Nov. 2009

This trilogy of enchanting fables begins with the search for a husband for the Princess of Ure. Three men vie for her hand, and undergo great trials to prove themselves worthy of her. Her true love, Galaad, wins.

After many adventures involving a wicked Wizard, flying goats, and other dazzling delights, the story ends with the King and Queen’s ascent to Heaven. Their son, Treece, becomes the new King.

P. K. Page is also an artist who paints under the name P. K. Irwin. She is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, travel, short stories, and children’s books. She has won numerous prizes, including the Governor General’s Prize for Poetry, has eight honorary degrees, is a Companion of the Order of Canada, a member of the Order of British Columbia and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Kristi Bridgeman lives in Saanich, B.C. with her husband and two children. She has illustrated several books. Her fine art pieces can be found at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and Sooke Harbour House Gallery.

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