Incidental Music / Carol matthews

ISBN 0-88982-234-4 • ISBN13 978-088982-234-4 • 208 pp $19.95 • pb • September 2007 • Short Stories

“There has to be give and take in a marriage,” Tannis’s father tells her when she becomes engaged. “You’ll find the lasting value of a marriage appears not at the beginning but later, towards the end. It is a journey, not a destination. And it’s how you travel, day by day, that makes the difference.” The seven linked stories comprising Incidental Music show Tannis facing the contretemps of maturity, mid-life, aging and abandonment. Set in Montreal, Vancouver and Vancouver Island, these stories trace the geographic and emotional journeys of Tannis and her husband, Stephen, as they negotiate the day-to-day twists, turns, impasses and throughways of their domestic and work lives.

Incidental Music covers a range of life situations in which women struggle to make the choice that is right and good. An approaching marriage presents tensions between a future husband and an eccentric father; a woman has to choose between the worlds of her daily psychoanalysis and her domestic relationship; an aging voice artist opts to leave her day-trading fiancée. Music runs through these stories, in title, theme and event, suggesting the line between the remembered past and the unknown future: “Shhh,” says one character, “listen to the music. Just follow it, one note at a time.” Poignant, humorous, these compassionate stories are also concerned with the larger social landscape. Underlying each one is a sense of hope and a belief in people and in the bonds that unite them.

Carol Matthews was born in Vancouver and, after living in Montreal and Nanaimo, has settled on Protection Island. A writer and consultant, she has worked as a hospital social worker, executive director of a family organization, and as a college instructor and administrator. Her articles have appeared in a number of educational and literary publications and in anthologies. She is a regular book reviewer for Event Magazine and The Malahat Review, and writes a quarterly column for The Relational Journal of Child and Youth Care.

“When stories are told wisely and with compassion for the characters, we are drawn in by them as we are by a good teacher: willingly and with a desire to hear more. In this quietly assured début collection, Carol Matthews leads us artfully into the lives of Tannis and Stephen, Caitlin and Paul, Diane and Warren, Frances and David, couples who cope with their past, with the darkness that looms, pausing often to contemplate the joys that stay with them: food, sex, friends, art and the sweet familiarity of the music they have always loved. What we come away with is rich. What we come away with is true.”
— Terence Young.

Elf the Eagle /Ron Smith; Illustrated by Ruth Campbell

Finalist for the Christie Harris Illustrated Children's Literature Prize, BC Book Prizes 2008

ISBN 0-88982-241-7 • ISBN13 978-088982-241-2 • 40 pp $19.95 • cl • October 2007 • Full colour illustrations
• Ages 5 to 8

Elf The Eagle Study Guide

This delightful book tells the story of Elf, a baby eagle who worries about many things, including the distance from his nest, high up in a tree, to the ground, way, way down below. He also worries about his sister, Edwina, who is older and more adventurous than he is, and who spreads her wings and flies out of their nest, which frightens Elf a great deal. Eventually, when his baby down grows into strong, black feathers, Elf ’s parents stop bringing him food, and tempt him with tasty morsels that they keep just out of reach. Elf gets very hungry and one day he accidentally tumbles out of his nest. As he starts to fall, his parents yell at him to flap his wings. He does, and he is flying! At the story’s end, Elf can’t wait for dawn to break so he can fly all the way to the sun.

With beautiful, full-colour illustrations by Vancouver artist Ruth Campbell, Elf is an inspiring story, told with gentle humour. It will delight children, who will relate to Elf ’s fears and will realize, as he does, that they too will grow into their wings and fly, when the time is right.

Ron Smith lives on Vancouver Island in a house by the sea, where eagles soar and nest in the trees near his home. He is the author of four collections of poetry, a play, and a book of short stories. He is the founder and publisher of Oolichan Books. Elf the Eagle is his first book for children.

Ruth Campbell is a painter born and raised in Montreal. She has degrees in arts and law, and is also a graduate of the Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design. She lives in Vancouver with her husband, Robin, and their small family of four cats and two dogs. She is the illustrator of Words, a children’s picture book.

“With wide eyes, lopsided wings, and unsteady feet, Elf the baby eagle hesitates at the edge of the world. He doesn’t know yet what his parents and sister are trying to teach him: that he belongs to the air, and the air to him. Perhaps you know someone like this? You’ll love this delightful tale. Join Elf as he learns to fly. Fly with him as he grows beyond fear and discovers joy.”
— W. H. New

For more information on eagles, please visit the following websites:

• Fraser Valley Bald Eagle Festival
• American Bald Eagle Information
• American Eagle Foundation

Other Oolichan titles by Ron Smith:

• What Men Know About Women $17.95 pb • $27.95 hc
• Enchantment & Other Demons $12.95

Mush and the Big Blue Flower / Laurie Payne illustrated by Ruth Campbell

ISBN 0-88982-242-5 • ISBN13 978-088982-242-5 • 112 pp $21.95 • cl • September 2007 • Children’s chapter book/fantasy • Ages 4 to 8.

Mush is a Gypsy word meaning ‘friend.' Mush and the Big Blue Flower is the story of a little boy who is persuaded that he has lost his voice. Unwilling to return to his mother without it, he goes looking for it. He meets a rather strange cast of characters and befriends a magical flying teapot who becomes his guide and transportation as he travels around looking for his voice and other senses, which the odd individuals he meets persuade him he is missing. Deeper and deeper into the lands of magic he travels, becoming more and more confused. For it seems that, although the people he meets are most friendly and determined to help him, they are all so dangerously misguided that time and again Mush is only able to escape danger at their hands with the help of the teapot and its counter-spells. A final terrifying confrontation puts Mush to the ultimate test. Despite his terror, he manages to summon enough courage to surmount his fears and in the process clears the way for a happy reunion with his voice and his other senses.

With playful humour and a delightfully loopy cast of characters, Mush and the Big Blue Flower tells how we all lose our voices, along with our ability to dream and to believe in the magic of imaginative play, as we emerge from childhood. It also tells how, with courage and the determination to be free, each of us can rediscover our own authentic selves.

Laurie Payne was born and raised in England. He lived in the UK, Australia, and the United States before settling in the Shuswap valley in British Columbia in the 1960s. He is an artist whose work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Bau Xi Gallery in Vancouver. He is also a sculptor, potter and writer. Mush and the Big Blue Flower is his first children’s book.

Ruth Campbell is a painter born and raised in Montreal. She has degrees in arts and law, and is also a graduate of the Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design. She lives in Vancouver with her husband, Robin, and their small family of four cats and two dogs. She is the illustrator of Words, a children’s picture book.

Along A Snake Fence Riding / W. H. New

ISBN 0-88982-236-0 • ISBN13 978-088982-236-8 • 96 pp $17.95 • pb • September 2007 • Poetry

Along a Snake Fence Riding is a long poem for eight voices. One of these voices is that of the narrator, who steps into the poem “from time to time” to record a life of intention and ambition, resistance and refusal, byways of discovery and decision, and continuing persistence. Other voices speak “out of time.” These are the voices of memory and experience, flooding back in fragments, recalling moments in a life (or the moments of living) — not in chronological sequence but by association, as though set in motion by the senses, or by the twisting circuits of thought. In the background, constant but often ignored, is the last of the eight voices, the voice of the clock, which carries time forward even while the mind is collapsing duration into momentariness, refusing the conventions of sequence, and revisiting the past as though it were happening even now.

The poem is, in short, a meditation on time and memory, and on the science of time and memory: rich in allusion and eloquent in imagery, wide-ranging and yet remarkable in its close attention to detail. The poem invites readers not just to follow the life that is imagined on these pages but to venture into their own lives, discover the joy and the pain of living in connection — in connection with other people, with love and loss, and with the environment we sometimes ignore and yet always call home.

Along a Snake Fence Riding is an experience, a visceral, emotional experience, that calls the reader to follow the fence line wherever it irregularly wanders, to immerse in the river it follows, to engage with the music of the language and discover, too, the possibility of celebration.

W. H. New is the author of a wide range of books, including several books for children, the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada, Underwood Log (shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry), and Touching Ecuador. His writing has received wide recognition, including the Lorne Pierce Medal and the Governor General’s International Award in Canadian Studies. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2006. Along a Snake Fence Riding is his eighth book of poetry. While some of his earlier work took readers travelling around the world, this new collection takes them time-travelling: into the workings of narrative and memory.

The Incorrection / George McWhirter

Finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, BC Book Prizes 2008

ISBN 0-88982-243-3 • ISBN13 978-088982-243-6 • 176 pp $17.95 • pb • September 2007 • Poetry

From Sasamat Street in Vancouver to Samoa, the fish, fowl and animals ask what we are up to with our fixings, our vegetarian dressings-up of salad and tofu to make them meat enough for us. Will that change the flux of our existence on the planet, the flow of everything in the old world into memory—from primary instinct into new good intentions, which turn into coils of the hangman’s rope, dangling over every deed—like mistletoe, waiting for the farewell kiss to all that, at low-cal Christmas, or next diet-mined and minded fest? The poems and the personae fight the battle between fat and thin, rhyme and un-rhyme, merely to find that love and poetry don’t care what shape or form we’re in, so long as we’re subject to the natural Law of Incorrection: In trying to correct an old wrong/I seem to create a new one/and find myself arraigned/by a hapless incorrection.

Born in 1939 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, George McWhirter grew up on the Shankill Road. He attended Queen’s University in Belfast, where his classmates included Seamus Heaney, and later completed a Masters degree at the University of British Columbia. McWhirter lived in Spain from 1965 to 1966, when he moved to Canada where he taught high school in Port Alberni, making an abrupt transition from Barcelona to living in a log cabin by Sproat Lake. He is the author of twenty books, many of which have won major awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the MacMillan Prize for Poetry, the Canadian Chapbook Poetry Competition Winner, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the FR Scott Prize for Translation.

In 2005, George McWhirter retired as a professor in the Creative Writing Department at UBC. In 2007 he was inaugurated as the first Poet Laureate for the City of Vancouver.

"McWhirter’s apprehension of nature partakes of the intensity and visionary quality of medieval Irish poetry; in this he is akin to Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley. But a sardonic humour utterly his own leavens the tenderness . . ."
— Books In Canada

"To sit with George . . . takes one into the ancient world of oral recounting, as the tales of Irish life pour out in an Ulster English as soft as rainwater, the voice rising and falling, sometimes as low as a whisper."
— George Woodcock

"George McWhirter's flashes assert transcendent meaning, with a literalness that seems almost medieval."
— Malahat Review

Other Oolichan titles by George McWhirter:

• The Book of Contradictions
• A Staircase For All Souls

• Oolichan's 2007 Spring Titles
• Oolichan's 2006 titles