Leaving the Farm / Ross Klatte

0-88982-237-9 • 344 pp • $22.95 • pb • March 2007 • Memoir/Farm Life

Leaving the Farm is a poignant, funny, beautifully rendered memoir about growing up on a small Minnesota dairy farm in the 1950s. It was a time when family farms throughout North America were beginning to disappear. Central to this story is the struggle between a bookish, daydreaming boy and his self-made, driven father — the tension between real life on the farm and the boy’s imaginative world.

It’s a story that lovingly delineates the richness and drudgery of farm life, the emotion of family ties, and a rapturous intimacy with nature. Above all it’s a farm boy’s story. At first, the farm, with its surrounding fields and woods, provides a natural playground for the boy. Later, called upon to do a man’s work and expected to take over the farm someday, the boy begins to feel trapped and dreams of escape. He escapes into worlds of his imagination based on avid reading and his longing for other places.

One day he is shocked awake, into dreadful reality, when his four-year-old sister is killed on the farm. Within a year and a half of that terrible accident, his parents hold an auction of their livestock and machinery and the boy leaves for Navy boot camp. This memoir is Ross Klatte’s tender requiem for his lost sister, for the father with whom he struggled for freedom, and for his childhood on the farm, whose shape has indelibly imprinted itself on the man he has become.

Ross Klatte was born in Minneapolis and raised on his family’s dairy farm just west of the city. After serving four years in the U.S. Navy as a journalist and obtaining a B.A. in journalism from the University of Minnesota, he worked as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, as feature editor of the National Bowlers Journal, in Chicago, and as a copy editor for the Detroit Free Press. He immigrated with his wife to Canada in 1971 and homesteaded near Nelson, BC, where he lives with his wife. The opening chapter of his memoir is adapted from his original essay, which won the first prize in the CBC Literary Competition for 1990.

“Ross Klatte sweeps the reader immediately into the excitement and fascination of childhood on a Minnesota farm. His loving attention to detail, and his consummate literary skill, takes the reader on a ride as wild as a toboggan run down a steep hillside alongside the barn.”
— Tom Wayman

“Ross Klatte leads us to an epic comprehension of the loss of one family’s farm, with writing so eloquent and disarming, so deftly nuanced and intensely moving that my sorrowful empathy with the tragedy herein is balanced by the sheer pleasure of reading such good writing. This is a wonderful achievement.”
— Caroline Woodward

The Year I Got Impatient / Valerie Stetson

0-88982-238-7 • 160 pp • $18.95 • pb • April 2007 • Fiction/Short Stories

A tragic accident leads to a disastrous love affair. A midlife crisis leads a man to trespass in a private pool. A marriage is torn apart when the husband becomes manic depressive. This collection of stories follows men and women in different walks of life while they cope with the events, good and bad, that shape them. In many ways, these stories look at how people bridge the differences between them, whether their differences are of race, culture, age or sensibility. These are stories of people in transition and an account of how they face everything from unlucky twists of fate to their own personal demons.

In these eight stories, the reader encounters a variety of characters: an auto body painter turned manic depressive, an unhappy art gallery owner who trespasses into a private pool in order to recapture his joie de vivre, a bitter, aged mother whose daughter suddenly redefines her sense of duty, an arrogant Czech engineer who is brought to her knees by an unexpected love affair. From the desperate to the dashing, all are clouted by life’s vagaries. Whether the sorrows range from the tragic— a senseless death — to the absurd— choking down a plate-sized, clandestinely imported mushroom at a dinner party — no one escapes unscathed. As their tales unfold, some characters stumble into false moves, while others find a way to triumph over their circumstances.

Valerie Stetson’s fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous literary journals and three anthologies. In 2001, she received The Bronwen Wallace Award for her story: “The Year I Got Impatient.” Her articles have appeared in The Globe and Mail , The Toronto Star and The Times Colonist. She lives in Kelowna with her husband and two step-kids, and is currently writing a novel. The Year I Got Impatient is her first book.

Father Tongue / Danielle Lagah

0-88982-235-2 • 112 pp • $17.95 • pb• April 2007• Poetry

Father Tongue is a poetic exploration of one family’s Indo-Canadian immigrant experience. The family’s stories of life in India and Canada are told in several voices, but the lens through which they are focused is the consciousness of the narrator — a young woman of mixed blood who is seeking to find her footing between two conflicting worlds. Bringing together the legends, secrets, and facts of her family’s history, she unearths and pieces together the stories of grief and triumph that will ultimately serve to illuminate her own truths. There is the story of Piari, her father’s sister, who was mysteriously poisoned to death at the age of seven in the family’s Indian village of Pubwan; the story of her father’s battle with a childhood illness believed to be caused by supernatural possession. And there is the story of the narrator’s own journey to the land of her ancestors — one that is marked by revelation and discovery of the purest kind. These are tales of betrayal and cruelty, death and birth, joy, and fierce love — in a word, family stories.

It’s been said that we can “reclaim truth from the lies of poetry.” Father Tongue uses the language of poetry to bridge the chasm between two cultures, two worlds separated by barriers of language, tradition, geography, history, and very different ways of viewing the world. Through poetry, the author has chosen to record, preserve, and ultimately construct her narrative.

The two worlds of the book — the dream-like landscape of far away India, and the concrete reality of the West Coast — are depicted in poems that merge verse with elements of prose and scripting, a method that serves to echo Father Tongue’s themes of disconnectedness and cultural blending.

“ Lagah’s poems are beautiful, lucid stepping stones through the rivers of imagination that surround her south Asian heritage. This is not a bridge between cultures, but a palimpsest: a document of Lagah’s own life written between the lines of inherited and witnessed stories of village, family, illness and disappearance — streams that feed a narration that began with her father’s tales of a secret garden in India. A unique, inclusive journey through the world of emigration, difference and adaptation, written with exceptional clarity.”
— Marilyn Bowering

Danielle Lagah was born in Victoria, BC. Her mother is of Scottish descent, and her father immigrated to Canada from the Punjab. Her poetry and short fiction have been published in literary journals and anthologies, and featured on CBC radio. Danielle travels to India and China several times a year for her work as a wholesale home décor buyer and stylist, a profession that allows her to constantly observe the effects and nuances of cross-culturalization. She lives in Nanoose Bay with her partner, Oakley, and their Scottish Fold cat, Zampano.

Notes For A Rescue Narrative / J. Mark Smith

0-88982-233-6 • 80 pp • $16.95 • pb• April 2007 • Poetry

Story rescues no one from death, but out of the seams and lacunae of narrative a certain kind of lyric can emerge. In Notes for a Rescue Narrative, J. Mark Smith charts the oxbow turnings of diverse human voices through scepticism and belief, hope and despair, pride and humility. Inspired by the elegiac plainness of Wordsworth as much as by the many-mindedness of Pound, Smith’s poems probe into regions of experience where meaning falls away, and “the names hardly stick.”

A middle-aged British sailor remembers, decades afterwards, a strange “human-and-not-human” incident in the colonial port of Bombay. A man walking his dog near the Katyn monument in Toronto wonders at signs, and at the “mother-deep” ocean of human suffering. In a moment “out of an airport,” the speakers and story-tellers of the Mackenzie River regroup and ready themselves, not for a rescue, but for the future. Blue jays in the pine forests of the Great Basin turn through a death-dance of forgetfulness and fecundity. A traveller on a snow-bound plane straightens his spine to bear the difficult reality of an unstoried present. A man buries his long-dead father’s alpine equipment beneath a mountain in California, and finds a new welcome in the familiar “noise of chaos.”

Notes for a Rescue Narrative moves deftly between metrical and free verse forms, and includes homages to Horace, Eugenio Montale, and Antonio Machado.

J. Mark Smith was born in Eugene, Oregon and grew up in Edmonton. After twenty-five years of living in other places, including southern California and Toronto, Smith recently returned to his home-town of Edmonton to teach in the English department at Grant MacEwan College. Smith’s poems and creative non-fiction pieces have been published in literary journals and magazines. Notes For A Rescue Narrative is his first book of poems. He holds a doctorate in English from UC Irvine, and has published scholarly articles on nineteenth and twentieth century poetry and poetics. He lives with his wife, Jennifer Stewart, and their dog, Jasper, near the North Saskatchewan river valley.

Words / Mark Ellis & Ruth Campbell

0-88982-227-1 • 40 pp • $19.95 hc • August 2006

Words is a story of a child who can't read "because the words dance around and won't stay still." This tender and inspiring tale challenges the cultural assumption that every child can access written language. As many teachers, librarians, and parents know, a number of children have difficulty reading. With understanding and empathy, the teacher-librarian in Words encourages the child to read, and eventually to write her own stories.

Written in lyrical language, rich in images, Words contains gorgeous full colour illustrations by Vancouver artist Ruth Campbell.

• Click here to download study guide (PDF)

Mark Ellis lives in Marlborough, England. Over the years he has lived and worked in India, Thailand, North Africa, and many European countries. Married to an American for 35 years he has also spent a lot of time in Canada and the United States. For most of his life he has worked in the field of education as an English language specialist. He is the author of five novels.

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 College of Art & Design. She lives in Vancouver with her husband, Robin, and their small family of four cats and two dogs. Some of their pets are featured in Ruth's illustrations for Words.

The Blue Sky / Galsan Tschinag
Translated by Katharina Rout

0-88982-232-8 • 144 pp • $24.95 hc • September 2006

"The hero may be a simple shepherd boy, but his tale is nothing short of epic. With this novel, a Mongolian shaman had stepped onto the stage of world literature."
— Der Spiegel (Germany)

In the high Altai Mountains of northern Mongolia, the nomadic Tuvan people's ancient way of life collides with the pervasive influence of modernity as seen through the eyes of a young shepherd boy.

The confrontation comes in stages. First his older siblings leave the family yurt to attend a distant boarding school. Then the boy's grandmother dies, and with her the boy's connection to the tribes. But the greatest tragedy strikes when his dog, Arsylang—"all that was left to me"—dies after ingesting poison set out by the boy's father to protect his herd from wolves. "Why is it so?" he cries out in despair to the Heavenly Blue Sky, but he is answered only by the silence of the wind.

Rooted in the oral traditions of the Tuvan people and their epics, Galsan Tschinag weaves the timeless story of a boy poised on the cusp of manhood, and with it the tale of a people on the threshold of a vanishing way of life.

Galsan Tschinag was born in the High Altai Mountains in western Mongolia into a family of nomadic herders. His family belongs to the Tuvan people and traditionally held a position of wealth and leadership. Tschinag was trained as a shaman. As a young boy, he traveled to Leipzig where he studied German language and literature and began to write, mostly in German. He is the author of more than thirty books, mostly short fiction, novels, and poetry, published in Germany and Switzerland.

Tschinag has been awarded several German literary awards, including the Order of the Federal Republic of Germany, as well as a Danish literary award and the two highest orders of the Republic of Tuva. A film by Oscar-winner Florian Gallenberger, based on the Tuvinian Tale, is in the works.

"Tschinag's books have reached well beyond his native Altai mountains, and with good reason. They speak of a true partnership between people and nature, and in a language as clear and stark as the steppes." — Südwest Presse (Germany)

"Tschinag describes the strenuous days spent between the herd of sheep and the yurt with both affection and precision, and evokes the stunning landscape in a particularly memorable way, all of it contributing to the unlikely sense one has as a reader that we are remembering our own childhood."— Die Welt (Germany)

• Oolichan's 2006 titles