Fiction

Penny Loves Wade, Wade Loves Penny / Caroline Woodward

ISBN 978-088982-267-2 • pb • 256 pp • $18.95 • Fiction • September 2010

In this long-awaited novel, Caroline Woodward returns to her Peace River roots. Penny Loves Wade, Wade Loves Penny is a contemporary story about middle-aged love enduring despite prolonged separations. The story winds around Penny Toland, resolute ranch wife and part-time teacher, and her husband, Wade, reluctant rancher and good man, adrift behind the wheel of his long-haul truck. Wade loops south on an odyssey from the Peace River region to the West Coast and across the province through the Okanagan and Kootenays. At home, Penny endures covetous neighbours, not-so-friendly bank managers, and suave strangers, while Wade encounters lotus-landers, biker gangs, and a ravishing all-woman country punk band called The Sireens. As the first winter blizzard blankets the north country, Wade makes a desparate push home to prove his love for Penny.

"A beautifully written and marvelous story! Characters with dignity, characters you like, care for, root for."
— Paulette Jiles, author of The Color of Lightning

“Woodward’s crisp, earthy writing cuts to the chase of what it is to be human in this finely crafted novel about hard times, love, and the best of intentions. Wade and Penny will live on in my imagination for a long time.”
— Anne DeGrace, author of Sounding Line

Prez: Homage to Lester Young / Jamie Reid

ISBN 978-088982129-3 • pb • 52 pp • $14.95 • Poetry • May 2010

Lester Young has been described as jazz’s first hipster who forever changed the sound of the tenor saxophone. In Prez, Jamie Reid creates an evocative image of Young with poetry and poetic prose that resonates with the fluid notes of Lester’s music.

“Cooler in tone than many of the raving epiphanies of Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsburg, Prez unmistakably partakes of both their style and substance in its jazz-derived improvisations-on-a-theme form and its deeply humanistic take on life.”
— John Moore, Vancouver Sun

“A strong, focused, and unified work that will long be in the collections of poets and musicians.”
— Victory Review

Homage to Lester Young was first published by Oolichan Books in 1993. Its author, Jamie Reid, was one of the five original editors of TISH, the Vancouver poetry newsletter that changed the face of Canadian poetry in the early 1960s. He is the author of four volumes of poetry, beginning with The Man Whose Path Was on Fire, in 1969. Prez was written in 1987 after Reid was absent for nearly two decades from publishing poetry while engaged in revolutionary political activism. It was followed by Mad Boys in 1997, and then by I. Another. The Space Between in 2004. Diana Krall, The Language of Love, Reid’s commercial biography about the celebrated Canadian jazz artist, appeared in 2002. He is also the author of several chapbooks, most recently homages from Pooka Press, a suite of poems based on his readings of modern French poetry. During the early 1990s, he produced and edited DaDaBaBy, a Dadaist-oriented magazine of poetry and commentary. He is widely published in anthologies, little magazines and electronic media.

This Innocent Corner / Peggy Herring

ISBN 978-088982-268-9 • pb • 304 pp • $19.95 • Fiction • October 2010

Fifty-year-old Robin Rowe returns to Dhaka, Bangladesh, her first visit since she was an exchange student there in 1970. The country, then East Pakistan, was on the brink of the war that led to its independence from Pakistan. Robin was repatriated just as the violence erupted, and as a result of the conflict, lost touch with her friends, and the Chowdhury family with whom she boarded that year. On her return visit, Robin discovers a shocking truth about her legacy in the country. A well-intentioned act she carried out – thwarting an arranged marriage – has resulted in disas- trous consequences: suicide, torture and the disappearance of the beloved Luna Chowdhury. Overwhelmed with this news, she returns home to Salt Spring Island, BC to find the roof of her house has collapsed. As she deals with the reconstruction, she must come to terms with the consequences of her act in Bangladesh, as well as other un- resolved parts of her life: the unexpected loss of her husband, Graham, a decade earlier, and her estranged relationship with her adult daughter, Surinder. Making peace with her mistakes and accepting the uncertainty of her future requires her understanding first the part she has played in the conflicts in her own life, and then becoming willing to engage with a world that is complex, unpredictable and sometimes as stubborn as Robin herself.

Peggy Herring is a writer living in Victoria, BC. Her short fiction appears in literary journals and anthologies in Canada and India. She’s lived in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, England and Japan, working as a journalist, international development consultant and volunteer, and teacher. This Innocent Corner is her first novel.

Young Adult Fiction

Made That Way / Susan Ketchen

ISBN 978-088982-270-2 • pb • 196 pp • $12.95 • YA Fiction • October 2010

In this sequel to Born That Way, Sylvia, fourteen, is now taking medication for Turner’s Syndrome, the genetic disorder with the missing X chromosome. Without treatment, Sylvia will remain short, undeveloped and infertile, and the object of ongoing teasing at school. Unfortunately Sylvia experiences serious side-effects to her medication and grapples with what it means to become “normal”. If the hornless unicorn she dreams about is still very much a unicorn, then is Sylvia still a young woman when she has no ovaries? Against her wishes, Grandpa has shipped Sylvia her first pony, who also turns out to not be normal, or at least not normal for a horse. He bugles instead of whinnying, and there’s something odd about his ears. Brooklyn is a hinny, a hybrid offspring of a male horse and a female donkey. Hinnies are also missing a chromosome, unusually short and sterile. But no one talks about a “hinny disorder”. Sylvia wonders if it is possible that she isn’t "disordered" either. Could she be a hybrid? And how bad would that be, given what they said at the car dealership about hybrids being the way of the future? Determined to take charge of her life, Sylvia first gains mastery over her lucid dreams. She challenges her unicorn spirit guide, she directs him, and eventually no longer needs him. Strength flows into her “real life” where, without being reckless or a bully, she stands up to her parents, she stands up to her tormentors at school, she even stands up to her hero Kansas.

Susan Ketchen was born in Nanaimo, B.C. She holds an M.Sc. degree in Marriage and Family Therapy. She has successfully pursued an alarming number of not overly-long careers and now resides on a small Vancouver Island hobby farm with her husband, two horses, two cats and a flock of chickens. Susan is a member of the B.C. Horse Council, the Comox Valley Dressage Club, and the Comox Valley Writer’s Society. She is a monitor with the Wildlife Tree Stewardship Program, giving her an official excuse to spend many hours staring out the window . . . at the eagles perching and nesting at the edge of the property. She is interested in animal training and teaches her horses to recognize a remarkable number of words, play the piano with their noses, and identify flash cards. Her favourite places to come up with new ideas are the barn, the pasture, and the shower. She has never received creative inspiration while vacuuming.

To learn more about Susan Ketchen and her horse that reads, visit www.susanketchen.ca

Poetry

Two O'Clock Creek Poems New and Selected / Bruce Hunter

ISBN 978-088982-266-5 • pb • 204 pp • $18.95 • Poetry • October 2010

Two O’clock Creek – Poems New and Selected brings together the best of Bruce Hunter’s previous books of poetry as well as exciting new work that shows the sustained development of a life-long poet. Highly acclaimed by Books in Canada, the Calgary Herald, The Globe and Mail, and Canadian Literature, twice short listed for the CBC literary prize, and selected as a People’s Choice winner, Hunter is a poet who goes to the core of life. These poems reveal the mysteries of rivers, the secrets of spurned loves, the lives of workers and the joys and heartbreak of new im- migrants, always against a carefully drawn backdrop, whether urban or rural. The unequivocal and unflinching emotions here move from awe to anger to whimsy in an authentic voice that is in turns, tender, scathing and celebratory. “Two O’clock Creek” is the “seed” poem which inspired Hunter’s novel, In the Bear’s House, which won the 2009 Canadian Rockies Award at the Banff Mountain Festival.

"Bruce Hunter’s poems are steeped in family history, legend, an agile sense of place, character, and are held together by the grit and gust of detail and the strength of sentiment. Two O’clock Creek is a bare-hearted book, composed of muscle and sweat, its verbs balancing a kind of heft and haul that powers the reader through close to thirty years. But it’s the light at the core of Hunter's writing that manages to connect the macho to the transcendent, creating shivers of tenderness."

— Barry Dempster, author of Love Outlandish

Bruce Hunter is the author of three books of poetry, a collection of short stories and the award-winning novel In The Bear’s House. Deafened as an infant, he worked in blue-collar jobs for nearly fifteen years, including variously as a labourer, Zamboni driver and gardener before and after attending Malaspina College. In his late twenties, he studied with W.O. Mitchell at the Banff School of Fine Arts and attended York University. For the past twenty years, he has taught English and Liberal Studies at Seneca College as well as stints teaching Creative Writing at the Banff Centre and York University. In 2002, he was the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Writer in Residence at the Banff Centre. In the fall of 2007, he was Writer in Residence for the Richmond Hill Public Library.

"Bruce Hunter writes with bold restraint and a poet’s sensibility. His blue collar characters walk the tight line of their lives into the common universe that includes us all."
— Wayson Choy, Saturday Night

Wind River Variations / Brian Brett

ISBN 978-088982-269-6 • pb • 184 pp • $22.95 • Poetry • October 2010

Brian Brett’s latest collection of poems, Wind River Variations, addresses the intricate weave of relationships that exists between human beings and the natural landscape. In particular, he speaks to the preservation of the Three Rivers watershed (The Wind River, The Snake River and the Bonnet Plume River). In his acknowledgements he writes: "In an odd kind of way, the plundering of the world in the past is understandable, because there wasn’t the knowledge. Now, there are no excuses, and the almost belligerent and certainly arrogant lust of so many individuals to destroy what remains merely to create more wealth for a few has to make us wonder about the mental health of our species, and its eventual survival."

In these poems, he takes us on an expedition into the Three Rivers watershed with other artists, writers, photographers, painters, naturalists in the hope that what they record will awaken and introduce us to the beauty and importance of this pristine area to the broader culture. In these sometimes bitter and angry, always insightful poems, Brett speaks to the many environmental concerns, both physical and spiritual, that overshadow the diverse eco-systems that are so vital to our humanity and our survival.

Brian Brett has been writing and publishing since the late 1960s. He has also been involved in an editorial capacity with several publishing firms including the Governor-General Award winning Blackfish Press. In the early seventies, he began working as a free lance journalist and critic for various publications and newspapers across the country. His journalism has appeared in almost every major newspaper in Canada, and his essays in most of the major magazines.

Brian Brett inaugurated the B.C. Poetry-In-The-Schools program, introducing children in schools to world poetry. He has been a member of literary organizations ranging from P.E.N. International to the Writer’s Union of Canada amongst others. In May 2005 Brian Brett became the Chair of The Writer’s Union of Canada. His last collection of poems/memoir, Uproar’s Your Only Music, was a Globe and Mail top 100 book of the year. His recent memoir/history, Trauma Farm, is the winner of the 2009 Writers’ Trust of Canada Non-Fiction Prize, was long-listed for the BC Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, nominated for the BC Booksellers’ Choice Award, nominated for the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize, and nominated for the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Book Prize. It is a Canadian best seller, an Amazon top 100 book of 2009, a Globe and Mail top 100 book for 2009, and a Times Literary Supplement top 100 book for 2009!

Brian Brett currently lives on a farm with his family on Saltspring Island, B.C., where he cultivates his garden and creates ceramic forms.

Non-Fiction

Snowdrift / Lisa McGonigle

ISBN 9780889822719 • pb • 204 pp • $18.95 • Travelogue • January 2011

Newly graduated from university in Ireland, Lisa McGonigle came to the Kootenay region of British Columbia to spend a winter snowboarding. She wrote emails to her friends back home describing a remote mountain-town called Fernie, a series of smashes in the terrain park, unrivalled powder turns, working for minimum-wage and duct-taping over the holes in her outerwear. She left to take up a PhD scholarship to Oxford but the lure of the snow was too much. Several months later she abandoned her laptop, clothes and bike in
Oxford and ran away back to BC. She went on to spend another three winters in the Kootenays, trading Fernie for an even smaller, more remote town called Rossland and learning to ski for good measure as well.

Composed of the emails written as events unfolded, and infused with an Irish take on Canadiana, Snowdrift documents the joyous, impoverished and injury-ridden life of a ski-bum who’ll do almost anything for fresh lines and explores just what happens when you leave it all behind to follow the snow.

Lisa McGonigle grew up in North County Dublin, Ireland. She attended Trinity College Dublin and the University of Aberdeen, Scotland before coming to British Columbia in 2005. Having spent several years skiing, snowboarding and hiking in the Kootenays, she is currently studying for a PhD in English at the University of Otago, New Zealand.

Recent Non-Fiction

The Missionary, The Violinist and the Aunt Whose Head was Squeezed / Keith Harrison

ISBN 978-088982-265-8 • pb • 176 pp • $18.95 • Non-Fiction • April 2010

This narrative diary explores the gaps and myths of family history, identity, and expressiveness through the retracing of a many-generational voyage. In this new work, the focus is on his own family and its, at times, troubled and troubling history. The story-line of The Missionary, The Violinist And The Aunt Whose Head Was Squeezed follows a five month journey that he made into the past, with his wife JoAnn as a companion. His father, John, had been born in Tokyo, and studied at Melbourne Grammar School before coming to Vancouver. His father’s father, Ernest, from St Ives, a journalist turned missionary, married Ethel Mercer, described in Melbourne’s Age as “Australia’s leading woman violinist”.

Keith Harrison discovers himself in the inadvertent circle shape of their voyaging, especially in the published writings of his father and grandfather. Of particular interest are the articles from Japan by Ernest during World War I and those by John that just precede World War II, that give a depth of time and range of tone to this composite, many-voiced book, that catches ancestors shaped by love and war. Other documents found on this extended journey not only fill in the past but disrupt myths that had been transmitted down through the years. Key to this re-visioning of the past is the figure of Aunt Betty who suffered brain damage at birth. Ultimately and paradoxically, through an embedded work of fiction, she finds an imaginative rest. This remarkable and honest fusion of travel writing, family history, and cultural anthropology is also a quest for meaning, and an understated love story.

Born in Vancouver, Keith Harrison studied at UBC, Berkeley, and McGill writing a dissertation on Malcolm Lowry. Harrison has also written a group of stories, Crossing the Gulf (1998), which contains a piece that won the Okanagan Short Story Award, and he has edited an anthology of short fiction, Islands West: Stories from the Coast (2001). His five novels are Dead Ends (1981), a tale of two cities, Vancouver and Montréal; After Six Days (1985), about two contemporary couples; Eyemouth (1990), set mainly in Scotland during the French Revolution and its aftermath and taking the form of letters; Furry Creek (1999), a documentary fiction exploring the life, death, and art of Pat Lowther; and Elliot & Me (2006), a doubled-voiced narrative about a mother and her teenaged son set on Hornby Island. Harrison’s novels have been nominated for Books in Canada Best First Novel Award, QSPELL’s Hugh MacLennan Fiction Prize, and the Ethel Wilson Award. Keith Harrison teaches at Vancouver Island University, and lives on Hornby Island, British Columbia.

Recent Poetry

Living Under Plastic / Evelyn Lau

ISBN 978-088982-262-7 • pb • 92 pp • $17.95 • Poetry • April 2010

Living Under Plastic represents a major departure from the author’s previous poetry books. Instead of the obsessive focus on relationships and emotional damage that has characterized much of her earlier work, this book opens up to explore new subjects: family history, illness, death and dying, consumerism, and the natural world. In a tone that is often elegiac, without ever being maudlin, these poems are steeped in immortality and loss. Haunted by the pull of the past, there is strength of character and a sense of affirmation in all of these poems. While grounded in travel and in place, the tone is surprisingly meditative and contemplative.

Evelyn Lau was born in Vancouver in 1971. She is the author of four volumes of poetry, two works of non-fiction, two short story collections and a novel. Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, published when she was 18, was a Canadian best seller and was made into a CBC movie starring Sandra Oh in her first major role. Lau’s prose books have been translated into a dozen languages worldwide. You Are Not Who You Claim won the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award; Oedipal Dreams was nominated for the Governor- General’s Award. Her work has appeared in over a hundred literary magazines, garnering four Western Magazine Awards and a National Magazine Award. She has also won the Air Canada Award for Most Promising Writer and the Vantage Women of Originality Award. Her poems have been included in the Best American Poetry and Best Canadian Poetry series. She has read from and discussed her work at literary festivals and universities around the world; she presently freelances as a mentor to aspiring writers through UBC’s booming Ground and SFU’s Writing and Publishing Program.

Recent Children's Titles

Uirapurú - Based on a Brazilian legend / P.K. Page, Illustrated by Kristi Bridgeman

ISBN 978-088982-264-1 • 32 pp • $19.95 • Children’s Picture Book • Ages 4-6 • May 2010

Deep in the rain forests of Brazil lives the Uirapurú, a bird renowned in legend for having the most beautiful and the strangest song in all the world. Those who hear the Uirapurú’s song can never forget it. Many go in search of the bird and many never return. In her version of the legend, P.K. Page tells the story of a group of mischievous boys who set off into the forest to catch the bird with nets and bows and arrows. During their adventures they meet an old man with a flute who has spent his life trying to mimic the Uirapurú’s song and a maiden of the moon surrounded by all the creatures of the night. In her tale of mystery and transformation, P.K. Page creates a story as beautiful and as haunting as the song of the bird about which she writes. A story superbly illustrated by Kristi Bridgeman. A story you will never forget.

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.
To discover more about P.K. Page please visit www.pkpage.ca.

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

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