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)

The Aviary / Miranda Pearson

0-88982-230-1 • 112 pp • $17.95 pb • June 2006

Connected by the element of air, the poems in The Aviary raise questions about desire, the spirit and the unconscious juxtaposed against the everyday, beautiful and absurd, the surface of "things." These poems propose an aesthetic of profound anxiety.

Like caged birds, they clamour for escape even as they mourn loss. The poems circle ideas of impermanence, of our inner and outer landscapes with all their diverse freedoms and imprisonments. The poems in this collection also reflect on the intimate power dynamics between men and women, employing an audacious tone of self-mockery to question the value of confession, and taking a mournfully wry view of the lyric and romantic tradition. Infidelity and betrayal are explored with stark and resolute determination, defining a philosophy of loss and attempting to delineate the ways and means of jealousy, grief and ironic ecstasy.

Throughout this collection landscape is invoked as balm, a touchstone more reliable than any human relationship. In The Aviary, we fly above the boundaries of countries, in and out of time, and our notions of sanity. We play with the imperfect process of remembrance, where artifice is defense against loss.

Miranda Pearson was born in England and came to Canada in 1991 to work as a psychiatric nurse. She is a graduate of the University of British Columbia's MFA program in Creative Writing, where she was also on faculty. Miranda is currently the poetry 'mentor' at Simon Fraser University's Writer's Studio. Her poetry has been published widely in literary journals and anthologies. The Aviary is her second book of poetry.

"I delight in these poems. Their verbal strategies, their echoes and replies, their life-givingness."
— Robert Kroetsch

About Prime: " A voice that is keen, convincing and utterly captivating."
— Nadine Shelley

" . . . a remarkably strong book. If Pearson carries on as she's begun, she's just entering her prime."
– John Moore, Vancouver Sun

" Pearson's distinctive, concise phrasings maintain her own poetic identity . . . evidence of her easy humour and on-going awareness of human weakness."
– Allen Brown, Canadian Literature

Writing On Stone / Michael Elcock

0-88982-231-X • 320 pp • $21.95 pb • August 2006

Michael Elcock emigrated to Canada from Scotland when he was 21. Since then, his life and travels have taken him to many parts of the world — and back to Scotland — many times.

In Writing on Stone, Elcock reflects on the immigrant experience, and the questions of memory and identity that come with leaving roots behind, and putting down new ones. Elcock's shrewd observations and humour take us behind the masks that old countries, and new countries, project — and to the importance of people to our reality. To his surprise, Elcock finds near the end of his exploration that he is not the first member of his family — as he'd supposed — to travel this emigrant route: From the west coast of Canada to the west coast of Scotland — and along the route of the Mounties' Great Trek.

Michael Elcock was born in Forres, Scotland and grew up in Edinburgh and West Africa. At age 21, he emigrated to Canada and worked in pulp mills, in the woods, on west coast fishing boats and as a ski instructor. Along the way he earned a B.A. and M.Ed at the University of Victoria, and undertook post-graduate studies in Quebec, Sweden, Germany, Belgium and Scotland. He was Athletic Director at the University of Victoria, and then CEO of Tourism Victoria. In 1990 he moved with his wife and daughter to Andalusia to work on developing Spain's Expo ‘92.

He has lived in a number of different countries, and has travelled extensively. He has published many articles in periodicals, newspapers and magazines in Canada and overseas. He now lives with his family outside Victoria, BC.

"Beautiful writing — like a photo album in words, layering memory and history, cross-hatching the personal with the political. Real life, in other words." –Isabel Huggan

"A wise and wonderful book, packed with great stories." –Leon Rooke

Other Oolichan titles by Michael Elcock: A Perfectly Beautiful Place.

Elliot & Me / Keith Harrison

0-88982-219-0 • 240 pp • $22.95 pb • March 2006

Elliot & Me is a tender, funny, moving double narrative about two people who don't understand each other. Elliot is a bright, reckless 17-year old who has just quit school late in his graduating year. Megan, his mother, is a woman who is haunted by the death of her father while she was "traipsing" through China, and is tired of being viewed as a beautiful work of art. The threatened return of Elliot's father, Jack, a huge American ex-ballplayer, causes Megan and Elliot to flee from their home in East Vancouver to Hornby Island.

Here, in an idyllic and very photogenic setting, this displaced odd couple — an angst-ridden, vibrant, self-destructive teenager and his inwardly questing mother whose physical loveliness makes her a target for other people's dreams — experience a highly consequential summer.

In a novel that is both a coming-of-age story and a portrait of the artist as a youngish, mesmerizing woman, both characters learn more than they want to about each other — and about themselves.

" The writing is beautiful and subtle and to me, very poetic."
– Marilyn Bowering.

Keith Harrison was born in Vancouver and studied at UBC, California (Berkeley), and McGill University, where he received his PhD for work on Malcolm Lowry. He is the author of three novels, Dead Ends, a finalist for the Best First Novel in Canada Award, After Six Days, and Eyemouth, shortlisted for a QSPELL Award. His collection of short stories, Crossing the Gulf, includes a piece that won the Okanagan Short Story Award. A non-foction novel, Furry Creek, was selected for the BC 2000 Award and nominated for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. He has edited an anthology of short fiction, Islands West: Stories from the Coast. He teaches at Malaspina University-College, and lives on Hornby Island, BC.

Touching Ecuador / W.H. New

0-88982-223-9 • 80 pp • $16.95 pb • March 2006

Touching Ecuador is a long poem, one that follows the interconnected observations of four people: a modern-day tourist-traveller, a struggling castaway, a disillusioned preacher, and an Everyman weaver who tries to come to terms with mountain histories and a mountain home. Everywhere these observers find a landscape rich in words: guidebooks and notebooks, calendars and woven letters, alphabets and beaded rituals, children's verses and the stories that populate place. Through their experience they move past security into the blessing of contradiction, finding at last "the breath to live by, / glimpses of connection, . . . / the ambiguities of liberty."

Those who reach the peaks and shores of Ecuador, who watch and listen, will never again be the same. Some will rediscover what it means to be alive; some will try not to leave; none will ever forget; all will change. Perhaps it is the effect of the Line itself—ecuador, equator, latitude zero, the pathway of the sun. Who crosses it? Whom does it touch?

W.H. New likes to travel, and recently has enjoyed trips to Winnipeg in mid-winter, Trigance in spring, and Quito, where all seasons are one. He has written three books for children, and edited the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada, among other books. W.H. New is the recipient of the Lorne Pierce Medal for an achievement of special significance and conspicuous merit in imaginative or critical literature and also of the 2004 Governor General's International Award in Canadian Studies. His most recent book, Underwood Log, was short-listed for the 2005 Governor General's Award for Poetry.

Time Out Of Mind / Laurie Block

0-88982-225-5 • 112 pp • $17.95 pb • June 2006

In the foreword to this moving, honest and luminous collection of poems, Laurie Block inscribes the last coherent words his mother said to him: I used to be quite fond of you. Shortly after that, she lost what remained of her senses and sank into the vegetative state in which she spent her last years. Lights Out, the first section of Time Out of Mind, is the poet's journey into a darkness that is only in part his mother's.

He writes to touch the borders of consciousness and emerges with a map of the mind and body in extremis. Many of these poems are rooted in disorientation, displacement and loss of equilibrium, the friction between what happens outside the skin and what may be taking place on the inside. The poet believes that we value consciousness as somehow more concrete, enduring and linked to assumptions about identity than our bodies.

He therefore asks the question: Is the self first a face or a soul? In the middle section, We Chemists of Grief, the poems address those who have come through the darkness to die and grieve well. These poems reveal the truth that healing is possible even in the absence of a cure. In moving beyond fear, anger, regret and disassociation fall away. It becomes possible to live and die in peace, fully alive and present to what each day might bring, to what had been and is no more.

The poems in the final section, Coming to my Senses, are offered as a celebration of living and dying and the naming of desire. In describing them, Block says: "I'm not ashamed of the naked romanticism, the disposition to gratitude and hope, even in the absence of a guarantee. No more will I hesitate to ask for what I want or give what I can. To ache for this earth and all that inhabit it, for the love that makes sense of living and makes room for death; for the words that bring comfort and the memories that give heat and light."

Laurie Block is a poet, playwright and storyteller. He was born in Winnipeg and now lives in Brandon, Manitoba. His previous work includes a chapbook of poetry, Governing Bodies, and a bilingual collection of poems, Foreign Graces/Bendiciones Ajenas, based on his experiences in South America. He is also the author of a full-length play, The Tomato King, produced by Theatre Projects of Manitoba in 1997, and a short piece, Pop! His short story, While the Librarian Sleeps, won the 2003 Prairie Fire fiction contest and, most recently, The National Magazine Award Gold Medal for fiction.

Cartography / Rhona McAdam

0-88982-221-2 • 80 pp • $16.95 pb • March 2006

In Cartography, her fifth collection of poetry, Rhona McAdam weaves an imaginative passage through the territories of love, work, family and aging. The journeys she takes her readers on are odd, familiar and memorable: we travel with her through startling and sensuous reflections on love, office paperwork and corporate layoffs; teen murder, truck stops and dementia.

Here we find poems about suitcases, shoes and vegetables imbued with the same wry compassion with which she suffuses her portraits of aging parents and meditations on marital status and childlessness. The world of her poems is completely and evocatively imagined, with humour and humanity, but also a sense of control, and bears traces of the poet's own movements, from England through Europe and back to Canada. Her themes are never overstated, and reveal themselves cumulatively through the course of the collection. With a mature and original command of her craft, she reveals a sensitivity to form, and to the ways rhyme and meter can enrich a poem.

Rhona McAdam was born in Duncan — a great-granddaughter of the town's namesake — and grew up on Vancouver Island. She has divided her adult life between Edmonton, Alberta and London, England. She moved to Victoria in 2002. She has worked in Canada, England and throughout Europe. For several years she cooked at Strawberry Creek Lodge in Alberta, where Rudy Wiebe and his family still run retreats for writers and other groups. Her poetry has been published in Canada, the US, Ireland and England.