Atlantic Books Today Issue #96

Stories for you and yours

Contents

Messages

4 Message from the editor

6 Notable quotables

Cover Feature

8 Literary human & nature by Erica Butler

News Feature

14 Indigenous art and the decolonization project by Erin Morton

22 Crafting the cold away by Marjorie Simmins

25 Emanata, a new YA graphic novel imprint of Conundrum Press, launches Call Me Bill by Mallory Burnside-Holmes

30 50 years of Breton Books and Cape Breton’s Magazine by Norma Jean MacPhee

Book Features

12 Elder Sister Dorothy Moore by Sheila O’Neill

27 Why we wrote Frequently Asked White Questions by Ajay Parasram and Alex Khasnabish

36 St. John’s author Bridget Canning by Shannon Webb-Campbell

Interview with the Editor

18 Author Jo Treggiari and editor Whitney Moran and an excerpt from Heartbreak Homes

Authors in Conversation

33 Rick Howe by Sheldon MacLeod

38 Carol Ann Cole and Ronan O’Driscoll Gardening

35 Garden for the soil you’ve got by Philip Moscovitch Food

41 Food from the heart of Membertou to your table by Julie Pellissier-Lush

49 The draw of Atlantic Canadian food culture is in its history by by Laura Oakley Essays & Poems

46 New writings from the HerStory Project

Excerpts

29 Country of Poxes

42 This House Is Not a Home

Some Hellish 44 Low Road Forever & Other Essays

45 Acceptance: Stories at the Centre of Us

Young Readers

53 Reviews Reviews

Courageous or Crazy 59 Touch Anywhere to Begin 60 Brat 60 The Last Days of Smallwood

A Life Spent Listening

More Maritime Murder

Eye of the Ocean

Stephen McNeil

atlantic books

ON THE COVER

We’re so excited our fall cover features “Black Magic” by photographic genius of PEI, Dave Brosha. “A classic long-exposure scene in beautiful Bayfield, Nova Scotia,” Brosha writes, “looking out over the Northumberland Strait. A storm had just broken and gave me a long enough window to capture some of its moody magic before the clouds dissipated entirely and the chaos turned to calm.” The image can be found in Brosha’s new collection of stark yet dazzling creative photographs, Tones of Grace: 100 Black and White Images from Planet Earth. Our thanks to Brosha and Rocky Mountain Books for letting us use this image for our special 30th-anniversary-year environment-themed issue.

A Fierce and Tumultuous Joy

Shadow Blight

Afterword

Teasers

Staff Picks

Editor’s message

Decades ago, I studied envi ronmental communication at York University. I worked as a professional environmentalist for several years after. I wrote the Sustainable City column for The Coast for years and I still write about environment every chance I get.

That’s why this issue’s theme of environmental literature is dear to me. In our cover story, environmental journalist Erica Butler talks of the dual need for books exalting the nonhuman world and books lamenting its decline at our hand.

She considers seven new Atlantic books serving one or both of those functions, and only scratches the surface of a wealth of literature on the subject. There had to be a further reading list, looking at new books and classics on environment, and still there isn’t enough room for all of them (visit atlanticbooks.ca/stories/ tag/environment for more). Publishers and writers from across the region have grappled with the existential crisis that is climate

change, and other equally fundamental crises facing our world, like toxicity and habitat loss.

Beyond Butler’s extensive literary review, this issue includes a snippet from Ruby Red Skies, a powerful novel that grapples with climate change and rampant wildfires, a guide to growing a thriving garden in acidic soils (in our digital issue), a feature about an Indigenous-inspired cookbook using local ingredients (local is sustainable), and children’s books about wild animals struggling to overcome human-induced environmental challenges.

And that further reading list: it covers art and photography to replenish our love and appreciation for this irreplaceable planet, thoughtful meditations in fact and fiction on our relationship with the nonhuman world and how we might rebalance it and stories of activists and others striving to do just that, by reworking our economy so it won’t destroy us.

As always, this issue is packed with author interviews and book features, excerpts and reviews. We have a beautiful story on Elder Sister Dorothy Moore’s new memoir, and the reconciliation happening in Indigenous art books, as well as celebrations of a 50-year publishing venture and a brand new graphic imprint for young readers. That’s sustainability and renewal, right there.

FEARNOCH

Steinbeck meets Toews meets Joyce This insightful and illuminating debut by Jim McEwen explores the decline of rural Canada, the meaning of community, and the need to see oneself in one’s neighbour.

NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT US Award-winning author Bridget Canning returns with an incisive and unsettling collection

A collection of short fiction about how we find connection in a disconnected world,

and considers what it means to be good, or a villain, in our relationships with others.

HARD TICKET

New Writing Made in Newfoundland

Edited by critically acclaimed author Lisa Moore, Ticket showcases the magnetic work of Newfoundland’s next generation of literary trailblazers.

FOUR FOR FOGO ISLAND

Sardonic private eye Sebastian Synard returns

shop on scenic Fogo Island leads to an investigation that takes Sebastien and Mae across

Newfoundland to track down the killer all the while dealing with family drama.

THE RAW LIGHT OF MORNING

A powerful debut

Laurel searches for a fresh start, humour, and love in the after math of domestic

covers how far she will go to protect herself and the ones she loves.

WHERE THE CROOKED LIGHTHOUSE SHINES

A dark, fantastical collection of narrative poems

Drawing on the unique elements of Newfoundland and Labrador culture and folklore. Readers of all ages will enjoy the rhymes of Joshua Goudie and illustrations by Craig Goudie.

Publisher Executive Director Editor

Graphic Designer Program Manager Administrative Assistant

Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association

Karen Cole

Chris Benjamin

Gwen North Chantelle Rideout

Lynn McCallum

Atlantic Books Today is published by the Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association (www.atlanticpublishers.ca), which gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of New Brunswick, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, the Government of Nova Scotia and the Government of PEI. Opinions expressed in articles in Atlantic Books Today do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Board of the Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association.

Printed in Canada. This is issue number 96 Fall 22. Atlantic Books Today is published twice a year. All issues are numbered in sequence. Total Atlantic-wide circulation: 30,000. ISSN 1192-3652

One-year subscriptions to Atlantic Books Today are available for $15 ($17.25 including HST). For a special offer on a 2-year subscription with a bonus canvas tote bag for $25 ($28.75 including HST), visit atlanticbooks.ca/join and use code ABT. Please make cheques payable to the Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association and mail to address below or contact admin@atlanticpublishers.ca for subscription inquiries. If you would no longer like to receive copies of the magazine sent to your address, please let us know.

Publications Mail Agreement No. 40038836

Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to:

Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association

Atlantic Books Today Suite 710, 1888 Brunswick Street, Halifax, NS B3J 3J8 Phone: 902-420-0711

Fax: 902-423-4302

atlanticbooks.ca

@abtmagazine

facebook.com/AtlanticBooksToday

@atlanticbooks.ca

@atlanticbooks.ca

NOTABLE

Quotables

“Post-apocalyptic mushroom clouds hovered above Ruby’s car, billowing up like beige parachutes. Over the last half hour, the clouds had slowly transformed to jellyfish shapes soaring through the air: orangey-pink and translucent, and strangely captivating … [T]he more unstable her surrounding environment became, the more Ruby felt in control of her life.”

—From Ruby Red Skies, by Taslim Burkowicz (Roseway Publishing)

“In places that have been rich through much of the twentieth century into the twenty-first, we have created a somewhat her metically sealed bubble that has made infections almost disappear from consciousness: we think of them as unusual, rare, once-ina-lifetime events....[W]e have had the luxury of hubris, to think ourselves separate from a tangled entwinement with the ecosys tems around us. But this separation is only an illusion.”

—From Country of Poxes, by Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay (Fernwood Publishing)

“Social justice to [Alfred Fitzpatrick] was liberty with no class, privilege, or ethnic boundaries, and it revolved around the ideal of service. His philosophy included universal education…and that education, as Alfred frequently mentioned in his writings, was for hand, head, and heart, that is, it should equally be vocational, academic, and altruistic.”

—From The Right to Read, by James H Morrison (Nimbus Publishing)

“After almost a month of tests and the incident at [my ten-yearold daughter, Maggie’s] elementary school a few days ago, the decision was made by our family doctor that we start considering alternative medicine, or perhaps consulting with a priest.”

—From What Happened to Maggie Dalton? by Christopher Tobin (Flanker Press)

“She got me some dry clothes that were a little too big, but they were warm, and they were dry. She put me beside the woodstove in the kitchen to warm up and then went to the phone. I only heard one side of the conversation among the ladies on the line. ‘No, he’s not dead.’”

—From Cows Out, by Dale McIsaac (Acorn Press)

“That this fake had turned up in 2016 at a respectable auction house in Toronto and was listed for sale as an original Gagnon seemed outrageous. Within hours of my visit, the auction house had changed the information in its listing to note that the paint ing had a fake Gagnon signature. We were left with the unsolved mystery of who had painted it.”

—From The Great Canadian Art Fraud Case, by Jon S Dellandrea (Goose Lane Editions)

“…while families may be the most adaptable institutions in our society, we require evidence-based, evidence-informed, and evidence-inspired workplace practices, community and social supports, public policies, and programs if families are to thrive as they strive to harmonize and synchronize their work, family, and mobility rhythms, including with their broader needs.”

—From Families, Mobility, and Work, by Barbara Neis, Christina Murray and Nora Spinks (Memorial University Press)

“Business biographies are written about successful companies and by inspirational leaders. But what happens when you take the leap, seize the day, and then discover it really isn’t as easy as all that? So few of those books, and certainly none of those memes, ever tell you about things going wrong.”

—From It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, by Annabel Townsend (Pottersfield Press)

“Known as the Highland Heart of Nova Scotia, Antigonish is recognized worldwide for St. Francis Xavier University (StFX), The Antigonish Movement, the Coady International Institute, and the oldest running Highland Games outside of Scotland. Antigonish County is surrounded by natural beauty, with warm waters, beautiful beaches, hiking trails, sporting and recreational facilities as well as cultural activities, visual arts, and fine crafts; it is no wonder many love to call Antigonish home.”

—From Antigonish: A History in Pictures, by Peggy Thompson (MacIntyre Purcell Publishing)

Quote vector created by starlinewww.freepik.com

Literary Human & Nature

How our stories help us understand our place on Earth

by Erica Butler

Aboutonce a week and sometimes more, I drive about 34 kilometres roundtrip to haul my kid and a few others to a nature school in the woods, so they can learn to appreciate, respect and love the natural world that sustains us all. Each trip, somewhere along the five-kilometre mark, I pass through a moment where I realize that in my efforts to raise a responsible and rounded human, I’m more than likely shooting myself and my kid in the foot.

The car ride sends about seven kilograms of carbon dioxide up into the atmosphere, and so every time I deliver him to the spot where he enriches his connection to nature, I know I’m adding a little bit more to the problem that is and will continue to upset the natural world, and our lives in it.

Image from Islands of Nova Scotia , courtesy of Nimbus Publishing.

It’s a dilemma that came back to me as I perused this year’s crop of Atlantic books with an environmental edge, a list that reflects both our individual and collective relationships with the natural world. Some of these books are rooted in a personal connection to nature, the sometimes spiritual nourishment humans get from being part of the natural environment.

Others look for ways to manage and dramatically reduce our collective impact on the natural world. Still another looks deeply into the efforts to reconcile differ ent ways of living in nature, including one where personal and collective responsi bility are indistinguishable.

All come from different corners of human thinking and feeling about nature. Yet happily, they share a certain hopefulness, an attitude that says it’s worth taking the time to connect, to appreciate, to understand, and to be willing to change.

In Wild Apples, New Brunswick poet Michael Pacey takes us on a walk through the journals of Henry David Thoreau, stopping to reflect and ruminate on carefully selected thoughts and observations, such as the titular “Wild Apples,” in which Thoreau notices his gathered bounty doesn’t taste quite as delicious when eaten in the confines of his cabin. Pacey draws on his own Walden-esque experi ence along the Nashwaak River in west-central New Brunswick, as he imagines and recreates scenes from Thoreau’s time at Walden Pond.

In Earthkeeping: Love Notes for Tough Times, writer Gary Saunders offers up a series of essays designed as a balm for the general ecological anxiety that is building in most of us, in step with the climate crisis. Saunders’ voice is wary but not panicked.

With curiosity, care and humour he tackles the small stories—of roadside flowers, attempted turtle rescues and the merits (or lack thereof) of growing cattle corn—and through the collection creates an ethos for a way of thinking and feeling about the larger world.

Two new collections of photography appear this fall to feed our emotional and spiritual connections with the natural world. In Wood & Water: Visual Therapy in Nature, landscape photographer George Fischer offers up a colourful journey through the forests and waterways that have served to calm and centre him in his life. Meanwhile, PEI-based photographer Dave Brosha abandons the colour wheel and embraces the delicacies of monochromatic photography in Tones of Grace: 100 Black and White Images from Planet Earth.

Brosha has truly traversed the globe, capturing images in myriad places such as the Faroe Islands of the North Atlantic, Chobe National Park in Botswana, the Antarctic Peninsula and his own neck of the woods, Brackley Beach, PEI. There’s no formula for what might catch Brosha’s lens, from wild sheep to working miners to magnificent sand dunes.

Over on the “collective responsibility” end of the new books shelf, we find two new offerings from Fernwood Publishing this fall. In Future on Fire: Capitalism and the Politics of Climate Change, sociologist David Camfield quickly eliminates the various play ers in the current power structure (including occasional green-left governments) as capable of mobilizing the emergency response needed to face the crisis. Instead he points towards a politically diverse mass social movement as the only thing that could lead us safely out of the crisis and into a fairer, more just system of living.

Writer and professor Aaron Saad also tackles “system change, not climate change.” In Worlds at Stake: Climate Politics, Ideology, and Justice, Saad sets out on the ambitious path of defining the options for humanity to address the climate crisis and the system that created it. Like Camfield, Saad recognizes the need for building a politically diverse movement and begins his journey with an effort to break down and understand the various ideologies that populate our social and political universe.

Both Camfield and Saad occupy a hopeful place. Like relationship counselling for a nearly broken marriage, it might seem like a hopeless effort to demand change from a system that seems bent on destruction. But a good therapist will tell you, learning to do relationships better will be worth your while no matter

“...an effort to remake our system of living into something fair and sustainable will not go to waste, regardless of what kind of physical world we manage to salvage.”

Gary Saunders, (courtesy of Goose Lane Editions).

which anniversary you end up celebrating next year. Likewise, an effort to remake our system of living into something fair and sustainable will not go to waste, regardless of what kind of physical world we manage to salvage. The point, for Camfield and Saad, is not to give in to despair, but to try to come out better on the other side.

If there was ever to be a crash course in the challenges of system change and of managing our collective impact on our natural envi ronment, the Atlantic fisheries could easily serve as the case study. Contested Waters: The Struggle for Rights and Reconciliation in the Atlantic Fishery takes as its starting point the violent events that took place in the fall of 2020, when angry non-Indigenous crowds burned fishing boats and buildings belong ing to Mi’kmaw fishers. The book looks forward and back from the crisis, bringing in a huge array of voices to tell the story of how the policies and politics of the wild fishery, and colonization itself, came to that violent moment, and where they go from there.

Editors Richard Williams and Fred Wien have gathered perspectives ranging from

Image from Wood & Water, courtesy of George Fischer.

long-time fisheries observers to legal experts to Mi’kmaw Elders to academics. The various essays go a long way toward building understanding of the particular viewpoints, and in doing so also start to expose the complexity of the challenge facing the fishery: decolonization.

The hill to climb includes real recognition of the Peace and Friendship treaties, and real understanding of the radically different ways of thinking that Indigenous nations and settler governments bring to the table. Like any good resource, Contested Waters finishes on a note of constructive “what next” proposals that seem to shine a light of a possible solutions.

All in all, the fall bookstore shelves hold lots of promise for those who, like my kid, need some time to soak in the beauty and promise of the natural world. And equally for those who, like me, are looking for a path forward in the seemingly gargantuan task of system change.

Truth be told, the most likely scenario is that we all need a bit of both. ■

ERICA BUTLER reports the local news in Sackville, New Brunswick, where she spends the rest of her time walking around the Tantramar marshes and keeping an eye on sea level in the Bay of Fundy.

Further Reading

Islands of Nova Scotia

Adam Cornick Nimbus Publishing

Education for Global Citizenship and Sustainability

Linyuan Guo-Brennan Island Studies Press

Towards an Encyclopedia of Local Knowledge Volume II

Pam Hall & Jerry Evans Breakwater Books/Memorial University Press

Daystart Songflight Brian Bartlett Pottersfield Press

The Honey Farm Harriet Alida Lye Vagrant Press

My River

Anne Laurel Carter Formac Publishing

Eco-Innovators

Chris Benjamin Nimbus Publishing

Waking Ground shalan joudry Gaspereau Press

The Mill

Joan Baxter Pottersfield Press

Restigouche

Philip Lee Goose Lane Editions

Marlene Creates

Edited by Susan Gibson Garvey & Andrea Kunard Goose Lane Editions

Mammals of Prince Edward Island and Adjacent Marine Waters

Curley, Daoust, McAlpine, Riehl & McAskill Island Studies Press

Image from Tones of Grace , courtesy of Rocky Mountain Books.

Elder Sister Dorothy Moore writes the truth of her own lived experience to work toward reconciliation

by Sheila O’Neill

The contents of my book lead to reconciliation all the way through.” This is how Elder Sister Dorothy Moore describes her new book, A Journey of Love and Hope: The Inspirational words of a Mi’kmaw Elder, published by Nimbus.

Elder Sister Dorothy Moore was born in 1933 in Membertou and is a survivor of the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School.

A Sister of Martha and a respected educational leader, through out her career Sister Dorothy gave a series of talks at conferences which, in today’s terminology, sought to disrupt the narrative, and to raise awareness about colonization and its ongoing negative effects on Indigenous peoples.

These talks addressed Mi’kmaw language as a human right, the challenges of growing up in a racist environment and the impor tance of healing. They challenged her audience to counter nega tive stereotypes. And she did so through her own lived experience.

“Being a survivor, I know what I’m speaking about,” Sister Dorothy shared when we met by video call to discuss her book.

“I really prepared to speak to the groups as if I was in the audience. I asked myself what is it that I need to hear? What would change me?”

Residential schools and day schools operated throughout Canada from 1840 until about 1996. Although the residential school no longer exists, “The spirit of its ghosts continues to haunt us in our lives today,” she writes in Love and Hope.

For healing to take place, residential school survivors need to tell their stories. And for reconciliation to take place, Canadians need to hear those stories.

Sister Dorothy’s stories speak of resilience and courage. Of literally (there was a fence around Membertou reserve) and

A Journey of Love and Hope Elder Sister Dorothy Moore Nimbus Publishing

figuratively jumping beyond what was permitted of her.

They also speak of racism, which she described during our call as “sneaky like a snake in the grass.” Sister Dorothy challenged educators to actively participate in making changes in the class rooms and in the curriculum that reflected the history, culture, language and achievements of Indigenous peoples.

In 2015, when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada published the 94 Calls to Action, Call to Action 63 called upon the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada, to main tain an annual commitment to Aboriginal education issues. Long before this, Sister Dorothy was using her personal stories to create an awakening experience for her audience. These stories—this lived experience—is relevant to this day.

Reconciliation is about establishing and maintaining a mutually respectful relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in this country. Or in the words of Sister Dorothy, “We need to walk together down this path.”

Coming full circle, on October 13, her 89th birthday, Elder Sister Dorothy Moore is launching A Journey of Love and Hope: The Inspirational Words of a Mi’kmaw Elder, in Membertou First Nation.

“I was born there, and I come back there to tell my story.”

SHEILA O’NEILL is from Kippens, NL, and is a member of Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation. Sheila is a Drum Carrier and car ries many teachings passed down by respected Elders. As a founding member and past president of the Newfoundland Aboriginal Women’s Network (NAWN), she has been part of a grassroots movement of empowerment of Indigenous women within the island portion of Newfoundland and Labrador. She lives in St. John’s.

New

for

Indigenous art and the decolonization project

Decolonization

is not a metaphor,” as scholars Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang remind us. While Tuck and Yang here refer to overuse of the term “decolonization” in education systems, their statement might also be considered in relation to publishing and creative projects: if decolonization means the “repatriation of Indigenous land and life,” how might this be achieved through the specific work of art books?

Indigenous-led curatorial and creative practices that repa triate Indigenous art and writing are crucial for the resurgence of “land-based” and “embodied knowledges,” as art historians Heather Igloliorte and Carla Taunton argue in their new edited book, The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories in the United States and Canada

Three recent art books that use such repatriation as a method of resurgence are Resilience: Honouring the Children of Residential Schools, Wabanaki Modern | Wabanaki Kiskukewey | Wabanaki Moderne, and TautukKonik | Looking Back.

Anishnaabe artist Jackie Traverse, from Lake St. Martin First Nation, and Residential School Warrior Geraldine (Gramma) Shingoose, a Saulteaux woman, activist and Elder

from Tootinaowaziibeeng First Nation, Treaty 4 Territory, have together produced a colouring book, Resilience, honouring the children of Residential Schools. In her foreword, Shingoose writes that “even in our suffering we were always playful, joyful, and happy children,” offering a story of resilience and love in the face of the cruellest forms of settler-colonial Canadian state violence against Indigenous children.

Traverse’s lovingly rendered drawings of children wrapped in tender care are offered alongside teachings such as “Lilybeans” (to whom the book is dedicated), Shingoose’s granddaughter, framed in a heart and a thunderbird that “tell her she’s loved by her mom and her kookoo.” Intergenerational and grandmother-led teach ings are a gift to the reader of this beautiful book, which speaks first to Indigenous children.

In Wabanaki Modern, published in Mi’kmaw, French and English, curators and writers Emma Hassencahl-Perley (Wolastoqew) and John Leroux (white settler) include a foreword by esteemed Plains Cree art historian Gerald McMaster, which contextualizes the period of the 1960s as one of cultural resur gence for First Nations, Inuit and Métis artists in Canada. The

by Erin Morton

Opposite page: From Wabanaki Modern, The Legend of Kingfisher, Stephen Dedam, gouache on paper, 1965, 38 × 53 cm. New Brunswick Museum 1966.85 (courtesy of Goose Lane Editions).

Left: (s tikijumut t) / (l to r): Maria Semigak Kairtok, Benigna (Boonie) Merkuratsuk, Boas Kairtok; photo by Candace Cochrane (courtesy of Memorial University Press).

book is divided into two essays by Leroux and Hassencahl-Perley, which together historicize and visually contextualize the history of the Micmac Indian Craftsmen or MIC from Elsipogtog, New Brunwick.

Leroux (who, in full disclosure, completed his PhD at the University of New Brunswick under my co-supervision) documents this group of “minimalist” printmakers and painters against the colonial and often bureaucratic struggle with settler governments to help fund their initiative, situating the MIC artists within a longer continuum of millennia-long Mi’kmaq cultural resiliency and resurgence. Individual stories from the MIC group, such as Michael Francis’s, document the oral traditions and life experiences that

influenced his art, including a screening of the Disney movie Snow White at the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School.

Wabanaki Modern’s inclusion of extended interviews with Francis complement and contextualize the visual and material documentation of his art. The beautifully reproduced images in the book display the materiality of each object: the paper trans parency of a story leaflet; the torn edge of a printed note card and accompanying legend to the silkscreened burlap package in which these objects were sold; the texture of the handwoven wool tapes try portraying the Mi’kmaw story of the Wild Goose.

Hassencahl-Perley’s essay offers a personal story of encountering Francis’ granddaughter, Starlit Simon, by chance through research

New World Publishing: www.newworldpublishing.com or 902-576-2055 ... in fine bookstores, online, and e-books too! Bringing the very best in well-researched regional history to life for Atlantic readers via thoughtful, provocative stories ... Priceless artifacts, scary pandemics, crime & criminals, moving Acadian stories, Cornwallis vs Le Loutre ...

Two great newer books, currently in reprint in 2022. Prolific story teller, Jude Avery, winner of the first Lt.-Governor’s Award of Excellence for l’Acadié & Francophonie (NS, 2021), brings you two stories of isolated Acadians, their resilience, and their vibrant culture despite adversity ... or perhaps because of it. The first, The Forgotten Acadians, sold out in 2 months in late 2019, & was replaced by a best-selling Updated Edition (987819894564127$16.95). Now in reprint #3 in 2022. New World also brings you Joie de Vivre/Love of Life (NEW: 2021; reprint 2022) 9781989564196 - $19.95) Based on iso lated communities these are stories of resilience, support of neighbours more like family, hard work, religion & respect for tradition, reflecting Acadian communities everywhere!

3-YEAR Bestseller (2019-21) Capturing Crime by Carol Taylor with narrative by Greg Marquis, with Roselyn Rosenfeld and Connell Smith – ISBN 9781895814972 –$24.95. Full colour coffee-table book: 11”x 8.5”, 80 lb. gloss. Short-listed for the Atlantic Book Award for non-fiction in 2021, with a quality review in ABT and an inspiring video. Covers 3 decades: of law courts, judges, prosecutors, witnesses, defense teams, evidence bags, all drawn from the artist’s perspective: the ‘good’ guys, the ‘bad’ guys, including the top 15 stories (at least 7 of national prominence): Alan Légère, Premier Hatfield, the Oland trials, a Columbian cartel, Bourque RCMP murders, crimes against children ... CarolTaylor’s sketches over 30+ years, are both factual and entertaining NEW(2022): Hard Cover Limited Edition - ISBN 978198956410 –-Reg. 39.95 Limited copies on special at $30.00

NEW Edition: 2020; reprint 2022 Quarantine, What is Old is New (2nd International Edition) by Ian A. Cameron, MD. ISBN 9781989564158 – $22.50 Fascinating story of pandemics, quarantine processes & issues facing immigration to Canada; great photos. Fully indexed with two new postscript chapters on the worst pandemics of the last 2000 years, Covid-19 update, and an archaeology survey of Lawlor’s Island (in photos) prompted by the release of the original edition. Recent winner (2021) of Independent Publisher’s Bronze medal (3rd place) for Eastern Canada! Read about viral mutation, influenza naming process; learn more about what most of us have lived through for over 2.5 years! Dr. Cameron, a fam ily physician for over 30 years, his first love and studies was in history, with many articles /books to his credit; he is certainly one of the more knowledgeable writers on quarantine history and processes. A regional best-seller for a second time : 2008, 2021!

NEW, 2021: Acadia’s Warrior Priest: A Conversation with L’Abbé Jean-Louis Le Loutre by Peter L. McCreath ISBN 9761989564172 – $16.95 Who would believe the most formidable guerilla leader in Canadian history would be a ‘humble’ French missionary priest? Enter L’Abbe Jean-Louis Le Loutre, who covertly led Mi’kmaq warriors and a small band of Acadian rebels (Beausoleil) with backing from France, to contest the establishment of Nova Scotia as a British/Protestant colony, leaving the mostly pacifist Acadiens in the middle. A contributing factor for the Expulsion? - and a disservice to the in digenous peoples who originally had sought peace. Arguably, in the name of religion & to prevent further settlements, Père Le Loutre may well have purchased more Protestant scalps than Gov. Cornwallis collected via his ‘infamous’ proclamations. Story was inspired by the author’s research on From Columbus to Louisbourg: The Colonial Evolu tion of Atlantic Canada & New England (2020: 9781989564059) $18.95

Little Warriers, from Resilience (courtesy of Fernwood Publishing).

on the MIC collection held at the University of New Brunswick’s Mi’kmaq-Wolastoqey Centre. The essay goes on to contextu alize the history of the MIC within the community history of Elsipogtog, which includes settler-colonial occupation and racism, and within the larger narratives of Indigenous art history by schol ars such as McMaster, Jas M Morgan and Sherry Farrell Racette.

Hassencahl-Perley elucidates the importance of Mi’kmaw sto rytelling within the MIC’s visual and material iconography and in combination with textual stories printed on note cards, stitched into deerskin wall hangings and sewn into textiles; as she puts it: “MIC designers Michael Francis, Stephen Dedam, Michael Dedam, and Vincent Barlow ensured that future community members, Wabanaki citizens, would have access to the stories they used in their artistic depictions.”

The essay concludes with a reflection on Mi’kmaw wom en’s labour behind the scenes of the MIC, as Jane Dedam and Mi’kmaw women of the MIC “produced jewellery, regalia, and copperwork; pulled the silkscreen prints; and hand-made the packaging” that was crucial to the collective’s output and suc cess. The book concludes with a full list of MIC members and contributors.

TautukKonik / Looking Back, published in Inuktitut and English, by Candace Cochrane, Andrea Procter and the Nunatsiavut Creative Group, is a photographic teaching on Nunatsiavut, with a foreword by Julius (Joe) Dicker, AngajukKâk (mayor) of Nain. The foreword establishes the family and com munity connections behind Cochrane’s historical photographs of northern life, from an Inuit perspective that uses language resur gence to share stories about the past.

Procter’s introductory essay details storytellers and Elders such as Levi Noah Nochasak, a collaborator on Cochrane’s photo graphs, who helps to document colonial and community histories around hunting, fishing and trapping dating back to the 1500s,

to the establishment of the self-governing region of Nunatsiavut in 2005. Cochrane details the process of taking the photographs contained in the book, which she took as part of the International Grenfell Association, describing the resulting images as “a bouquet of all I saw in Inuit culture that I found unique, generous, coura geous, caring, and at times difficult.”

The photographs are divided into thematic clusters around land, seasons and change, which are presented alongside Inuit stories offering knowledge on each theme, many by Nochasak. The blackand-white photos themselves are part portrait, part documentary, and each shows an interconnectedness between Inuit, land, water and non-human animal alongside a story and a teaching, such as “August is the best time to pick berries, maybe late August, maybe September, early September. That’s when the berries are good and big. We fatten them. We pick berries, even bakeapples, in the fall. We save them for winter or Easter or birthdays.”

Procter provides a curatorial essay on the process of exhibiting the photographs in Nain, which involved tremendous community involvement looking at images of families and places they lived. A full biography of each member of the Nunatsiavut Creative Group co-authors as well as bios on Cochrane and Procter closes the book.

As Igloliorte and Taunton note, there are Indigenous “nation-specific” practices that Indigenous art and languages can help share with a wide audience, in ways that re-generate longheld community knowledges for new generations. These three books offer such regenerating practices for entire families. ■

ERIN MORTON is professor of visual culture in the Department of History at the University of New Brunswick and the author of Unsettling Canadian Art History (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022).

Author Jo Treggiari answers questions about her new novel, Heartbreak Homes , from her editor, Whitney Moran

Whitney Moran, the editor of Heartbreak Homes, the gritty new YA murder mystery from Governor General Award–nominated author Jo Treggiari, had a few questions for the author.

WHITNEY MORAN: Heartbreak Homes has such a fascinatingly complex plot—a murder mystery, multiple points of view, a town on the brink of collapse. Do you remember the initial spark that led you to write this story, and did that initial idea change much as you developed the novel?

JO TREGGIARI: Thinking back, my original idea revolved around a property development and how its failure impacted an entire community. I was really drawn to the contrast between this ostentatious showroom house and a town filled with bankrupted mom-and-pop shops and foreclosure signs.

I thought about how that kind of financial ruin would impact the children of those who had invested their nest eggs and even those who hadn’t, then I thought of a way to bring together my three teen narrators who came from different backgrounds. Once I had the party idea, I decided to up the ante with a murder. I really wanted to talk about the wealth divide and I think I did that.

WM: Our three POV characters—Cara, the street-smart punk; Martin the self-deprecating journalist and Frankie, the book nerd with a heart of gold—are all underdogs in their own way, and each has a unique perspective. Why was it important to you to write Heartbreak Homes in multiple POV, and what do you think each of these characters brings to the story?

JT: I love writing multiple POV. I think it comes naturally to the way I tell a story and enables me to bring together three or more distinct threads of narrative. Having more than one point of view focussed on the same event, allows the reader to get the bigger picture.

Each narrator’s particular biases are revealed and since the characters bounce off of one another as they interact, I can develop them more fully. You see Cara through Frankie’s eyes, Frankie through Martin’s and vice versa.

Each of them is interested in solving the murder for personal reasons. I think that, espe cially when writing a whodunit, it’s important to offer the reader various perspectives and allow them to sift through the information and decide what to believe and what not to believe.

Frankie is doggedly persistent, Cara is fighting to keep her found family intact, and Martin doesn’t know where he fits any more and is trying to reconcile his past with his future. Multiple POV allows me to be more nuanced in how I portray each char acter because we all lie to ourselves and we all fall prey to making assumptions about others.

WM: This book explores a number of huge social issues and deeply personal traumas, but doesn’t lose sight of the universal experience of being a teenager. How did you manage to balance all of these narratives, and why is it important to you to include both macro and micro “issues” in your work?

JT: I am trying to write the truth to the best of my abilities. And I am trying to write richly. I want my characters to live and breathe on the page and part of their development is a believable backstory (most of which does not make it into the final draft but helps me know my characters fully) which supports all their actions in the book.

Frankie doesn’t have to react the way that I or the reader would, but she has to act in character. They are teenagers. They are ques tioning and finding their way.

And my characters are flawed. They have their little tics, their interior monologues, their fears and their insecurities. I want to challenge them and I want them to change by the story’s end, to have come to some hard realizations, and find some kind of reso lution that brings self-awareness.

WM: How did the mystery elements of this story come to you? Did you start with the ending or work backwards, or just find yourself with a murderer on your hands and work forward to try and figure out the story as you went? (No spoilers!)

JT: I wrote forwards, backwards and sideways. Once I got the main part of the story laid out, I worked from both ends simulta neously which is just as haphazard as it sounds.

I do make lots and lots of notes, and sketches of timelines, and maps and anything that helps me to keep all those balls in the air. I always knew there would be a murder or two or three but it was the why that interested me.

What drives someone to murder? Conceiving a classic lockeddoor mystery was confusing enough; adding teenagers who are limited in resources and access to information, and also telling

the story from different viewpoints, turned the writing into an intricate puzzle box.

Luckily I had a very good editor.

WM: What were, in turn, the most surprising, difficult and rewarding parts of writing Heartbreak Homes, and what do you hope readers take away from the story?

JT: It was certainly a challenge to write but ironically those are the only story ideas I see through to the end. I’m a huge fan of mysteries but it was far more complicated to plot than I expected it to be.

I wanted to play fair so that meant that my narrators had to figure it all out on their own, each one providing another piece of the puzzle until the bigger picture appeared. I wanted to emulate the classic format—the murder, the investigation, another murder or two, the confrontation, the confession, with clues sprinkled throughout and various plot lines interweaving.

It’s always important to me that I include LGBT+ rep in my books but that my characters’ queerness is not the main part of the story. It is just who they are.

It is also important to me to write about marginalized kids without getting preachy with it. I lived in a punk squat in my young adult years and I wanted to write about the kids I knew then, those who were living so far on the periphery that they were almost invisible.

So Cara and her girls are really a piece of my heart. My aim with every book is to entertain but also to encourage dialogue. To ask readers to look below the surface before judging a person and maybe ask themselves, “I wonder what their story is? Maybe they’re not so different from me?” I hope I achieved that. ■

See our review of Heartbreak Homes in our Young Readers section.

WHITNEY MORAN is the managing editor at Nimbus Publishing and Vagrant Press in Halifax.

JO TREGGIARI is a bestselling and multi-award nominated author of several young adult thrillers including Heartbreak Homes, The Grey Sisters and Blood Will Out.

“I lived in a punk squat in my young adult years and I wanted to write about the kids I knew then, those who were living so far on the periphery that they were almost invisible.”

An excerpt from Jo Treggiari’s Heartbreak Homes

FrankieThis was not my scene. We stood, gasping for breath, at the crest of a long upward climb over rocky soil peppered with potholes that could have sunk the Titanic. For the most part it had been straightforward: park at the bottom of the hill near the big sign some graffiti artist had altered to read Heartbreak Homes, then walk straight up the unpaved road. Jessa had already consulted her phone twice, looking up the text invite Suzie Jackson had sent her. I certainly wasn’t going to voice my fears, but it had crossed my mind that this might be an elabo rate set-up—that we had received a set of alternate directions to this so-called “back-to-school rager,” designed to send us on some wild goose chase into the wilderness.

I clicked on my flashlight app. The watery beam picked out the iron-hard earth, gouged into deep ruts filled with muddy water, and a landscape violently cleared of trees and brush. The early October wind cut straight across our path, chill with the threat of rain to come, and sadly, Jessa’s second-hand Golf was already out of sight.

“How did they even get permission to do this?”

“I guess his dad just doesn’t care,” said Jessa. She gripped my arm. “Listen!”

I sharpened my ears. Barely discernible over the sound of our heaving lungs was a low hum, a droning consistent enough to register as human-made. Bass-heavy music surging and ebb ing in a long wave. Still far off, tucked in next to a thicket of trees, a faint glow indicated lights, and most tellingly, a whiff of weed smoke drifted on the cold air.”

Oh thank the gods,” Jessa said, threading her arm with mine. “It’s really happening.”

Soon enough, we came to a row of vehicles on the shoulder. “Looks like we could have parked a little closer,” I said, scowl ing at the gunk packing the treads of my Blundstones.

“I was feeling a little bit nervous.” She inhaled deeply, squar ing her shoulders. “The fresh air is good.”

“Why would you be nervous? These are your friends.” I tried to keep the bitterness out of my voice. My fervent wish was that instead of shivering on a hillside in the middle of nowhere, we could be curled up on Jessa’s bed watching mov ies in our pajamas, surrounded by bountiful snacks and drinks. Our regular weekend routine.

“Yeah, but it still feels new, you know?” Her forefinger went to the bridge of her nose. A nervous habit from when she’d worn glasses that were always slipping down.

I summoned up a smile. “What did you tell your mom?” Jessa’s mother, Casey, was Lincoln’s chief of police, and to say she was overprotective would be an understatement.

“The usual.” She placed her hand over her heart. “That I solemnly swear I will not do any drugs. I will have a single beer and then water for the rest of the night. I promise to call if anything goes remotely wrong, and”—she pinched my elbow—“that I’ll let you keep me on the straight and narrow and drive us home. She’s at work tonight and I’m praying she doesn’t get a noise complaint. How about the elderly relations?

“My parents had both died when I was four. My grand parents didn’t like to be bothered by anything untoward, so the mutual understanding was that I didn’t tell them much about what was going on in my life. Like my photography. Or tonight. Or the fact that I was into girls. I liked to imagine that my parents would have approved of everything

“Sleepover at your place. Back home tomorrow by lunch. I may have left out any exciting middle bits.”

She smiled up at me. “An omission rather than a lie, Frankie.”

“That’s right, future lady Supreme Court Justice.”

“So, c’mon then,” Jessa said, hauling at my arm with fresh enthusiasm. “Let’s get to the middle bits.”

I admit I gasped a little as we finally rounded the bend. The rough track opened up into a graceful circular driveway,

paved with red bricks and lined with inset solar lighting. At the end was a garage bigger than my two-bedroom. And rearing up from the earth was a jewellery box of a house, like some giant had just plonked it there. A two-storey mansion, tiered and turretted like a wedding cake, pristine white stone pillars with gold-flecked marble steps, glossy black wrought iron railings, an excess of polished golden wood, and a wide front door, lacquered a rich red like a poisoned apple. It all screamed for a row of maids bedecked in starched white linens, plump-faced cooks, and a stern-yet-kindly butler with a chest puffed out like a pigeon.

It was the perfect clandestine party location.

“Wowza.” I sped up. I couldn’t wait to see if the interior matched. It was over the top in a way that was both fascinat ing and repellent. As if Donald Trump had designed a luxe ski lodge. This was the showroom home of the Heartwood Development, and the only residence that had been completed before the project went bust.

“Hold on,” Jessa panted, hanging back. “I can’t go in like this.”

I fanned her flushed cheeks with a bookstore flyer from my jacket pocket, wishing my entire head didn’t turn brick-red when I was hot. Jessa was lighter-skinned than her mom and our exertion had given her a peachy-warm glow.

“I didn’t want to be so late,” Jessa said, fiddling with her neckline and pulling at the hem of her short skirt. Her eyes went to the black Mercedes coupe crouched like a panther in front of the steps: Malcolm Bradley’s status object.

“Why didn’t he have to—” I swallowed the rest of my sen tence. Of course he wouldn’t have to trudge up a monster hill.

“It’s his party,” Jessa reminded me. Her warm brown eyes had that shiny thing happening. As if she was all lit up from inside.

I remembered finding a postcard once when I was seven or eight; it had slipped down behind the china cabinet in my grandmother’s formal parlour. The tiny room was cold yearround and smelled like mothballs, but my dog Bumble and I were playing hide-and-seek and that’s where I had chosen to conceal myself. The photograph was of frothy waves rolling onto a golden beach edged by high cliffs. It looked nothing like the gentle green hills and old pine forests of Lincoln and I could almost smell the fresh salt tang. On the back in looped cursive were the words The heart wants what the heart wants. It was signed Marie. My mother’s name. She and my father had died in a car crash when they were twenty—barely older than I was now. My grandmother found me holding it to my chest

and snatched it away from me. “Does the heart no good to stay stuck in the past,” she said while I cried. She never spoke about my parents again. And I never asked about them. Still, I won dered what they would think of me.

I couldn’t stop Jessa from feeling her feelings, but I could stand up for her no matter what happened.

“Well, at least you know he’s here,” I said, indicating the sports car.

She shot me a stern look but I saw her dimples peep for a second before she sighed. “I know you don’t like him.” Even if I weren’t gay I wouldn’t like him. “Yeah, well he passed you over in ninth grade, didn’t he?” We’d been at a party. Spin the bottle. Mal had demanded a re-do when it landed on Jessa. And then he’d gone and spent way more than seven minutes in the closet with Anabel Stevens. She raised her eyebrows in mock outrage. “That was a long time ago, Frankie.” She pulled out her phone again.

“Hey, give me a second.”

“What are you doing?”

“Checking Missy’s Instagram.” She exhaled in relief. “They’re inside.” Her smile slipped. “They’ve all got their hair up.” She showed me the screen. A row of girls who looked cast from the same mould, even if their hair colour and skin tone differed. They held an identical pose, arms bent in triplicate, leading with their chins. Their long hair was piled up in artful topknots, deceptively messy, held in place with jewelled clips. Suzie’s were blue. I remembered Jessa had given them to her for her birthday. “I should have worn mine like that.” Her woebegone expression almost made me laugh out loud but I bottled it up. I also restrained myself from pointing out that Suzie’s sparkly pink lipstick made her mouth look like it was open for busi ness. Instead I made some kind of noncommittal noise. “Don’t be like that,” Jessa chided. “Like everyone else who judges on appearance. You have to trust that I can make good decisions.” Her lips quivered. “They have hidden depths.”

I swallowed my snort with difficulty. “Just remember you’re one of a kind,” I said, reaching out to intercept her fingers before she ruined her sleek chestnut tresses. “You look amaz ing.” I sensed people arriving behind us, but before I had a chance to stand aside, I was jostled hard. A short, sinewy girl pushed by me, followed by two more girls. I caught a glimpse of hooded eyes, straight black brows, and a wide, generous mouth as she shot me a challenging look. She wore an orange bandana tied tightly across her close-cropped head, a black hoodie, and jeans. The other two were tiny, dressed in black with plaid shirts

tied around their waists and raggedy high-tops. A blond with a shaved head, the other a brunette with hair spiked up as prickly as a cactus. I really wanted to take their picture.

Jessa wrinkled her nose as they swung the door open, unleashing a maelstrom of noise. They smelled bad. Like they hadn’t showered in a while. I could smell her on me now, the strong-looking one, where she had brushed against my sleeve. A ripe mixture of BO and a tang of woodsmoke that made me want to sneeze.

“Who was that?” Jessa asked, glaring at their backs disappear ing into the crowd. I shrugged. I’d never seen any of them before. There was a wildness about them. An edge of danger. Maybe this party would be more interesting than I’d thought. ■

EXCERPT

Photo of Jo Treggiari by Madeleine Kendall.

Crafting the cold away

Two Newfoundland books to help the handicraft hearted get their fingers flying

by Marjorie Simmins

Haveyou noticed? The once homebound world of knitters has burst its seams, revealing people knitting everywhere you turn.

You may also have noticed that knitting is an equal-opportunity art form: your mother knits, and your brother, too, along with Demi Lovato, Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe. Knitters tell you how relaxing it is to sit with needles and yarn and create some thing beautiful and practical.

The same goes for the quilters and fabric artists. While they might not have the same level of visibility in public, tucked away in their homes and studios, they’ll match the knitters for passion and precision, stitch for stitch. Sure, the Covid lockdowns stirred our creative souls, looking as we were for diversion and personal expression, but we were always a crafty old world here in Atlantic Canada, and around the world.

That said, you don’t have to craft to be knocked out by two new titles from Boulder Books, in Newfoundland, The Quilted Stash: A Dozen Newfoundland & Labrador-Inspired Projects, by Ralph Jarvis and Corey Follet, and Saltwater Socks: Caps, Mittens, and More, from the Island of Newfoundland, by Christine Legrow and Shirley A Scott. You don’t even have to—poor you—like wearing fine wool socks or sleeping under a colourful cotton cover designed to bring the softest of dreams. All you need is an appreciation of quality produced books, an interest in history and the arts and a love for stories of a time, place and people.

The Quilted Stash is the collaborative creation of Newfoundland-based artists, Ralph Jarvis and Corey Follett. It’s also a tribute book, “to the strong, creative women who made space for us in the world of quilting,” writes Jarvis in the preface,

“[who] defied social expectations to create room for us to safely make and share in their craft.”

Jarvis and Follett are accomplished artists whose fabric art cel ebrates nature and Atlantic Canadian culture. The intent of their book is to share their knowledge and offer designs that beginners and expert crafters can produce, from the stories within their own lives.

“Quilting can reflect good and hard times, inspire a whole from small scraps of fabric and memories, and reflect the present as clearly as the past,” the authors write in the introduction. “They tell stories of everyone who taught and inspired us to quilt, tea in the woods, encounters with wildlife, constantly changing weather, and our pride in this place. We hope that they also point you to people, places, and traditions from your own experience. That they take you home even if you are not from here.”

And who, in these fractious times, isn’t looking for a reaffirma tion or recreation of home?

Included in the book are 12 patterns to create quilts, throw and bench pillows, wall hangings and table runners. The quilting tech niques include piecing, appliqué and collage.

The chapter titles are irresistible: “Birds, Bergs, and Whales,” “Snowmageddon 2020,” “Nested Dories,” “Mudder’s 9-Patch Garden Quilt” and more.

Traditionally, both knitting and quilting would take place in winter. As Jarvis and Follett note, more poetically, “At the end of winter as the snow melts and patches of frozen land are revealed, it would be said in Newfoundland and Labrador that ‘the land is quilting.’”

Saltwater Socks is the fourth title in a popular series by authors

Rory MacMaster, Donna McMaster’s grandson.

and artists Christine Legrow and Shirley A Scott. Legrow is the founder of Spindrift Handknits, a company that produces handcrafted woollens available around Newfoundland and beyond. Shirley A Scott, known to friends as “Shirl the Purl,” has worked with Legrow for the past 40 years, collecting and studying mittens from across Newfoundland.

Together, these historians and raconteurs have recreated more than 25 knitting patterns inspired by traditional designs for today’s knitter. As Newfoundland journalist Heather Barrett writes in the introduction to the book, “A trigger mitt is not just a trigger mitt, and a vamp is not just a vamp. For Christine Legrow and Shirley A Scott every hand-knit item is a story. And in Newfoundland, a story is often known as a yarn.”

You may be thinking, “Well, a sock is just a sock, isn’t it?”

Emphatically no. Here’s a sample of storytelling about socks in this book:

“Newfoundland socks had a moment of glory on the world stage in World War I. Conditions in the trenches were appall ing and a serious circulatory ailment called ‘trench foot’ was feared. In just two years, 62,000 pairs of grey socks were knit in Newfoundland under the auspices of the Women’s Patriotic Association and distributed to the British Expeditionary Force. Countless pairs were also made for family members, as some people preferred to knit for family and others for ‘the unknown soldier …’”

This latest collection of designs includes socks, mitts, caps and warm ups for both legs and hands. Again, the chapter titles are pure poetry: “Signal Hill Vamps with Sweetheart Soles,” “Sound Waves Fine Wool Socks,” “Sea Fever Fingerless Mitts, the Gull’s Way and the Whale’s Way,” “Caribou Migration Socks,” “Osprey’s Eyes Gloves,” “Bell Island Tickle Vamps with Snowflake Soles.” And the colours!

Friends and fellow-knitters Donna MacMaster and Hughena MacDougall, both from Dundee, Nova Scotia, can’t wait to get their mitts on Saltwater Socks

“Knitting is an excellent activity to support my mental

health and my long-term wellbeing,” says MacMaster. “It brings me joy and keeps my joints pain-free. It also brings me back to those special, gentle, quiet times in the family kitchen with my Nanny, learning to knit.”

MacDougall literally does not remember a time when she didn’t knit.

“I started when I was four years old,” she says. “My mom showed me and I liked it right away.”

MacDougall, like MacMaster, is a year-round knitter. “It takes me to a quiet place and settles me. Especially when my mind goes to the person I am making the socks for. I knit and sift through memories at the same time.”

It’s hard to imagine a better way to pass any season than work ing with different colours and textures, remembering uncompli cated childhood days and making art for those we love. ■

MARJORIE SIMMINS is a freelance writer and author of four books including Somebeachsomewhere: The Harness Racing Legend from a One-Horse Stable. She lives in Truro, Nova Scotia.

The Quilted Stash

Ralph Jarvis & Corey Follett Boulder Books

Saltwater Socks

Christine Legrow & Shirley A Scott Boulder Books

“It’s hard to imagine a better way to pass any season than working with different colours and textures…”

CREATIVE COLLABORATIVE COMPELLING

Emanata, a new YA graphic novel imprint of Conundrum Press, launches Call Me Bill

by Mallory Burnside-Holmes

Ayoung-adult

graphic-novel imprint has set sail in Nova Scotia. Award-winning children’s author and graphic novel connoisseur, Sal Sawler, is at the helm, leading its debut title, Call Me Bill, by Lynette Richards, into open seas.

Emanata, an imprint of Conundrum Press, promises to bring high-quality, character-driven graphic novels to young adults and to anyone who loves the agelessness of a coming-of-age story. It opens a space for Canadian creators to showcase their literary and visual artistic prowess to tell untraditional stories and previously untold histories.

“I want people to know that if they purchase an Emanata book they’re getting [...] a story they haven’t run into a whole bunch of

times before,” Sawler says, “But more than anything, I want teens to know if they pick up an Emanata book they are going to see their own world reflected.”

When Lynette Richards’ Call Me Bill slid itself into Sawler’s submission pile, it was like they heard “an audible click.”

“Her work is just stunning. Her illustrations [...] just blew me away. I opened them and it was masterpiece after masterpiece,” Sawler recounts. It was without a doubt the title that would lead Emanata on its maiden voyage.

In Call Me Bill, author and artist Lynette Richards rediscovers the largely forgotten history of a “female sailor” whose body was found in the wreckage of the SS Atlantic steamship that crashed

by Shannon Webb-Campbell

The imprint’s first release explores history, queer identity and the courage to be oneself

on the shores of Lower Prospect, NS, at 3:00 am on April 1, 1873. In watercolour illustrations that spill across the page and defy straight lines, Richards paints what is known and what she imagines of the sailor, who was named Maggie at birth but went by Bill whenever wearing their “pantaloons.”

How Bill’s story found Richards is a tale within itself. When Richards first moved to Nova Scotia from Ontario, she found her self living on a rural road with her spouse, Nadia, in Terence Bay. Looking for a way to connect with her new community she wan dered down to a small museum at the end of her street, where she discovered the story of the SS Atlantic. It wasn’t long before she joined the board of the SS Atlantic Heritage Park Society. For six years she dedicated herself to honouring the story of the victims, survivors and rescuers of the historic crash.

She was enraptured by the story of the then state-of-the-art White Starline steamer carrying 1,000 people (mostly immigrants and many women and children) that was forced off course by a storm while sailing from Liverpool to New York.

“And then, to put a cherry on top, was the discovery that one of the sailors who died was—according to the language of the time—a female sailor.”

In Bill’s story, Richards found a reflection of herself. “It res onated with my own story of being a gender non-conforming woman when I came out of art school in 1979. There were a lot of obstacles in my way to [finding work]. There were still gauntlets that women were sort of ushered into. Secretary, teacher—they weren’t trades. And I wanted to go into the trades.”

Richards is a lifelong cartoonist who studied printmaking in school and has since become a Master Artisan in the art of stained glass.

Richard’s expertise in stained glass aligns perfectly with her first foray into graphic novels. Both are visual art forms that tell a story in sequential order.

“I chose stained glass as my medium because it is a storytelling medium […] I’m not a religious person at all, but I am a scholar of church stories, and I can see how metaphorically they are like fairy tales and other types of guiding stories, and that fascinates me. But they didn’t tell women’s stories, they only told men’s stories. It was patriarchal to the max. So I got into this material with the intention of telling women’s stories as sacred stories in a medium that is about sacred stories.”

From the outset, Richards knew this story would be told as a graphic novel, “I could see it in my head like a movie,” she says. Her stunning watercolour and ink illustrations traverse pages in shades of grey.

“I wanted to comment visually on the whole notion of non-bi nary. There is black and white, but all these greys in between them. [The illustrations] cross lines; they have a fluidity that suited the story.”

One might not initially consider a shipwreck in which hun dreds of women and children died the obvious subject for a young adult’s story. (The first few pages paint quite a bleak scene.) Richards sees things differently.

“I don’t believe in talking down to children. I don’t do baby talk, never did. I think children have a capacity to understand— and in fact, they must be allowed to grow and expand into the life that they want to lead and are born to lead.”

Call Me Bill is many stories in one. “There are two lost stories in this book,” Richards says, “that of the sailor and that of the SS Atlantic. [The wreck] got overshadowed by the World War, the Titanic [and] economic disasters. This was wrong and the story needed to be re-told.”

Bill’s story also tells that of millions of people, one that will resonate with anyone who has carved out a path for themselves in defiance of cultural norms in order to live an authentic life that’s true to themselves.

Call Me Bill hit bookstores September 13, an intentional time as the wreck approaches its 150th anniversary this coming April. While the wreck—the largest in Nova Scotia’s history and second ever in Canada—is significant, Richards wants to shift the focus to the rescue.

“Women played a huge role in that. The local people made a champion effort to go into the ocean [...] and it was dangerous and cold.

“They rescued 400 people and gave them food and shelter and bandaged them. There are stories that there were so many wet, traumatized people going through the houses that they had to drill holes into the floors to drain the houses. And there are still a couple houses that are proof of that.”

Call Me Bill Lynette Richards Emanata

Stay tuned for more from Emanata, which will publish one title a year and is currently lined up to 2024. ■

MALLORY BURNSIDE-HOLMES is a freelance writer and editor living in Halifax.

CELEBRATE 30 years of radical publishing with Fernwood Publishing’s PODCAST

Highlighting some of Fernwood’s most impactful authors, each of the fifteen episodes is hosted by Nora Loreto and asks how radical books contribute to the work of political movements.

Featuring authors like Ardath Whynacht, El Jones and Daniel N. Paul, Thirtywood embraces the dynamism of transformative worldbuilding, the power of critical inquiry, and the joy of justice.

Join Nora and our guests as they discuss some of today’s most pressing issues in social movements and independent political publishing.

AVAILABLE

Why we wrote Frequently Asked White Questions

by Ajay Parasram and Alex Khasnabish

In recent years a resurgent right wing around the world has been working to destroy public confidence in scholarly research and evidence. In the United States, our colleagues are being attacked by democratically elected legislators for the crime of studying and teaching “critical race theory,” a term used colloquially to describe any serious engagement with race in society.

According to Rashawn Ray and Alexandra Gibbons from the Brookings Institute, Fox News said the phrase “critical race theory” 1,300 times between August and November 2021. By that November, when Ray and Gibbons wrote their article, nine US states had passed legislation effectively banning critical race theory from schools and another 20 had similar kinds of legisla tion in the works.

Critical race theory, along with words like “intersectionality,” is a lightning rod for white people who believe our society is already free and equal. Whether the charge is “cancel culture” or “social justice warriors” allegedly destroying the fabric of modern civilization by removing statues or renaming streets, we take up these concerns throughout the book. In some import ant ways, critical race theory and intersectionality are tools with which to build the world that many middle- and upper-class straight white men think they already live in.

Frequently Asked White Questions

Ajay Parasram and Alex Khasnabish Fernwood Publishing

To the casual observer, it may seem like the pushback against social justice came about during the reign of former US president Donald Trump, but this is a nearsighted view. The resurgence of the right is much older than Trump; he was preceded inter nationally by career politicians including Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte.

The very important and still incremental gains made recently in Western countries, including talking about racism as a real thing and beginning to reckon publicly with ongoing colonial violence, have been met by an overwhelming response from right-wing white nationalists. They have done an exemplary job of producing easy-to-consume propaganda to convince people that “social jus tice warriors” or “postmodern neo-Marxists” are trying to destroy all that is good and sacred in this world.

Those who have power have always resisted changing the structures that give them power. Beneficiaries of unearned power and privilege (e.g., a trust fund kid who never had to work three part-time jobs while going to school) are especially vocal about defending society as it is rather than supporting changes to make it fairer for everyone. One of the best ways to understand forms of oppression is learning the difference between agents and struc tures. We return to this point throughout the book’s chapters, because like the proverbial chicken and egg, it’s not about which one creates the other but rather how the two re-create one another in practice. We may not always be explicit about structure and agent, but you can keep score as you read and see how many times you can catch us explaining structure and agent in different ways!

We wrote FAWQ to confront the rising tide of white nation alism and right-wing populism. We also wrote it because our students, friends, comrades and fellow travellers have asked for a straight-to-the-point analysis they can recommend to people in their lives who are not interested in dense theory.

Ultimately, we wrote this book because we believe helping white people understand race helps everyone build the kind of world we deserve and urgently need. If you want to learn more about racial justice but do not want to overburden your nonwhite friends with questions, this book is for you. If you feel shy or

intimidated by not knowing the right lingo to use without inad vertently offending someone, this book is for you. If you struggle to find the words to help your peers or loved ones understand how race and economic justice go together, this book is for you. And if you are just damn tired of having to explain things to peo ple who seem convinced the only way to understand something is to play devil’s advocate, we hope this book can offer you some reprieve as well.

Without further ado, here are the top ten most frequently asked white questions we get:

1. Can you be racist against white people?

2. How do we fix past wrongs without creating new ones?

3. How does racism relate to other forms of oppression?

4. How can I make antiracism part of my family life?

5. How can I talk about social justice without turning people off?

6. What’s the difference between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation?

7. Can members of an oppressed group be oppressors?

8. How can white people be involved in antiracist struggles without centring themselves?

9. How can I be an antiracist in my everyday life?

10. How can we build the world we deserve? ■

AJAY PARASRAM is a multigenerational transnational by-product of the British empire, with roots in South Asia, the Caribbean and the settler cities of Halifax, Ottawa and Vancouver. He is an associate professor in the Departments of International Development Studies, History and Political Science at Dalhousie University in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), unceded Mi’kma’ki.

ALEX KHASNABISH is a writer, researcher and teacher com mitted to collective liberation living in Halifax, on unceded and unsurrendered Mi’kmaw territory. He is a professor in sociology and anthropology at Mount Saint Vincent University.

Ajay Parasram (left) and Alex Khasnabish.

An excerpt from Country of Poxes

Pandemics Past

How Infections Have Defined Humanity

My paternal grandfather was orphaned in early adolescence, a trauma that marked him and his siblings irreparably. His father, given to frivolous extravagance, had died fairly young from com plications of diabetes, having run his once middle-class family aground with his general imprudence. My great-grandmother sur vived her husband by only a year. No doubt the story of her death has been warped by the years that have passed, the unreliable memories, and the deaths of its witnesses. But we do know that as a high-caste widow, especially one of limited means, my great grandmother was allowed few pleasures in life. The day before her death, she was apparently enjoying one of them — some puffed rice mixed with spice and oil — though perhaps she should have suspected that such hedonism would invite karmic displeasure. As she tossed a handful into her mouth, a fingernail caught and lanced a small boil above her lip. She thought nothing of it until she began to feel quite unwell later that evening. Within twen ty-four hours, her face entirely swollen, she was dead.

No one can confirm that a doctor was called, though I wonder what use it would have been had one even been available. Would an accurate diagnosis have been possible with the limited tools at a physician’s disposal in an Indian village in the 1930s? And what is the point of naming a condition if there is little to do about it? Eighty years later, I suspect that she died of Staphylococcus aureus sepsis, when an otherwise benign species of bacteria that would have usually lived contentedly on her skin, fulminated into the boil and then sneaked through the indulgence-inflicted wound to flood her bloodstream. While she would normally have been able to fend off this disrespect of her boundaries before matters got too out of hand, in this case, for reasons related to both her and the bacteria in those specific circumstances, this assault overwhelmed her immune system, sending it into an inflammatory overdrive. The end result of this response was the shutdown of essential organs.

Had S. aureus just waited a few more years before launching its inopportune onslaught on my family’s psychological well-being, it is possible that my great-grandmother would not have died, delivering us from the knock-on intergenerational dysfunction

Country of Poxes Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay Fernwood Publishing

her death caused. Penicillin, commercially available as of 1942, might have liberated all her descendants from their emotionally frigid fates, presuming that the drug would have filtered down to a working class household in a humble village five miles outside of Calcutta early in its commercial history. Beyond potentially rescuing one branch of an obscure Bengali family from decades of pathological behaviours, the advent of antibiotics, more broadly, radically altered the therapeutic relationship between healer and healed in profound ways, changing the expectation of what was feasible within medicine in a way that has haunted the field ever since. ■

BAIJAYANTA MUKHOPADHYAY is a Bengali settler living in Tio’tia:ke for over two decades. A family doctor who serves primarily in Eeyou Istchee, Baijayanta also works in Treaty 3 and 9 territo ries, as well as with undocumented migrants, unhoused people and queer/trans youth in the city. His previous works include A Labour of Liberation and essays in Briarpatch Magazine, Sarai Reader and Upping the Anti

Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay

Cape Breton’s Magazine50

years of Breton Books and

Ronald Caplan’s persistence pays off for the people of Cape Breton

Witha thirst for stories and the passion, dedication and patience to give them a home, Ronald Caplan has been capturing and sharing stories of Cape Breton for 50 years.

Caplan was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He moved to Cape Breton’s North Shore on a whim and the urging of friend in 1972.

“I wasn’t here very long before I knew I had really found an exceptional place,” says Caplan. “In terms of interesting people, their kindness, generosity and interesting backgrounds.”

Caplan had read a book about the Firefox movement out of the Appalachians and its magazine about rural life. “I thought some one should do that in Cape Breton,” says Caplan.

“In one day driving from Wreck Cove to the Englishtown Ferry I designed the magazine in my head.”

Cape Breton’s Magazine was first published in 1972. During the next 25 years, Caplan recorded stories, took photographs and secured ads for 74 issues.

by Norma Jean MacPhee

He started meeting with people and collecting stories in his nearby neighbourhood of Wreck Cove.

“How fortunate I was that I knew so little that nobody took it for granted I knew the answer to the questions I was asking,” says Caplan. “I was a genuine explorer and people were kind to share things with me in detail, getting me to see what was going on, the context for whatever the subject was.”

Caplan says he wanted the new magazine to be the largest on the newsstand, a goal he achieved. To this day, in many living rooms, rec rooms and antique stores you’ll find copies of the large 10 x14 inch distinctive Cape Breton’s Magazine

Its newsprint quality paper and black-and-white printing were the cheapest route. He invested his money in a good quality cover, a decision which boded well for its lasting quality.

“The stories I was hearing were remarkable, they were a new world for me,” says Caplan. “I guess I was also driven or deter mined to share them—save them first of all, and then out of

Photo by Carol Kennedy

respect for those people who had shared their stories with me, to share them with the wider world.”

When asked how he felt with that first issue in his hand, Caplan laughs and says, “Well, that’s a funny story.” Excited with his very first issue ready to go, Caplan filled his van with maga zines to drop off at stores.

When he walked into a store in Glace Bay, “The fella took a look at it and said, ‘Buddy, you’ve made a terrible mistake,’ and he did not put my magazine on his shelf,” says Caplan with a chuckle. “All I can say is 50 years later, his store is long gone.”

The tagline on the cover of Cape Breton’s Magazine says “Devoted to the History, Natural History and Future of Cape Breton Island.” From tales of bald eagles to Waltes, a Mi’kmaq game, to women in the Steel Plant, Caplan allowed those stories to tell themselves, in the voices of the person of focus. He pro vided the interest to draw them out of people and the venue for others to enjoy and learn from them.

“First you get a knife of proper steel.” That’s the opening line from the article about my grandfather Lauchie Gillis.

When preparing for this article, my mom reminded me that her father had been featured back in 1973. She kept a copy of that edition and dug it out. The article is called “Lauchie C. Gillis, Skinning a Lamb.” The first 15 lines are about the importance of using the correct knife. Such definitive, precise knowledge allowed to breathe in the space of the story.

Seeing the many pictures of my grandfather, who died when I was a baby, and hearing his words, provided a fascinating glimpse into his life. The now soft, brittle pages of the newsprint held so much history.

“He made the everyday person an extraordinary person,” says Mary Munson of Caplan. Munson is a journalist and author of The Fairies of Cape Breton, a book recently published by Breton Books.

Since creating Breton Books in 1986, Caplan has edited and published more than 200 books devoted to Cape Breton topics and Cape Breton writers.

Munson first met Caplan when she submitted a story for one of the Cape Breton Christmas anthologies he publishes. “That’s when I got to know his talent as he was able to get so much more out of me,” says Munson.

“I can’t figure out his energy level,” laughs Munson. “His passion keeps him going, his passion for where he lives and his passion for what he calls home.”

In terms of the editing process of her book, Munson says she thoroughly enjoyed it. “He has a great sense of fun, a sense of humour. He knew how to draw things out of me, he had faith in me and he was a joy to work with.”

Bill Culp is another of Breton Book’s latest authors. Culp’s book Have Guitar Will Travel came out in the fall of 2021.

A travelling musician for decades, when the pandemic hit, he didn’t know what to do with his days. He started writing a book about his experiences in the music business. With the pages swiftly flowing, Culp soon had the makings of a book.

“I just picked up the phone and called Ron,” says Culp. “I knew it probably didn’t fit within the scope of what he tradition ally published, there wasn’t anything about an 80s rock and roller who lived in Cape Breton during a pandemic.”

Culp is grateful Caplan took on his book and he appreciated all the energy and time Caplan provided. “It became a much, much better book as a result of his input,” says Culp.

“I thought it was just going to be a fun rock and roll book–kinda light and fluffy—but he forced me to reach deeper. I just told the story from the heart, so it’s not just a rock and roll story, it’s the story of someone’s life.”

Telling the story of Cape Breton lives has been the mantra of Caplan’s life work, providing a venue and a home for thousands of stories.

Breton Books, like Cape Breton’s Magazine before it, tells stories as varied as the people across Cape Breton. From Rita Joe’s poems to Wanda Robson’s account of her sister Viola Desmond to Father Jimmy Tompkins, the books provide glimpses into many lives and histories of the island.

The first and last issues of Cape Breton’s Magazine.

“It’s a gem of a collection—Cape Breton’s Magazine and Breton Books—it’s a treasure that will definitely be well used and enjoyed into the future,” says Richard MacKinnon, Vice President Academic and Provost at Cape Breton University. MacKinnon’s also a folklore professor with decades of experience studying story telling and its impacts.

“It’s a national if not internationally significant collec tion of material that represents a story of a whole island,” says MacKinnon. “The stories we tell are pretty important about who we are and how we perceive ourselves in the world.

“He sought out those people, the storytellers of the commu nities, whether it be in Cape North or Wreck Cove or Grand Mira South. Those stories are about resilience and the tough, hard times. Good times but also a lot of lessons we can learn… There’s not many places in the world that have that kind history available.”

All 74 issues of Cape Breton’s Magazine are archived at CBU in the Beaton Institute and also online.

MacKinnon grew up in the mining town of New Waterford and remembers reading accounts Caplan gathered from surviv ing family members of a mine explosion that happened in 1923, killing 63 men and boys.

“I remember being a university student and being quite moved by that, this is my town and I knew the names of the people he talked to. It was quite a moving piece of history, giving me connections to my community. I think a lot of people had that same experience when they would open up the magazine or look at some of the books, it connects people to their community and their past.”

While teaching his folklore courses, MacKinnon would often search the many stories saved in Cape Breton’s Magazine to gather material for his students. “I still go back now,” says MacKinnon. “If I’m working on a project, I’ll think, what’s Ron already done on this, and I’ll go have a look.

“There’s probably not a topic in Cape Breton that Ron hasn’t touched on at some point, so it’s really a good starting point for any researcher.”

Those complexities build our sustainability as a people. And through those stories, that heart and grit, a reminder that we’re not alone in our struggles or our triumphs.

Ron Caplan’s resumé glistens with prestigious awards includ ing the Order of Canada and Nova Scotia's Cultural Life Award, along with other folklore and oral history accolades. He doesn’t do it for any of that.

“I believed in the power of these stories. I believed in gathering these stories. And I believed they should be shared.” ■

NORMA JEAN MacPHEE is a freelance journalist in Cape Breton with a passion for laughter, nature, books, fine food and finer people.

The National Arts Centre, Vita Brevis Arts, Canadian Stage, Neptune Theatre, Grand Theatre production of

by

MOSCOVITCH

ALISA PALMER

by

MOSCOVITCH

PALMER

by Sheldon MacLeod

He ended each show with his familiar tag line: “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” And for almost 50 years, Rick Howe enraged, engaged and entertained radio listeners across the Maritimes.

SHELDON MacLEOD: Thank you for the stories over the years and thanks for writing this book.

RICK HOWE: No problem. It was a pleasure to write. It was actually fun to write. Once people asked me, “How do you get started?” But the idea is just start, you know, write something and then suddenly it starts to flow. So yeah, it was an easy job.

SM: Some of the stories you got into a lot of detail. You must have had a collection of notes and interviews and recordings.

RH: When I began my career in Saint John at CFBC in 1976 as a reporter, I just decided to keep all my notebooks. And so over

the years, through the two years in Saint John and the subsequent three decades at the CJCH in Halifax, I kept every notebook. When it came time to write the book, I had easy access to files and quotations, and it just made the job a whole lot easier. But the bottom line is, I’m a packrat.

SM: Can you tell me about disclosing your health issues?

RH: People knew that I was having a struggle with health that was obvious. I missed some time for doctor’s appointments. But I didn’t want to become a poster boy for the disease. I just decided that (it) was something between me and my wife and my sons, and that’s where it should stay.

An interview with Rick Howe, author of Behind , on five decades of radio journalism, the flow of writing, adjusting to rural living and battling cancer

Photo by Sheldon MacLeod

But then people kept asking, “How are you feeling? How (are) you doing? What’s your problem?” I just felt that maybe it was time to cut to the chase and reveal that I do have cancer.

I’m battling cancer. I’m right now undergoing chemotherapy. I’ve got another session left and then they’ll make a decision on whether or not to operate and remove the cancer itself. I’m hop ing that’s going to be a positive response.

SM: Clearly, it was a lot more serious than you had thought.

RH: It was not untypical of me after the shift was over to stop at a fast-food place and scarf down some food on the drive home. But I decided that at one point I was eating too much of it.

So I scaled back and I knew that I would lose some weight. But I began losing a whole lot more weight than I was expecting. And that’s when I decided, I better go see a doctor and have this checked out.

And the family doctor immediately recognized it as cancer and immediately made an appointment with a specialist. He con firmed the diagnosis and began the first session of treatment.

Unfortunately, after that first session last summer, they decided to just let it lie. And then when they did another test, they dis covered the cancer cells they thought had shrunk to nothing, had grown again.

So that’s why they started the new chemo session and I’ve got one more to go next week. And then the decision would be made whether or not that has shrunk the cells to the point where they can remove them surgically or I’ll have to learn to live with it. So big decision coming mid-August.

SM: And this pushed up your retirement?

RH: I wasn’t really ready for it, but I recognized that I couldn’t (continue). Initially, I would spend the morning on the air, be done at 1:00 pm. And then I rushed down to the hospital and spent a couple of hours getting chemo and radiation.

So that went on for six weeks. That began to take a toll and it just got to the point where I couldn’t do both. And yes, I wanted to work till December 28, 2022. That would have been 50 years to the day when I was hired at CKNB Radio in Campbellton, New Brunswick.

SM: Was there a station you wanted to work, that you didn’t get the chance?

RH: I started off at CKNB in Campbelltown, moved to CFAN in Newcastle and then CFBC Saint John, all New Brunswick sta tions. And the goal at that time was to work in Halifax. So when I got the job offer to go to CJCH I was in seventh heaven. And when I got to Halifax for the very first time, I fell in love with the city.

And I said, “This is where I want to plant my roots. This is where I want to raise a family.”

We recently moved down to the South Shore in our retirement home overlooking the ocean, which is a great pleasure. But we go back to Halifax at least once a month to visit my granddaughter and her parents and my other son. I just loved Halifax and I still love Halifax.

SM: The pace of life is a lot different there. Is it boring?

RH: No, not quite. I just finished another book and it’s going to be out in the fall of next year. I’ve just started researching another one. I enjoy sitting out on the deck just doing nothing, letting my mind wander helps stir the creative juices as well. I’m not bored, but I do miss the buzz of the city. I do miss the buzz of the news room. I miss the interaction. I miss chasing down interviews and doing the interviews. But I’ll overcome that.

SM: Health issue aside, everything seemed to fall into place.

RH: I just want to say to all the people of Nova Scotia, I’m here, I’m still kicking, and I’ve got a lot more in me yet. So, look for more books coming and perhaps more commentaries ahead. So, I’ll still be a little busy. ■

SHELDON MacLEOD has been a broadcast professional for close to 30 years, during which time he’s been an eyewitness to the transi tion from 45s and magnetic tape to CDs, MP3s, computers, websites, blogs and the world wide web. Through all the technology one thing remains constant: the satisfaction of sharing compelling stories.

Garden

for the soil you’ve got

by Philip Moscovitch

ToddBoland and Jamie Ellison originally set out to write a book about rhododendrons. Instead, they decided the world didn’t need yet another rhodo manual—so they got a whole lot more ambitious.

The result is Gardening for Acidic Soils: Working with Nature to Create a Beautiful Landscape.

Boland, who works at Memorial University’s Botanical Gardens, says, “We have lots of rhododendrons here, and people are always asking, ‘What can I grow with them to extend the sea son of interest?’ Because they are boom and bust.”

Looking around, Boland and Ellison—a horticulture instructor at the Nova Scotia Community College—were shocked to find there didn’t seem to be any books specifically on gardening in the type of soil prevalent throughout most of eastern North America, and much of the West Coast too.

The authors promote an approach of “working with nature and not against it,” Boland says. All too often, he sees garden ers advised to add lime to soil in order to make it more alkaline. Meanwhile, at the botanical gardens, “we have 2,000 or more plants that are happy growing in acidic soil conditions.”

The book opens with an introduction to acidic soils and how they work. It’s “a bit technical in places,” Boland admits, but gardeners who are less technically inclined can easily skip ahead. Then, the authors offer a primer on woodland and bog gardens— both excellent for acid-soil-loving plants.

The heart of the book is a guide to individual species, organized by type (for example ferns, conifers, ornamental grasses), with information on the plants and their families, how to grow them, and design tips on where and how to use them. The book is filled with photos of both individual species and plants in gorgeous garden settings.

The scope of Gardening for Acidic Soils extends well beyond Atlantic Canada, encompassing New England, where “you can

Gardening for Acidic Soils Todd Boland and Jamie Ellison Boulder Books

grow rhododendrons like it’s nobody’s business”—and beyond. “It can be just as useful for the New England states and the Pacific Northwest,” Boland says. “We decided to select plant material from Zone 7 and north, and that’s into much milder conditions than we have here in Atlantic Canada ... So, we did include things like Camellias that we can only dream about growing here, but grow quite happily in places like Baltimore.”

His personal favourite species are Willow Gentian (“Really extends the season!”) and Himalayan Blue Poppies (“Just spec tacular! We are one of the few places in Canada that can grow them.”)

And the biggest mistake gardeners with acidic soil make? Not doing their homework.

“People go to a nursery, see a plant, think oh my God that plant is beautiful—but it’s probably adapted to alkaline soil,” Boland says. “So if you put it in soil that’s acidic it’s not going to do well for you.”

You could lime the soil, but why not go with what you’ve got? If you live in Atlantic Canada, it’s “more than likely” acidic. ■

PHILIP MOSCOVITCH is a freelance journalist and author in Halifax.

by Shannon Webb-Campbell

Newfoundland author Bridget Canning believes the best advice for emerging writers is to keep building your story. With three books under her belt; including two novels: The Greatest Hits of Wanda Jaynes and Some People’s Children; and her new short story collection No One Knows About Us, she believes stories are like architecture.

“I compare writing a first draft to building a house—you have to dig a hole for the foundation before you even get started,” says Canning. “First draft can feel like digging that hole; it’s a lot of work and time before you even get a sense of the place you want to create. Just keep going.”

The stories in No One Knows About Us were written over many years, and throughout various circumstances in the writer’s life. With threads of various connections woven throughout each of the stories, Canning describes drafting a short story as much harder than working on a novel due to the challenge of balancing brevity and pressure. The structure of a short story needs to be strong and compelling on its own, while simultaneously com ing together to create a whole collection.

“I think the awareness that for the audience, of course there will be some stories they like more than others, whereas with a novel, it’s more of a focus on capturing the audience’s attention and desire to see where the story goes,” she says.

As a collection, No One Knows About Us explores how we find connection in a disconnected world and what it means to be good, or bad. Canning attempts to write characters whose flaws and weak nesses can be frustrating, but also relatable.

With stories that explore secret acts of ven geance, vigilantism, grudges, yearnings, fears and

St. John’s author Bridget Canning’s stories of vengeance, vigilantism, grudges, yearnings, fears and fixations

fixations, Canning believes literature, like most art, serves to build empathy, and can connects us as human beings.

“In this collection, I played around with this idea a lot, how something that feels very big for us internally can simultaneously make us feel very small in comparison with the turmoil of the world at large,” says Canning. “I guess you could say it’s my hope that readers would see and understand something of themselves in a character, even if that character is making grave errors they would never make or consider.”

Canning describes her stories “The Gutless Bravado, Part One,” “The Gutless Bravado, Part Two,” “The Gutless Bravado, Part Three” and “The Gutless Bravado, Part Four” as being the most difficult ones to write, due to the personal implications—the character’s recovery from surgery is something she went through herself. She wanted the linked stories to show the feelings of having to learn and understand one’s new boundaries when their body is healing.

“In 2012, I had a preventative gastrectomy, and the recovery period was a lot of dealing with energy loss and all the frustrations of waiting to adjust and heal. The character in these stories feels the absence of their stomach means they’ve lost much of their sense of fear; therefore, they now have little holding them back from what they really want to do.

“It was important to me that this was established and made sense throughout, so these ended up being the ones I went back to the most.”

Canning, who grew up in the Highlands, a coastal community southwest of Stephenville, on Bay St. George, spent her youth reading, writing and retreating into her imagination overlooking the Port au Port Peninsula. “It’s one of the most stunning areas in the province and I completely took the landscape for granted growing up. We could see across the water to the Port au Port Peninsula and were totally spoiled for beauty.”

Canning cites Newfoundland as a profound influence, as story telling is inherent to the culture of the place. Living on an island that is more or less isolated, there’s a pronounced sense of things being finite, yet the only thing that may be infinite are stories.

“When you live here, you can always see where things end: the land into the ocean, the seasons, the edges of communities, the fragility of a resource, the popularity of a political party,” says Canning. “For me, living here encourages a sense of simultane ously appreciating and enduring what is happening around me, because there it is, the end.

And that is very much like a story, isn’t it?”

Canning loves reading short stories and picks up new col lections all the time. She continuously returns to books by Newfoundland short story writers like Lisa Moore’s Open, Eating

No One Knows About Bridget Canning Breakwater Books

Habits of the Chronically Lonesome by Megan Gail Coles, Terry Doyle’s Dig, and Send More Tourists, the Last Ones were Delicious by Tracey Waddleton. Canning describes the literary community in St. John’s as an ecosystem of “gentle mentors,” who encourage new writers and expand points of view on the work created in Newfoundland and Labrador.

“It comes back to that popular James Joyce quote: ‘In the spe cific lies the universal.’ Being able to see one’s experiences and his tories in the art and literature around them and seeing this valued is important—it grants esteem in shaping our individual and col lective identity,” says Canning. “In the big picture, Newfoundland and Labrador can feel like this small place hemmed on to the edge of a continent, beleaguered by a history of misguided leadership.

“But this is what also makes our point of view and experi ence distinctive and ours and an important voice in the canon of Canadian and North American literature.”

Canning’s novel The Greatest Hits of Wanda Jaynes was recently optioned to become a film, and she is working on another new novel. As a morning person, she likes to write in the morning when things are quiet.

“I like to go for a ‘walk and a gawk’—go for a stroll with a jour nal, maybe people-watch in a café. Like most writers, it’s mostly trying to spy on life and take from it.”

SHANNON WEBB-CAMPBELL is a member of Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation. Her books include: Still No Word (Breakwater 2015), I Am A Body of Land (Book*hug 2019) and Lunar Tides (Book*hug 2022). Shannon is a doctoral candidate at the University of New Brunswick in the Department of English, and the editor of Visual Arts News Magazine.

“Canning describes the literary community in St. John’s as an ecosystem of ‘gentle mentors.’”

Carol Ann Cole and Ronan O’Driscoll

IN CONVERSATION

Two contributors to an unusual new anthology discuss the not-so-solitary act of writing

Ronan O’Driscoll

Carol Ann Cole

Carol Ann Cole is a bestselling author, professional speaker and the founder of the Comfort Heart Initiative. Carol Ann is working on a non-fiction book with a working title of the Cole Connection; going home, to be published in November 2022. Her fifth novel in the Paradise Series will be out in the spring of 2023.

Originally from the West of Ireland, Ronan O’Driscoll is the author of two novels: Chief O’Neill and Poor Farm. Both are carefully researched stories from the past, still relevant and compelling for today’s readers.

Both participated as part of a welter of writers, led by writer and editor Andrew Wetmore, in the creation of Less Than Innocent: A Lockdown Story, a unique novel written by the whole multitudinous collective, each author building off what the previous one had committed to paper … er, screen. Here, Cole and O’Driscoll reminisce on the process and talk about their work.

Author to Author

CAROL ANN: Over 20 of us. Over 20 of us?

This was my first reaction reading an email from Andrew Wetmore, our editor at Moose House Publications. Many of us, if not all of us, have been on conference calls organized by Andrew, so we could introduce ourselves to each other and share with our peers what we were working on.

I found this very helpful, not just because the call allowed us to put a face to the name, but some personalities came through as well. Other than that, we all got on with writing our own books. Not together … individually.

So, I said to myself again, “Over 20 of us?”

Is it possible to have authors who really don’t know each other’s writing styles sit down individually to write their one chapter in Less Than Innocent?

Having said all of that, I couldn’t wait to reply, “Yes. Count me in.”

Ronan, how did you feel reading Andrew’s email?

RONAN: Funny you should mention our Moose House con ference calls. My reaction upon reading Andrew’s email was that the project sounded a little like a book version of a Zoom call: 20 talking heads on the screen, some speaking over each other.

Then I realized how writing in the format reflected the jarring turn our lives had taken during the pandemic. The subtitle, after all, is A Lockdown Story.

Personally speaking, my own working life got upended by the switch to remote working. I used to teach at Nova Scotia Community College, NSCC, and found the challenge of online education impossibly daunting.

I partly turned to writing as a means to deal with the stress, and

my novel Poor Farm was the result. I also looked forward to the opportunity of working with Andrew, especially on something experimental like Less Than Innocent.

After signing up, I eagerly followed each week’s installment. The twists and turns from the seeds of Andrew’s first chapter were sur prising. I didn’t agree with all of the changes to certain characters’ fortunes but I found myself invested in them all the same.

Mostly, I was pleasantly surprised at how the book took on a coherent life of its own as each writer ran with the previous chapter.

What about you Carol Ann? How did you find the process?

CAROL ANN: I didn’t expect all of the pats on the back as each of us in turn handed our chapter off as we might hand the baton to a teammate during a race. The big difference being the runners always have a pretty good idea how their story will end.

In writing Less Than Innocent we learned this only after the fact. With each chapter completed, the positive reinforcement came in one or two words as we hit ‘reply all’ and gave our peer a pat on the back: Smack. “Great writing.” “Love it.” “I smell a sequel.” “Didn’t see that coming.”

I used to cringe when I heard an author say they sat back and let the characters speak for themselves. Now I’m that person encouraging other writers to, “listen to your characters.”

Only after writing several books would I experience the joy of listening and hearing my characters and their chatter. With only the final chapter left to write in Paradise d’Entremont Private Investigator, one character in particular told me the ending was not the one I had in my head. And, sure enough…

In Less Than Innocent I found it difficult to develop my chap ter to any great extent until I read the preceding chapter several

times. Some chapters turned personalities completely around and some were even killed off. I knew I had written a good chapter when I too received positive comments from my peers.

What about you Ronan? Any surprises?

RONAN: No spoilers but I do remember being disappointed when one character I hoped to write about was taken off the board. I also soon realized there was little point planning out my own chapter without having the preceding.

But that was all part of the fun! In fact, I like having rules to push against when writing.

For my first book, Chief O’Neill, I gave myself the rule that each section was a title of an O’Neill tune I had to tie in with the story.

In Poor Farm, I wanted to communicate the uniqueness of the autistic voice so I wrote some chapters in the second person.

For my Less Than Innocent contribution, I found myself filling in details which seemed to come out of nowhere. Not having control of how the characters got here was a real boost to my creativity.

For example, I needed to supply a background for where the Indigenous character Liz got her hacking skills and decided she learned IT security working at a reservation’s online casino. With no real forethought, an older character Cora developed a Yorkshire accent, having moved to the Valley years before. This allowed her to quote her father’s adage, “A shut mouth catches no flies” as Liz gapes at the computer screen. I liked this interaction between these unlikely friends, so much I made Cora’s expression the title of my chapter.

Less Than Innocent Edited by Andrew Wetmore Moose House Publications

CAROL ANN: The title of my chapter, “He could feel the water rising,” comes from two totally different directions. First and on a personal note, each time I have heard the words, “you have cancer,” I immediately felt the water rising and I became overly anxious to be rid of the cancer in my body.

In Less Than Innocent, when the big guy reaches his best-before date the water will begin to rise around the feet of one of our many characters and he doesn’t see it coming.

We owe our thanks to our publisher Brenda Thompson. I can’t imagine how this idea was pitched to her! If anyone could con vince her it would be our editor, Andrew Wetmore. Imagine 24 authors all having questions for their editor!

Ronan, it’s been a pleasure interviewing you and being inter viewed by you. I tend to work solo on my books but this has changed my thinking.

I have enjoyed getting to know so many Moose House authors. The Writers Federation of Nova Scotia has been a great source of feeling connected to others for me as I’m sure it is to many.

RONAN: Thanks for that, Carol Ann. It is exciting having worked with you along with Andrew and all the other Moose House writers.

I used to be very taken with the stereotype of the solitary author struggling alone. Now, the more I write, the more I realize how important a writing community is.

For me, it means breaking down my reserve and taking risks to stretch myself through collaboration. This can be through work ing with an editor, finding a writers’ group I enjoy (shout-out to Tufts Cove Writers’ Collective!) or attending local readings and events.

Being part of a community really helps a writer grow. I am especially delighted to have been part of Less Than Innocent and look forward to getting hold of the final book.

CAROL ANN: Speaking of the final book, watch for Less Than Innocent to be released by the end of October. And a sequel? You tell us! ■

Food from the heart of Membertou to your table Kiju Restaurant’s executive chef brings you favourite recipes to outlast any trend

by Julie Pellissier-Lush

Youcan hear the pride in Shaun Zwarun’s voice when he talks about his work, and this work of art is full of delicious recipes, mouthwatering pictures and easy and fun directions on how to prepare each dish. He brings his many years of experi ence, sourcing local produce and knowledge from the many cultural chefs who have crossed paths with him at Kiju’s Restaurant in Membertou First Nation, where he is executive chef.

When asked why he picked the recipes he did, he says, “It was hard. I had double the amount I needed and I knew I had to cut a few out when I realized I had 21 different soups, and this wasn’t going to be a soup cookbook. I picked the ones that were import ant to me, showcasing the foods from across the [Unima’ki/Cape Breton] Island and I tried to stay more original than going just with the trends that come and go.”

When creating his menu for Kiju’s Restaurant, the first few years Zwarun changed the menu every season—four new menus a year. This was a huge task for him and the rest of the staff, but he found customers would come in for certain dishes. He learned to leave those items on the menu.

Many of those recipes he added into this book as customer favourites. These foods have stood the test of time, like his deli cious cheesecake.

“People come sometimes just for that and a cup of tea. So, what I learned over time is a lot of our menu items don’t get changed out. And when I do change things out it is only about half the menu, just to keep the menu current. Some of those items that must stay on will be here in my book,” he says.

Zwarun advertises special menu items online and has discov ered people will pack the restaurant just because of the advertise ment. The community has been supportive of the work he has been doing, as he has implemented Indigenous cuisine into the menu with help from Indigenous cooks, to share their knowl edge of preparing their food. Zwarun has also held International Culinary Night—with different cuisines from around the globe— each Saturday night for the past several years (prior to Covid).

As a big fisherman and a seafood lover, Zwarun struggled decid ing which recipes were his favourites. For someone who does not have much experience cooking easy meals (like soups and salads),

Fresh, Local and Delicious Shaun Zwarun Formac Publishing

he has written a set of recipes with instructions that are easy to follow and make anyone feel like a professional chef.

Writing a cookbook was always a dream of Zwarun’s. Now he has put together his favourite recipes, had photographers take breathtaking photos of his food and had the collection profession ally edited (from his publisher, Formac) to create a perfect book.

“I am so excited to have my own book,” he says. “I think this will be good for me and the restaurant as well.” ■

JULIE PELLISSIER-LUSH, M.S.M., is the Poet Laureate of Prince Edward Island and the author of My Mi'kmaq Mother, Mi’kmaq Campfire Stories of Prince Edward Island and Epekwitk: Mi’kmaq Poetry from Prince Edward Island.

An excerpt from This House Is Not a Home by Katłįà

The third book from acclaimed Dene, Cree and Metis writer Katłįà, This House Is Not a Home is a fictional story based on true events. Visceral and embodied, heartbreaking and spirited, this book presents a clear trajectory of how settlers dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of their land—and how Indigenous communities, with dignity and resilience, continue to live and honour their culture, values, inherent knowledge systems and Indigenous rights towards re-establishing sovereignty. In this excerpt, the young protagonist, Kǫ, ponders the complexity of the traditional learnings about the land.

Kǫ was taught that every animal had a reason for being, but he had great difficulty understanding the purpose of the mosquito. Letting one of the annoying buzzards land on his exposed, balmy skin, he watched the pesky insect curi ously. Why was its long stinger designed solely for the purpose of drinking blood? Kǫ wondered. Without consent, the insect took as much as it could carry and flew away, low to the ground, heavy with the weight of Kǫ sticky red blood, leaving a cruel itch and a large welt in exchange. Not a fair trade at all, Kǫ thought.

It was early morning, still dark, but Kǫ and his father were already on the move. Kǫ tried to sit still and quietly like his father, but he was restless. Their backs upright and straightened against a towering cold piece of flat slate, they waited for the per fect opportunity to approach the large bull moose they had been following closely for the past day and a half.

Kǫ was born in one of the most unforgiving parts of the world. In a place where the cold can kill a man in a matter of minutes. Where one wrong move could end a life. Where there is no room for mistakes, no room for doubt, no room for anything other than survival. Where at the end of the day gratitude sets in. A deep appreciation to Creator. Having lived now for the count of ten winters, Kǫ was thankful to be alive each and every day and grateful for all things Creator made.

Kǫ learned from a young age not to let one day go by without giving thanks to Creator. To Kǫ, Creator was the land, and the land was Creator. They were one and the same. For thousands of years, Kǫ family travelled the vast North. They had many gath ering places that spread far and wide in all directions. They knew the best spots to pick berries and where to set traps. They knew where to lower their fishing nets and which migratory routes the caribou would take from year to year. The land was their home. They had many homes. Some areas they travelled to for the sum mer, other places they would hunker down for the long winter. They had no need to stay in only one place; the entire countryside was theirs to explore. Kǫ ancestors passed on the knowledge of

This House Is Not a Home Katłįà Roseway Publishing

the land and how to live as one with the land from generation to generation so as not to lose their way of life.

Kǫ developed a sense of pride in knowing how to survive on the land with his heart and his hands, mostly through the teach ings of his father. Because of this, Kǫ learned to both love the land and fear it for he knew nothing was as powerful as nature, and for that he respected it greatly.

Kǫ studied his father’s serious weathered face as they sat together in wait. He couldn’t remember the last time his father had spoken other than giving him short orders. His father had no need for words; one look from him told Kǫ all he needed to know. On the land, words had little meaning. Words were weak sounds carried away by the wind, but actions had strength behind them and served best when out on the land.

The rare time Kǫ’s father did speak was when he told stories, stories that Kǫ could not entirely piece together all at once. Kǫ’s father was a good storyteller, but Kǫ was often left with many unanswered questions.

“

Ts’ehwhı̨ ” He was assured by his mother that, in time, he would come to know the ancient teachings in the stories and the meaning behind them, that he would one day be the one to tell those same stories and pass them on to his own children. Everyone Kǫ knew was a storyteller. They all told stories with les son behind them. Stories were told incrementally, throughout the years, so that the message would become ingrained in the listener, retained for life after an entire lifetime of repetition. ■

Katłįà is a Dene woman from the Northwest Territories. Previously serving as a councillor for her First Nation, Yellowknives Dene, she is an activist, poet and columnist and law student in Indigeous Legal Orders. Katłįà writes about Indigenous injustices with a focus on the North. Katłįà’s first novel, Land-Water-Sky, won the NorthWoods Book Awards (2021).

An excerpt from Some Hellish by Nicholas Herring

In this debut novel from Prince Edward Island’s Nicholas Herring, having come perilously close to death, our protagonist (also named Herring) is forced to confront the things he fears most: love, friendship, belief and himself. Some Hellish is a story about anguish and salvation, the quiet grace and patience of transformation, the powers of addiction and fear, the plausibility of forgiveness and the immense capacity of friendship and love. In this excerpt, Herring’s family reacts to his strange behaviour.

There was just something about the basement flight of stairs. When Herring thought of them he ground his teeth and curled his toes, cracked his molars and popped his joints. He could not let them go. Could not get the image of them from his mind. There was just something about having to take the stairs that had begun to bother him. To think of his weight on the treads, groaning the wood beneath, provided him with a glimpse of something bigger, some immense dread capable of consuming not only all of him, but all of everything. They seemed to him to be evil, wicked things.

He couldn’t recall if it was in a fit of rage, or perhaps a fit of idleness, but in early December, in the midst of an exhaustive sweep of wet snow and razor winds, he had taken his chainsaw and cut a hole in the living room floor. Then he went out to the barn, retrieved his chain-block hoist, and fastened it to the ceiling joist above the opening. He rigged a little platform out of plywood and old carpet and lowered himself onto the dirt floor of the basement so that he could load more wood into the fireplace. When Euna and the girls got home from church and saw the hole in the floor, Euna had blown a gasket. The girls thought it was cool. He had never seen her lose it as she had over the hole in the floor. From the way her face had grown red and the somewhat vacant look to her eyes, how she was almost calm, and the way her body held itself upright, he had a vague sense that this was a major blunder on his part. And even that was putting it lightly.

Euna, for much of her life, and for much of their married life, had been an orderly person. Things would happen, problems would arise, and initially she had addressed each of these events in her life with the same deliberation. Hers was a cogitated method ology. Something would come from nothing. She would approach and begin the process of remediation. She returned something back to nothing, whether it be dirt on the floors or laundry in the hampers or a lack of food in the refrigerator or the tail light in the van. In the winters, when they were about to be storm-stayed, it was she who filled the tub with water and checked the batteries in the flashlights. To leave a car overnight in the drive without gas was utter foolishness, because one might need to get to a hospital before the garages opened.

Some Hellish Nicholas Herring Goose Lane Editions

To find the words to say to him had taken her quite a few days, and in the interim he had slept on the chesterfield, only a few feet above that fiery maw, sweating liquor and enduring terrible dreams that he could not remember seconds after waking. They avoided each other, stretching the silence between them as if it were a cat’s cradle. Now, it’s your turn. Now, it’s your turn. ■

NICHOLAS HERRING’s writings have appeared in The Puritan and The Fiddlehead. He lives in Murray Harbour, PEI, where he works as a carpenter. Some Hellish is Herring’s debut novel.

An excerpt from Low Road Forever & Other Essays

With the cranky forthrightness of Fran Lebowitz in Pretend It’s a City, the essays in Low Road Forever are self-assured and deeply self-effacing as she exposes the light haze of misogyny that hangs over us all to find what’s funny, what’s true and what needs to be said. In this excerpt from her essay “I Got Ended,” Thorne writes of being “fired”—that is, having her business relationship ended—from a weekly CBC arts gig, after tweeting about a retiring premier’s son’s sex life.

Ifyou’ve flipped directly to this essay then you might not know this, but really if you have any idea about me you should know that I do not care about what happens to straight white men. Their time is over. Do I feel bad about what I tweeted, specifically? Absolutely not. If it had been just a random man’s son, no one would have ever cared; if the Liberal toadies had thought it through they would have realized pointing it out only extends its life not just to do harm to me, but also to expand the alleged embarrassment the premier’s son felt—that is, if you believe men can be slut-shamed, which I don’t. Some people pretended to seriously ask what if it were his daughter (it wasn’t), or what if I were a male journalist (I’m not) tweeting about a woman (it was a man), or did I think about his girlfriend at all (I identified her as “my downstairs neighbour” only, no gender, cool assumption). I wanted more for his girlfriend, that was the fucking point!

Do I regret the tweet? Yes and no. Yes, because I knew immedi ately that a line had been crossed, but I knew it was funny and I wanted the external validation. I regret that I needed that. I regret that it made everyone else I worked with at the time feel like it was necessary to hold meetings to decide whether they could continue working with me. And I regret that I no longer get to speak with the hosts and techs I loved working with, and that we’ll never get a goodbye. Occasionally a random person will recognize me by voice and say something like, “Love listening to you on Thursdays!” and I just let them have it, because they’re clearly not a regular listener and will never know the difference.

I got ended on August 10, 2020. By Labour Day, I had my first feature film fully funded by Telefilm, a podcast with the Halifax

Examiner, and a deal for this book with Nimbus. It turns out the corporation was dark energy holding me back from my des tiny and I’d had no idea. I would have stayed on until I aged out, which in CBC time means I would have been on the air into my fifties.

It’s certainly not the way I would have chosen to go. I’ve spent many nights falling asleep to my own various quitting fantasies over the years. We’ve all dreamed of standing up and walking out in a big dramatic fashion, a story that becomes company lore or at least a party anecdote, but this was not that. No matter how well things have turned out since, if not for this I never would have quit. They would have had to ask me to leave and they would have been kind about it, some bullshit about budget probably, and I would have had my little goodbye week with a cake and people calling in and we all would have moved on as friends. ■

TARA THORNE has been an arts advocate and journalist in Halifax since 2000. She leads the rock band Dance Movie, hosts “The Tideline” podcast and coordinates the Halifax Independent Filmmakers Festival. Her feature debut as a writer and director, Compulsus, is currently on the film-festival circuit.

Low Road Forever & Other Essays Tara Thorne Nimbus Publishing

“It turns out the corporation was dark energy holding me back from my destiny and I’d had no idea..”

An excerpt from Acceptance: Stories at the Centre of Us

From “Felicity” by Hannah Jenkins

Acceptance: Stories at the Centre of Us Edited by Craig, Giwa, Ryan & Thompson Engen Books

Newfoundland and Labrador’s Engen Books partnered with Quadrangle NL to make a collection celebrating 2SLGBTQAI+ writers and stories, featuring 22 stories in all. The book was made in support of Quadrangle’s mission to create a community centre for 2SLGBTQAI+ individuals and organizations in Newfoundland and Labrador, a space that is a resource for building community resilience and connection and that provides supports for existing initiatives of the 2SLGBTQAI+ community.

In this gorgeous excerpt from Hannah Jenkins, the author draws on all the senses to describe moments of abandon and feelings of deep love, consequences be damned, and what it means to the psyche to find a true human connection.

She awakes exactly as I do.

We quietly roll and entwine our fingers between each other, like ivy, wrapping its way across an old Victorian terrace. I am now unable to distinguish my thigh from the blue-black pajama bottoms that encases them, or her hand from my stomach where it gently roves amid the blankets.

We lie here, in this room that smells entirely like her. I briefly register the dim, blurred glow of a desk light upon her abandoned copy of The Importance of Being Earnest, the gentle hum of our refrigerator drifting through the crevices of the bedroom door. In this moment, I am every bit as in love with myself as I am with her.

I want to remember everything about us. I want to taste every shared breakfast, and every overpriced piece of cinema popcorn. I want to feel the tingles she sends down my spine as she runs her nails through my hair, or presses her fingertips against my wrist in the empty supermarket. I try to hone in on the fuzzy soundtrack of her voice that reverberates in my mind as she reads Voltaire and tells me I look beautiful in white.

But right now, her even breathing is a sound I am prepared to forfeit the English language for. My mind softly sways in the gusts of her exhales, like loose dandelion seeds in the wind, wondering if it may call this summer breeze a home.

As I accidentally brush my lips across the warm skin behind her left ear, I realize that one of us ought to feel embarrassed soon, worry what this means, think that perhaps this isn’t quite what roommates do. But we don’t. This throw blanket is so warm it would be a disservice to cast it off for something as trivial as shame, anyway.

Tomorrow, I muse. Tomorrow sounds like a lovely day to think. ■

HANNAH JENKINS’ debut collection of poetry, The Birds Come Back in the Spring, was released this year by Engen Books. She is an award-winning Newfoundland and Labrador writer who is currently completing a Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature. She is an active member of her university’s writing community where she was on the editorial board of her school’s journal and is currently serving as President of the Grenfell Campus Literary Society for the third year—a role dedicated to encouraging creative expression and fostering a sense of community among students. Hannah’s poetry and short fiction have appeared in anthologies, newsletters, magazines and journals, including WORD Magazine and Mythology from the Rock. Her work has won awards such as the Grenfell Campus Moynes-Keshen John McCrae Poetry Award, and the Writers Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador’s 2021 International Women’s Day Contest.

“…one of us ought to feel embarrassed soon, worry what this means, think that perhaps this isn’t quite what roommates do.”

New writings from the Her Story Project

Powerful creative works from Atlantic Books Today & YWCA Halifax’s first-ever Writer-in-Residence program

Reflections on my time as the Inaugural HERStory Writer in Residence

She spoke about how her parents met, her childhood influences and the many paths she took which eventually led her to getting her holistic-veterinary-assistance license at age 56, then to her role at the YWCA. She was open, confident, irreverent and humorous about everything she had gone through.

She would branch off and come back to the main storyline. Her commentary and reflections added depth and perspective.

Why she shared? “I want to be the person that, if someone else is just starting their journey of healing themselves, I will walk with you. I can’t do it for you but my hand will be there if you need to grab a hold of it.”

The uber pulled up to the corner of Gottingen and Uniake Street. I’d been advised to schedule plenty of time for this interview in case I had anywhere to go afterward. I did. I would be giving my first talk at Dalhousie University to a creative writing class after this. I took the advice and scheduled a two-hour slot.

I walked to the house on the corner of the row and up the steps to iMOVE, which stands for In My Own Voice and serves as a recording-studio community-gathering space. Deb was there wait ing. Or did I arrive first? On the main floor of the two-storey row house, we sat on chairs across from each other.

Equipped with my phone recorder and selfie stick, which served as an extension bar, I pressed record and let Deb do her thing. She had been the first to volunteer to tell her story as part of the writ ing residency—a collaborative initiative hosted by the YWCA and Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association.

The goal was for me to work with anyone—staff or clients of the YWCA—to share any story they wanted to tell with one end result of being published. They could share their life story or just one story of their life. They didn’t even have to write about them selves at all.

Deb had volunteered to share her story of being a sex worker. She calls it her time in the war.

We finished recording and she agreed to take a photo with me. Outside, I mentioned that I would be giving a talk at Dalhousie. I decided to take the bus between the two locations. Deb let me know which bus would take me close to my destination. As I looked into my purse for exact change, Deb reached into hers and pulled out bus tickets for me.

Feeling almost like a little girl receiving a treat from a neigh bourhood auntie, I thanked her for the ticket, for her time and for passing on courage to others coming out of the war.

To be the first HERStory Writer in Residence has been an hon our. I am grateful for all I was able to do: serve as a writing coach and workshop facilitator; write my first book review; help create a database for Atlantic authors; bond with APMA staff over lunch; write poems with young moms and be moved to tears and finally, hear about how Chris Benjamin and Miia Suokonautio dreamed up how they could create a space for lesser heard stories and then made it happen.

To each woman who made time to sit with me in trust, courage and creativity each week, I thank you all so much. Our meetings were truly highlights of my days. ■

Poet, writer and dancer ABENA BELOVED GREEN (Abena A Tuffour) seeks to create, engage and elevate through words and movement. She teaches people to write stories of their own through workshops and coaching. She is the author of two poetry collections: The Way We Hold On and Ode to the Unpraised

L to R: Chantelle Rideout, Abena Beloved Green, Miia Suokonautio, Alex Liot, Chris Benjamin and Mallory BurnsideHolmes.

New Levels of Trust

Trust looks like lots of things: waking up in the morning to the sound of the chiming clock, boarding the bus or the car and expecting google maps to take us to our destination and going to work every day of the week believing we will get paid. It looks like provid ing a meal for the family even when you don’t know where the food is coming from and like placing all your love in someone who doesn’t know how to love you back.

There have been times where I felt I didn’t deserve to count on others: when my bestie didn’t come through for me; when my mom didn’t get me the outfit I so needed for an occasion; the time my partner did not live up to my expectations of protection, love and assurance. There are many times I let myself down by believing a lie and, yet, how easily others are able to trust in me. They accept it when I give advice. Other times, people expect my help with a particular situation and I dedicate myself to seeing them through it. But even though others trusted me, having confidence in myself seemed uncomfortable and I became fearful of achieving my own dreams.

Sometimes it’s easiest to depend on the familiar: the facts and the people who have been there all the time. But I am now starting to believe that trust is not so much about how routine the world is or about having total belief in self, but instead is what you do when you put yourself out into the world at the risk of what could be. It is about allowing yourself to be guided by your strength, purpose and faith. When you reflect on your struggles or achievements, your responsibilities, and the decisions you made, whether good or bad, you learn that the tools you relied on yesterday to get through might not be the same tools required for the present day.

A couple of years ago, I accepted a new job without knowing what it entailed. Being the first point of contact on the job, it is my responsibility to provide service to clients who require shelter and safety. In some cases, their survival depends on these services. Reaching the next level rests with me. In doing my job, I am required to be open to all people and knowledgeable about what resources are available for them, and I must act with confidence while keeping confidentiality. Completing each task day by day and putting my best foot forward is one way I’ve been learning to develop trust at a new level.

■

SHELLY ANN BROWN has been journalling for about eight years. For her, writing her thoughts is therapeutic and opens the way for her to have further discussions around a par ticular subject. In addition to journalling, Shelly Ann enjoys baking, self-care, being creative (e.g., making floral arrangements, designing) dancing, listening to music and chatting with family and friends. She also enjoys reading. Brown resides in Dartmouth and works as a Housing and Intake Coordinator for YWCA Halifax.

Overflow

I hope your day is full Of so much self-love You overflow

I hope you get outside today

And breathe in all of nature’s Stunning beauty

And breathe out all the stress

And negativity

You have carried for too long

I hope you run a nice bath

Fill it with love And lavender

Salts and melts

And you let the water Envelop you Cleanse you Release you Renew you

I hope you nurture Your every need And forgive yourself For all the times You didn’t

MELROSE is a poet, writer, entrepreneur and yogi who grew up on the sandy beaches of PEI. You can find her creations on socials and at www.thefreyadiaries.com.

Shelly Ann Brown

Melrose

One morning I knew it was time to exit from a profession that wasn’t mine.

Limousine rides, gel nails, VIPs to the clubs of downtown rails. It was their way of keeping me on track, Never a time for me to look back.

I used you as much as you used me, But I had to leave a life that wasn’t free.

A statistic—Missing and Murdered Aboriginal women, that could have been me!

Human trafficking shows on the faces of females and males and exploits the innocence of the children wearing pigtails. When opportunity shows its freedom face, My exit plans were being carefully put in place. I gained my strength from my Ancestors that watched dearly over me.

Leaving the big city life, led to my freedom and strength, For I am an Aboriginal woman—with resilience, at arm’s length. The best decision I made took me home to heal, For I am a woman of grace and feelings so real. It took me years to know that I was worth more, To my family whom I respect and adore.

With all the shame, I paid the price; lost all that was nice.

Exit Wounds I call it, as I drove home to my original comfort zone.

Breaking free from the ads which said:

“Beautiful aboriginal woman, 5’2 with curvy body and great abs.”

With courage and confidence, it felt as I left the hustle of human trafficking and city life, I was dealt.

I am a survivor of my own faults and fears.

Now, I stand confident and tall, knowing I survived it all –the hustle and limousine rides.

The bruises that shadowed my beautiful smile and blue eyes.

I have learned to love myself again

I tell you young ladies and men:

There is a way out; Be safe and careful without a doubt.

‘Exit Wounds’ I call it, a path of passion and forgiveness. Resilient we are with the strength of a standing tree, and roots that anchor us to Mother Earth and all that is free. I spread my winds, and thank you, Exit Wounds, for showing me my strength and wisdom. I am here to pass on my life story,

To those of grace and glory.

‘Exit Wounds’ I call it, many lessons learned, with wisdom in return. Leaving the past where it belongs,

For now, is the time,

To pass down my storyline to those who Walked the same journey.

You can do it too!!

Have faith in yourself, there is a light that is no longer blurry.

VICTORIA LAFFORD: I am from Paqtnkek First Nation and I work as a Peer Outreach worker for YWCA Halifax. I started writing poetry about a year ago and with the help of Abena, it became a healing part of my life that I left in human trafficking.

APMA and YWCA Halifax recognize funding for the HerStory Project from Support4Culture, a designated lottery program of the Nova Scotia Provincial Lotteries and Casino Corporation.

The draw of Atlantic Canadian food culture is in its history

by Laura Oakley

Atlantic Canadian food is shaped by a fascinating mix of ancestral, historical and environmental influences

The

vast and varied food specialties of Atlantic Canada, some might say, are too diverse to be repre sented as one grouped-together region. Not only does each Atlantic province have a multitude of distinct dishes to call its own, but these unique culinary takes can also be further narrowed down to counties and even towns.

This is why reading about food designated as “Atlantic Canadian” is so much fun. A culinary and histori cal rabbit hole, if you will.

One must only think back to their own family gatherings, where typically someone was lamenting the inclusion of raisins (or lack of raisins) in a certain baked good. Or maybe the memories of which donair toppings were standard practice at your hometown pizza place.

Every quirky Atlantic Canadian food is the sum of countless different factors. Where your ancestors came from, how food had to be preserved to make it through long winters, whether you lived in a fishing

Prepared dulse, photo by Karolin Baitinger

community or near farmland—every detail has come to shape the boundless number of nuanced Atlantic Canadian specialties as we see them today.

Thanks to local authors like Steven Laffoley, who has taken a deep dive into the many influences on Nova Scotian food, we can learn just what some of these historical, cultural, environmen tal and circumstantial factors look like. In his most recent book, Dulse to Donairs: An Irreverent History of Food in Nova Scotia, Laffoley examines everything from how to cook a beaver’s tail in

extrapolates how a fully grown mastodon could have been pre pared 10,000 years ago.

Packaged as a 12-course “meal,” the book looks at each formal course by providing extensive, well-informed history and context before outlining a recipe or two (or three, or in some cases—even four) each with a sizeable dash of humour. Of course, many of the recipes of old wouldn’t even be considered today, and some, frankly, would now be illegal to make.

Either way, it’s unendingly interesting to look at how people cooked over the last few centuries, making do with what they had and where they lived. It should be noted that the book is sprinkled with men tions of current breweries, distilleries, wineries and other food producers that readers can further explore.

the most delicious way to the ingenious cooking techniques of the early Mi’kmaq to how to make the gelatinous Acadian favourite rappie pie.

By reading through historical texts, letters, cookbooks and other communique, Laffoley paints a picture of the evolution of food consumed in Nova Scotia by the more than 145 ethnic groups who have relocated to Atlantic Canada over the past 400 years, as well as a look at traditional Mi’kmaw foods. He even

Another recent Atlantic Canadian food publication takes a different approach to expressing regional spe cialties. Newfoundland’s Best Breakfasts and Brunch by previously published writer, yet first-time cook book author, Jennifer Leigh Hill, pays homage to bed and break fasts that are currently in operation across Newfoundland, plus collects recipes from local food bloggers.

The more than 55-recipe collection, although focussed on breakfast and brunch, covers many of the Newfoundland special ties that you’d expect. Hill, a research academic who first visited Newfoundland in 2008, was struck by the province and vowed to

“We are lucky to have had an eclectic collection of influences that have shaped our food culture into incredibly interesting and unique ways of producing, sourcing, preparing and enjoying food.”

Photos:

Rappie pie

return (funny how Atlantic Canada does that). After several more visits spent thoroughly exploring the area, she decided she wanted to collaborate with owners of bed and breakfasts to create a recipe book.

The recipes have been tested and range from partridgeberry jam to Jigg’s Dinner. Backed by fun facts like “Newfoundlanders and Labradorians eat more bologna than anyone else in North America,” the book is delightfully homey and humble.

The anecdotes preluding each chapter and recipe give glimpses into the ancestral, historical and environmental influences on traditional Newfoundland food. Some of the stories are extremely charming—like how toutons (small, disk-shaped pieces of fried bread) were created to keep the children from devouring the daily loaves of fresh white bread before anyone else could get some (sounds genius if you ask me)—and some are more practical, like how preserves provided nutrient-rich fruit for consumption throughout the long Newfoundland winters, or how they made (and still make) use of stale bread. Hill gives background to dessert-tray specialties like date squares and snowballs by getting her hands on a local cookbook dating as far back as 1905—plus covers how to make moose bologna.

Interestingly enough, Hill is based out of British Columbia, and Laffoley is not originally from Atlantic Canada. Laffoley starts his book by indexing several of the vile mid-60s and 70s dishes of his childhood in Massachusetts, before declaring that after first visiting Nova Scotia, he “discovered that Nova Scotian food could be fresh and fascinating, frivolous and fun,” and, “As a result, I was deter mined to change my wayward ways about food and learn more.”

As a food writer based in Halifax, I can’t count how many times I’ve heard stories of those who have become enchanted with the food culture on the East Coast and either relocated permanently to open a business in the food or hospitality industry, or at the very least committed to spending a good amount of time here on seafood-fuelled vacations. It makes me feel proud every time.

We are lucky to have had an eclectic collection of influences that have shaped our food culture into incredibly interesting and unique ways of producing, sourcing, preparing and enjoying food. So much so that it continually draws people in and convinces them to stay.

One thing is for sure: in both Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, how we find, cook and consume food has changed drastically over the last few decades. From the timeless, cherished family recipes that are passed down through the generations, to the new ways talented chefs in the region are riffing on traditional Atlantic Canadian dishes, every year it seems to get more exciting to eat and drink your way through this part of the world—and I hope people keep writing about it. ■

LAURA OAKLEY is a freelance writer and content creator in Halifax, who professionally follows personal callings for travel, food and writing about food and travel.

Dulse to Donairs Steven Laffoley Pottersfield Press

Newfoundland’s Best Breakfasts and Brunch Jennifer Leigh Hill Formac Publishing

Toutons

Young readers

From Mi’kmaw Moons, illustration by Loretta Gould

Reviews

Un logis pour Molly / A Home for Molly

Jennifer Houle and Natasha Pilotte Bouton d’or Acadie (Ages 4-7)

Illustrated by Natasha Pilotte, Jennifer Houle’s first children’s book, Un logis pour Molly / A Home for Molly was published simul taneously in French and English in June. Houle is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, The Back Channels and Virga (Signature Editions) and is actively involved in the arts community.

Un logis pour Molly introduces young readers to the effects of plastic debris and the climate on ocean life. Molly lives and swims in the bay next to the town of Shediac, the “Lobster Capital of the World,” which boasts a large monument to the sought-after crustacean. Since the book’s release, Molly has delighted children on Atlantic beaches and at festivals.

Molly even had a chance to go to France! I hope every child gets a chance to meet her soon.

The lobsters, crabs and fish in the bay are tired and frustrated by the amount of plastic waste in their habitat. They decide to collect Frisbees, bags, toys, bottles and wrappers and stuff them into lobster traps.

When fishers raise the traps and return them empty, their plan seems successful. But do they have the energy to continue? If not, how will Molly find a safe, clean home to raise her young?

Inventive as they are, the sea creatures need help. Fortunately, their efforts draw the attention of humans, who clean up the beach and water in time for Molly to find a safe place to release her eggs.

Houle’s story and Pilotte’s pictures inspire the optimism required to change hearts and minds. The pictures are bright, the lobsters are resilient and cheerful, and although humans are held accountable, there is hope we can learn.

by Jo-Anne Elder and Lisa Doucet

Adélaïde au couvent : de Québec à Lamèque

Chantal Duguay Mallet Bouton d’or Acadie (Ages 8+)

The title character in this new book for young people is depicted with care and talent. Readers will be enchanted by Adélaïde’s remarkable person ality as she navigates boarding school relationships, secrets and misguided adventures. Elevenyear-old Adélaïde is a kindred spirit of Anne Shirley, of Green Gables fame: feisty, sensitive, keen to learn and unwavering in the face of injustice.

Faced with the departure of her beloved older brother to the Front and her mother’s lengthy hospital stay, Adélaïde is left alone with her busy father in a big house in Quebec City. She infuri ates a series of governesses with her pranks and loudly protests her father’s lack of interest in her. As a last resort, he sends to the school her mother once attended in remote Lamèque, New Brunswick.

There Adélaïde finds comfort in her devotion to her violin and the opportunities she is given to learn and perform, as well as her heart-to-heart talks with her brother’s teddy bear. She becomes friends with Rosalie who, like her, has been tormented by her classmates.

Rosalie is also lonely; her closest friend died tragically the year before. Adélaïde dedicates herself to solving the mystery of Eugénie’s death.

Whether she is confronting thoughtless schoolmates, befriend ing outcasts, breaking unfair rules or putting her life in danger to reunite a baby seal with its mother, Adélaïde acts on the same outrage, concern and interest in social justice.

The book begins a few months before the 1942-43 school year and continues until she returns home. As fascinating as she is troublesome, Adélaïde is a compassionate and tender soul, on a mission to rescue vulnerable beings from misfortunate and mis treatment. I hope she will become a delight and an inspiration for young readers, just as Anne has been.

JO-ANNE ELDER has translated more than 20 works of poetry, theatre, film, fiction and non-fiction from French to English and has been shortlisted for a Governor General’s Literary Award for translation three times.

A Baby Whale Ventures North Samantha Baker, illustrated by Dawn Baker Flanker Press (Ages 0-6)

A mother-daughter duo combine their talents to create this delightful tale of a mother and baby whale.

The pair of humpback whales embark on a long journey northward until they reach the cold waters off the coast of Newfoundland. The young calf has never been so far from the tropical waters where she was born, but she feels safe and secure with her mother always at her side.

She soon discovers that this new part of the world is home to a tremendous abundance of capelin, the tiny fish that humpbacks like to eat. There are many other discoveries for the curious calf as she explores the ocean waters: fascinating plant life and creatures that live deep underwater; shipwrecks and coral reefs; boats filled with people at the surface who clamour to watch the antics of the playful calf and her mother.

When the summer draws to a close, the young whale knows that she has learned many new things and is ready for the next adventures that await them.

Samantha Baker’s simple and accessible text provides children with a fascinating look at the lives of humpback whales and their underwater home. The story of this one calf’s journey gives read ers basic information about humpbacks and their ocean habitat while also conveying a sense of the close relationship between mother whales and their offspring, and highlighting the playful, curious spirit of this particular young mammal.

Dawn Baker’s fastidious and uncluttered illustrations heighten the book’s impact as they bring the creatures and setting vividly to life on the page. With thin black outlines and a rich colour palette, the images are delicate and dynamic. The skillful linework and vibrant scenes provide visual references that will delight read ers of any age.

Groundhog Night

Doretta Groenendyk MacIntyre Purcell Publishing (Ages 4-8)

The Shubenacadie Wildlife Park is a much-loved Nova Scotia attraction that is home to a vast array of creatures, including its most renowned inhabitant, Shubenacadie Sam, the ground hog who is credited with predict ing the arrival of spring. In her latest book, Doretta Groenendyk tells the story of the groundhog’s adventures on Groundhog Eve.

Sam anxiously awaits the next morning, when everyone will gather to see if the groundhog sees its shadow.

Sam can’t sleep on this beautiful winter’s night. “Will the other animals at Shubenacadie Park have shadows too?” Off Sam goes to find out!

Sam traverses the park and encounters a snowshoe hare, a moose, a barred owl and many other animal friends. Some of them are wide awake while others are snug and sleeping. Each casts an interestingly shaped shadow, as do the trees and the logs.

“Can a shadow predict the arrival of spring?” Sam wonders, finally drifting off to sleep.

This gentle, lovely tale takes young readers on a snowy night time journey and introduces them to a number of the animals that make their home in this park. Groundhog Sam discovers many things on a late-night ramble, such as which other creatures are awake and on the prowl and which ones sleep at night.

Sam notes the different shapes that each shadow makes and that all the shadows disappear when the moon becomes obscured by the clouds. Groenendyk’s whimsical illustrations are dark-co loured but diffused with light and richly textured.

Soft and inviting, her nocturnal winter landscapes are expansive and colour-saturated, a beautiful visual evocation and celebration of the magic and mystery of nature and the world around us.

Mi’kmaw Moons Cathy Leblanc & David Chapman, illustrations by Loretta Gould Formac Publishing (Ages 5-9)

While this book is structured as a set of stories of Holly and her auntie as they make their way through the seasons and months of the year, it is also a captivat ing look at the culture and traditions of the Mi’kmaq. The authors describe how the Mi’kmaq used the changing phases of the moon to create a calendar of lunar months which they named accord ing to the significant events that they associated with each month (like Rivers Freezing Over Time; Birds Laying Eggs Time; Trees Fully Leafed Time).

Holly is curious and eager to learn as her auntie shares sto ries with her about each month, telling her about how it got its name, the traditions that the Mi’kmaq associate with each month and season of the year and corresponding facts about the natural world.

A fascinating blend of natural science and stories, this book is thoughtfully designed and formatted with the information clearly presented in each section and on each page. Providing the descriptions of each month as a set of stories that Auntie relays to Holly highlights the importance of storytelling in Mi’qmaw culture, while also allowing readers to see through the eyes of a young girl who is learning about, and embracing, her own culture

in a modern context. Additional sections at the beginning and the end of the book give valuable insight into the ways in which the Mi’qmaq relate to the natural world, as well as fascinating information about world calendars in general, and a description of Etuaptmumk, or two-eyed seeing.

Loretta Gould’s illustrations add an extra element of warmth and wonder. Each one is vibrant and light-infused with thin black outlines that create a sense of depth and detail and help capture the profound appreciation of nature’s wonders that permeates this entire book. In terms of text and informational content, images and design, this is an absolute gem.

Jellies in the Belly Carol McDougall Boulder Books (Ages 5-9)

With its gentle and reas suring refrain of “jellies in the belly. Swim far sea turtle, swim far,” this fact-filled story gives young readers an intriguing glimpse into the world of leatherback sea turtles.

From her earliest moments as a hatchling on the beach who makes her way to the ocean, this young sea turtle constantly

searches for her favourite food: jellyfish! Lally spends many years in warm, tropical waters but does eventually travel north.

While she faces a variety of dangers, Lally and all of the leath erbacks are an important part of the ocean ecosystem as they feed on the jellyfish that eat other fish and thereby deplete those fish stocks. And although humans can endanger the lives of ocean creatures, they can also help wounded or entangled animals as they learn about Lally and her kind by observing her and tracking her movements.

Lally eventually begins to look for a mate and to ultimately make her way back to the warm waters where her life began so she can lay her own clutch of eggs before she resumes her never-end ing quest for “jellies in the belly.”

Informative and entertaining, Carol McDougall’s account of one leatherback’s life and adventures will help young readers gain insight into the world of these turtles as well as a sense of the interconnectedness of the various creatures who inhabit and occupy the world’s oceans. Birds and fish and turtles, along with jellyfish and polar bears, are each shown to contribute in their own way to a healthy ocean habitat.

Brightly saturated, uncluttered ink and watercolour illustrations focus attention on Lally and provide an artful depiction of her underwater world. The “Did You Know?” section at the back pro vides valuable further information while the instructions for creating one’s own artwork invites youngsters to explore their own creativity.

A Wonderful Bigness Diana Daly, illustrated by Bruce Alcock Running the Goat (Ages 8-12)

Inspired by the stage show If a Place Could Be Made, this book is Diana Daly’s loving ode to her greataunts and uncles and an inspiring story of faith, family and forti tude. As in the original show, this book shares the story of Daniel and Kitty Daly from Saint Mary’s, Newfoundland, and their big, boisterous family.

Daniel and Kitty had 12 children and of these six were born with skeletal dysplasia. Diana Daly creates a snapshot of their lives as the family grew and of the love and laughter that permeated and defined their home. In addition to rhapsodizing about the “house full of love” that Daniel promised Kitty and they then cre ated, this book provides individual vignettes about each of these six great-aunts and uncles who lived very full lives in spite of their health issues, each contributing in their own way to the health and happiness of their family.

While this is a deeply personal story that vividly manifests the author’s pride and love for her family, it is also a remarkable testament to one family’s tremendous strength of spirit and a true inspiration for all. With a candid and conversational writing style, Daly invites readers into this time and place, very poignantly cap turing a sense of the community and of Daniel and Kitty’s firm faith and convictions.

There is a warm feeling of nostalgia throughout and a heart warming recognition of the importance of acceptance and inclusion. Daly introduces these men and women by recounting anecdotes from each of their life stories.

Alcock’s loose, bold and thickly outlined illustrations, with their gentle washes of colour, provide their own joyfulness and perfectly capture the spirit of this bighearted tale.

While readers may be interested to know more about skeletal dysplasia, they will undoubtedly be inspired and moved by the resilience of this family.

Where the Crooked Lighthouse Shines

Joshua Goudie, illustrated by Craig Goudie

Breakwater Books (Ages 10-13)

“Oh, but now that you’re here, since the storm drove you in / we should take down a book of the tales that I spin.”

Thus the narrator welcomes a visitor to their crooked light house home where everything that isn’t nailed down rolls away

(even the dog!). What follows is a selection of sinister and spooky tales featuring a variety of terrifying creatures.

From the evil Lord of the Cod to the giant sea creature known as the Nanurluk, each story introduces a villainous foe to be out witted or otherwise overcome. The Hag is a hideous fiend who sits on children’s chests and fills their heads with bad dreams, but who is eventually convinced to embrace a career change.

The fearsome Wild Baloney finds himself “sizzled, baked and burned” when a gigantic sneeze propels him into the burning stove. Changelings and fairies also find their way into these ghoul ish verses that the narrator spins until dawn.

Delightfully dark and filled with foreboding, these grim and ghostly tales will keep young readers wide-eyed and hanging on every word. Told in rollicking verse, this series of narrative poems is jaunty and boisterous and begs to be read aloud in hushed tones.

Each poem is its own darkly humourous adventure and the poetry itself is lively and rhythmical with a musical cadence that leaps off the page and tongue. With its heavily ominous atmo sphere and the vivid depictions of each being, this collection of tales will send shivers up the spines of its readers and listeners.

The illustrations are equally atmospheric, at times suffused with an unnatural light and/or saturated with a dense, inky black ness. The facial expressions are dynamic and the compositions are energetic and provide a heightened sense of urgency and otherworldliness.

Altogether, this is a spine-tingling series of story poems capturing unique aspects of Newfoundland and Labrador lore and legends.

This is it, Lark Harnish Laura Best Nimbus Publishing (Ages 10-14)

When 13-year-old Lark Harnish arrives on Mrs. MacMaster’s doorstep, ready to begin her new job as the hired girl, she is determined to prove herself to her stern and demanding employer. Since her father passed away, times have been tough for her grieving family and she knows how much mama needs the money that this job will provide.

Somehow nothing she says or does seems quite right and she worries she’ll never make it past the trial period Mrs. MacMaster has set. Lark desperately misses her own home and family, but she also begins to see the sadness that has engrained itself in the MacMaster home where they also have suffered a terrible loss.

As she gets to know the MacMaster children, she realizes that their big, beautiful house with all its finery does not make up for the love and laughter it lacks. Can she keep her opinions to herself and be the quiet, dutiful hired girl that the MacMasters expect her to be? Or will she be the one to help this hurt-filled family find its way?

From the very first page, Lark Harnish is an amiable and

endearing protagonist. Her genuine love for her family, her kind and tender heart and her unfailing ability to see the good in those around her conspire to make her an unforgettable heroine, even when she makes mistakes or loses her temper.

Author Laura Best has once more crafted a timeless story that brings to life a bygone era and explores the myriad ways in which grief manifests itself. Her depiction of family life in rural Nova Scotia in the early 1900s is evocative and earnest, filled with emotional resonance. She beautifully captures Lark’s voice in this wholesome, sweetly satisfying historical fiction.

Heartbreak Homes Jo Treggiari Nimbus Publishing (Young adult)

An opulent mansion on a hill sits empty, a lavish reminder of Emerson Bradley’s spectacularly failed real estate development that ruined the lives of many people in his small town. Now it is the perfect spot for an epic back-toschool bash hosted by his son, Mal.

Martin’s father was one of the Heartwood Homes’ victims. Now Martin is at this party longing to reconnect with his friends and former life.

Frankie is there for Jessa, her best friend who is hoping there may be something special between her and Mal. And Cara is there for other reasons entirely: to rob the rich and hopefully find some things to make life a little easier for herself and the girls who have become her makeshift family.

When Frankie and Martin find Mal Bradley dead, all three teens become embroiled in the quest to determine who killed him, and why.

GG award-nominee Jo Treggiari has created a tense, riveting murder mystery that provides thought-provoking glimpses into the lives and hearts of many of its primary and secondary charac ters. The three alternating narrators are well-rounded, sympathetic individuals who are believably flawed and achingly real.

Their relationships (with their families, friends and each other) are complex and nuanced. The story is carefully constructed with enough clues to keep readers fully absorbed in the mystery while also becoming deeply invested in the life stories of each character.

Treggiari has created a satisfying whodunit that also invites readers to look beyond the surface to see the realities and influ ences that have shaped the lives of its denizens. She provides an affecting look at the motivations that can lead people to think and want and to do things they might never have imagined. ■

LISA DOUCET is the co-manager of Woozles Children’s Bookstore in Halifax. She shares her passion for children’s and young adult books as our young readers editor and book reviewer.

YOUNG

Reviews

Marjorie Simmins reviews a series of reflections on 90+ years of taking on new life experiences

Courageous or Crazy Hilda Tremblett Boularderie Island Press

Some children, the sages are known to say, “come from the factory” a particular way—and never really change. If you are fortunate, your changeless child might be a self-moti vated go-getter who fears little, accomplishes much, then turns around and gives as much and more to others, during a lifetime of meaningful work. They might even then write about that life, in seven succinct and saucy chapters, and title the work Courageous or Crazy, a phrase they will explain with self-deprecating humour, which sets the tone for the book, published by Boularderie Island Press in the summer of 2022.

Hilda Tremblett, “an immigrant to Canada who was born and raised on the windy shores of Bonavista, Newfoundland” (before Canada’s last province joined Confederation in 1949), was such a child, born the third of four, to a fisherman’s family. Tremblett was also fortunate to receive timely support as a young woman, by way of a scholarship from the JW McConnell Foundation. This unexpected windfall (she was the single student in all of Newfoundland to receive the scholarship, with only four others awarded across Canada) gave her the opportunity to study medi cine at McGill. It would also shape her future ideas about giving back, whenever she could, to students of modest means.

But in 1945, she was simply and proudly a fisherman’s daughter who had been set to start a teaching career in a two-room school in Greenspond, on the northeast coast of Newfoundland. Instead, she was off to the big city of Montreal. As the saying goes, she never looked back—until, perhaps, she started writing her book.

Tremblett, a noted philanthropist, graduated as a general prac titioner from McGill then specialized as a pathologist at Queen’s University in Kingston. She spent almost her entire working life at Northside General in North Sydney, Nova Scotia.

Her community has been blessed in many ways by this choice. In 1996, in honour of her parents, Tremblett created a memorial award for Cape Breton University students requiring financial assistance. In 2021, Tremblett committed a generous planned gift to the university.

Tremblett was at first reluctant to write her life story. Her friends, and a suddenly changed world, changed her mind.

“Several people have said, ‘Hilda, you should write a book about your life,’” she writes in the preface.

“I am a voracious reader, often reading two books in one day. Although it may be true that everyone has a ‘story to tell,’ I wasn’t convinced that I had a book waiting to be written. Until Covid19. Like so many people, I was more or less housebound, but I do not like to be idle. The pandemic finally presented an opportunity to put pen to paper.”

The book, she says, “is not a memoir—it is a series of reflec tions. I wrote what came to mind each day when I sat down at my desk and recorded my thoughts in longhand. I thoroughly enjoyed the writing process.”

As the reader will discover, there is little Tremblett doesn’t like, in terms of taking on a new life experiences, and conquering them. That determination and self-confidence would take her, a girl born in 1928 to a working-class family in a hardscrabble mar itime setting, to places that few young women of her day had the opportunity to seek out. Even today, her story is a handbook for success against the odds.

“For any young woman reading this book,” she writes, “my hope is that I will inspire you to go for it, but be prepared to work hard and don’t be afraid. You may not always be able to return the favours to those who helped you, but you can always pay it forward when the opportunity arises.”

A reader might wish for more personal details of Tremblett’s life, and perhaps fewer broad strokes that paint over what must have been a complex life journey, but introspection is not her strongest suit. Tremblett lives in the here and now—eyes open for the next challenge. ■

MARJORIE SIMMINS is the author of Somebeachsomewhere: The Harness Racing Legend from a One-Horse Stable; Memoir: Conversations & Craft; Coastal Lives and Year of the Horse. A freelance journalist, she has published across Canada with major daily newspapers, as well as numerous magazines.

THESE BOOKS WERE REVIEWED FROM ADVANCED GALLEYS PROVIDED BY THE PUBLISHERS.

Touch Anywhere to Begin Mark Anthony Jarman Goose Lane Editions

InTouch Anywhere to Begin, Mark Anthony Jarman carries us through turmoil, moments of time standing still, to the divine comedy of all that is unexpected in travel. Jarman, author of 19 Knives, My White Planet, New Orleans is Sinking, Knife Party and more, is an old hat at the travelogue. He inserts us directly into the narrative as buses rush by in Mumbai, warm hearths and fiddles enrobe us in Ireland and suspend us in the moment as “roads fall to the sea from heights above the white desert.”

Jarman’s collection opens in a panic we can all strangely recol lect; February 2020 in Italy, just as the cafés and theatres begin to close in Venice, and the throes of a mysterious “vee-ros” has yet to fully take flight. Jarman’s essays add depth to the reverberation of ancestral spirit, yet give us the fluidity of time. When we travel, we are the past, present and future in this gorgeous, elastic way.

“Liv at my door just a moment, her brother’s truck waiting, she is arriving and leaving, that hovering moment in the portal when your life can go either way,”

As famed travel writer Pico Iyer says, “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves.” Scanning his life experiences, Jarman brilliantly weaves personal narratives through his past into present, including an homage to memories of friends and days passed on, remembrance and what we are indeed here for.

He reminds us that “sometimes, when GPS fails and error guides you, you stumble upon olive groves, sage, and the most gorgeous views,” and that in perpetuity, through travel: “over and over we unravel, we unlearn.”

This juxtaposition of narrative and time creates an interesting structure. Scenes and dialogue buzz electric as we race through the script and dialogue of the drama, always set to a descriptive back drop. Scenes upon scenes effortlessly come and it only helps that travel is built of spectacle, of misunderstanding and uncertainty.

The traveller must heed all of these, no matter mood or mel ancholy. The author does not spare any of the inconveniences: being lost in Vienna, the red swell of bedbugs in China or Venice in “puzzling warrens and wrong turns and beautiful dead ends.” Even a hospital bedside where life hangs in the balance.

Jarman’s tone takes us through the historical dips and veers of each of the places he visits. He includes a profile of Chairman Mao in Shanghai’s French Concession, the breath of the Iron Age Vikings in Ireland and the Japanese warships of 1937.

Jarman also speaks of villains closer to home, including Samuel de Champlain’s discovery of a big river in New Brunswick. “Local natives told Champlain the river already had a name, it was called Wolastoq. Champlain said their input was deeply appreciated and that they could look forward to Airbnb and smallpox.” Read this memoir for the editorial alone.

Readers will also identify with the weight of their own dis comfort around the colonialism, migration and time. “Migrants move around us as we move, but they are not visible. Armenian and Kurdish refugees are not sipping Earl Grey tea on this sunny terrace, refugees from Syria or Sudan do not study the lovely sea scape statues.” There are no excuses made for British soldiers and Irish mercenaries, although the architecture and social systems are prominent from Mumbai to Shanghai.

Through the meat mazes of Venice, Croatia, Ireland, China and back to the Mediterranean, Jarman lays thick the theme that travel changes us. Through the “atonal orchestras” of Mumbai to the “rhythmic constellations” of street dancers, it is apparent that life is a dance, and the end notes not necessarily always where we meant to go.

Perfectly encapsulated in the thought, “Am I digesting Europe, or is Europe digesting me?” we vibrate with movement, feel ing and acceptance, all just short stops within each other on the journey.

When steeped with the voices of the global chorus, Jarman reminds us that we have the same access to consciousness in our own backyards. I liked the poignant reminder that, “In my yard four crows watch me, a kingfisher on a low branch watched the river, then becomes a bright blue rocket hitting the water head first.” We can always slow down, we can always watch crows, and as the Italians say, at the table you never grow old. ■

MO DUFFY COBB is the founder and editor of Pownal Street Press (pownalstreetpress.com). She has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction and is the author of Unpacked: from PEI to Palawan, The Chemistry of Innovation: Regis Duffy and the Story of DCL and Crescent Moon Friends.

Mo Duffy Cobb reviews a travelogue of turmoil, time standing still and always the unexpected

Guyleigh Johnson reviews an eccentric poetry collection with a mischievous willingness to challenge

WhenI think of the word “brat” I imagine someone spoiled; when reading through this publication I believe it embodies confi dence, wit and strength against all odds. Brat is a collection of poetry that provokes thought and imagination where words become moments, experiences and emo tions wrapped together in eccentric titles and poems.

Its passages are full of creativity, free flowing smoothly on the page and very descriptive—with themes of raw and riveting perceptions of chaos, and honest reflections. This work takes us through the narration of the concept “brat,” in terms of onus and empowerment.

I enjoyed the uniqueness with which many of the poems were written, some of them even causing me to excitedly turn the page seeking to grasp the full concept, such as with the line:

“If I wanted an explosion in my hands,” which appears on the page sideways.

One of my favourite poems was “The best thing about me,” which cultivates the essence of resilience regardless of what one is up against. The imagery in the words expresses the strength and pride one has for overcoming.

This collection has a tone of attitude, mischievousness, mystery and the willingness to challenge. It took me on an

unexpected journey of discovery. There are moments when creatures converse, like in the poem “two rats living in a raccoon’s corpse discuss structural brutalism,” an exercise in the unconventional creativity of the storytelling, an interest Sophie Crocker conveys throughout the collection.

Crocker does a good job showcasing the way art and poetry mesh, with different styles of stanzas that capture the essence of the messages they are trying to convey, using innovative methods.

As an astrology lover, I was excited to see the zodiac signs’ reflective messages throughout some of the poems. ■

GUYLEIGH JOHNSON is a writer and spoken word artist from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, and the author of the poetry collection, Expect the Unexpected and Afraid of the Dark, a collection of poetry and prose.

The legacy of Joseph Roberts (“Joey”) Smallwood lies in his endeavours as a politician and journalist, his push for Newfoundland and Labrador to join Canada and his premier ship of the province (1949-1972). Edward Roberts, who died on 14 January 2022, challenges this legacy by focusing on the final years of Smallwood’s premiership, and the substantial economic changes for Newfoundlanders during this time, demonstrated by the complex relationship of political and industrial forces involved in the Stephenville Linerboard Mill project and its relevance for premier Smallwood’s political downfall in 1972.

Smallwood’s final years as premier are interpreted through the eyes of two former companions. The author was premier Smallwood’s first executive assistant and for mer Lieutenant Governor of Newfoundland and Labrador. The foreword author, Clyde K Wells, was the Minister of Labour

under the Smallwood administration and Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador (1989-1996).

Chapters are in two parts: an examination of the Linerboard Mill project and excerpts from writings by key players. The first, writ ten with balanced frankness, convincingly shows the connection between Smallwood’s efforts establishing the Linerboard Mill, his downfall, and his responsibility for the financial and political burdens of successors.

In the second part, the author’s inter pretation is supported by five well-selected

excerpts, offering first-hand accounts of former allies and opponents: Smallwood’s own party opponent John C Crosbie’s “No Holds Barred: My Life in Politics,” historian Richard Gwyn’s “Smallwood: The Unlikely Revolutionary,” Bill Rowe’s “The Premiers Joey and Frank,” Smallwood’s own publi cation “I Chose Canada” and Janice Wells’ “Frank Moores.”

This is a rich collection of valuable sources. The absence of notes requires addi tional efforts when used for research.

Elaborately written, with relevant firsthand accounts, this book is an asset for anyone wanting to learn more about the tumultuous events leading to the end of pre mier Smallwood’s political career. ■

MATHIAS RODORFF is research man ager at the Gorsebrook Research Institute at Saint Mary’s University and managing editor of the Journal of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society.

Mathias Rodorff reviews valuable account of Smallwood’s political downfall

Munju Ravindra reviews a gentle and charming memoir/self-help book to help us find the light in life

Youmight expect a memoir by an Iranian-born psychotherapist to be dark. From the bright teal cover of Hassan Khalili’s A Life Spent Listening, through his ruminations on hiking, food and psychology, tips for living life to the fullest and even his closing meditation on death, Khalili keeps it light.

Like sitting for a cup of pomegranate tea with a favoured uncle. It was no surprise to turn the final page and see Dr. Khalili smiling at me.

Part memoir, part self-help book, Khalili includes the usual “wellness” information: exercise, eat vegetables, time in nature, cultivate friendships, relax. It’s loaded with helpful checklists, suggesting developing a ‘life list’ and with things you’d like to accomplish in your life (versus a ‘bucket list’ for things to do before you die).

The first entry on Khalili’s list: “learn

English,” without which this book would not exist. There are lists to help the reader discern whom to trust (and how to be worthy of trust), how to resolve conflict, how to treat a car-accident victim and how to choose a life partner. He likens the latter to choosing an apple “without any bruises or bad spots.”

It is also a charming tale of a man’s love for his own life. Born in Iran, Khalili built

his life and career in Newfoundland. I expected more descriptions of personali ties or places I recognized. But it’s Khalili’s connection to Persia that is palpable. He uses memories as prompts for reflections on life and lessons in psychology.

The cream puffs he savoured as a child stand for absolute joy. He exhorts us to build “cream puff moments” in our own lives. This is a gentle and delightful reminder we each have the power to influ ence our reactions, emotions and experi ences. ■

MUNJU RAVINDRA lives by the sea outside Halifax. She works as a conservation biologist, but reads (and occasionally writes) in her spare time.

Lovers of Maritime true-crime stories are in for a treat with Steve Vernon’s new release, More Maritime Murder, a follow up to his 2010 bestseller, Maritime Murder. Skillfully mixing historical details with descriptions of violence and slaughter, Vernon uses police files, court records and his own brand of captivating storytelling to detail a series of ghastly crimes, committed between 1859-1947, in New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia.

While reading the book, I was imaging Vernon telling his stories by a campfire, slowly and enthusiastically crafting his tales, pausing for effect, then going in for the kill—so to speak—all while relishing the looks of shock on the faces of those lis tening. Vernon gives detailed and graphic accounts of the murders, allowing readers a behind-the-scenes peek into these violent acts, including grim descriptions about the murderers and their victims.

He weaves tales about these shocking events, including intriguing (and perhaps lesser known) information about cases such as the Butterbox Babies murders, a “butch ered butcher” and murderous behaviour that seems to run in one Maritime family.

Vernon provides fascinating, though sometimes gruesome details, about Maritime murders by spurned lovers and disgruntled employees, friends and neigh bours, and more. He describes misunder standings, disagreements and mystery, all

with the same murderous results.

A note of caution to readers. There’s little left to the imagination in the descrip tions about how victims were killed, the conditions of corpses, how perpetrators were hanged (sometimes more than once) and more.

Though the subject matter is not for everyone, Vernon’s tone is folksy and conversational; his prose descriptive and detailed: a perfect formula to reel in lovers of a good tale and historical true crime. ■

LYLA HAGE is an entrepreneur and teacher in Halifax. She enjoys travelling, reading and writing, and is a columnist for a local community paper.

Lyla Hage reviews true tales of shocking and sometimes gory historical events in the Maritime provinces

Heather Fegan reviews a message of love, hope and empathy

ThroughEye of the Ocean, author and journalist Janice Landry strives to deliver the message that love, hope and empathy are essential com ponents of life. She illustrates this through a collection of wide-ranging stories.

The theme of hope originates from the story of her late grandfather, Vasil Bochoff, an immigrant to Canada from Bulgaria, fleeing poverty and settling in Nova Scotia. The theme of empathy was inspired by the outpouring of support for the Barho family, the Syrian refugees involved in a tragic house fire in 2019, and first responders who helped them.

The theme of love originates from her parents’ unconditional love and her father’s fierce loyalty to the Halifax Fire Department. Love is the thread woven throughout her stories.

The book includes 21 interviewees with members of the Hants East Assisting

Refugees Team (HEART) society, the Imams who were the primary organizers of and officiants at the funeral for the seven Barho children, the curator and artists of a national exhibition display ing artwork by those who have served their country and communities, mental health and wellness experts and the (now retired) coordinator of the Firefighters and Family Assistance Program who supported firefighters in the aftermath of the tragic

2019 fire. It ends with a tribute to the first responder who answered Landry’s emer gency call the day her mother died.

Revisiting these circumstances to edu cate and support readers and demonstrate the power of love, hope and empathy is no small feat. Landry handles the subject matter delicately.

Through her work advocating for the mental health of first responders and their loved ones, Landry knows firsthand how important it is to take care of those who take care of us in times of need. She will donate profits from sales of her book to the HEART society in memory of her parents and grandfather. ■

HEATHER FEGAN is a freelance jour nalist in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She’s working on her soon-to-be published memoir about living with Crohn’s Disease. Follow her chronicles at heatherfegan.ca.

Paul W Bennett reviews a judicious and definitive post-mortem of a consequential premiership

StephenMcNeil was an unlikely choice for Nova Scotia Liberal leader in 2007. Almost everyone underes timated the gangly, bearded former appli ance repairman. Standing six-five, McNeil proved as premier to be a towering political figure who exuded authenticity and never abandoned his homespun principles.

Veteran journalist Dan Leger’s biogra phy, Stephen McNeil: Principle & Politics, will cement McNeil’s legacy as one of the “most consequential premiers of recent years,” as pollster Don Mills put it.

Nova Scotia’s 28th premier was a res olute leader who inspired intense loyalty, bristled when challenged and stared down determined resistance. Leger paints a fair, textured, balanced portrait. He might have noted parallels with NB’s no-non sense premier Frank McKenna and his affinities with Dr. John Hamm.

While McNeil was a “big L” Liberal, Leger shows he embraced many “small-c” conservative values nurtured in the Annapolis Valley: self-reliance, thrift, forthrightness and concern for the

neglected and disadvantaged. Viewed through this lens, his seemingly contradic tory policy decisions make sense.

McNeil prided himself on being from a normal, hard-working family. Leger notes there was nothing “normal” about being raised as one of 17 children, nor witnessing your father choke to death at the kitchen table and your widowed mother become the first woman sheriff in Canada.

McNeil toppled Darrell Dexter’s NDP government with an effective campaign targeting Nova Scotia Power and escalat ing power rates. Welcoming Syrian refu gees, increasing immigration and doubling trade with China produced growth and

reversed population decline.

Leger recognizes the political risks McNeil took shutting down the polluting mill at Boat Harbour, tackling the fester ing issue of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children and stepping up during the pandemic with his “Stay the Blazes Home” stance.

Balancing the budget and imposing wage restraints on the public sector earned him enmity from provincial unions. He reined in the ballooning deficit and (nar rowly) won a second majority.

Taking stock of McNeil’s legacy and applying his journalistic skills, Leger walks the line providing a judicious post-mor tem which will stand as the definitive biography. ■

PAUL W BENNETT, Ed.D., is Director, Schoolhouse Institute, Halifax, NS, and Adjunct Professor of Education, Saint Mary’s University. His latest book is The State of the System: A Reality Check on Canada’s Schools (2020).

Trevor Corkum reviews a retrospective that coolly and confidently dissects class and privilege

AFierce

and Tumultuous Joy gathers five decades of poetry by cel ebrated author David Adams Richards. Taken together, these poems reflect the poet’s ongoing concern with the working-class men and women of rural New Brunswick—loggers and fishermen, lovers and schemers, brawlers and dream ers. By keeping his focus squarely on lives which are so often overlooked, Richards is in conversation with poets like Patrick Lane and Milton Acorn, whose own poetic subjects struggle to find solace and grace in a dark and turbulent world.

Written as they are across such a huge sweep of time—with more than a few marked by specific dates, like “The Goodbye, 1966”—it’s no surprise that many of the poems are tinged with nostalgia, reflecting vivid and poignant moments in a world that has mostly disappeared.

Others are written in direct address to old friends, rivals, past lovers and acquain tances, many of whom have passed on. Still others are written to literary heroes, like Dylan Thomas and Dostoevsky. In such poems in particular, Richards deftly conjures a fresh and welcome intimacy, a sense of recognizing and calling out to one’s comrades in the struggle.

One can’t help but feel the pull of time upon the work, the sense of a poet looking

back over his shoulder. In many instances, this backward glance takes the form of settling scores. Perhaps most powerfully is the poem “I Came to Canada,” which explores, in part, the author’s fraught relationship with the Toronto literary establishment. Like Richards’ best work, this poem coolly and confidently dissects class and privilege, calling out the hypoc risy and small-mindedness of many of our nation’s cultural taste-makers.

As ever, Richards seems unafraid to ruffle a few feathers in the name of so eloquently and directly speaking truth to power. ■

TREVOR CORKUM lives on the South Shore of PEI, where he operates a residency program for writers at The Hideout. His debut novel is forthcoming with Doubleday Canada.

Griefand confusion clung to me like the humid air of a sum mer day as I submerged myself in Annick MacAskill’s Shadow Blight. Through a lens of classical mythology, MacAskill presents the bewildering experi ence of child loss.

The ever-present impression of sorrow that follows one’s existence post-trauma pours out of every page and every line: “That in her sorrow the mother became the blight.”

As I moved through this poetry col lection, MacAskill’s titles, epigraphs and grounding maternal figures of classical myth provided a delicate but tangible path through the haunting expressions of loss. I followed the lament of the narrator as the loss of hope found in birth becomes unbearable in its unexpected disappear ance— “[She did not think she would know this death in life].” With a defining

loss so sudden, some grasp for reason must be made.

Myth has long been used to make sense of the world around us. Over time, myth has been exchanged for more rational explanations; however, some events in life cannot be brought to reason. My journey through Shadow Blight along with the narrator led me to search for an answer to a question posed in the poem “Variant:”

“What is left when what defines us slips away?”

A loss so devastating almost demands an answer, but only an echo of emptiness returns from the void.

In the poem “Rooms,” I found a compromise to my question: “in her emptiness our lack/ we clutch mythic/ intermediaries.”

Here in this stark yet vulnerable line, MacAskill offers Shadow Blight as another branch to hold on to through the dis orienting blur of pregnancy loss. This collection of poetry offers solidarity to all seeking solace through a difficult time, for all seeking answers to a situation that has none. ■

ALEXIA MAJOR is an English Studies graduate of Mount Saint Vincent University. She loves books and rainy weather. Most often she can be found enjoying the poetry of Emily Dickinson or composing poetry of her own.

Alexia Major reviews a work of poetic solidarity for those seeking solace through difficult times

Teasers

Growing up, I always saw the thick covers of Wilde’s collected works high up on the bookcase, and thus I understood the book as a symbol of adult reading and of the mysteries of adulthood. When I was around thirteen, we went to Trinidad to celebrate my grandmother’s ninetieth birthday. Stuck in the family home, I found my aunt’s copy of Frank Harris’s biography of Oscar Wilde. Recognizing Wilde’s name, and very conscious of reading something importantly mature, encountering Harris’s excerpting of Wilde’s “[The] Ballad [of Reading Gaol]” had a particularly moving effect on me. I immediately memorized many of the verses, and when we returned home, I took my parents’ book from the shelf and read the entire poem.

I liken the reading of Wilde’s poem to a kind of reverse Narnia. Rather than stepping into the fantasy world from which children are ejected upon aging out, reading Wilde was my entrance into understanding what I keenly understood as serious issues. For the first time, I acutely recognized an accounting of injustice. I grew up in a family marked by colonization where, in my own mother’s lifetime, Trinidad had become independent. Later, the works of Eric Williams, C.L.R. James, Claudia Cumberbatch Jones, and other Trinidadian writers and think ers would influence me, but at this age I had only my mother’s family stories of oppression and resistance, which I had yet to apply to a more global analysis of power. Similarly, while I had intimations of feminist analysis as a young girl, I had not yet developed a feminist framework and certainly had not yet encountered the works of Black feminist writers. Reading Wilde was an opening into the world of social justice, of clearly seeing a wrong and burning to right it. I often tell people I became an abolitionist at thirteen.

—Excerpted from Abolitionist Intimacies by El Jones. © by El Jones. Published by Fernwood Publishing. fernwoodpublishing.ca

She was having a staring contest with the Kit-Cat wall clock she had purchased at Eaton’s years ago when there was an Eaton’s. The cat with moving eyes and tail was winning but then Mable Gibson, at the moment, was hardly in her finest form. When she couldn’t bear to look at her husband any longer but was still too paralyzed to move or think, she turned to the clock. The ticking had become louder; the only sound was its beat, drumming out a message in the deadly, smoky silence with a pungent aroma of human blood, freshly spilled, and a sharp smell of burning. Was it cordite? Maybe that’s what Earl said the smell was, she thought, without really caring. Her ears ached and her eyes were swollen—she had, she realized now, cried furiously for an indeterminate time.

All she had done this morning was pull out the Rattail silverware for a good cleaning. The forty-eight-piece set had been a wedding gift and she polished it faithfully once a month—whether it needed it or not. She had taken the tray into the living room and sat it on a little table by the window where the morning light was the best. It was, she thought—although she knew her thinking was jum bled—but when Earl came in, when he opened the door, it was 6:22. Now it was 7:40. She couldn’t do the math, it didn’t matter. She had to move. Somebody had to do something.

—Excerpted from The Oxford Wives Murder Club by Bruce Graham. © by Bruce Graham. Published by Pottersfield Press. pottersfieldpress.com

It was the usual nightmare. A dozen or so undercaffeinated wretches in line at the counter, anxiously shuffling from side to side, poking at their phones, look ing at their watches, trying to ignore the ongoing terror from the news feed on the TV screen, and waiting, like junkies outside a methadone clinic.

Waiting.

And waiting.

And waiting, as the loud and colourful gaggle of yoga moms with the sweatstained tights, back packs, baby strollers, and rolled up mats milled about at the head of the line, excitedly discussing what they wanted to order, as if they’d never been in a coffee shop before, and a half decaf oat milk latte with extra foam and sprinkles and a shot of Bergamot was something a sentient being would actually want to drink.

I was practising deep breathing, and trying not to let the music on the sound system enter my consciousness. It was yet another self-absorbed, sad sack white kid with an acoustic guitar, who’d holed up in an unheated cabin in the woods for a year, with his notebook, a battered Gibson guitar, and an old tape machine, to get in touch with his “inner demons.” And yes, he’d actually said that, during an interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air.” As if a privileged 23-year-old white male had inner anything. There are a million of these singer-songwriter kids out there, male and female, and they all sound as if they’re singing in their sleep.

These stories are just there if you’re willing to do the digging. Every epitaph is a clue. Cemeteries are what I call a perpetual story machine, a beat that generates something new every day. When you see them that way, their value becomes more than just utilitarian. They are the community’s collective memory. And they need to be preserved. The precious acres of green space in the heart of downtown are a lovely inheritance to the living from the dead.

The earliest gravestone featured in this book is from 1751. The most recent is from 2003. To tell the stories covering the 252 years in between I had to learn about wars, religious conflicts, the Canadian legal system, the history of medicine, the tangle of Nova Scotia politics and a surprising amount of information about boats. So. Many. Boats.

The stories are not intended as a complete collection of Halifax’s most inter esting historical inhabitants, nor an exhaustive account of its historic cemeteries. There are thousands of stories buried in Halifax’s cemeteries and graveyards. I let my gut decide which ones to dig up and tell here. I am not an academic and I don’t claim to be an expert in any field—but come for a walk with me in the boneyard, and I’ll spin you a yarn. I am a storyteller and the graveyard’s gate is my entry point into the tales of this city. For me, historic cemeteries are repositories of biographies, libraries of lives lived. I believe the dead would want us to tell their stories.

—Excerpted from Dead in Halifax: Stories of Adventure, Scandal, Heartbreak and Heroism by Craig Ferguson. © by Craig Ferguson. Published by Formac Publishing. formac.ca

—Excerpted from 6 Crows Gold by Garnet Rogers. © by Garnet Rogers. Published by Tickleshore Publishing. garnetrogers.com

Staff Picks

36 Atlantic Canadian books that are generating buzz this season

Art & Craft

On Inuit Cinema / Inuit TakugatsaliuKatiget

Mark David Turner Memorial University Press

Mark Turner writes in his introduction

the story of Inuit cinema must be told “by and with Inuit filmmakers, media advocates, and producers, as well as with their collaborators, colleagues, and families.” Like a good movie, this book is an impressive piece of collaborative storytelling.

Halifolks

Jack Scrine

Nimbus Publishing

From the Halifolks Facebook page (inspired by Humans of New York):

“A love letter to the city of Halifax and its people, two years in the making, with the support of Nimbus Publishing! It is a combination of stories from this page over the past 7 years, as well as more recent, unpublished stories and photos.”

History Hard Aground Bett Fitzpatrick Boulder Books

Based on eyewitness accounts of survivors and rescuers of the 1942 Pollux and Truxton disaster off the south coast of Newfoundland, Fitzpatrick tells the

story of the men who saved themselves, the miners who carried survivors up the cliffs and the people of St. Lawrence who opened their homes and hearts to the victims.

The Sea Wins Eric Allaby Nimbus Publishing

This is a compel ling narrative and pictorial history of more than 40 Bay of Fundy shipwrecks among the most powerful tides in the world. But it’s not just the current.

Wreck by fog, wreck by incompetence, wreck by storm. If this Bay could write, this would be its book.

Re-Reading Catherine Parr Traill Dorothy Lander HARP Publishing

Lander shows courage and honesty in closely examining herself, her influences, her famil ial ties to colonialism.

We have yet to see many confessional analyses like this one, where a settler is reflective on her own impacts. This is a necessary narrative if this country is to reach a reconciliatory stage.

Mi’kmaw Fiddler Joe Marble Plays to St. Anne Dorothy Lander

HARP Publishing

Etuaptmumk, two-eyed seeing, is an effort to appreciate the value of both

western and Indigenous ways of under standing the world, and the intercon nectedness of all living things on Mother Earth. It’s a high-minded concept that Elder John Prosper and Dorothy Lander generously embody in their ongoing friendship and work together.

The Great Saint John Fire of 1877 Mark Allan Greene

Formac Publishing

With assistance from more than 120 archival images, Mark Allan Greene tells the story of the enormous fire that swept through the busy centre of North America’s third largest city—home to thriving shipbuilding and lumber industries—for nine terrifying hours in the early summer of 1877, leaving 13,000 homeless.

Biographical Dictionary of Enslaved Black People in the Maritimes

Harvey Amani Whitfield

University of Toronto Press

Harvey Amani Whitfield has thoroughly researched and catalogued more than 1,400 brief life histories of mostly enslaved Black people, originally from Africa, the West Indies, the Carolinas, the Chesapeake and northern states, providing a remarkable diversity of Black experiences.

The Longbow, the Schooner, & the Violin Marq de Villiers Sutherland House

Marq de Villiers, in this engag ing and at times humorous sci entific history, makes a fascinating contribution to the genre that dissects an unsuspecting object—or in this case three, all made of wood—and shows readers how they changed the world, human and otherwise.

Dear Billie: A World War II Love Story

Karen Lundy Flanker Press

As Joan Sullivan wrote in her review for Saltwire, this collection of Second World War love letters between a young Newfoundland couple chronicles “a courtship and … a two-and-a-half-year arc on their rela tionship … [It is] both a family story and a broader social history.”

Bombs and Barbed Wire Ronald Cormier Goose Lane Editions

Based on exten sive, in-depth interviews con ducted in 1990 with 11 surviving Acadian veterans, passionate Second World War his torian Ronald Cormier brings to life those experiences for English-language readers. Their stories of commitment and bravery, displayed by 24,000 Acadians who volunteered, counter the prevailing notion that Acadians refused to support the war effort.

Memoir

For the Love of Sea View Hilary MacLeod Acorn Press

The house started at Park Corner, on the pond LM Montgomery called “The Lake of Shining Waters,” moved above Brander’s Pond and became known as “the little dollhouse.” MacLeod fell in love on first sight and couldn’t stop herself from buying it, starting a 30-year adventure with an Island community.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands Kate Beaton Drawn & Quarterly

“...there is no knowing Cape Breton with out knowing how deeply ingrained two diametrically opposed expe riences are: a deep love for home, and the knowledge of how fre quently we have to leave it to find work somewhere else.” A personal story with universal resonance.

The Art of Misadventure Dave Brosha RM Books

With humour and grace, Dave Brosha (“one of the most cele brated creative photographers in the world”) of Prince Edward Island recounts the philosophy and spirit that has allowed him to see so much, so well— sometimes on purpose and sometimes not.

Around England with a Dog Lesley Choyce RM Books

“I’d travelled to England many times but never with a dog.” Simple, a trip and a book. But with Lesley Choyce, and his “West Highland terrorist,” Kelty, it’s never simple—a curious mind and an 11-inch-tall travel ling companion who is “a bit naughty” make for many hijinks and delightful discoveries.

Poetry

Surrender & Resistance

Katie Fewster-Yan Gaspereau Press

In drawing on the natural world as well as Classical myth and fairy tales, Katie FewsterYan ponders the quality of fate and our responses to it, ever shifting our perspectives on life. “The rain is not an accusation / In fact, it is falling very beautifully.”

A Matter of Inclusion

Chad Norman

Mwanaka Media and Publishing

“...I want to understand what it is like to find one’s home in Canada, whether it is for economic or political rea sons, or having to flee violence,” the poet writes in his introduction. “...as a white man who has lived in Canada his whole life, I can only do that by asking questions...”

This is a Stickup Amber MacMillan Wolsak & Wynn

“Look, I want you to know / That everything is different, / but it’s the cold and quiet end / of another year, just as cold / and quiet as all the ends to all / the years, and I’m still here.” This passage, in tribute to RM Vaughan, is typical of MacMillan’s emo tional wallop.

The End is in the Middle Daniel Scott Tysdal Goose Lane Editions

Mad Magazine inspired, Tysdal’s poems go beyond the page— literally—invit ing us to fold the page and find the closing statement. In content he probes his psyche and varied environments, from airports to baseball games, that hold those deemed mad.

The Remembering Susan Sinnott Vagrant Press

Retired widow Liz’s world is crumbling from grief and early-onset demen tia when her daughter reveals she has been sexually assaulted. From the awardwinning author of crossover novel Catching the Light, this is a highly anticipated work, filled with empa thy, exploring multigenerational trauma.

Young Readers

Knight of the Rails Christine Welldon Red Deer Press

Billy Knight is our young guide through an era of desperation, dan gers, difficulties and the comradery they built among the down and out. They found courage and strength in their numbers and their commitment to helping each other survive. The Canadian answer to the great dust bowl balladeer, Woody Guthrie.

Face the Music

Lesley Choyce Orca Book Publishers

Troubled youth on a road adven ture in a stolen car that breaks down. Choyce delivers quick action and an engaging story featuring a com pelling protago nist pulled into uncomfortable situations. He has a talent for drawing in-depth characters with few words. The issues are engrossingly embed ded in a well-constructed story.

Anna Maria and Maestro Vivaldi Jan Coates Red Deer Press

Music, like story, is a powerful means of conveying feeling. Coates, who has already

shown a gift for rhetorical music appre ciation, taps into a universal loneliness and longing to convey the story of how a young girl connects through music to another soul from another time and place.

My Fade is Fresh Shauntay Grant Penguin

It’s hard to overstate the importance of confi dence to a young per son, or how hard it is to find it when everyone tells you there’s a certain way you’re supposed to look. Grant’s rhyming story and Thomas’ vibrant illustrations deliver an important message of self-assur ance—and pride in their hair!—to young Black girls.

Fiction

Because of Nothing at All Paul Sunga Goose Lane Editions

It begins like a thriller, but quickly shows itself as a profound story of impossible choices, identity, disparity and injustice. This is a vividly compelling novel that shows the world as a place of justifiable madness amidst blurred and crumbling lines.

Apastoral: A Mistopia Lee D Thompson Corona/Samizdat

Novelist and critic Jeff Bursey calls this work “hilari ous, sad, sarcas tic, imaginative.” It is also Canlit

Atypical, bril liantly satirical and weird, with a story centred around Constock, a penal system where criminals’ brains are transplanted into farm animals; the guards are wolves with the brains of, well, prison guards.

Fenian Street Anne Emery ECW

In 1970s Dublin, Shay Rynne is a thoroughly com pelling protagonist, a policeman who is not completely unsympathetic to the IRA’s sentiments. Emery authentically combines fact and fiction, layered into a bevy of fascinating characters, from police to family members of murder victims to Irish-American mobsters, all rooted in an ancient poverty.

Shimmer Alex Pugsley Biblioasis

Pugsley is a forceful, fearless yet intimate storyteller, whose characters fall into a range of social classes, geographic realities and situa tions—struggling with varied relation ships, social norms and boundaries. He has a filmmaker’s gift for sharp dialogue that enlivens characters, makes them larger than life yet fully real.

Bystander Mike Steeves Book*hug Press

Peter Simons is an antisocial creep with hilarious observations made mostly from his apartment watch ing horrific online videos. Steeves’ writing is surgical and often hilarious. What we are left with is an unforgettable portrait of a crumbling mind that, for all its acerbic dissections of human nature, is painfully lonely.

We Happy Few Aren A Morris Black Box Publishing

Morris’ debut novel is driven by Polly, a strong protagonist during the Second World War, with great convictions, character and determi nation. Morris expertly blends fact and fiction to show wartime Halifax and gender norms of the day, educating readers about the Halifax Five, Nova Scotia female weld ers from across the province.

A Dreadful Splendour

BR Myers

HarperCollins Publishers

Halifax’s BR Myers conjures a wickedly whimsical brew of mystery, spooky thrills and intoxicat ing romance in this Victorian London tale of Genevieve

Timmons, a huckster spiritualist who finds herself in an all-too-real haunted manor—no tricks required.

Four for Fogo Island

Kevin Major Breakwater Books

The latest Sebastian Synard book finds our dearest detective quest ing for a little R&R on Fogo Island, when murder strikes in an unsuspecting quilt shop. On top of that, he has an important family get together with his son and ex-wife and her new police officer partner.

The Raw Light of Morning

Shelly Kawaja

Breakwater Books

far she will go to protect herself and the ones she loves.

Arguments

Solidarity Behind Bars

Jordan House & Asaf Rashid

Fernwood Publishing

Author and spo ken-word poet extraordinaire El Jones calls this “A must read for all interested in [prison] abolition movements.” It argues because incarcerated workers are exploited labourers, unionizing them is critical for the struggle for social justice.

The Thong Principle

donalee Moulton

Business Expert Press donalee Moulton is a respected business communication pro fessional in Halifax. Her thong principle, while it came to her on a beach, has less to do with swim wear than the idea of communicating authentically, in a way that suits the writer or speaker. “Look and sound like yourself,” Moulton says.

Assume a Position

Jeff Bursey Corona/Samizdat

Literary critic Jeff Bursey returns with a second collec tion of reviews covering fiction and nonfiction by

Fourteen-year-old Laurel Long needs a fresh start, and educa tion is her ticket out, but when her past starts to catch up with her, she must decide how

a diverse (and international) group of authors including Anne Finger, Lance Olsen, Rosa Liksom, Hilton Obenzinger and Thomas Glavinic, with interviews with Sam Savage, SD Chrostowska and fellow Newfoundlander Michelle Butler Hallett.

PRIVATEERS WHARF HISTORIC

The

We

Nova Scotia

“Photographer

Book of Fame

HOLIDAY TITLES

FICTION

& CRAFTS