2 minute read
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Message
4 Message from the editor
Foreword
6 Cover story
Cover Feature
8 Full capacity sparkle by Sarah Butland
News Feature
13 When true crime hits close to home by Mallory
Burnside-Holmes
16 Imagining Crime by Meg
D. Edwards
18 Seas the day to save our fishing history by
Trevor Corkum
Book Features
12 Review of Francene Cosman’s Nurse! by Abena Beloved Green
30 A young history of Canada’s oldest Black community by Andre Fenton
31 The people you find in lost graveyards by Craig Ferguson
Author in Conversation
21 “Our stories are catching on”: The origins of the Mi’kmaw Honour Song by Julie Pellissier-Lush
24 How to cheer up a poet
A conversation with Lesley Choyce
24 Birdsong in winter to silence the inner critic
A conversation between Renée Hartleib and Daniel Lillford
ABOUT THE COVER
Reflection
32 “When one parent dies, you lose two.”
Excerpts
33 Some There Are Fearless
34 Chasing Paradise
38 Chores Reviews
36 Mercy Gene
37 What Comes Echoing Back
39 Staff Picks
Young Readers
41 Reviews
Photo-explorer Steve Skafte has built a big online following for his images of abandoned and forgotten places. His photo, “Old Rugged Cross,” was captured in an overgrown Church of England cemetery in Gays River, N.S. He found the rotting cross broken into two pieces and repaired it.
“It’s really just a brief salvation; no wooden reminder lives half as long as the stones here. It’s the irony of iconography, placing eternal meaning in things that fade so fast; a dead tree shaped into a symbol of resurrection, brought down by a living one uprooted in a storm,” he writes in The Dead Die Twice, published by Nimbus. Read our review on page 31.
A few weeks after taking over as editor of Atlantic Books Today in the fall from Chris Benjamin, I had my first public event: the launch of Books by Heart. It’s a public humanities project that will explore the potential of book culture to help patients and staff in a hospital setting. Students at the University of King’s College are piloting the program for us, so we launched it there. It was a homecoming for me, as I graduated from King’s with an MFA in creative nonfiction in 2020. Dr. Gabrielle Horne, who works in the cardiology department at the QEII Hospital in Halifax, spearheaded the program, which will bring free, accessible Atlantic Canadian books to patients on her unit. She was also a classmate of mine at King’s and I was delighted by the chance to work with her on this important project. The highly trained staff know how to take care of the body; this program hopes to foster the human connection between staff and patient. I told the gathering how my father, a retired chaplain at that hospital, had told me he was often the only person to visit patients solely to ask about them, not to fix their body. Patients could sometimes feel like broken-down cars being repaired in a garage, he said, and he sought to create a human connection. Just like Books by Heart
Less than two weeks later, my family found itself at a crossroads. My father was back in the cardiac unit — as a patient facing an unexpected open-heart surgery. Suddenly, Books by Heart was a very personal project. I saw the astonishing, life-saving work Dr. Horne’s team does, and how patients face long, lonely hours of waiting. Hours perfect for reading. My dad even volunteered to pilot the project for us.
I saw how staff and patients long for a human connection with each other, and the potential for Books by Heart to connect them. We brought my father home on Christmas Day — the greatest present. It’s a gift I look forward to returning many times as Books By Hearts prepares to launch at the hospital.
When I saw our cover image, Steve Skafte’s delicate portrait of a fallen cross in a spring-green cemetery, it stirred my heart. For many people, the cross is a symbol of transforming suffering into hope. In the pages ahead, you will meet people who found that power in books. They poured their pain and joy onto the pages, and came out sparkling at full capacity. Read on for books, hearts and hope.
