Launched

New titles from FBCW members

Midnight Thoughts: A Fusion Of Poetry And Visual Arts

Annick Lemay | Rutherford Press, 2020 | ISBN: 978-1-988739-41-0 | $44.95 Poetry from a person in love with life’s vivid colours. Paintings that describe scenes in a thousand words. Photographs that reach through the eyes to the mind of a sensitive observer. Midnight thoughts come with eyes dreamily closed and minds wide open. “Easy to read, the kind of poetry that gives you ease and comfort. A gorgeous art book to be kept close by and to be read one poem a day or one poem in need. Like a friend, this poetry comforts, guides and reassures. Written with honesty and a clear sense of love for life!” Thierry Amezcua, New York. Available through Chapters and from the publisher, Rutherford Press https://rutherfordpress.ca.

Loose Ends

Brian d’Eon | Wipf and Stock, 2020 | ISBN: 978-1-725271-43-2 | $18.00 USD How did Lazarus cope after being raised from the dead? Did he simply return to his normal routines? During Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, what was the donkey thinking? If a stone had the gift of sentience, what witness would it have given to the woman caught in the act of adultery? These are but a few of the questions posed by the author in his collection of short stories, Loose Ends. Inspired by countless generations of midrash writers, d’Eon looks for ways to join piety and imagination together, searching for new meaning in stories whose long familiarity may have blunted their original impact.

Vancouver’s Women in Blue - Trailblazers of the Vancouver Police Department 1904–1975

Carolyn J. Daley | Ruddy Duck Press | ISBN: 978-1-999279-20-2 | $20.00 Vancouver’s Women in Blue is the groundbreaking account of the first 125 women who served with the VPD. Theirs is the story of women who first served as matrons and the slow, twisting path their role travelled as it evolved into assignments as fully operational police constables. Foreword by Bev Busson, RCMP Commissioner (retired) and endorsed by the Honourable Wally Oppal, QC.

Finding Heartstone: A Taste of Wilderness

Cathy Sosnowsky | Caitlin Press, 2020 | ISBN: 978-1-773860-34-3 Finding Heartstone tells of a house in the wilderness and its builders, a family marked by abandonment, grief, separation. With well-chosen and often poetic detail, Cathy Sosnowsky shows how, over decades, the art of construction enriches all their lives. (Review by Cynthia Flood, author of The English Stories.)

Dispatches from Ray’s Planet: A Journey through Autism

Claire Finlayson | Caitlin Press, 2020 | ISBN: 978-1-773860-30-5 | $24.95 Finlayson’s debut memoir is based on her relationship with a brother who didn’t know he was autistic until he was fifty. “On my planet,” he always insisted, “telling little white lies would be a capital offense.” His anxiety in social situations only increases his propensity toward verbal gaffes. But in writing—where he has time and space to formulate a response—he has no communication deficits whatsoever. Ray patiently explains how the mechanism of empathy works in him, and how eye contact is difficult, not because he doesn’t care about people, but because he sees too much. Together, these siblings from different “planets” study the complexities of autism spectrum disorder, and learn to appreciate, if not quite understand, each other.

Cosmic Bowling

Cornelia Hoogland and Ted Goodden | Guernica Editions, 2020 | ISBN: 978-1-771835-37-4 Cosmic Bowling is a pause button, a tiny meditation room a reader can slip into between twitter storms. Based on the I Ching, here are sixty-four human situations that can illuminate a reader’s present moment, provide perspective. The collaboration with Ted Goodden, visual artist, is composed of six-line poems and figurative sculptures. Created with haiku-like brevity, they are “windows, open to the stars.” Cosmic Bowling is a book for the briefcase, the backpack, and the Vancouver Transit System. One of eight books chosen by WORD VANCOUVER to travel the buses for the next year! This is Hoogland’s seventh book of poetry. Previous books such as Trailer Park Elegy and Woods Wolf Girl have been short listed for national prizes. www.corneliahoogland.com.

A Manual for Perfect People

D.B. Sertaine | Monsoon Thundercloud Books (Indie) | ISBN: 979-8615038-61-7 | $6.61 A little satire for troubled times. Putative author Dr. Randolph Pandolphian provides guidance for perfect people. Less than perfect editor D.B. Sertaine received the manuscript’s first draft late at night near an ATM machine. The manual is Sertaine’s eighth book.

Dominion of Mercy

Danial Neil | NeWest Press, 2021 | ISBN: 978-1-774390-20-7 | $20.95 Edinburgh, 1917: Headstrong Highland lass Mary Stewart is a vibrant woman forced into the world’s oldest profession in order to provide for her ailing father and younger sister in the city’s Old Town. When her uncle, a well-to-do solicitor with political aspirations, thinks that her presence might impede his lofty ambitions he gives her a way out with dignity: a one-way ticket to the frontier town of Anyox, British Columbia. She must survive by her quick intelligence, but that is a quality that few women were allowed to reveal. Danial Neil’s historical epic combines the gritty feel and attention to detail of HBO’s Deadwood with the Canadian sensibility of Guy Vanderhaeghe’s frontier trilogy.

Magda’s Odyssey

Deanna Barnhardt Kawatski | 2020 | ISBN: 978-1-777085-80-3 | $21.95 “Brimming with adventures and heart, Magda’s Odyssey takes its reader by the hand and won’t let go. Magda and her twin sister, Mariel, are determined to reunite. In this beautifully written story they cross continents and oceans in order to do so. Never daunted, they are helped on their journeys by beloved animals and the kindness of unexpected friends. You’ll learn how to survive in the wild, and to fight for your dreams. Full of magical landscapes and a wise and deep love of the natural world, Magda’s Odyssey is a treasure.” Marjorie Simmins, award-winning author.

Leah’s Gift

Destanne Norris | Balboa Press, 2020 | ISBN: 978-1-982250-58-4 | $20.95 USD How do you live with the unanswerable questions that surface when someone you love dies? This question and others lie beneath visual artist Destanne Norris’s voyage through the mysteries that shroud life and death. In this story, Norris journeys through the loss of her daughter as she illuminates her artworks—some of which were created before her daughter was born—that were mounted in an exhibition entitled “Leah’s Gift.” Through her narrative and paintings, she reveals how she navigated grief and learned to reframe her questions to find new purpose and meaning in life.

Stillwaters Runs Deep, Book Three: The Awakening

Frank Talaber | 2020 | ISBN: 978-1-777092-85-6 | $17.95 How angry would a mythical god be if he found himself awakening inside a mortal? After a strange and inexplicable death inside a jail, an intriguing and extraordinary shaman detects great unrest in the world, and breaks his way into the jail to investigate. He enlists Detective Carol Ainsworth to assist as an undercover prison officer who, rather strangely, also finds herself tasked with bringing to justice the murderer of a gentle forest being’s mother.

Permanent Tourists

Genni Gunn | Signature Editions, 2020 | ISBN: 978-1773240-80-0 and 978-1773240-81-7 Permanent Tourists is a collection of linked short stories. From Canada, the USA, Thailand, Cambodia, Mexico, and Italy, the characters are less thrill-seeking tourists on vacation than they are P.K. Page’s “terrible tourists with their empty eyes longing to be filled with monuments.” What they’re looking for cannot be found in any postcard destination. Within the unfamiliar, these characters’ problems resurface to be confronted and re-examined. Permanent Tourists presents physical, emotional and psychological tourists, all striving to delve more deeply into themselves, their friendships, their families, their love relationships, and ultimately, to spur themselves to action.

Harking

George Mercer | 2020 | ISBN: 978-0-987975-48-5 | $19.99 After her parents’ divorce and the discovery of a series of cryptic notes left behind after her father is killed in an avalanche, Harking Thompson struggles to come to her own understanding of love, loss and what really matters. Caught up in a battle to save a mother grizzly bear and her cubs, Harking’s fight to protect the wildlife and wild places she loves teaches her a brutal truth: sometimes saving a life might mean losing another you love even more.

Skookum Raven

Heather Haley | Ekstasis Editions, 2020 | ISBN: 978-1-771713-90-0 | $23.95 There are some rough and wild birds around Howe Sound—West Coast avians like the sharp-shinned hawk, the northern harrier, and the whiskey-jack. Heather Haley, an accomplished mapper of human migration, pair-bonding and predation, takes these feathered frenemies as her starting point in this assured third collection, Skookum Raven. Like her foremothers and contemporaries Gwendolyn MacEwen, Susan Musgrave and Karen Solie, Haley writes sophisticated free lyrics of a witchy feminist kind—but adds some proletarian ferocity with her bus-station grandpas and sketches of iffy guys like Ed the Fence. These are astute, austere poems which sometimes take flight into optimistic beauty—this book is “pockmarked with luck.”

The President’s Great & Unmatched Wisdom for Children & Their Parents

Jack Nealon | 2020 | ISBN: 978-0-968360-34-7 | Donald Trump teaches parents twenty-six lessons on what their children must learn so they can grow up to be just like him. Humorous political satire written in The President’s voice and cuts to the bone. A deadly accurate fiction that will keep you laughing and appal you in equal measure. This is the Trump tell-all book as told by Trump himself. It is an accurate account of lessons the 45th president of the United States is relentlessly, insidiously teaching Americans, including their children—lessons that affect all of us wherever we live in the world. I believe the stark pairing of young kids with this self-obsessed man offers up a revealing shift in perspective from the usual discourse on Trump.

Small Courage: A Queer Memoir of Finding Love and Conceiving Family

Jane Byers | Caitlin Press, Dagger Editions, 2020 | ISBN: 978-1-773860-40-4 Rarely do we know what life will hold. When starting the adoption process, Jane Byers and her wife could not have predicted the illuminating and challenging experience of living for two weeks with the Evangelical Christian foster parents of their soon-to-be-adopted twins. Parenthood becomes even more daunting when homophobia threatens their beginnings as a family. A moving and poetic memoir, this is an examination of love, queerness and what it means to be a family.

Still Waters

Kamal Parmar | Silver Bow Publishing, 2020 | ISBN: 978-1-774031-24-7 In a slender and tender volume, poet Kamal Parmar brings to twilight life a mother/daughter struggle with encroaching memory loss. Still Waters is sensitive, touching, honest, even gritty, a compelling read that asks the question: Who am I? “Am I a young girl in ponytails with stars in her eyes? Or am I an old decrepit woman ? A thought-provoking book, that highlights the pathos and helplessness of humans facing this problem.

I will be corrupted

Joseph Dandurand | Guernica Editions, 2020 | ISBN: 978-1-771835-06-0 | $20.00 I will be corrupted are poems about a man who suffers from serious depression but is able to appear normal and live somewhat of a normal life. And yet what he sees and experiences in his every day become poems and an insight into the mind of a kind and gentle person who wants to understand why he is here.

The Next Casebook of Doctor Sababa

Lawrence Winkler | 2020 | ISBN: 1988429560 | $24.99 Six original stories of survival, suspense, and satire from the Sage of the Salish Sea. Sharpen your pencils. Put on your thinking caps. Like the Good Doctor, you will have six minutes to see each patient. Don’t be alarmed. Think of it as an intellectual challenge. With lives in the balance.

The Little Breadwinner: War and Survival in the Salvadoran Heartland

Lucia Mann | Operion Books, Agoura Hills, CA, 2020 | ISBN: 978-0-985603-93-9 “There is no crown more worthy than a child breadwinner.”

Float House Family Favourites.

Myrtle Siebert | 2020 | ISBN: 978-0-988070-93-6 | $22.00 This book was written for young people and new cooks who may need a few dependable recipes and methods to help them prepare tasty and healthy meals for themselves, their housemates, and their family members. These are recipes that I and my family members have depended on since I graduated university and began teaching, and feeding my own family.

Luyten’s Star

Nasreen Pejvack | 2020 | ISBN: 978-1-775322-38-2 Nasreen Pejvack’s debut novel Amity was published by Inanna Publications in October of 2015 and was a finalist for a BC Book Prize. Her Paradise of the Downcasts, a collection of short tales and essays inspired by her experiences of life in Canada, and Waiting, a collection of poems, were published 2018. In Pejvack’s stories, her characters give expression to her life’s learning and experiences in order to relate narratives relevant to the concerns of our time. Luyten’s Star is her newest publication, a sci-fi novel which further speaks to the environmental and economic issues facing us all, while also taking us on a journey to the stars.

Serious Court: Confessions of a Prison Judge

Nelson M. Tsui, Q.C. | W & Y Cultural Products Co., 2020 | ISBN: 978-1-896672-43-4 | $22.00 This is a book about Canadian federal prison inmates and the disciplinary court (officially known as the Serious Court) from the perspective of a prison judge. It contains real stories of prison inmates—many are hilarious, most are heartbreaking, and all of them are unique due to the unusual environment from which these stories arise. Behind these stories is an overarching theme which the writer, a former prison judge, returns to throughout: an emphasis that prison authorities should observe the rule of law when disciplining inmates, and that all parties— the staff members, the Indigenous counsellors, and even the inmates—should take Serious Court seriously, pun intended.

Painted Fences

Sara Cassidy | Heritage House, 2020 | ISBN: 978-1-772033-51-9 | $19.95 A charming and evocative story within a story, exploring themes of wartime resourcefulness, local history, friendship, and the reverberations of the past in the present day. On a beautiful spring day in Victoria’s James Bay neighbourhood, eight-year-old Esther takes a walk with her great-grandfather on his birthday. On the same street and the same date, but seventy-five years earlier, two enterprising young boys go door to door offering to give people’s fences a fresh coat of paint so that they can earn a few extra cents in an era of wartime austerity. When her great-grandfather shows Esther a chip in a fence that reveals every colour it has ever been painted, Esther learns just how close the past is.

Haven Hold

Shelley Penner | RCN Media, 2020 | ISBN: 978-1-989898-02-4 In a future where mutants are considered “devil’s spawn,” fit only for slavery, Daniel’s mutant eyes mark him. Betrayed, hunted and driven into the northern wilderness, he lives alone, until one day he risks his life to save two normal holders and wins the chance to find true friendship at last, if he can only bring himself to trust again.

Nothing You Can Carry

Susan Alexander | Thistledown Press, 2020 | ISBN: 978-1-771871-98-3 | $20.00 Nothing You Can Carry is rooted in a keen, even holy, sense of place within the natural world. These poems take an honest, sometimes ironic and sometimes broken-hearted look at how the self and society are implicated in our climate crisis and the systemic complexities surrounding it. Yet life goes on. The collection moves through environmental fears and spills into all the areas that absorb the self—memory, story, family, love. These poems are vivid and vulnerable, humorous and emotional. They summon the deeper mysteries of being human in a world that is increasingly separate from the sacred.

Miss Harriet’s Wedding

Valerie Fletcher Adolph | 2020 | ISBN: 978662913493 Someone plans to prevent Miss Harriet’s wedding. Can Alice and Trudy outwit his sinister plans? England, 1947, Princess Elizabeth marries Phillip Mountbatten. Also the elderly, shy Miss Harriet is venturing to marry John Prentiss. But problems arise including a plan to abduct the bride. The abductor has not reckoned with the Avalon hotel guests—including the always military Colonel Starr, frequent fainter Fay, name-dropper Mrs. Shand, the politically incorrect Calvin and cousin Mike, Gluedog and the friendly detective Kenneth Wilson. This is light reading for our time, the second in the Alice and Trudy historical mysteries, about which one reader said: “Really enjoyed this gem. Would definitely read more from this author.”

Old Bones & Battered Book Ends

Ian Cognitō, Pat Smekal, Eds. | Repartee Press, 2020 | ISBN: 978-1-775133-94-0 | $15.00 In this poetry anthology, twenty-seven poets from BC and beyond explore the topic of ageing—its impacts and its implications. The poems in this collection explore this topic with humour and compassion as the authors tap into both the universal and the personal. “We stand with stiffening spines, and we lean on others, here, between the battered book ends of our lives. We are neither failing to be young at heart nor succeeding at ageing gracefully but carrying on with an appetite for living.” (From the foreword by Anne Marie Carson.) Contact: repartee@telus.net.

Shades of Loss

Jule Briese | 2020 | ISBN: 978-0-995080-53-9 | $25.00 Shades of Loss is a collaborative memoir in photography, poetry and prose creating an opportunity for photography to capture the essence of the written text. The focus is on how shades of loss have shaped my life. I believe reconciled losses stimulate inner growth and move life forward in ways totally unexpected. The nature photographs in this book were taken on Vancouver Island by my niece Kashmir Lesnick-Petrovicz currently enrolled in the Fine Arts Program, minoring in Global Studies, at VIU, Nanaimo, BC. The book can be ordered through tranquilshorescreative@gmail.com. A fund-raiser for Kashmir’s education account.