Launched

New Titles from FBCW Members

Soul of a Nomad

Kim Letson / West Moon Publishing, 2020 / 9781777271107 / $26.99 Transversing Canada, rounding Cape Horn, riding the Patagonian Pampas and Mongolian wilds. From Greek Islands to North Cape. Through Thailand or along the Silk Road, Letson’s journeys reflect her curiosity and adventurous spirit. Readers meet characters imagined and real: ancestral ghosts, the author’s intrepid parents, lighthouse keepers, an Auschwitz survivor, gauchos, Roma and nomads. Set within historic and literary contexts, Soul of a Nomad shares sixty-five years of journeys and revelations. Evocative descriptions nestle amongst hair-raising anecdotes, every page encouraging the reader to explore further.

Arc of Light

Lorraine Gane / Raven Chapbooks, 2020 / 9780973440843 In this loving and light-filled elegy to her mother, Salt Spring Island poet Lorraine Gane evokes a painful stage that mid-life children of ailing parents will recognize. It is a complex grief, letting go of parents as protectors, moving into acceptance of inevitable loss, and of their own place, parentless, now on the front lines of mortality. The beauty of the natural world is ever present in these poems; doubtless Salt Spring’s stunning landscapes assist Gane’s braiding of light and dark, life and death. The final poem finds her tranquil and accepting, comforted by the image of a luminous white arc floating over her mother’s body. (Wendy Donawa.)

ARGENTINA poesia

Franci Louann / Ekstasis Editions, 2020 / 9781771714068 / $24.95 Franci Louann’s book captures the unique and sensuous qualities of Argentina and its cities. It gives the reader the view of an outsider looking through eyes of love—personal and cultural—but clear-sighted about dark political histories and present complexities, and the difficulties gaining knowledge of how to live in a new land. In Louann’s poetry, we hear the music, taste the wine, read the authors, and enjoy the artists and architects of this place, while we take up residence and wander its streets, grand and humble.~ Adrienne Drobnies, author of Salt and Ashes.

Lou and the Whale of a Crime

Inga Kruse / November, 2020 / Paperback ISBN: 9781777300104 E-book ISBN: 9781777300111 Lou can’t seem to help herself—when she sees something suspicious, she has to investigate. Her Great Dane Rocky is always by her side trying to help, but mostly getting himself into hilarious tangles. Using her homemade spy gear, she stumbles on nefarious criminals operating nearby. Along with Lou’s best friend Oliver, it takes all of her bravery and smarts to figure out what’s happening. Little does she know there is something else more serious brewing in the town of Squamish. The crime turns out to be bigger than anybody could imagine. Lou pulls together her friends to figure out what is happening Now they have to figure out how to stop it.

Unamakik, Land of Fog

Afiena Kamminga / FriesenPress, 2020 / 9781525577093 / $22.49 In this sequel to The Sun Road, 2014, we follow a tenth-century Norse woman from Greenland, Thora Thorvinnsdottir, on her travels in newly discovered “Westland” across the Western Sea, with her lover, Elkimu, and indigenous “Westlander.” The story features harmony and conflict in the meeting of two people, one from Viking Age Scandinavia, the other from the indigenous world of that time in what is today known as Atlantic Canada. Will Thora succeed in creating a new life for herself in an alien place among an alien people?

My Delightfully Dysfunctional Family (and me)

Loraine Hartley / September, 2020 / 9781525578267 / $20.00 The book begins in 1972,when dad created a “blended family” long before the concept was considered as normal and common as it is today. It ends when my dad dies. It contains struggles, joys, trials and triumphs that I and my family members faced through the next generation of divorce and deception. Families are complex and don’t always turn how the way we want them to. There are incidents where you can’t help but laugh, and adventures that were not easy to survive. There are eye opening experiences about how my faith and spirit have carried me through—always trying to maintain a positive outlook. Many people can relate to the stories, as they are comparable to their own.

Guilty Knowledge—Canadian True-Crime

Allan W. Waddy / December, 2020 / 9781775176305 Guilty Knowledge is a real-life look into true-crime files investigated by the author Allan W. Waddy and his wife Gloria. During their twenty-six year career as Licensed Private Investigators, they concluded thousands of criminal, civil litigation, fire causation and surveillance files throughout British Columbia and the United States. The cases depicted in this book amplify rules and regulations relating to the Canadian Criminal Code, Privacy Act and Evidentiary Chain of Custody.

Strength and Vulnerability

Ken Westdorp / FriesenPress, 2000 / 978152555152 / $14.99 pb $7.99 e-book Strength and Vulnerability is a follow-up book of poetry to the book entitled Gateway to Obscurity dealing with an in-depth look at the human condition. This time Ken uses a great deal of his outreach experience with NightShift Ministry as he recounts the emotional turmoil and triumph of those living on the street. In addition he describes his early spiritual journey that had both elements of addiction as well as depression as he searched for greater purpose. Beside being available online from FreisenPress, the book is also accessible from Google books, Amazon. ca and Indigo Books.

Tone Dead

Sydney Preston / 9781775315728 / $22.50 When the body of a local arts reporter is found at a local tourist site, it appears to be a robbery gone wrong. She had been under police protection after witnessing a murder in Edmonton, but the modus operandi does not fit the profile of a professional hit. Detective Sergeant Ray Rossini leaves for Italy believing the case is closed, but his partner, D.S. Jimmy Tan is not so sure. The reporter had made enemies with her vicious reviews and had been accused of causing the death of a famous choral conductor. On his own time, his investigation takes him to Edmonton where he unearths an astonishing story.

All That It Takes

K.L. Ditmars / January 2021 / 1777410100 / $21.99 A human trafficking ring is operating in the shadows of Victoria, BC. When they murder her husband, Julia Bowen is determined to turn on the light. As she navigates grief, being hunted, and attempting to expose a network of local businesses involved in the sexual exploitation of young women, Julia encounters help from unexpected people and discovers a God who is present through it all.

Heart Work

Susan McCaslin / Ekstasis Editions, 2020 / 9781771714020 / $25.00 This luminous book is a poetic mandala, a circle of compassion that embraces the planet and illuminates the particulars of sparrow, snail and spider. Susan McCaslin follows the poet’s vocation to “dream, receive, and chant the broken world.” The poems speak most movingly to our times, addressing coronavirus and lamenting a beloved forest region devastated by wildfire. Hildegard of Bingen, Keats, and Julian of Norwich enter her reflections to enrich our sense of these times and their meaning. McCaslin has evidently lived with the mystics’ writings for a long time, and they appear here, not as though they are of the past, but as though they are presences who have been with us all along.

WARRIOR ANGEL Beyond Disabiity: A Family’s Quest for Ordinary

Susan Dunnigan / December, 2020 / 9781989092484 / $25.00 Raw and real, Warrior Angel intimately shares one family’s lived experience with disability. Standing against ingrained societal tendencies that patronize and marginalize people with disabilities, the family rejects segregated approaches. Susan and Neil fiercely nurture capacity, belonging, and responsibility for their son. Equally independent-minded, Matthew doggedly pursues an ordinary life, where abundant risks, struggles, and rewards await. Diverse vignettes spill decades of indelible memories. The book weaves two tales. The first speaks to Matt’s textured journey and the challenges he encounters. The second is his family’s story. With candour and sensitivity, the stories exude the elements of ordinary life: unconditional love, vulnerability, angst and hope.

Wind on the Heath

Naomi Beth Wakan / Shanti Arts, 2020 / 9781951651558 / $25.00 The poems in Wind on the Heath are all about the examined life. Naomi Beth Wakan, personal essayist, and the inaugural poet laureate of Nanaimo, has spent a lifetime pondering what it means to be human. What is clear from this collection of poems spanning her mid-twenties to late eighties, is that she was born inquisitive and has remained inquisitive. Whether she is writing about sex or how to cut a rose, these poems offer a bittersweet look at life with irony, humour, reflection and a healthy dose of cynicism. These are poems that speak to human nature, our existential aloneness, the fleetingness of life, the pitfalls and hurdles we all must face—this collection offers readers a crack through which we may glimpse reality.

What I’d Say To Buddha If I Met Him In the Pub

Frank Talaber / January 2021 / EPUB: 9781777526917 Print ISBN: 9781777092870 Enter the literary world of Frank Talaber, Canada’s Foremost Off-Beat Author. A natural storyteller, whose compelling thoughts are freed from the depths of the heart and the subconscious before being poured onto the page. Literature written beyond the realms of genre. He is known to grab readers kicking, screaming, laughing or crying, and drag them into his novels.

One Good Thing—A Living Memoir

M.A.C. Farrant / Talon Books, 2021 / 9781772012842 / $19.95 One Good Thing is a charming collision of memoir with the living, exuberant, and vulnerable natural world. Written in sixty-four short epistolary chapters, M.A.C. Farrant’s latest offering represents a search for hope and appeasement in a rapidly changing and often perplexing society. One Good Thing is also an homage to gardening columnist extraordinaire Helen Chesnut of Victoria’s Times Colonist, each section of the book focusing and expanding on one of her gardening columns.

Diary of a Mad Travel Writer

Carolyn Walton / FriesenPress, 2019 / 9781525544811 / $20.00 This collection of tales and misadventures takes the travel lover and armchair traveller on an engaging and often humorous journey to the heart of some sixty bucket-list destinations around the globe. The old adage: “Half the fun is getting there” just doesn’t compute when Carolyn’s much anticipated flight to Paris is politically interrupted or a transfer to the wrong boat in the South Pacific leaves her abandoned on a Fijian Island!

The Electric Girl

Christine Hart / March, 2021 / 9781777519404 / $2.99 Polly Michaels is trying to forget that her mom has cancer. She keeps busy at school and plods through a normal social life. Until a freak electrical storm and a unicorn appear in the orchard next to her house. Sy’kai wakes on an orchard floor to the smell of rotting cherries and wet earth. She doesn’t know where she is—or what she is—but she knows something is hunting her. Polly recruits her friends to find the creature she saw from her window while Sy’kai, a confused shape-shifting endling from another dimension tries to piece her mind back together. Once the human girls find Sy’kai the mystery unravels and the danger facing all of them comes into focus.

Kateri O’Leary and the Show Dog Scene

Shirley Martin / November, 2020 / pb 9780992061548 $9.95 e-book 9780992061555 $4.95 Kateri O’Leary is finally ready for the Show Dog ring, despite a friendship fiasco, money troubles, and a bully named Clive. But does her rescue dog, Belle, have a different plan? “This entertaining story for eight- to twelve- year-olds features a lovable and feisty redhead whose freckled Irish charm and hair-brained Irish Setter keep you turning pages. I kept finishing a chapter and thinking “I’ll just read one more…” Shirley Martin has created a memorable character, one that kids everywhere will relate to.” (Joanna Streetly, author of Wild Fierce Life: Dangerous Moments on the Outer Coast www.shirleymartinwrites.com)

Some Christmas

Teresa Schapansky / December, 2020 / 9781988024097 / $6.99 A fifteenth birthday and a drug bust in the midst of a global pandemic. Pretty sure this will turn out to be…some Christmas. Some Christmas is the first book in the Inspire Series: high interest, short stories directly inspired by and written for the adolescent in all of us.

Cowichan Kid

Joy Sheldon / September, 2020 / 979-8673139400 / pb $46.21 e-book $9.99 Wringer washers, sad irons ’n hog jowls! Staples of rural life back in my day. Growing up at Stratfords Crossing near Duncan, BC was vastly different from what most kids experience now. From party lines to bucksaws. Life on a small truck farm interspersed with the antics of several, mostly dysfunctional, family members. Several had mental illness, undiagnosed and not talked about in those days. The neighbours, mostly poor, like us (but some rich by our standards) also had their share of eccentrics. From Nestor N., the hermit, to Mr. McGonagal who blew himself up with dynamite! School days from Old Somenos to Cowichan High. And all under the shadow of that unusual red “crossing house” named Stratfords. Yep, those were the days.

Courage to Speak: Honouring Ancestor Voices

Sharon E Syrette & Siyamtelot Shirley Leon / January 2021 / 9780986936845 / $20.00 Your culture is disappearing, so what can you do? In the mid-1970s the Coqualeetza Elders met weekly to document their Halq’eméylem language. The history of the change from oral to written Halq’eméylem became the story of individual Elders whose memories of education were so negative. Throughout this new “apprenticeship in linguistics,” they maintained their dignity, corrected one another, laughed together, and created the grounding for the written words that were recorded for the first dictionary. The stories of ten fluent speakers focuses on three Sto:lo women. Over 100 photographs and graphics help bring the stories alive. ancestorconnections@gmail.com

To Kill a King: a Hollystone Mystery Book 4

W. L. Hawkin / March 2021 / 9780995018495 Sorcha just wanted to warn Ruairí of his fate until she fell in love. How could she leave him to be ritually murdered and cast in a bog to cure for two thousand years? Though he’s grieving the loss of his lover, when Estrada discovers that the archaeologist is trapped in Iron Age Ireland, he demands Cernunnos take him back through time to rescue her. There are rules: “You cannot change history or develop bonds with anyone.” How can Sorcha survive this Druid culture? Assuming she’s fey, Ruairí’s rival wants her power, but worse still, his lover, the Crow Queen wants her dead. Read this romantic, time-travelling, prehistoric thriller to find out what it takes To Kill a King.

Wild Horses of the Mind

Lisa Rawn /December 2020 / 9781777310219 / $15.00 Part of a two volume coffee table set of poetry chapbooks, Wild Horses of the Mind explores the events, connections and demons that defy us during our lives. This equine-themed volume contains twenty-three pages of choice poems, accented with antique engravings. Each chapbook is exquisitely crafted of finest materials and design, with stitched bindings. Readers review them as beautiful to hold, admire and read, making them a lovely gift item. Lisa Rawn is the author of four poetry chapbooks. Her poems have been published in prominent magazines and anthologies. Lisa won Vancouver’s 2015 Pandora’s Collective poetry contest, and was nominated for a 2016 Pushcart Prize.

The List of Last Chances

Christina Myers / Caitlin Press, 2021 / 9781773860596 / $22.95 At thirty-eight years old, Ruthie finds herself newly unemployed, freshly single, sleeping on a friend’s couch and downing a bottle of wine each night. Having overstayed her welcome and desperate for a job, Ruthie responds to David’s ad: he’s looking for someone to drive his aging mother, Kay, and her belongings from PEI to Vancouver. But once they’re on the road, Kay reveals that she’s got a list of stops along the way that’s equal parts sightseeing tour, sexual bucket-list, and trip down memory lane. Heartfelt and humorous, The List of Last Chances follows a pair of reluctant travel companions across the country into an unexpected friendship, new adventures, and the rare gift of second chances.

Albert Quimby

George Opacic / Rutherford Press, 2021 / 9781988739458 / $32.00 Albert has moved through life easily taking on different personas. He falls in love while helping a co-worker who had found their boss’s body. Running from a gang that blames them for shooting their former employer, they hide on an island in the Salish Sea, helped by a growing sentience they call Beasty.

Out of the Dark

by Lillian Boraks-Nemetz / Ronsdale Press, 2020 / 9781553806325 / $17.95 This collection offers a cycle of poems about the poet who, as a child survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, has had to live with the memories of the Holocaust all her life. The first section describes the evils of suffering and prejudice, of war and destruction, and the loss of loved ones, even the loss of self. “This is a ghetto / where humans live in neglected cages / within a fire that burns sleep out of their eyes.” The second section brings glimmers of light in finding ways to move towards a better, fuller life, as the poet realizes “We must always seek / new ways / of reaching one another / though each of us / is a world unto itself.” The third section offers a tribute to the artists and poets who have come before and who have left behind their gifts for us.

Mother Nature Eats Her Kind

Neil Garvie / Pod Creative Publishing, 2020 / 9781715683993 / 64 pp $10.00 Mother Nature Eats Her Kind is Neil’s second environmental book of poetry. In it the author pulls no punches, offering real images of nature which touch on the disturbing—reminding us, “Mother Nature is pounding at our door. There is no doubt she will survive. The question is, will we?” That said, this book is also mindful of those whose hearts are heavy from the constant reports of doom and gloom, concluding with an important message to hold strong and not lose hope. Presented in strikingly varied styles and forms it is a must-read. You can purchase a copy of this exciting new book at garvie.ca.

The Pit

Tara Borin / Nightwood Editions, 2021 / 9780889713956 / $18.95 Set in a small-town sub-Arctic dive bar, this debut poetry collection explores the complexities of addiction and the person beneath, and the possibility of finding home and community in unexpected places.

Lady Black

Tim Hanley / 9781777263911 Jack Marian is a young man, the son of a single mother, and though he doesn’t know it, he is in need of a father. Roy Allen the “old man of truth” hires him on and becomes his mentor. Likes dogs circling a singular bone, man’s greed comes knocking. A deadly chain of events leads from the blackness of the Turn Again gold mine, to a desperate adventure on board the sternwheeler “Lady Black” to raucous bars and taverns where murderous plots are hatched. All in the quest for another man’s gold—and a harbinger of the worldwide evil to come. And behind it all, a story of love that was missed and then reached for.