Bøger udgivet af Caitlin Press

Go "beneath the coal dust" to discover the unexpected stories surrounding the Elk Valley and Crowsnest Pass. In Beneath the Coal Dust, author Wayne Norton digs deep, exploring the fascinating and sometimes sobering stories of the mining communities in the Elk Valley and the Crowsnest Pass. In this new collection, Norton chooses mainly a micro view, focusing on the stories that are specific to this isolated and unique geographic region. These tales span from the notorious red-light district of Fernie to women's ice hockey in the 1920s, to the civic financial crisis caused by the Home Bank collapse, the regional history of breweries and prohibition, and the experiences and amazing fortitude of both Chinese and Syrian immigrants in what was a predominantly white settler town. This is a book about the local past, intended for those interested not necessarily in the broad sweep of national history, but rather in the smaller stories that are specific to this remote and historically rich area. And instead of dealing with the core regional narrative surrounding the coal industry, these explorations reveal some of what has been neglected and hidden "beneath the coal dust," as the title suggests.

Barkerville Lives On! First published in 1969, Barkerville Days is the nearest thing we have to a definitive history of one of the world's most colourful gold rushes. It has taken more than a hundred years for the first truly extensive and carefully researched story of Barkerville and its Cariboo goldfields to be placed between covers of a comprehensive volume. This book, rich in fact and anecdotal history, is the work of a do-it-yourself miner-historian, a mining man who talked the language of the last of the originals and their first descendants. A dedicated gatherer of the authoritative story of the Cariboo, centering on Barkerville, Fred Ludditt has done for that area what another Mitchell Press author, the late Walter R. Hamilton, did for the Klondike in his book The Yukon Story. Here is the priceless product of interviews which can never be done again. It is the story of how Billy Barker's claim suddenly sprouted the lusty town of Barkerville far inland from the sea in the upper headwaters of British Columbia's famed Fraser River. Barkerville Camp, which in its heyday was the most populous place on the continent west of Toronto and north of San Francisco, will live on in these pages for posterity to know.

Award-winning poet Arleen Paré pays homage to the work of lesbian Syrian American poet Etel Adnan. If books come from books, as David W. McFadden has claimed, then Time Out of Time is a clear example, arising, very deliberately as it does, out of Etel Adnan's astonishing collection entitled Time. The poems in Time Out of Time are in love with the poems in Adnan's Time and, it seems, Paré has fallen in love with Time's author, Etel Adnan, the internationally renowned poet and painter--or perhaps it is that she has merely fallen in love with Adnan's words. Paré's poems mirror the form, the rhythm, the shape, the short, brief lines in her own spare missives that are the poems in Time. This mirroring increases the intensity of Time Out of Time, creating a rare intimacy in Paré's collection. Paré's work pays homage to Adnan's work. Both collections pay homage to the world of the lesbian in the twenty-first century and to the world of the small poem. Using clear, crisp, well-defined language in visibly defined geometries, in "stanza after sweet-smelling stanza," Paré attempts to examine the trials of this new century, the hush around the word lesbian, the hush of the world's general collapse.

In this unflinching and whimsical collection, Victoria's former poet laureate Yvonne Blomer explores death, disability, and the fate of our imperilled world. In The Last Show on Earth, Yvonne Blomer gathers the diverse characters and distinct moments from everyday life, its tragedies, and triumphs, and begins to imagine them in a circus as side shows and exhibitions of the unusual. In her latest collection, Blomer borrows from museum dioramas, the paintings of Robert Bateman, and the animal portraits in National Geographic to question and explore the human element in the lives and survival of other species. In poems that are at times unflinchingly dark yet playful, Blomer balances on a tightrope of grief and hope as she traces the lines from motherhood and caring for aging parents to caring for our planet and its endangered creatures--the whale, the elephant, the wolf, the polar bear--as they face ongoing environmental destruction. In The Last Show on Earth, we are all performers under the bright striped tent or packed on the circus train heading toward an unknown destination.

Award-winning poet Sarah de Leeuw considers the ways in which words and languages form and embolden coloniality and create unequal imaginings of--and power in--place. In Lot, award-winning poet and essayist Sarah de Leeuw returns to the landscape of her early girlhood to consider the racial complexities of colonial violence in those spaces. Following loosely as a companion to Skeena (Caitlin Press, 2015), Lot is written entirely of couplets, mirroring the two main islands of Haida Gwaii, and draws on lyric traditions, assemblage, and investigative poetry techniques to re-imagine geological and anthropological data, re-read colonial documents, and interrogate the role of language in centering stories of white supremacy on and about the islands. Written in a time of ostensible Truth and Reconciliation in lands now called Canada, a time when the Government of British Columbia has declared support for the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples but continues to arrest Indigenous peoples in their homes and on unceded lands, Lot draws a firm, and yet poetic, line between historic and present-day white-Euro-colonial violence. Through structure, form, and sound, the poems in Lot insist on the possibilities of poetry to create better worlds, to utter something anew.

With enormous care and unquenchable daring, Rhona McAdam explores our relationship to the living world and challenges the constraints of contemporary poetry in her latest collection, Larder. Fully immersed in the organic world, Larder is at once an elegant transcription of the spiritual nourishment that comes from our embrace of the earth and of the inevitable loss in our unwillingness to embrace sustainability. In her latest collection, McAdam navigates the dark places of human movement through the earth and the exquisite intricacies lingering in backyard gardens and farmlands populated by insects and pollinators, all the while returning to the body, to the tune of staccato beats and the newly discovered symmetries within the human heart.

In the Blood traces the relationship of two brothers through childhood to adulthood and in and out of institutions to reveal the intricate, often hidden bonds that are broken and forged by the effects of mental illness. In his debut full-length collection, former City of New Westminster Poet Laureate Alan Hill delivers a deeply revealing and heartfelt depiction of a lifetime of mental illness--both his own and that of his brother. In the Blood traces the brothers' relationship from childhood to adulthood, and how his brother's diagnosis became inextricably intertwined with Hill's own mental health struggles. As his brother spends much of his life in and out of institutions, Hill grapples with his own guilt, shame, and loss. Moving from the past to the present and back again, In the Blood is a search for meaning and comfort in the confusion of childhood and the untethered searching of adulthood. With stark vulnerability, Hill reveals the intricate and often hidden bonds that are both broken and established by mental illness and pushes toward a form of relief, release, and recovery.

Part history, part true crime, Murders on the Skeena: True Crime in the Old Canadian West, 1884-1914 contains the true accounts of murders, crimes, and scandals--some of which remain unsolved to this day--in small-town northern British Columbia. With a focus on the victims as much as the cases themselves, award-winning author Geoff Mynett relates untold stories of BC's deadly history while providing both the natural and social history of the region. Hazelton, situated where the Bulkley River joins the Skeena River, was one of the most important sites in the interior of northern BC from 1870-1913. The gold rush, the arrival of the telegraph, and the ability for steam boats to journey upriver increased outside interest in the region. As new modes of transport were built, more non-Indigenous people arrived, and as colonial law and governance increased, so did tensions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. One such case was that of the murder of Amos "Charley" Youmans in 1884--the escalation of a clash between the laws and customs of the Gitxsan and those of the encroaching traders and settlers. Mynett also recounts the stories of the so-called Skeena River Uprising of 1888, a bank robbery shoot-out, and a deadly dispute between two prospectors. Peeling back historical, social, political, and geographical layers, Murders on the Skeena draws almost exclusively from documents from the time to reveal the fascinating secrets and surprising consequences of these captivating true crime tales.

Whatever could possess a 53-year-old grandmother to brave untold hardships in order to illegally enter forbidden Tibet via nigh-impassable roads?

Off-beat, provocative, philosophical, Music from a Strange Planet traces the fault lines of identity and emotional attachment. Grief, tenderness, and longing soak the pages, admitting the reader into the intimate places of the heart: An awkward child envisions herself as a darkling beetle; an unemployed business analyst prefers water-walking over "rebranding" himself; after being kidnapped, a psychologist rejects the idea of marrying herself; and in the squatters' district, a biogenetically-altered couple visits an attic to observe a large cocoon. From the ruins of a dystopian city to the inner self-created landscapes of a coma victim, this unique story collection places characters at the core of their vulnerabilities. With a masterfully crafted tone and a register that ranges from contemplative to comic, the subversive, immersive stories in this collection brim with humanity. Expect your planet to tilt a little to the strange after reading this engaging, vivid and incisive collection of stories.

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. Ruthie thinks it's the perfect chance for a brief escape and a much-needed boost for her empty bank account. 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. As David prods for updates and a speedy arrival to his home in Vancouver, Kay begins to share details about a long-lost love and Ruthie takes a detour to play matchmaker, but finds herself caught up in a web of well-intentioned lies. With the road ahead uncertain, and the past and present colliding, will Ruthie be able to forge a new path? 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.

Taking the name of a nervous system disorder that causes involuntary shaking, Essential Tremor undertakes an exploration of the body that holds disruption at its heart. The captivating and timely poems in Essential Tremor attend to many bodies--the body of the world, changing, unreachable, at times momentarily illumined; the human body, loved, ill, mourning, passing or passed from this world; and the divine body, questioned, encountered and not, sought by people from the margins in the body of a biblical palimpsest. In her third collection, award-winning poet Barbara Nickel blends sonnets in sequences and scattered stand-alones with more formal innovations and extensions--erasures of the notes accompanying da Vinci's anatomical drawings, lines found from Beethoven's autopsy, and the musings of poet isolating in the midst of a twenty-first-century pandemic. Nickel asks her readers to consider the many facets of the body, how it finds the words, lines and poems that together form an essential life, a gift among our deepest wounds and terrors.

Within us all are questions of identity, belonging, and connection. Beth Kope's third poetry collection, Atlas of Roots, is a work of the heart that uncovers the many facets of adoption. In poems that both witness and question, Kope shares her own quest to uncover family history and answers--finding her adoption records, questioning her parent's choices, and the truth of her own conception. Moving beyond the personal, Atlas of Roots shares other stories of adoption through the voices of other adoptees and parents of both relinquished and adopted children. In seeking a name and one's own story, Kope has written a striking and courageous narrative of adoption.

At eight years old, Grace Eiko Nishikihama was forcibly removed from her Vancouver home and interned with her parents and siblings in the BC Interior. Chiru Sakura--Falling Cherry Blossoms is a moving and politically outspoken memoir written by Grace, now a grandmother, with passages from a journal kept by her late mother, Sawae Nishikihama. An educated woman, Sawae married a naturalized Canadian man and immigrated to Canada in 1930. They came with great hopes and dreams of what Canada could offer them. However, within just a little more than a decade after settling happily in Paueru Gai (Powell Street) area, her dreams, and those of her husband's, were completely shattered. It was 1942 and more than 22,000 Japanese Canadians on the West Coast were interned and had their belongings, property and homes confiscated, and then sold off by the Government of Canada. After the war ended, restrictions on Japanese Canadians' movement continued for another four years and the Government ordered anyone of Japanese ancestry to move "east of the Rockies," or be deported to Japan. There was nothing on the West Coast to return to, so the Nishikihama family moved first to rural Manitoba and, when government restrictions were lifted, later to Winnipeg. At eighty-four years of age, Sawae began writing her memories for her children, ensuring they would know their family's story. While translating her mother's journal, Grace began to add her own experiences alongside her mother's, exploring how generational trauma can endure, and how differently she and her mother interpreted those years of struggle. Despite her years spent studying art and working as a gallery director and curator, translating her mother's writings, and her country's perceived efforts to simply move on from a dark period in Canada's history, Grace continues to seek an understanding of her past, while facing both sexism and racism. As an advocate for reconciliation, she openly shares her story with the next generations; throughout, Grace returns to her mother's teachings of hope and resilience symbolized in the cherry blossoms around what was once their home.

"On a sunny Sunday afternoon in June 2013, performer and singer Pat Henman, was driving home on the highway with her 19-year-old daughter, Maia, when they were struck head-on by a drunk driver. Pat and Maia's injuries were too complicated and life-threatening for the small hospital in Cranbrook, and they were flown to Calgary. Pat was revived four times, and her family was told to prepare for the worst. Maia had multiple breaks of all four limbs and the doctors had to induce her into a coma for more than a week. Both women spent months in the hospital recovering and undergoing major surgery. Pat had nineteen surgeries in the first week alone and Maia, a first-year university student, was left permanently disabled. This was the beginning of a long and painful struggle for their entire family. But as Pat and Maia were rehabilitating and trying to adapt to new routines, the family's life became engulfed in the confusing world of insurance settlements, a criminal trial against the impaired driver, and a broken legal system. Pat writes candidly about the accident and their family's ongoing struggle in a powerful memoir demanding justice not just for her family, but for all victims. Among the grief and anguish is a story of resilience, and recovery. Pat, whose vocal chords were damaged from the breathing tubes and was left with a permanent broken shoulder, was told she was unlikely to ever perform again. But with determination and retraining in her late fifties, she has slowly returned to her passion--the stage. Beyond the Legal Limit is the story of how love, community support and the compassion of many, including strangers, can be the path to survival."--

"By providing a deeper understanding and appreciation of the adoption journey, she enables us to more clearly see and honour adoptive families. ... This memoir shifted my perceptions in the way only compassionate and vulnerable writing can." --Monica Meneghetti, Lambda Literary finalist and award-winning author of What the Mouth Wants 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, seeping in from places both unexpected and familiar. In this moving and poetic memoir, Byers draws readers into her own tumultuous beginnings: her coming out years, finding love, and the start of her parenting journey. Little did Byers know that her experiences when coming out was merely training for becoming an adoptive parent of racialized twins. Small Courage: A Queer Memoir of Finding Love and Conceiving Family is a thoughtful and heart-warming examination of love, queerness and what it means to be a family.

In the long-awaited follow-up to her 2012 memoir, Journeywoman, Kate Braid returns with an honest and thought-provoking collection of essays reflecting on her career in a male-dominated profession and on the changes female tradespeople have witnessed. In 1977, Kate Braid began work as one of the first women to stumble (literally) into construction. Since then, feminism, the #MeToo movement, pay equity legislation and other efforts have led to more women in a wider variety of careers. Yet, the number of women in blue-collar trades has barely shifted--from three percent to a mere four. In Journeywoman, Braid told a personal story of working almost exclusively with all-male construction crews. In Hammer & Nail: Notes of a Journeywoman, Braid returns to the trades with courage, compassion, and humour. Connecting her lifetime of experiences as a construction worker, as well as an educator and writer, Braid reflects on the culture of labour and recalls the thrill of realizing her own skill and capabilities. Through stories, articles and speeches, Hammer & Nail sheds new light on our ideas of traditional gender roles--and how those ideas change in small but profound moments of gentleness, strength, humility and clarity on the job. Hammer & Nail is a thought-provoking collection of the highs and lows, the laughs, the heartaches and some of the lessons of Braid's journey.

When Cathy Sosnowsky and her family first joined the Hemming Bay Community, a cooperative formed to preserve a large piece of forested land on a remote coastal island of British Columbia, she found the idea of experiencing the raw wilderness appealing. But as her husband Woldy and his brother Vic thrive in this new environment, Cathy begins to feel like she's not in her element. The wild paradise she envisioned reveals itself as a harsh and hostile environment, the water too cold to swim, the beaches rocky and jagged. Cathy withdraws to her work, her love of raising her family, and her passion for sharing meals sourced from local delicacies with her new friends. But when their lives take a tragic turn with the loss of their three children, one to a fatal and tragic accident and two to addiction, the couple begin to drift apart. Ironically, Cathy's writing becomes her link to Heartstone Lodge, drawing her back to the support of the community and the wilderness she shared with her children.

For many, the Doukhobor story is a sensational one: arson, nudity, and civil disobedience once made headlines. But it isn't the whole story. In Our Backs Warmed by the Sun, the author, Vera, through the stories of her mother Elizabeth, describes a wholly activist life. The Doukhobors led anti-military protests throughout the early 1900s, harboured draft dodgers in the 60s, and stood up for their beliefs. In response, they were hosed down, arrested, and jailed. Vera learns of the confusion and fear when, as a child, Elizabeth's father served time in prison for charges related to a peaceful protest, and of her loneliness when she was institutionalized--one of a series of Canadian government efforts in assimilation. By removing the children, it was believed, the cycle of protest and resistance could be broken. Elizabeth's story is also one of a small but thriving Kootenay community, and of the experiences of a family who stood by their beliefs.

Blending lore and magic with contemporary questions around belief and beauty, power and fear, this stunning new poetry collection from Kelly Rose Pflug-Back is a grimoire for our times. Spanning centuries, The Hammer of Witches reaches from present-day urban dystopias and the unlikely enchantments that they harbour, to medieval Norway, where the first Christian king waged war on the country's gender-nonconforming wizards. Macabre imagery, speculative themes, and everyday mysticism blur the distinction between the real and the unreal, challenging modern concepts of beauty, power, and fear. In her first full-length collection, Kelly Rose Pflug-Back weaves together the magical and the monstrous, the sacred and the profane, to make sense of a world where primeval forests are clear-cut to build parking lots, and where it often seems that the gods have all gone to live behind the veil.

As a child, Claire's big brother Ray was bright and inquisitive, but as the two became teenagers, Ray struggled to acquire the social skills that came more easily to others. Claire tried to help, pointing out what he should or shouldn't have said or done. Ray insisted that he wasn't the problem--"On my planet..." he would explain, there were no social climbers, no subtle hints or subliminal messages to miss, and the telling of little white lies would be a capital offence. At sixteen, sitting with him in the high school cafeteria, Claire vowed to find Ray's planet. Dispatches from Ray's Planet draws on Ray and Claire's correspondence to tell the story of two siblings from two very different planets. There are thousands of Rays in our world. In this collective memoir, Claire and Ray share their journey with the hope that others can also learn that we all perceive the world in different ways, and that "different" does not necessarily mean "wrong."

The English poet, William Blake said, "joy and woe are woven fine." So it is in The Crooked Thing. In tales delicate and steely, a troubled young ferryman finds himself with an unexpected passenger, a songbird finds its voice, a mother learns to let go of her son and, after a chance encounter, an aging ballerina dances again. In her debut story collection, Mary MacDonald brings each narrator to face their own existence, taking the reader into darkness, passing through fear and resistance, to seek redemption and freedom. At their core these are love stories; they move us, disturb us, and upend our beliefs, to show us characters not all that different from ourselves.

"A compelling memoir by the daughter of convicted polygamist Winston Blackmore explores a young womans journey from polygamy to feminism and independence. As the daughter of Mormon leader Winston Blackmore, Mary Jayne Blackmore grew up within the closed-off polygamist community of Bountiful, BC. She spent her younger years riding ponies, raising pet lambs and playing in the hay in the Old Barn. Her familys staunch Fundamentalist Mormon faith imposed fanatical doomsday preparation and carried an instilled fear of the world outside her community. The church community split in 2002 when her father was revoked of his leadership position by Prophet Warren Jeffs. In 2017 Winston Blackmore was convicted of practicing polygamy further inciting the media sensationalism and worldwide criticism that had surrounded Bountiful for decades. Through the evolving and controversial narrative of her young adult life, Mary Jayne was forced to redefine her faith, family and womanhood for herself. Today, through her work and her personal exploration of feminism, Mary Jayne is helping to heal an injured community, one that she watched turn from safe and loving to defensive and resentful. She is also building her own place in the worldas a teacher, mother, writer and educated womanand she has managed to restore loving bonds with her family, including her father. From a childhood in an idyllic but sheltered community to early adulthood in an arranged marriage, ensuing divorce, and eventual return to Bountiful, Balancing Bountiful is Mary Jaynes journey of coming of age and coming to terms with her background as she strives to answer the question: What is the right kind of family, the right kind of woman and the right kind of feminist?"

"In her debut poetry collection, Shannon McConnell explores the fraught history of New Westminsters Woodlands School, a former 'lunatic asylum' opened in 1878 which later became a custodial training school for children with disabilities before its closure in 1996. Partially set in the 1960s and 70s, The Burden of Gravity uses personas to imagine residents lives, giving voice to those who were unable to speak for themselves, to shift focus from the institutional authority to the experience of residents. As poetry of witness, the collection uses a grounding tone to excavate the individual experiences through traditional narrative, ekphrastic and experimental erasure forms that elicit an array of emotions, from heartbreak to anger. Drawn from archival research, The Burden of Gravity, challenges readers to consider how we, in the aftermath of deinstitutionalization, choose to remember institutions like Woodlands School."--

DEVOLUTION's quirky, reality-bending poems and fables of extinction and ecological unravelling are haunting and unforgettable.