Atlantic Books Today 99

atlantic books TODAY

Deep roots hidden by time and crime

Books for anxious children

A noir take on Acadia

New Horizons

E.R. Zarevich

Publisher’s Corner 22 Francis Mitchell, New World Publishing Book Features 15 Corps étranges et poésie de l’Acadie by Marc Arseneau

24 Writing through rain, sleet or crows by Marjorie Simmins

28 Cross-Canada bike ride produces a hell of a read by Jeremy Hull

Authors in Conversation

26 “Which comes first, the banana or the story?

29 Health Hacks 30 Journey to the Dark Galaxy 31 The Widow & The Will

Captain Solitude

Canada’s State Police Reviews

Readers 41 Reviews by

Who Killed Richard Oland? 36 Donald Andrus: The Shape of Desire 38 A Seal of Salvage 39 Editor’s Picks

Donald Andrus was a boy in England when the Second World War ended. His childhood travelled through Portugal and Wales before depositing him in Canada at the start of his teen years. He began painting and had his first sold-out shows in the late 1950s. Since then, his career has drifted between curating, teaching and creating art.

Donald Andrus: The Shape of Desire is a beautiful new book by Ihor Holubizky, Pan Wendt and Roslyn Rosenfeld that documents his career. Our cover image is the central panel of a triptych called Sardonyx, mixed medium (2016) on Meranti board, 121.9” x 91.6” per panel.

A diptych in books

Editor’s message

Our cover image comes from Donald Andrus’s new retrospective book, The Shape of Desire. It’s the central panel of a triptych called Sardonyx. We have a full review of the book inside, and you’ll also see all three panels of the artwork. How does it strike you in contrast, rather than standing alone?

Allow me to offer you three sets of book diptychs from our authors’ work in the spring of 2024. These are books published separately, but that I read together, and found they enhanced each other, much like in Andrus’s triptych.

In The Gift Child, author Elaine McCluskey writes a novel that’s begging to be mistaken for a memoir. Harriett, our heroine, is trying to find out what really happened to her missing cousin, perhaps so she can include it in the memoir she’s writing. Much of the appeal of the novel is this feeling that we’re sitting with the memoirist as she tries to make sense of her days.

Meanwhile, in The Old Moon in Her Arms, Lorri Neilsen Glenn writes a memoir that reads like a literary novel. We begin on the ocean floor with Glenn searching for periwinkles and trying to find the meaning of her life. “In many ways, I am a stranger to my former selves … I address the younger me in the second person as ‘you’ and reflect on that young person as ‘she’,” we read. How much of your own life memories are nonfiction real, and how much poetic licence?

If you are anxious, you will find comfort and help in two new books. Pet Tales by Heidi Tattrie Rushton stars a bright

and charming young person named Penny who spends her free time with shelter animals to ease her alarm. But when the owner plans to shut the shelter, Penny must decide if she can let the animals go — or face her fears to try and save them. This is a great read that could launch a series, and I’m not just saying that because Heidi is my sister.

Bertie Stewart Is Perfectly Imperfect by Melanie Mosher (who is not my sister) begins with Bertie having a full-on panic attack in her Grade 6 classroom. Anyone who’s had one will recognize the dry mouth, pounding heart and overwhelming urge to run. Through the haze, she hears her teacher seal her doom by announcing the school will hold a public speaking event, and Bertie is told she will have to address a packed auditorium. Will she be able to do it? Read to find out.

I’ll leave you with a pair of poets. Matthew Walsh’s Terrarium takes a conversational stroll through a young man’s soul as he leaves the small town that birthed him for a bigger city, where he can ask bigger questions. Walsh reflects on his younger self trying to find his place as a queer poet.

Raymond Fraser: Collected Poems features similar reflections on the poet as a young man, but grows and stretches across the pages to encompass a life. It’s a life that ended in 2018, leaving it to Fraser’s friends to publish his last book. It’s fitting for a poet who expresses his desire to help those same people:

I could help them stand up I could pound on doors for them I could keep them from the bottle

Desire is the need for something else. Perhaps in these book diptychs, you’ll meet your own want. ■

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Printed in Canada. This is issue number 99 Spring 24. Atlantic Books Today is published twice a year. All issues are numbered in sequence. Total Atlantic-wide circulation: 30,000. ISSN 1192-3652

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Cover story

Labrador, A Reader’s Guide

Robin McGrath’s new book, Labrador, A Reader’s Guide, promises to take you with her as she devours Labradorian literature from the 1700s to today. When it came time to create a cover for the book, she thought about an iconic woodcarving of George Cartwright. The British officer stands majestic, inevitable, a rifle slung over his shoulder as he boldly snowshoes across the land in the second half of the 1700s.

McGrath drew a nearly identical image for her cover. but she replaced the man with an insouciant snowshoe hare.

“I think the significance of either image actually depends on whether you are a Newfoundlander or Labradorian,” says Mark David Turner of publisher Brack & Brine. “While people in both parts of the province know who he is, he is more widely known in Labrador and is likely to elicit more mixed emotions there. As Robin discusses his papers in her book, he was a colonial force with an inclination to hunt anything that moved.”

So why turn him into a hare?

“I personally read Robin’s image as a lampoon that deflates the persona of Cartwright by giving him the head of one of his most innocuous pieces of game,” he says.

Beginner’s mind Embracing not knowing on the way to success

by Renée Hartleib

As a child, author and illustrator Jack Wong loved to draw and write. But he was also strong in sciences and math. The adults around him weighed in and the more practical path won out: he would combine drawing and math into a career as an architect.

However, a trip to Europe before he began his architect studies would change all that. “There I was, standing in front of this incredible architecture and I realized I had absolutely no interest in buildings,” he laughs. Instead, he found himself drawn inside to the galleries and museums, marvelling at the art on the walls.

This seed of awe and insight flowered in a move from B.C. to Nova Scotia to attend NSCAD University. While to some this might have seemed daunting — starting over in a new place with new dreams — Wong was entering a space he has learned to deeply love. One of being a beginner.

And whether it’s acquiring a new language, or teaching himself bike repair or learning to become an author and illustrator, Wong is a big proponent of embracing the beginner mind and finding your way forward in spite of the fear or hesitation that can accompany doing new things.

“I knew from my past experiences of being a beginner that the feeling of being insecure was normal.”

Upon graduation, he was called upon to put this philosophy into action. Having just studied art, he felt secure in his artistic abilities, but lacked confidence as a writer. “It would have been really easy to convince myself that I should stick to illustrating other people’s stories and not try and write my own.”

But he didn’t let that happen. Instead, he told himself that he just wasn’t good at writing yet. “I knew from my past experiences of being a beginner that the feeling of being insecure was normal.” He gave himself permission to experiment in early picture books that never saw the light of day, but did help him find his voice and gain confidence.

When he finally had a draft of a first book he was proud of, he was surprised that he kept getting the advice to sit on it. “I kept hearing that I shouldn’t be so quick to send it out, that I should wait for at least six months and then reassess.”

This advice didn’t feel right, so he ignored it and sent his book out into the world. That book, When You Can Swim, ended up winning the 2023 Governor General’s Literary Award in Young People’s Literature – Illustrated Books. Interestingly, When You Can Swim and his latest book, All That Grows, contain characters who are learning new things. It’s a topic that fascinates him.

“It can be really hard to be in the ‘beginner’ phase, in the not-knowingness,” says Wong. “But after you’ve done it a few times, you realize that the space of not knowing is quite

potent and fruitful. It’s not one you want to rush through to the end.”

Susanne Alexander is very familiar with this beginner phase. The publisher of Goose Lane Editions in Fredericton has been on many learning curves in her thirty years with Canada’s oldest independent publisher. And there’s one particular adventure that she’s been on twice!

Way back in 1995, Goose Lane entered into a collaboration with CBC Radio and produced over 100 audiobooks by Canadian authors in cassette and CD formats. “If you’re of a certain era, you might remember the CBC program Between the Covers,” says Alexander. The program featured books by some of the biggest names in Canadian literature — Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields, Timothy Findlay, Anne Michaels, Thomas King, Alistair MacLeod — read by actors who were also household names. Over a 13-year period, the voices of Gordon Pinsent, R.H. Thomson, Shauna McKenna, Colin Feore and Mary Walsh helped Goose Lane sell thousands of audiobooks under their BTC Audiobooks imprint.

Despite the success, cassettes and CDs soon gave way to digital recordings, and Goose Lane lost its production partner in the CBC. Fast forward to 2021 and with the help of the Canada Book Fund, the publisher received financial assistance to start producing Canadian-authored audiobooks again.

All That Grows

Jack Wong House of Anansi Press Daughters of Silence

But, as Alexander puts it, “everything had changed.” Turns out selling audiobooks is very unlike selling recordings on cassettes and CDs. They had to learn a whole new production process as well as finding a new production partner and distributor. They also had to audition voice actors and in the case of two books — Some Hellish by Nicholas Herring (set in P.E.I.) and Daughters of Silence by Rebecca Fisseha (set in Ethiopia) — ensure that the accent and pronunciation were correct. All of this led to a bit of a slow start, but in 2023, scoring a new distributor changed all that. Suddenly their audiobooks were available to consumers through online venues such as iTunes, Spotify, Kobo and Amazon, leading to a massive increase in audiobook sales.

From their hundreds of titles, Alexander has her own personal favourites, some old and some new. The Piano Man’s Daughter by Timothy Findley, narrated by Colm Feore, is one of them. “In fact, Tim was the first writer to sign up for our first-ever season of audiobooks,” she says. “Based on his willingness to say yes, other writers felt comfortable licensing their books to us. Without him, the entire adventure may have never occurred.”

Adventures in publishing is a term that resonates with Marie Cadieux of the Moncton-based publisher Bouton d’or Acadie. While she has been literary and general director of the Acadian children’s book publisher for the last 11 years, she’s recently taken a step outside her comfort zone by creating an adult imprint called Mouton noir Acadie.

This isn’t the first time Cadieux has experimented with trying something new. When she stepped in to fill the shoes of Marguerite Maillet, known as “the founder of Acadian literary studies” back in 2012, she was tasked with turning a traditional publishing house into something more contemporary.

“Things had slowed down. We needed to turn our minds to marketing and making the company more visible,” says Cadieux, who did an excellent job of that, growing from one paid employee to five, expanding their catalogue, and selling rights overseas.

And then in 2020, she felt a similar urge to grow as she surveyed the landscape and saw a lack of options for Acadian authors. “I was seeing some fine writers who didn’t know where to go and some good manuscripts that didn’t have a place to be published.”

And so Mouton noir Acadie, an adult imprint of Bouton d’or Acadie, was born. “We didn’t do huge feasibility studies and we didn’t do market research; we just went with what seemed like a good idea,” says Cadieux. “It may have been a little innocent or naive, but it’s worked out in a very organic way.”

Since 2020, when Mouton noir Acadie was launched, there have been a few new titles added to their catalogue every year. Cadieux loves having an adult imprint that gives her the ability to “scout” books and approach writers who have manuscripts of interest.

Terminus ventre-ville by Alain Raimbault, a book of poetry by an accomplished poet, and La colère de l’autre by Marjorie Pedneault, a brave book for young adults about domestic violence, are two recent additions to the Mouton noir Acadie catalogue. “These are both examples of two voices that might not exist if not for Mouton noir,” says Cadieux. “We are so proud to offer a place for high quality books by talented Acadian writers to be published.” ■

RENÉE HARTLEIB is an author, professional writer and editor. She also offers writing support to other creatives and reviews first drafts.

Terminus ventre-ville

Alain Raimbault

Mouton noir Acadie

La colère de l’autre

Marjorie Pedneault

Mouton noir Acadie

Finding love among the living and dead

by Meg D. Edwards

With warm weather on the horizon, it might be time to indulge in some new books for the coming summer. If so, look no further than these recently published books of fiction by Atlantic Canadian authors and publishers.

Critically acclaimed author Carol Bruneau has a new collection of short stories out and both Michele Hébert and Katerina Bakolias have debut novels that place them firmly in the “should read” list. Across different genres, all three books give the reader a window into the warm, and sometimes eccentric lives, of ordinary people.

In Threshold, Bruneau’s collection of fifteen short stories, half of the stories were written pre-pandemic and half mid-pandemic. A few pieces of poetic flash fiction serve as a “kind of border” between the different times and tales, says Bruneau. Bruneau’s stories are detailed and deep, each one offering enough raw material for a novel. It is especially interesting to read her stories set in the time of the pandemic, a time of unprecedented change that we are all still digesting.

With casual references to people grabbing masks from their pockets, or characters obsessing about their neighbours while locked down and isolated, Bruneau’s stories offer the reader an opportunity to look back on how the pandemic restrictions affected individual lives.

In Bruneau’s new collection, the healing power of nature is a blessing, allowing her characters to reconnect with themselves or each other. In one story, a newly widowed woman books a special catered meal on a beach to try to reconnect with the world and her place in it, and in another, a young man whose life has been completely disrupted by the lockdowns is brought back to earth by a near drowning.

In the last story in the collection, “Flight Path,” an older married couple who are growing estranged find that their

treks to view migrating herons bring them together in love and companionship. After a difficult chat with painful recriminations, the woman’s husband reaches for her hand and says, “We’ll see if they are there in the morning, okay.” The reader feels the balm of being connected to nature, and each other.

“It’s like ‘spirit’ is embedded in nature. I really believe that,” says Bruneau. “We have to recognize how therapeutic it is, and how it saves us, and also, how we have to save it.”

Michelle Hébert’s debut novel, Every Little Thing She Does is Magic, is a beautifully crafted coming-of age story about a young woman’s journey towards the acceptance of her family. The novel is upbeat with a focus on trust and love and a surprising narrative twist that is skillfully woven into the story.

Kitty comes from a family that believes they have been cursed with bad luck from an ancestral witch. The family home is preserved in the decor of 1987, the year Kitty’s father died. And the bedroom of Kitty’s Aunt Nerida, who drowned as a young teen, has been maintained like a shrine to the 1970s.

When Kitty finds herself back in her family home as a young adult, she sneaks into the preserved room and discovers Nerida’s tarot cards, cool clothes and a cache of mixed music tapes. These items help Kitty heal, along with the guidance of the lively spirit of the dead Nerida, who writes letters and leaves tarot cards on the floor to guide her.

Magic, spirits and fate are important themes in the novel, and so is music. Every chapter title in the novel comes from the Magical Mixtape, a list of songs included at the back of the book. “I hope that people will actually listen to the songs,” says Hébert, because not only will Gen X recognize the titles, but readers will also find messages in the songs that hint at where the story is going.

LEFT: Katerina Bakolias, author of Luscious Love.

Photo by James Arthur MacLean Photography

Threshold

Carol Bruneau

Vagrant Press

Every Little Thing She Does is Magic

Michelle Hébert

Vagrant Press

A journalist and social worker, this is Hébert’s first novel, but not her first book. In 2007, she published Enriched by Catastrophe: Social Work and Social Conflict after the Halifax Explosion

Writing a novel is a “different process altogether” says Hébert, but the planning that she did for this novel is helping her now as she works on a literary memoir.

Katerina Bakolias, a busy actor, screenwriter, producer and playwright, is now the author of an excellent novel aimed at younger adults. Luscious Love is the story of a young Greek-Canadian girl named Mina, and the challenges she experiences with her first job and first love.

Mina is from a loving, slightly hectic home with doting parents and high-achieving siblings. She doesn’t feel as charismatic or athletic as her siblings, but she is loved and loves herself. What she really wants is to get a part-time job at Luscious Lingerie so that she can take the first steps to making her own way in the world.

The story begins with her picking out her outfit for the first day at work: black leggings, a black cami and a cropped black knit cardigan, “Comfy, practical, and cute, she thought with a smile.” But later, when her mother questions her choice, she wonders if she should change into a sweater that covers her stomach.

In Luscious Love the fat shaming that exists in our society is part of Mina’s life and it is portrayed in a deft, non-didactic manner. Mina feels like she is never allowed to forget that her body is “imperfect” and this sentence — “She placed a hand on her stomach and squeezed” — will strike a chord with many readers.

Bakolias says that “body image is close to my heart” and she has created a confident person in Mina, and one who will offer comfort and strength to other people struggling to feel good about their bodies. Mina has a strong sense of self-worth, and her experience of dysmorphia does not actually hinder her ambition in work or love.

Luscious Love

Katerina Bakolias

Formac Publishing

As Mina settles into her job at the large chain store, she is offered a chance to be a model for the underwear and have her image displayed in the stores. This is an interesting dilemma (and a good discussion topic for young readers) because Mina has become increasingly uncomfortable with the industry and the effect it has on young women. She does not want to be the token representation of a “big girl” from another culture and decides against it. Her girlfriend doesn’t at first understand her reluctance and urges her to do it.

Part of Mina’s well-rounded character includes her attraction to girls, and in this contemporary novel, particularly for readers from 13 to 18 years, being a lesbian is not an issue. Her parents and friends are accepting and supportive.

In Luscious Love, Mina learns about herself, how to communicate her needs and when to take a stand, but the challenges she faces are not related to her body size or dating preference. She is a fully formed character, not defined simply by her sexuality or her body type. Bakolias, who graduated from Dalhousie University’s Fountain School of Performing Arts, says that when she creates a character, she sees them with her actor’s mind, “right in front of me, fully formed.”

“I feel a strong urge to move away from telling traumatic queer stories,” says Bakolias, who was approached by Formac Lorimer Publishing after someone from the company saw her play ’Til Death Do us Part, a farce produced by Neptune Theatre in 2022.

They told her they were looking for queer authors that could write a lighthearted book for young adults and she was happy to comply, writing this funny, thoughtful tale of a confident teen making her way in the world. ■

MEG D. EDWARDS is a writer living in Baie Verte, New Brunswick. She writes plays and poetry, and her personal essays can be read on her blog, Notes from a Sinking Isthmus.

Truth

Tand its many lies

by Sarah Butland

he truth in Elaine McCluskey’s new novel The Gift Child is that there is no one truth, only fragments we piece together. The novel poses as a memoir and offers several versions of the same key scenario, depending on who is experiencing it or retelling the tale. McCluskey masterfully crafts a story, fictional yet twisted with well-researched facts, to spin the tale of The Gift Child, leaving this reader wondering who the gift child is.

The novel is primarily a search for missing cousin Graham, who was last seen biking alone in rural Nova Scotia with a big tuna head in the basket, and who turns out to be a shadier and stranger person than Harriet could have guessed. Her search for him turns into an accidental exposé of their shared and mysterious family ancestry. The search for the truth merges into “what could have been” segments and at times the characters yearn for another life.

This is the story of Harriet, a one-time photojournalist who got humbled into a new job as a casino host. She’s the daughter of Stan Swim, a local TV celebrity, the sister of Peter, cousin of the missing Graham, and ex-wife to Jack. Her story is wrapped in comedy, heartbreak and intrigue. It is

Elaine McCluskey, photo by Gwen North

Whetherit’s

a wild race to the sea

The Pig & the Dumpling

Bonnie Johnstone/ Veselina Tomova

9781998802081 / paperback / $13.99

March 2024

also the story of family, history, fisherman and Cape Sable Island. Harriet wants to figure out what happened to her cousin, and her search takes her to the archives, and to a few beaches hunting for bodies, only to find family is more than blood — and much more than one person can expect.

familiar criminals from Nova Scotia. McCluskey says she enjoyed fictionalizing the journalism sections, as “the idea of truth could be flexible and benevolent.”

McCluskey has not (yet) written a memoir, though she did offer Atlantic Books Today two potential titles: Grudges I Have Held for Forty Years and How My Grade 8 Math Teacher Tried to Ruin My Life, both of which I personally would love to read.

My Bunny Lies Over the Ocean

Bill Richardson/Bill Pechet

9781998802098 / hardcover / $21.99

May 2024 or a wild ride across it, of adventures in store this spring.

The Gift Child begins with this vulnerable confession: “I wrote as truthfully as I could, knowing that my memory is as imperfect I am, a mess of bad clothes and bad decisions and men I should never have trusted.”

Set in Dartmouth as well as Shag Harbour, with reference to the historical and extraterrestrial events there, the journey of best-kept secrets and oversharing of personal information, it was a natural mix of truths and lies.

Find out more at www.runningthegoat.com Running the Goat has lots

Harriet is writing a memoir and taking a class led by a woman called Pamela. She encourages Harriet, as she encourages all of her students. “The group turned to Pamela for guidance, and she said, because she was wise and came, like most fiction writers, with the thinnest of enamels: ‘You will find your own truth; the story will lead you to it.’”

Has Elaine McCluskey had a Pamela in her writing life?

"Pamela is deeply invested in her art, and arguably too sensitive for this world. I drew on my own experiences as a workshop leader to create Pamela, who is more delicate than I am,” the author says. “The people in Pamela’s group are sincere, but occasionally misguided. (One wants to write a novel about underground stick people.) That makes for some fun. The people in my groups were, without exception, interesting and intelligent, and we had great discussions.”

McCluskey, like Harriet, is a former journalist and is married to a photojournalist, and much of that real experience comes out in the novel, which includes several

“I am generally satisfied with my life, but I occasionally imagine what could have happened. I won second prize in a rinky dink writing contest once, and I would rewrite that scene. First prize was a yellow VW Bug. Second prize was a handful of Harlequin books. In a better version of that scene, I would also have won a yellow VW Bug and I would have been last seen driving it to the beach,” she said, editing her life on the fly. ■

SARAH BUTLAND lives in Pictou County, Nova Scotia, and previously spent many years exploring the streets of Moncton, New Brunswick, collecting stories and memories and meeting interesting people. She’s the author of Losing It At 40 and Gaining It At 41.

The Gift Child

Elaine McCluskey Goose Lane Editions

Corps étranges et poésie de l’Acadie

Born in Paris in 1966, Alain Raimbault lived in Nova Scotia for 13 years before he moved to Montreal in 2011. He is the author of 20 books in many genres. Terminus ventre-ville is his fifth collection of poetry. In this collection, Raimbault writes in a free verse style which narrates in the first person. Stylistically, Raimbault mostly uses repetition, enumeration and metaphor. The collection is divided in three sections.

This first section, entitled «Présent singulier», is relatively introspective and addressed to a «you». The recurring theme is one of the observant disposition of a writer and the practice of writing. Raimbault enumerates many writers, but it is Bukowski that he mentions most.

on pense à John Fante à Kent Anderson à Bukowski j’apprends d’eux le diable du détail

In the second section, «Montréal viscéral», Raimbault’s verses depict various aspects of mundane urban reality, such as metro stations, bus rides and even a car garage. The narrator observes, questions and seeks, through action, to find truth. Snow fills the streets in many poems, implicitly reminding the reader that he is writing in a Canadian context. Often, the observant narrator offers a humorous vision of everyday situations in carnivalesque fashion :

comme moi ils viennent de la Rive-Sud la même ligne d’autobus depuis 95 ans descendent depuis 3 siècles au même arrêt travaillent depuis 4 millénaires dans leur tour à bureaux et rentrent chez eux à 17h27

Through hyperbolic imagery, the poetry becomes a witness to the frenetic and, somewhat absurd, rhythm of urban living où je grouille parmi les fourmis, like the excessive composition of Hieronymus Bosch’s Hell or Fitz Lang’s Metropolis. In the third section, «Corps étranger», childhood memories are mixed with the barbaric nature of humanity with evocations of war, consumerism, environmental and nuclear destruction.

pauvre Ukraine après la guerre de 14 et la Révolution après Staline et sa famine

by Marc Arseneau

Terminus ventre-ville

Alain Raimbault

Mouton noir d’Acadie

Hitler et ses barbares finir le siècle avec une explosion nucléaire et Poutine début du XXIe siècle

That being said, the author is no longer in the hustle and bustle of the second section. Henceforth, he inhabits his neighbourhood where diverse and multiethnic characters, often refugees who have fled war and torture, exchange parcels of their unique and enlightening existence. Raimbault’s poetry denounces the folly of war around the globe. Furthermore, as a counterpoint, it celebrates inclusive and multicultural spaces.

je suis l’espace de mon corps ce squelette que je ne partage pas que je remplis de café colombien de bagels au beurre de cacahuètes nigérianes de bananes panaméennes de sandwichs au pâté à la truffe périgourdine

Throughout the book, Raimbault’s poetry observes the mundane and succeeds in generously including snapshots of unassuming people and the lessons learned from their existence. The poetry in Terminus ventre-ville is not one of the intimate realm nor laments of emotional outpouring. Rather, it creates a contemporary portrait of the world around us as viewed by an observant writer who seeks to be sincere with his tone and his sensibility.

Terminus ventre-ville is written in language on the side of orality, in the tradition of literary canons such as Prévert or Ferlinghetti. Thus, these poems are accessible to a wide audience and, in its rhythmic simplicity, Raimbault’s book may engage readers who have not read much poetry. Therefore, this approach seems to fit nicely with Mouton noir d’Acadie readership orientation. Certainly, it will be interesting to read more from this imprint in the future. ■

Born in 1971 and raised in Moncton, MARC ARSENEAU has published five books of poetry with Perce-Neige in Acadie and Écrits des Forges in Québec, as well as in anthologies, periodicals and magazines. He was, during the nineties, editor of Éloizes, a literary and visual periodical published in Moncton. He is known to be part of l’École d’Aberdeen, an Acadian literary movement born in the late twentieth century. He now lives in Louisbourg, on Cape Breton Island.

The lost bones and buildings of our forgotten ancestors

by Denise Flint

Who are we? Where did we come from? How did we get here?

Those are universal questions; we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t seek the answers. But sometimes those questions can be framed in such a way that the answers are exclusionary rather than opening up our knowledge about our existence. When we focus the question too narrowly, we may either ignore entire populations or dismiss their culture, virtually negating their existence.

We can know a people once existed, but know nothing about how they lived. We can stumble across abandoned

buildings and know nothing about their purpose. We can even be ignorant of the fact that certain people existed in a particular space and time.

Three new books explore some of those previously darkened pathways, bringing to light a new narrative about our collective past that has been largely obscured. The books represent a kind of rediscovery of what came before us and they contain some surprises.

The first book is Black Harbour: Slavery and the Forgotten Histories of Black People in Newfoundland and Labrador, co-written by Xaiver Michael Campbell and Heather

Barrett. Barrett is a white journalist whose ancestors have lived in Newfoundland for generations. Campbell is a Black man from Jamaica and a first-generation Newfoundlander. Their commonality? They both call the island in the middle of the North Atlantic home, and are deeply curious about its past.

One of the first things Campbell was told when he arrived in Newfoundland was that he wouldn’t see any faces that looked like his. That turned out not to be true, but it did start him wondering about the entrenched idea that there are no Black people in Newfoundland and there never have been. After all, there were Black people in

every other British colony around the world. Why would Newfoundland be different?

It wasn’t. During the course of their research, Campbell and Barrett discovered references to Black slaves and Black sailors with connections to Newfoundland, as well as Newfoundland’s connection to the wider slave trade that was deemed essential to the development of European economic and trade systems. But that story has never been part of popular history.

“It’s important to acknowledge the bad parts of our history as well as the good,” says Barrett. “And to document and give recognition to the people from all backgrounds who helped build life in Newfoundland and Labrador over the centuries. That heritage belongs to all of us.”

“By telling these stories we hope to add to the history of Newfoundland,” Campbell says. “These people were taken away from their own places and their own people and taken into bondage. It’s really important to highlight the stories that have been largely forgotten whenever we can. There’s a lot of historical erasure going on everywhere. When the rich, white men were deciding things, there were a lot of other people in the room.”

Barrett says being in the same room as Campbell as they created Black Harbour was an enriching experience. “I now know that not everyone in Newfoundland was from an English or Irish background like me. Newfoundland is a more complex, rich and interesting place and society than we may have thought.”

To call Archaeology and the Indigenous Peoples of the Maritimes by Michael Deal comprehensive seems almost trite — there are a full 62 pages devoted to references alone. Dean is a retired professor who taught in the faculty of archaeology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. His work focussed on the ancient archaeology of the land now known as the Maritime provinces and the book is an extensive study that grew out of Dean’s lectures and online notes dating back to 2000.

One thing he acknowledges is how much the study of archaeology has changed since he began nearly 40 years ago. One of those changes is the contribution of an Indigenous perspective to our understanding of the past.

Speaking of the European tradition, he says, “We can’t go back in time, so we are basing our understanding on what was left behind: the artefacts, the plant remains, the animal bones, even the residue on pots. We look at it linearly and we try to create a narrative of history and identify events or changes. What we’ll never know is what they were thinking

Kluscaps Cave, photo by Scott Osmond

and just how complex their religion and social organizations and politics were. We look for triggers that caused changes and set up a timeline with developmental periods.”

But that’s not the only way to gain an understanding of the past. Speaking of Indigenous people, Dean, who is white, says, “They think about history in a different way than we do, based on oral traditions and community values.” He uses Indigenous tales about the retreat of the glaciers or the forming of the Minas Basin as examples. “Their ancestors were there and recorded these things in oral history and it’s something we recognize as well and so the two forms converge.”

Another type of vanishing history comes from Hidden Nova Scotia by Scott Osmond, which bills itself as “your guide to 125+ secret coves, wreck sites, abandoned armaments, and other off-the-beaten-path destinations.” Divided by regions, the book tells you exactly how and where to find quirky and compelling places of interest across the province.

Want to see a piece of the Berlin Wall? Look behind Dalhousie’s agricultural campus in Bible Hill. A Royal Canadian Air Force radar site? Climb a barren hill overlooking Cole Harbour. At first it sounds fairly straightforward, but even a cursory glance through the pages shows that this is more than a simple guide.

Osmond prefers to think of it as an atlas of curious wonders. “A lot of times these stories aren’t known. When you dig a little deeper, their deeper significance is found. For example, the World War II and Cold War things that are buried around the province show the fear and the effort as we all came together to build this infrastructure.

“Some of these things are in the middle of nowhere, but here they are. They used to be a town or a mine. Old lumber mills have hired a lot of people. Either you or your neighbour has a connection to this industry. They show our impact on the land and how far our reach is.”

Hidden Nova Scotia is an activity guide meant to lead you to some of the lesser known features, both natural and built, of the province. But is also a guide to the history, culture and impact of the people who have inhabited the province.

These three volumes, with their study of Black connections to Newfoundland, Indigenous heritage in the Maritimes and the obscure artefacts of the modern world, bring to us largely forgotten or even unknown parts of a heritage that belongs to us all. And, as Barrett says, that makes for a more complex, rich and interesting society. ■

DENISE FLINT is an award-winning freelance writer and editor with years of experience writing on a diversity of subject matters for a wide audience.

Black Harbour: Slavery and the Forgotten Histories of Black People in Newfoundland and Labrador

Xaiver Michael Campbell and Heather Barrett

Boulder Books

Archaeology and the Indigenous Peoples of the Maritimes

Michael Deal Memorial University Press

Hidden Nova Scotia

Scott Osmond

Boulder Books

Poetry from the edges of life

by E.R. Zarevich

Atlantic Books Today makes it a point to keep its readers well informed on all the exciting new publications coming out of the Eastern provinces of Canada. It is proud to present and recommend three new poetry collections by Canadian creatives that have graced bookshelves this spring. They each offer a refreshing reading experience to accompany this year’s promised bout of warm weather and blossoming greenery. They also make choice, if belated, studies for this year’s Poetry Month in April, which is already shaping up to be a fruitful one for the nation.

All three books are written in free verse and offer a meticulously well-crafted and specialized representation of each author’s personality and worldly experiences. First in the lineup comes courtesy of Island Studies Press. This is A Skeptic in Springtime, the latest turnout by Brent MacLaine, a university professor at the University of Prince Edward Island. MacLaine is the author of the previously published Prometheus Reconsiders Fire, and he once again revisits the theme of deep psychological consideration of formative life events, both mythological and human. MacLaine’s A Skeptic in Springtime covers everything from the imperial Song dynasty in China to the Lamassu, the Assyrian (now Mesopotamian) deities of protection. Even the long-deceased

Newfoundland coastline,

photo by Carter Hutton

French painter Claude Monet makes an appearance, pondering how his paintings ended up hanging in so many clinic waiting rooms. There are also affectionate tributes to his good friend John Smith, who has sadly passed on, but continues to motivate MacLaine’s work with the inspiration only providable by a muse.

MacLaine spoke to Atlantic Books Today about the background of the book’s completion, which combines professional practicality with his form of gentle spirituality.

“The book was a long time in the making — some of the poems were written over five years ago. One result is that, perhaps, the poetry has benefited from a longer than usual gestation and editing. More generally, I think that the poems in this collection follow the larger pattern of my previous books: roughly an equal distribution of poems rooted in a familiar, local (pastoral) landscape — gardens and fields are prominent — and poems that range farther afield to events and images drawn from the ramblings of the imagination or international news and travel. In other words, home and away.”

Consider this excerpt from MacLaine’s “Album Leaves: an Elegy,” written particularly for his dedicatee John Smith. This quote from the poem especially resonates to an audience still reeling from the cultural phenomenon that was last year’s Oppenheimer. MacLaine, in his own manner, also humanizes the mysterious, eccentric, almighty scientist utterly absorbed in their work. They were just a person too:

“You speak of physics class at U of T, of how you walked across the quad with Leopold Enfold, colleague of Einstein.

‘Enfold’ you remember, ‘once got ‘stuck’ when writing out an intricate equation. But the next day, he came back to it.

‘I asked him once:

‘Are you a determinist?’ He replied that, before the event, he believed in free will, but after the event, well, he tended to be a determinist.’”

Newfoundland and Labrador publisher Breakwater Books has brought out the brilliantly titled The Wind has Robbed the Legs Off a Madwoman by Agnes Walsh. A native of the province, and a seasoned poet with numerous publications on her record, Walsh, through her new book, strives to dig to her bare roots. Her womanhood and her steady relationship with her provincial and famously lush surroundings, presented raw and fresh like newly harvested crop, are at the

centre of this calm and forthright collection. The world and its wonders are not just the background, they are constant companions propping up every troubled soul.

“It was written over several years, mostly when I was living out along a rugged shoreline in rural Newfoundland,” Walsh commented, when asked by Atlantic Books about her own unique writing process. “The poems mostly come from observing nature and trying to find my place in it while getting on in years.”

Walsh’s poetry examines the overpowering presence of nature even in the face of personal tragedy and modernday occurrences. Secular matters will always take second place in scope to natural splendor, which offers distraction, solace, and the opportunity to pause and self-reflect on one’s circumstances. Here is an excerpt from her “Driving into the Waves,” which demonstrates exactly this disparity between what is seemingly grounded and what is not, and what really deserves one’s attention the most:

“Driving into the waves of clouds, the altocumulus, static as if frozen, as if stuck in mud.

So much sky, so much ocean . . . the line between them a dulled, quivering mirage.

And why does spring look like autumn?

Even the green is really a pale yellow, the trees black, the air biting every inch of bare flesh.

It’s hard to be happy lately. You mock yourself for that last stab at love— There wasn’t even a slam of the door as you left in the night.”

Finally, we have Matthew Walsh’s Terrarium, published by ice house poetry. Walsh, another Nova Scotia-hailer and traveller who now resides in Toronto, utilizes their poetry as a means for navigating life as a queer individual in a twenty-first century Canada that is ever progressing, but still politically imperfect.

Walsh’s prose style is unpretentious and engagingly cheeky, and not afraid to poke fun at the modern-day conveniences and concerns which often border on the ridiculous. He allows his own sense of humour to fully shine through and isn’t shy about sharing intimate details about his love life. Here is an excerpt from Walsh’s “Bluet,”

a textual near-comedy sketch which demonstrates some of his intriguing takes of contemporary literary lifestyles, relationships and the new vocabulary words that would have never appeared in poetry volumes in the past:

“A book of poetry astonished me I forgot it was a book not Instagram Messenger as if the poet was typing to me personally I went home and ate a strawberry sundae feeling my cynicism about things that are asked of me to complete and it leaves me My friend said I was so naïve he saw me in a cult and he felt like he was jealous of my happiness something not created by myself but secretions and I am told serotonin.”

This excerpt from his “Moonstone” demonstrates how Walsh effectively finds the romantic in the everyday, even in industrial settings, a common practice among resourceful city-bound poets.

“In a repair shop I kiss a mechanic in front of several mirrors inside True Centre Muffler and Care and it is similar to therapy All the versions of me go on forever I like the image of how art is here and the scent of oil how things are fixed here.”

All three books are readily available for purchase online. Happy reading! ■

E.R. ZAREVICH is a writer and teacher from Burlington, Ont. Her research journalism has appeared in Women in Higher Education, Jstor Daily, Russian Life and The Calvert Journal, among others.

Publisher’s Corner with Francis Mitchell New World Publishing

ABT: You founded New World Publishing 27 years ago to produce books that make a difference to people’s lives. Can you share a few books that have made that difference?

FM: Our original titles were books on health and automobile safety. The first title on health, Free to Fly: A Journey to Wellness, was by a nutritional consultant, Judit Rajhathy, a graduate in journalism from Carleton, who moved to Nova Scotia and became unwell. She began to study nutrition and opened a practice to help others. I encouraged her to write a book and subsequently became the principal editor and the designer of the book, which became a Nova Scotia bestseller in year one, then a Canadian bestseller in its second year. We also sold many thousands in the U.S. and beyond. A third, updated edition is planned for 2024.

Balance: Nature’s Way to Heal Your Body was similar: first an Atlantic and later a Canadian bestseller that is based on the author’s journey with cancer. Both are books of hope. Reluctant Target, a book for both older and new drivers, was welcomed by driver instructors and sold very well in Canada, reaching bestseller status in year three. It saves lives … and insurance dollars as well. An expanded version is currently on the drawing boards.

ABT: You’re working on a new edition of Three Centuries of Public Art: Historic Halifax Regional Municipality by Barbara DeLory. What are some of the new works of art you will document?

FM: There are more than 125 new works and photos, which include Halifax-Dartmouth and the suburban communities, as well as many rural parts of Halifax Regional Municipality from the Guysborough border to the southern areas, including Tantallon and Sambro. Subjects include the hummingbird sculpture in Middle Musquodoboit, the Moose River Disaster memorial, the cenotaphs in Sheet Harbour, Moser River, Head of Jeddore and Porters Lake, and the suburban communities

of Springvale (Penny Farthings); monuments in Spryfield, Lower Sackville, Waverly, Beaverbank-Kinsac; history in Rockingham and more.

There are the amazing public art murals in Mulgrave Park, as well as those on Quinpool Road, downtown Halifax and the Alderney area of Dartmouth. Included among the newest public art are Mi’kmaw creations by David Brooks, Alan Syliboy and Jordan Bennet, as well as numerous creations reflecting the African-Nova Scotian community, including the Africville Museum and Viola Desmond.

ABT: You are now publishing two books by Barbara Keddy, a retired nurse: Nightingale’s Vision: Nurses’ Voices from the 1920s and 1930s and The Lamp Was Heavy: Nova Scotia Nurses-in-Training in the 1950s. Why did you want to work with her, and what will people find in her books?

FM: The stories in Nightingale’s Vision were taken from the voices of the nurses themselves as interviewed by Barbara Keddy years earlier. The author was a practising RN (paediatrics) and nursing supervisor in both Yarmouth and in the Victoria General, who subsequently obtained her PhD and taught at Dalhousie University for 30 years.

The first book is about nursing in the 1950s; the second book predates the first: from roughly the First World War, through the Spanish Flu pandemic, and the economic ravages of the Great Depression up to the Second World War, times when nurses struggled for recognition and wages.

It is also enjoyable just to sit and discuss wide-ranging topics with Barbara as her experiences are both vast and entertaining.

ABT: NWP is dedicated to working with new authors, and with seniors. Why is that, and how often are the new authors also seniors?

FM: Initially, most were not seniors. As the company grew and multiple authors aged along with the publisher himself, it seemed that other seniors, some of whom were turned

down by other publishers, gravitated to New World to make their submissions. Many were determined to tell a story/write a book based on a wealth of life experiences and research of nonfiction topics. Success breeds success within each of us at any age. Many were accomplished writers in a wide range of disciplines, but a few had written very little. What the latter had were great stories that needed to be told and they worked diligently with staff to polish them. In more recent years, a larger percentage of books were by seniors, including several in their eighth decade.

ABT: What advice would you give to someone who wants to approach you with a book idea?

FM: Well, the first would be to have the knowledge and ability to write something that has not been written before, or to write it from an entirely new, exciting and challenging perspective. John O’Brien, the author of Oak Island Unearthed!, was certainly one of those. It’s a Canadian bestseller among a wealth of good books on the topic. It is due to be revised and expanded in 2024-5. The other area of interest to me are books that can make a difference in other’s lives, especially if the author/ researcher has a passion for the story they wish to tell. ■

Three Centuries of Public Art

Volume II

Barbara DeLory

New World Publishing

This art installation about Viola Desmond, created by Marven Nelligan, will be included in the updated edition. Photo by Jon Tattrie.

Writing through rain, sleet or crows

by Marjorie Simmins

Vernon Oickle is one of those writers who have a nose for bestselling books. At the heart of his dozens of nonfiction and fiction books, this proud Maritimer delights in detailing the particularities of East Coast Canadians, including, for example, their lives, slang, superstitions, history, art, music, food, culture and overall “celebratables.”

This spring, he will be celebrating the publication of his 35th book, Through Rain, Sleet or Snow: Mailboxes in Rural Nova Scotia.

A lifelong resident of Liverpool, N.S., Oickle is also a multi-award-winning journalist, with a community newspaper career that spans 33 years and includes expertise in every form of journalism, including photography. In the spring of 2020, Oickle was inducted into the Atlantic Journalism Awards Hall of Fame. Currently, he is a columnist for the South Shore Breaker and owner and operator of Privateer Promotions and Communications.

These enviable achievements aside, anyone who can list on his CV that he is “a resident ghost storyteller” at a fine South Shore resort, is obviously living a good life.

So what was it about mailboxes in rural Nova Scotia that caught his imagination?

“I was driving down the road one day, saw a cool mailbox, and took a photo,” says Oickle. “Then I saw another one, took another photo, and the pictures starting piling up. Then I thought, ‘Hey, these are unique, these are pieces of art. I should turn this into a book.’”

By word of mouth and via social media, Oickle started asking people to send him the locations of unique, handcrafted mailboxes. Information poured in from around mainland Nova Scotia and the island of Cape Breton. He started driving to remote mailboxes under the guidance of his constant navigator: his wife Nancy.

“We must know every backroad in the province,” laughs Oickle. “We made ‘a day’ of our explorations. It’s been fun!”

Twelve years after he took that first photograph, the gorgeous, full-colour “mailboxes book” is now a reality. It showcases different categories of mailboxes, along with their history, and an index of locations.

The stories that accompany the images are compact and informative, with Oickle’s love of small towns and rural life adding warmth to the people on the pages.

“The mailboxes are a dying art form,” he says. “Plastic has taken care of that.”

As curator and author Ray Cronin writes in the book’s foreword, “That is why a collection of photographs such as this one is so important — it records authentic folk expressions that many of us have either never seen, or at least never really looked at … we can slowly peruse these pages, and enjoy the ready wit, the inventiveness, the honesty and the authenticity of our neighbours.”

“So many Atlantic Canadians live in rural settings,” says Oickle. “In those small communities we know each other. We celebrate each other’s successes, and share our sorrows. We [settler Canadians] also like to know where we’ve come from, our heritage and culture.” His books feed this curiosity and bolster a sense of belonging, Oickle believes.

One of his titles, How to Talk Nova Scotian, was the bestselling book in Nova Scotia for 2018. Oickle clearly knows, and appreciates, his audience. He also gives a nod to his closest circle, saying, “My wife and my family are so supportive.”

Through Rain, Sleet or Snow: Mailboxes in Rural Nova Scotia

Vernon Oickle SSP Publications

As for fiction, he says, “I wanted to not work with facts for a change, to create my own worlds, characters and people.” His Crow series, based on the old British nursery rhyme, “One Crow Sorrow,” etc., has been as popular as his non-fiction books, and shares commonalities.

“People like the mystery, intrigue, crime and human relations that I write about,” says Oickle. “I have readers emailing me to know when the next Crow title is coming out. The feedback is motivating! That’s why you do it. It’s gratifying.”

Brandy Berry, manager at the Coles bookstore in Yarmouth, is delighted that Oickle has a new title this spring.

“We love having Vernon in for signings,” she says. “He’s such a sweet guy, so genuine and fun.”

And the man sells books.

“Oh, yes, it’s always a great day at the store,” says Berry. “We put out all his titles and he sells those, in addition to the new title. And a big shout-out to Nancy, who organizes his book-signing schedule so well. They are busy!”

Oickle is anticipating a spring publication for Eight Crows for a Wish, the eighth in the series, and readying to do the promotion for Through Rain, Sleet and Snow

“I love what I do,” says Oickle, who has plans for many more books. “My imagination is always percolating.” ■

MARJORIE SIMMINS is the author of Coastal Lives, a memoir about living on Canada’s East and West Coasts (2014), and Year of the Horse (2016), which details her life with horses in British Columbia and Nova Scotia. In the spring of 2020, Simmins’ third non-fiction book, Memoir: Conversations and Craft was published, followed by Somebeachsomewhere: The Harness Racing Legend from a One-Horse Stable (2021)

Which comes first, the banana or the story?

Michelle Robinson is the best-selling author of more than 50 children’s books, and she’s doing something brandnew for her latest: she’s publishing it directly in Canada! We caught up with the English ex-pat at her newish home in Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia, to ask her how becoming Canadian has influenced her literary output.

Michelle Robinson, photo by Saffron Morriz

ABT: You’ve written books starring jelly, a dinosaur, a banana and two lorries, among other things. Do you find your character first, and then squeeze them into a banana peel? Or does the banana come first and tell you who they are?

MR: I tend to start with something I’m interested in — a dog, a llama, a cake, a kayak or whatever — then my curiosity kicks in. My brain tends to look at things in a slightly kooky way. I tend to anthropomorphize just about everything and emphasize with inanimate objects. I guess it would be a pretty annoying and useless habit if I hadn’t managed to turn it into a job.

ABT: You’ve published a lot of books in the U.K. Can you recommend a few for your new Canadian fans?

MR: One of my most popular books, How to Wash a Woolly Mammoth, was inspired by the model at Mastodon Ridge in Nova Scotia. It’s about how difficult it would be to keep a mammoth as a pet. Similarly, A Beginner’s Guide to Bear Spotting was written while trying to make sense of the conflicting advice local friends gave me on how to deal with bear encounters. Like most of my stories, these books are both very fun and very silly.

ABT: How does the different landscape of Tatamagouche affect your very visual books?

MR: Having so much space and beautiful nature around me is an incredible privilege that, coming from a squeezed and overpopulated U.K. town, I will never take for granted. It really helps my imagination relax and expand.

ABT: When you compare the book worlds of Somerset, England, to Atlantic Canada, what seems similar and what seems different to you?

MR: There’s definitely a lot of support for local creators here. That’s possibly true in the U.K. too — certainly within smaller communities — but it’s harder for small books to stand out on shelves that are just so busy and loud. It’s good to see underrepresented voices being amplified everywhere — and dispiriting to see the same small handful of authors getting a disproportionate amount of shelf space both sides of the pond.

ABT: In your new book, Lobster’s Vacation, we learn that even as he enjoys travelling around Nova Scotia, Lobster

feels homesick for the ocean. He wonders if he can ever be a true Bluenoser. Authors are not their protagonists … but is there any of you in Lobster?

MR: Well spotted. I am a lot like Lobster, but certainly not because I want to go back where I came from! We’re both introverts. Lobster likes to see and experience new things, but he’s most comfortable sitting quietly at home, minding his own business.

ABT: You worked with Halifax illustrator Paul G. Hammond for this book. What did he bring to Lobster’s Vacation?

MR: I was thrilled when Nimbus told me Paul was going to be breathing life into Lobster. I love his colour palette and I’m always a huge fan of hand-drawn lettering, which is one of the many things Paul excels at. He’s managed to give our book a nostalgic vibe, which is really fun. It’s great that the book is the product of both a Bluenoser and a Come From Away. Different perspectives in books are fun and valuable.

ABT: We have moose, ospreys, coyotes and black bears. Do any of them appeal to you as potential stars of new books?

MR: You bet. In fact, that reads like a To Do List. I might be tempted to write about a moose next, or maybe a chickadee. The wildlife here is varied, fascinating, charming and occasionally terrifying. How can I not feel inspired? ■

Lobster’s Vacation

Michelle Robinson, illustrated by Paul G. Hammond Nimbus Publishing

Cross-Canada bike ride produces a hell of a read

by Jeremy Hull

It’s hard to get lost when you bicycle across Canada. There aren’t that many highways that connect the remote parts of the large, sparsely populated country. With so much solitude, there is greater risk of getting lost inside one’s head.

When Martin Bauman started his journey across Canada in 2016, some part of him was already lost. In his first book, Hell of a Ride, winner of the 2023 Pottersfield Prize for Creative Nonfiction, Bauman writes about cycling across the world’s second largest country, which he did because he was “restless.” It’s a wonderful euphemistic catch-all for the psychological anxiety that’s haunted every young person who ever dreamt of going west.

The pieces in Bauman’s travelogue are familiar. He makes a nod to both Kerouac and Pirsig in Hell of a Ride. He borrows a good reason for his trip from one of his personal heroes: Terry Fox. Bauman’s charity is depression, which has had a profound effect on the men in Bauman’s family, including his father. So, Bauman sets out to ride across Canada to raise money for men’s mental health because it sounds better than restlessness.

What distinguishes Bauman’s travelogue is his honesty about his trauma. To be clear, Bauman is never diagnosed with depression. He reiterates the need to talk to somebody throughout the book. Bauman could have chosen to talk about depression without talking about his personal demons. He could have talked about his personal demons without detailing the ways he was abused. He made a braver choice.

“I tried the straight-up travelogue,” Bauman said. “I tried the version of the story at a distance. It’s certainly more comfortable talking about other people.”

Bauman isn’t afraid to explore the uncomfortable. Hell of a Ride is a happy story about growth and renewal, but like any arduous journey, it’s also a rite of passage. It is, at least in part, about confronting pain. Bauman follows the Trans Canada into the infinite, unexplored edges of his consciousness to find himself because he was so restless it made him hurt.

Hell of a Ride

Martin Bauman Pottersfield Press

The heavy themes are tempered with plenty of fun in Hell of a Ride. Bauman’s odyssey is replete with mentors and helpers that fit perfectly into any iteration of the hero’s journey. A quirky cast of backwater helpers appear from across the great white north. Helpers who sustain him through the underworld – which is that place in the Rocky Mountains, or during a lightning storm on the prairies, where the awe-inspiring power of nature nearly defeats the hero, but it doesn’t. He returns stronger from his trials and dips his bicycle tire in the Atlantic Ocean — a tribute to Terry Fox — to mark the completion of the journey when he reaches St. John’s, Newfoundland.

“I would encourage anyone to do it,” Bauman said. “Suddenly you’re in completely different circumstances. That can be enough to lift the needle off the record and let you reset.”

Canada is a large country. It’s easy to forget just how large unless you are facing the prairies on a bicycle. As cathartic as solitude can be the most important lesson Bauman learned on his journey came from the opposite direction.

“Well, I think the universal truth is we’re not as alone as we think,” Bauman said. “We really do matter a lot to each other. I think that that was hammered home to me. Being in the middle of nowhere in the prairies and thunder and lightning is crackling around me. The only thought flashing through my mind at the time was wanting somebody else to be there with me. It wasn’t about any sort of survival. It was about companionship and company. And I think that that was such a crystal-clear lesson: Yeah, you dumbass. You can’t do this by yourself.”

Only Bauman does complete the journey by himself; it’s just that much of what he does, like much of what he writes, is a metaphor for life — one a hell of a ride. ■

JEREMY HULL writes about art, sports, business and energy, but he’s happiest when writing about jiu jitsu or fly fishing. Jeremy was a writer-in-residence at the Canadian Film Centre.

Hacking a health-care system people are losing faith in

An excerpt from Health Hacks: How You Can Get Good Health Care in

Nova

Scotia by Mary Jane Hampto n

Ihave never been as worried about the future of our publicly funded health care system as I am now. It used to be that three or four times a year I would get a question about how to arrange to pay for care privately, either in the U.S. or somewhere else in Canada. Now it’s two or three times a week. What’s more alarming is that there is an increasing range of options, and people are willing to pay, even if they have to borrow to do it.

Long before COVID, the system was overwhelmed. Demand vastly exceeded supply. A recent poll of Canadians found that 62 per cent of Canadians think they should be allowed to spend their own money for the health care they want at a private clinic in Canada (27 per cent oppose and 12 per cent don’t know). That’s the highest level of support for an openly two-tiered health care system ever recorded, and it’s very worrisome. It suggests that people are shifting from being frustrated with long waits for care to losing hope that things will ever get better.

It’s been argued that if you allow some people to buy the care they want privately, that will open up more spaces in the public system. But that hasn’t been shown to be the case at all. Instead, clinical staff migrate to the private sector (for the money and working conditions), and leave the public system in the process because there are only so many health care providers to go around (and the private sector does not magically produce them).

In fact, wait times are only reduced for people with gold cards. For everyone else, wait times get longer because the doctor you need is straddling both systems (and it’s more than likely that they will migrate to the private side over time). So, an openly two-tiered health care access really is a bad idea if we’re serious about having any semblance of a publicly funded system. The question is: are we even committed to this anymore?

Many Canadians think of our health care system as overwhelmingly publicly funded. In reality, Canada is considered “middle of the road” among OECD nations, with a 70–30 per cent public–private split of health care expenditures, slightly below the OECD average (73

per cent public and 27 per cent private). Even though U.S. health care is often considered private, it’s actually 48 per cent publicly funded, 52 per cent private, and the public share is rising. In contrast, Canadian public sector spending declined from 76 per cent to 70 per cent since the 1980s. In some provinces, the decline was even steeper. In Ontario for example, the public sector health share fell from 75 per cent to 66 per cent.

I am a huge defender of a publicly funded health care system, but it is broken. What we have now makes no sense because it covers unlimited demand to a very narrow range of services. Your visit to the doctor is covered, but the drugs they prescribe are not. Your stay in hospital is covered, but your ambulance trip to get there is not. Medically necessary dental care is private pay, rehabilitation and counselling services are often out-of-pocket and a service covered in one province might not be covered in another, so you have to move to get it. There’s nothing comprehensive about our publicly funded system at all.

But the second ballooning issue is that wait times for some elective procedures are so long that people, out of sheer desperation, have no choice but to look for different pathways to get what they need. It’s not just people with more money than time who are elbowing their way to private options. It’s ordinary people who can’t wait several years to get a surgery that will allow them to get on with their lives, or who are afraid to wait several months to confirm a diagnosis that might end better with early treatment. People are willing to borrow money to find private options, which is exactly what Medicare was created to avoid.

It wouldn’t be so bad if we had not already paid for our health care through taxes. So really, when you purchase a diagnostic test or surgical procedure from a private clinic, you’re actually paying for it twice. The danger is that as more and more people quietly migrate to private clinics to get timely care, pulling out your credit card for health services will become increasingly normal. And as more and more providers migrate to work in private clinics, the public system will continue to shrink in its capacity and relevance. ■

Health Hacks

Mary Jane Hampton

Formac Publishing

AI civilization searches for war with humanity

An excerpt from Journey to the Dark

Galaxy by Hannah D. State

They flew over cities with tall, shimmering silver buildings that rose upward into the clouds.

This planet must be rich, if they could afford such structures. Perilium must be prevalent here, but the cost had to be immense.

As they descended into Glustony, an onslaught of holograms and advertisements streamed toward them from the centre of the room. The bombardment of flashing images was so close it almost touched them.

A raucous robotic voice sliced into Sam’s eardrums. “How about a diagnostic assessment of your ship? Our robots are top of the line and will locate the source of the problems within a few minutes. Then, they’ll tell you which enhancements and upgrades you need. One hundred thousand credits.”

One hundred thousand credits? That sounded like a lot.

“Uh…” Boj hesitated.

“If we don’t hear a yes or no response within two seconds, we’ll proceed to do the diagnostic assessment.”

Boj fiddled with the controls, his hands moving frantically.

The voice over their intercom sounded satisfied. “That confirms it, then. Thank you for your business.”

A chart appeared on the screen with a counter showing a debt of one hundred thousand credits.

The robotic voice continued. “How about a thorough cleaning of your ship? We’ll use our high-end powered pressure washers to remove all dust, dirt, grime, and microbes that could have arrived with you on your flight. Ten thousand credits.”

“No,” Boj stated, a little forcefully.

“How about a—”

“No,” he interrupted. “Zenobii, is there a way to dismantle the ads? I would prefer to negotiate face-to-face.”

Zenobii just shook his head.

Kwan took a few steps toward Boj. “Let me try.” Before he could say no, she pressed a few buttons and waited. The ads disappeared a few seconds later.

“How did you do that?”

“I noticed something flashing when those ads first appeared.”

Sam was amazed at how rapidly Kwan seemed to pick up on these things, having no training. It just came naturally to her.

Journey to the Dark Galaxy

Hannah D. State Glowing Light Press

The ship took a slight left turn and descended further until they reached a landing pad. They hovered over a huge grassy area with a dome-shaped white stone palace glistening in the distance. Lush gardens spread throughout its vicinity.

“There’s something you need to know. According to the ship’s database intel, the Glubens are hostile,” Kwan said on their secure channel. “They’re not part of GAIA.”

“Hostile?” Sam asked. “What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t take much to get them angry. I’ve dealt with hostile people before. This is a bit different. Just be prepared for anything. Don’t let them smell your fear. Be confident but not too confident. Don’t do anything to draw attention. Don’t talk. Keep those helmets on at all times. And most of all…just pretend you’re nobody. The less they know about you, the better. If the plan goes smoothly, we should be in and out of here within an hour. Got it?”

Sam tried to sound confident, but she couldn’t suppress her growing fear. “Got it.”

Cold sweat clung to her skin as they waited for the ship to power down. The gangway descended, and a thick wave of dusty air swirled up and pushed against them. The brilliant red and white grains of sand sparkled in the air, almost blinding her.

“You ready?” Kwan asked Sam as they made their way outside.

Ready? Kwan’s instructions had been vague and subjective at best. Be confident but not too confident—what did that even mean? Don’t let them smell your fear? She was ready all right—ready to run and hide. Hide her identity, hide away somewhere where no one could find her. That’s all she wanted to do right now. She wanted to turn back. But she couldn’t. Not now. They were already moving. Descending the gangway like prisoners being forced off the plank of a ship. This didn’t feel like a diplomatic mission at all.

Dread rose from the pit of her stomach. They were leaving the ship and heading into uncharted territory. With a bounty on her head and hostiles approaching, not knowing what would come next, it took all her power just to keep herself together.

“As ready as can be.”

Inside, she didn’t feel ready at all. ■

When ghosts come grieving in your dreams

An excerpt from The Widow & The Will by Rhonda Bulmer

The wind rose sometime in the night. It whipped around the corner of the house and preceded an abundance of rain. Under normal circumstances, the thrum of water on the windowsill would be comforting, but the bang of the widow’s walk door was more insistent.

It opened and slammed shut with every gust of wind from the window. The latch arm clattered against the groove. Don’t turn your back to the stairway. Looks like something is moving down there in the shadows.

Melinda, stop being ridiculous.

Yeah, okay, Gram. I hear you.

I threw back the patchwork quilt. Maybe grouching out loud would push back the darkness, even if it was all imaginary. “Am I going to have to do this every night?” Tomorrow was my first day in that tiny office and it was important to be fresh.

I opened one of the desk drawers and found a roll of packing tape. Perfect. I pushed a chair against the door and weighed it down with a couple of old-fashioned hardcover dictionaries from the bookshelf in the corner. Then I tore a few pieces of tape and applied them to the latch.

I stood back to examine my handiwork for a moment. “There. Let’s see you break through that, Mrs. D’Avray.”

I left the light on and climbed back into bed. Comforted by this achievement, my eyes grew heavy, and I drifted away.

In the gentle light of the desk lamp, a woman in a dark linen gown with a white collar appeared at the end of my bed, holding something like a photo in her hand. I pulled myself into a tight ball against the bed frame.

I didn’t want her to grab my feet.

Was she looking at me or through me?

A few tendrils of grey-streaked dark hair escaped her bun, and her face was lined not so much with age, but with sorrow. She paced the room before sitting on the edge of my bed. Her shoulders shook as she wept.

“They’re all gone. I’m all alone.”

I heard the words clearly. And I answered her clearly. “I know. They’re all gone.”

Uncontrollable grief welled up from the centre of my

The Widow & The Will Rhonda Bulmer

Merlin Star Press

being. Was it hers, or mine? Loneliness for Gram and Gramp swept over me. For the parents I never had. “I’m all alone, too.”

“What does life mean without them?” The widow’s walk door opened, and moonlight streamed through it. She walked through the door, dropping the photo as she melted into the darkness.

At five o’clock, my eyes snapped open. My pillow was soaked. I’d been crying in my sleep.

Last night’s steady rain gave way to a dull, overcast sky, but the wind was still blowing. And I shivered, not just from the cold and damp. That dream … it was a dream, right?

I sat up. Everything was the same as I’d left it—the chair in front of the door, the tape on the latch, and the desk lamp glowed in the daylight.

But I could have sworn the door had banged open. And the woman cried at my bedside, and disappeared up the steps. Not only had I seen her, I’d felt her. I’d shared her emotions. I understood them because I had the same ones. Hey, it was only a dream. Snap out of it! I had a big day of number-crunching ahead, and I couldn’t schlep around indulging my grief-stricken night visions.

I dressed, returned the chair to the desk, and tore the tape off the latch. In the literal cold light of day, don’t you feel silly? Everything sounded louder in the dark. And who can control what they see in their dreams?

As I turned away, the little door burst open behind me. It slammed with a loud bang! against the wall.

I shrieked, jumped back and stumbled over the bed. An icy blast of wind hit me in the face.

My eyes were locked on the steps, waiting for something to come through. After a minute, I dared stick my head through the doorway. A strong gust of wind whooshed freely throughout the observation deck.

Glass shards were scattered on the tiny staircase. This morning’s gale had finally broken through the old, cracked window panes, and they crashed to the floor.

There was something else. ■

Following the waves of Nova Scotia’s saltiest son

An excerpt from Captain Solitude

by RC Shaw

It was the first day of school, and I wasn’t going. As our sensible minivan crunched down the gravel and straightened for the road, I flailed like one of those inflatable tube men, blowing kisses and miming hugs to Genny and the girls as they waved back. Then they were gone.

For a minute, my highly structured teacher-dad-husband brain swirled with frantic energy, spinning up a smoothie of domestic concerns and renegade emotions. Did they pack enough to eat? Will they make new friends? Could my students forget me? Am I a selfish fool?

The grey Atlantic horizon offered no answers, but its ruler-straight line drew my eye and slowed my breath. One-hundred-and-twenty-six years earlier, a bald fiftyone-year-old man in a three-piece suit would have a been a speck on that line, a lone sailor turning east on the sailboat he built himself, the lights of Halifax Harbour the last North American beacons he’d see for three full years. Joshua Slocum, Nova Scotia’s saltiest son and the world’s greatest sailor. My dude. I could almost sense him out there, all alone, knifing through the chop.

And here’s where I should ratchet up my reason for stepping away from teaching to undertake some mid-life transformation, the more radical the better. I’m forty-four years old, the perfect age to embody a cliché. Ripe for all kinds of crisis. But I can’t fudge it. My marriage is rock-solid, I love my kids, I like my job, and I live within walking distance of a headland that can, on occasion, produce clean waves that serve up almond-shaped slots to slip through. On the surface, I’m as conflicted as a cat curled up next to a wood stove. Problem is, I have an obsession, an itch I’ve been meticulously planning to scratch for the same duration as Slocum’s unthinkable odyssey. Moments after I closed Sailing Alone Around the World, his classic book, my mind hatched its own quest. A stunt really. A no-phone, no-tech, leg-powered lark. This was my vision: I would stuff my cargo bike with camping gear and pedal solo from my driveway in Cow Bay to distant Brier Island, Nova Scotia’s most southwesterly point and Joshua Slocum’s boyhood home. Why? Three burning reasons: to surf uncharted waves, to experience deep solitude, and to crack a mystery no seabound scholar has ever solved

Captain Solitude

RC Shaw

Goose Lane Editions

— what happened to Joshua Slocum when he disappeared nine years after circumnavigating the globe?

As the first drops of sky spittle found my face, I knew I had to snap out of it and start moving. I was about to do what only a sailing virgin would do: leave in a storm. A Hurricane Ida–strength gale to be exact.

In my mind, this departure date was immovable. When else would a teacher get to embark on a September voyage of adventure that didn’t involve emailing, photocopying, laminating, border-stapling, and seating-plan creation?

So when Hurricane Ida crossed the Bay of Fundy after testing the dykes of New Orleans a week earlier and tracked, against my fervid prayers, toward Nova Scotia, I kept my schedule inked. If I’d known what awaited me, I would have been a smart sailor and held off a day.

My cargo bike looked ready though. I circled it in the mist, checking for snugness. I had everything I would need. Borrowed waterproof front panniers with clothes, tools, bags of nuts and dried mango. Dry bag backpack with sleeping bag, poncho, and wetsuit. A newly acquired, and soon-to-be nemesis, hammock tent locked and loaded on the bench seat. Front handlebar box with notebook, camera, Grandpa’s pipe, ripped-out road maps, and a topped-up flask of Teacher’s malt whisky. Four-litre bottle of water and snorkel kit lashed on either side of the back wheel frame. Essential weird stuff like Chicken Tender (my red Penny skateboard), black awooga trumpet horn with wine-cork mute, and stone-dead 1950s Westclox clock zip-tied to the handlebars, of course.

To max out the weirdness, I had my Conjuring Kit. Joshua Slocum had been gone for a century, so I reckoned I’d have to find other ways to reach him. There was my Magic 8 Ball, cradled to the frame in a homemade bicycle tube sling; a Death tarot card, tucked away in my notebook; and the wooden staff I’d borrowed from the abandoned birth house of Slocum himself, in Mount Hanley, an object I believed he may once have touched.

Then there were the books. I’d packed Frank Parker Day’s Rockbound, Helen Creighton’s Bluenose Ghosts, and a pocket edition of Slocum’s magnum opus — two inches by three — so it would literally never leave my side. ■

Scrutinizing the RCMP beyond the “national icon” of red tunics and Stetson hats

An excerpt from Canada’s State Police: 150 years of the RCMP by Greg Marquis

Since its inception, Canada’s federal police service has benefited from a largely positive image, courtesy of not only the population’s uncritical view of all police forces, but also an ongoing — if largely uncoordinated — effort by politicians, writers, journalists, historians, tourism promoters, the American entertainment industry, the NWMP/RCMP itself and retired Mounties. Like the British “bobby” or the Irish “guard,” the Mountie, typically portrayed or imagined not in a working uniform but in a red tunic, Sam Browne belt, Stetson hat, riding pants and high boots, was elevated to the status of national icon — especially for outsiders. As Paul Palango has argued, the RCMP has been protected from major change because of its “brand” as “an untouchable symbol of Canada.” Popular culture, political cover and public relations reinforced the stereotype of a polite, efficient, understated and effective police service that peacefully secured the West and North for Canada, enforced the law and kept the nation safe from Communist spies and other undesirables.

Absent from this image was the role of the Mounted Police as a quasimilitary arm of the state: breaking strikes and spying on labour, social democrats and other leftists; enforcing colonial rule on the Indigenous peoples of the West and North, which included keeping people confined to reserves and rounding up children who were resisting the residential school system; volunteering as soldiers and police to extend white British rule in South Africa; persecuting law-abiding LGBTQ citizens during the Cold War; resisting reform of drug laws in the face of medical and social scientific evidence to the contrary; spying on draft dodgers, Black activists, the anti-war movement and young feminists in the 1960s and 1970s; and engaging in illegal acts to disrupt the radical separatist cause in Quebec. In terms of settler-Indigenous relations, the traditional benign depiction of the NWMP/RCMP was a type of nationalist fantasy that justified colonialism.

In addition to the disproportionate use of deadly force against people who are Indigenous, poor or suffering from trauma or mental illness, the most serious manifestation

Canada’s State Police

Greg Marquis

Lorimer

of the RCMP as the “iron fist” of the state has been its racialized response to Indigenous activism. This has included low-level intelligence gathering and monitoring of Indigenous activists and organizations, the framing of peaceful movements and protests as criminal or threats to national security, the equating of the needs of private sector corporations such as forestry, energy and pipeline companies with the national interest (and framing opponents as “anti-Canadian”) and the militarized “warrior cop” responses to Indigenous land defenders in New Brunswick and British Columbia. Although these deployments typically take place under provincial contracts, the use of the RCMP as a rapid deployment force in the service of the state was an important rationale for its creation in 1920 following the Winnipeg General Strike. Its capabilities and biases were dramatically displayed in the repression of the On-to-Ottawa Trek at Calgary in 1935. Yet this legacy, and its implications for the present, is contested. Conservative Canadians, who tend to dismiss issues such as Indigenous protests over land and resources, support aggressive police in these situations, at the same time calling for “freedom” for white Canadians. The framing of these controversial issues has become more complicated by the recent advent of the RCMP union, the National Police Federation. In addition to seeking improvements to pay, benefits and working conditions, the federation has been espousing “thin blue line” rhetoric which, despite some nods to modernizing police-citizen relations, seeks to undermine critics of the police and insulate police from civilian oversight. As noted above, police unions generally do not have a good track record on accountability, diversity and curbing the use of force. Posing as society’s last line of defence against crime and disorder, and aided by opportunistic politicians and lobby groups, they have contributed to a situation in which the police in North America have become all but untouchable in terms of criminal prosecutions. ■

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

How a killer escaped justice in Saint John

by Ryan Van Horne

In her book Who Killed Richard Oland? A Real-life Murder Mystery, author Janice Middleton starts with a vivid “reconstruction” of the 2011 murder in Saint John, N.B.

Spoiler alert: Dennis Oland, Richard’s son who was acquitted in July 2019 of second-degree murder in a second trial, is not the perpetrator in this scenario. Far from it.

Middleton characterizes the murder as a “contract killing” and speculates that it could have been ordered by sour Russian and Ukrainian investors who lost $17.5 million in a failed bid to rekindle the sugar industry in Saint John. Richard Oland acted as a broker, bringing public and private investors into a group that bought the old Lantic Sugar plant and started a new venture called Can Sugar that quickly went bankrupt.

Middleton’s book raises a boatload of reasonable doubts. So many that the reader is left wondering how a jury of 12 people could have found Dennis Oland guilty beyond a reasonable doubt at his first trial nine years ago.

With so many red flags, she wonders how the case even got past the preliminary inquiry stage, what with all the shoddy police work, jury tampering and skimpy evidence. (More on that later, and even more in the book).

In his ruling after the preliminary inquiry for the first trial in 2015, provincial court Judge Ronald LeBlanc pointed out that the Crown failed to prove that Dennis Oland had a motive to kill his father.

“So weak was the case the Crown presented that it is not immediately apparent why it was not dismissed at this

Formac Publishing

level,” Middleton writes.

Doing so would have saved the taxpayers of New Brunswick millions of dollars, but Middleton theorizes there was a reluctance to repudiate the work of the police and Crown in “the most high-profile murder in New Brunswick judicial history.”

At the trial, the Crown’s case hinged on a few tiny dots of blood found on Dennis Oland’s jacket — blood that matched the DNA of his father.

Middleton recounts the lax handling of the jacket, which was sent for testing by Saint John police after their warrant to keep it had expired. Middleton also reveals the jacket was improperly stored in the desk of police Insp. Glen McCloskey for several months before it was sent for testing. That’s a big no-no in the forensics world, where the chain of evidence is paramount. Judges usually throw out any evidence obtained from contaminated items like this.

In the Oland murder trials, however, it became the only piece of evidence the police and Crown used to connect Dennis Oland to the crime.

At the preliminary inquiry for the first trial, Judge LeBlanc questioned “why Dennis Oland would keep a blood-stained jacket while disposing of the murder weapon and his father’s iPhone.”

A few days after the murder, investigators called the phone and technicians received a “roaming error” message, which suggests it was out of the Rogers coverage area.

Middleton interviewed a telecommunications expert for her book who said that with the technology that existed in

Who Killed Richard Oland?

Janice Middleton

2011 “the Saint John police should have been able to locate the phone anywhere in the world. The police never found Richard Oland’s iPhone.”

Soon after Richard Oland’s battered and bloody body was found at the downtown Saint John, N.B., office of Far End Corporation on the morning of July 7, 2011, Saint John police investigators were very quickly and thoroughly convinced that Dennis Oland was the killer.

They neglected other investigative avenues, Middleton writes, and looked at all evidence through the lens of “Dennis Oland murdered his dad.” They also ignored all evidence that did not support that theory.

In painstaking detail, Middleton analyzes how the faulty police investigation was further hampered by “tunnel vision.”

They did not pursue the angle Middleton describes in her reconstruction, but more tellingly, they did not explore the angle involving one of Richard Oland’s two mistresses.

Here are the lowlights of how the Saint John Police Force’s ham-fisted investigation was derailed by a misguided notion:

1. The crime scene was not fully or properly investigated;

2. key witnesses were not interviewed and not called to testify at the first trial;

3. video evidence that gave Dennis Oland an alibi was not uncovered by police;

4. autopsy evidence suggesting the killer was righthanded while Dennis Oland is left-handed was ignored.

Middleton also pokes holes in the Crown’s rationale that Dennis Oland committed an “act of spontaneous rage” in murdering his dad, hence the charge of second-degree murder.

First-degree murder would have required proof of planning, like thinking about such major details as concealing all the blood that would have been on the killer and bringing the murder weapon — a drywall hammer — to a meeting with Richard Oland. It was not something that was kept in the office at Far End and it’s not something people usually carry around with them.

With all these errors in practice and reasoning, Middleton suggests that in Dennis Oland’s case, the fundamental tenet of our justice system, that a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty, was turned on its head.

“Dennis has had to prove his innocence, and in the eyes of too many he has yet to do that,” Middleton writes. ■

RYAN VAN HORNE is a freelance journalist, writer, editor, and playwright.

Saint John, New Brunswick, photo by Miguel Ángel Sanz on Unsplash

The desires that have shaped Donald Andrus

by Ray Cronin

Art exhibitions have a fleeting life. Projects that take months, even years to develop, that can reflect decades of work by an artist, are on view for mere weeks. Most viewers experience them in just minutes. It is this ephemeral quality that makes a retrospective exhibition so special, and so daunting for the artist and organizing gallery.

“Retrospective” just implies a look back, of course, and in past decades the term was used for any exhibition that looked at a body of work over a period of time. Five years might have been enough in the 1950s to mount a “retrospective,” though these days anything under thirty years tends to be termed a “survey.” One feature of the gallery retrospective is the publication of a catalogue, once little more than a list accompanied by a

few black-and-white photographs. Like the frequency of retrospectives, the catalogue has evolved with the times.

True retrospectives rarely happen more than once in an artist’s lifetime. Thus their special quality and their relative rarity. They are often accompanied by a book, offering readers the opportunity of a deep dive into an artist’s work, aided by the static medium of print. When delving into the monograph to a solo exhibition, the viewer becomes a reader, and their experience slows down, is repeatable.

Donald Andrus: The Shape of Desire is a true retrospective, an exhibition and a book that looks at more than 35 years of one artist’s production. The book, published by Goose Lane Editions, is a handsome hardcover that accompanies an exhibition at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown.

The team at Goose Lane is no stranger to publishing art books; indeed, over the past decade or so they have become one of the most active publishers of art books in the country. The Shape of Desire displays all the qualities that have earned them that distinction: sumptuous illustrations, well-edited texts and beautiful design (in this case by Julie Scriver and Amy Batchelor). The book falls between the familiar “coffee table” tomes and the more user-friendly formats familiar from the world of fiction. At nine inches square, the book is both comfortable to read and formatted to give ample space to the illustrations.

With an introduction and essay by the exhibition’s curator, Roslyn Rosenfeld, and additional essays by Ihor Holubizky, Pan Wendt, and the artist himself, the reader is provided with a holistic view of the artist’s career, one that, the texts make clear, has been anything but conventional.

Andrus had a long career as a curator and art historian. It was only in the late 1980s, just a decade before his early retirement from a professorship in art history at Concordia University in Montreal, that his art career, as a career rather than as an occasional activity, began. Rosenfeld carefully delineates the process by which Andrus reinvented himself as a maker of art, rather than a commentator on it. With his move to Prince Edward Island in 1998 he fully embraced painting as his vocation. Rosenfeld discusses the evolution of his work, which unfolded in a surge of related bodies of work, a spate of what Rosenfeld accurately describes as “furious activity.”

Where Rosenfeld takes a retrospective approach in her essay, looking at the whole breadth of Andrus’s career, Holobizky and Wendt choose to focus on recent bodies of work, bringing an element of specificity to the broad strokes of the retrospective exercise. Andrus himself dives deep into the origins and implications of a series of works that he calls the “field” series, a step-by-step description of how he followed an idea through a series of works over years.

While Donald Andrus: The Shape of Desire will outlast the exhibition it chronicles, its strength is as a record of an event and of a career, providing context to the work which will be dispersed at the end of the show, perhaps never to be brought together again, except as it is in these pages. Art may last, but exhibitions pass. All the more reason to be grateful that galleries and publishers continue to collaborate on books such as this. ■

RAY CRONIN is the curator of Canadian Art at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton. From 2001 to 2015, he was a curator and director and CEO at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Cronin has written about visual arts for more than two decades and is the author of Our Maud: The Art, Life and Legacy of Maud Lewis and Alex Colville: Art and Life

Donald Andrus: The Shape of Desire

Ihor Holubizky, Pan Wendt and Roslyn Rosenfeld Goose Lane Editions

Donald Andrus’s triptych SARDONYX, mixed medium (2016) on Meranti board 121.9” x 91.6” per panel.

A rolling, stormy love letter to the ocean in Clayton B. Smith’s A Seal of Salvage

by Molly Rockwood

As a lifelong ocean person, I was delighted by the opportunity to read and review Clayton B. Smith’s A Seal of Salvage, a queer coming-of-age story about selkie mythology set in a small Newfoundland fishing town. And, reader, this little book did not disappoint.

It took a good few pages before the book really hooked me. I struggled a little to get into the flow and cadence of the sentences, and the introductory line of, “If, for some reason, you fancy hearing the story of Oliver’s time in Salvage, Mrs. Genge is who you should find,” didn’t work that well for me since I didn’t know yet why I would fancy hearing Oliver’s story.

But then came the line that made me fall for Smith’s writing. We’ve moved on from the “There’s going to be a story; get ready” section into the story itself, and as a strange woman appears at a wedding celebration, Smith writes, “She was the moonlight through stained glass, the space between the fiddle and the shanty, the calm between rolling breaths.” I loved this line. “The space between the fiddle and the shanty” in particular rolls beautifully around my brain. I love the image and simultaneously the lack of one — it’s so ephemeral and fleeting, exactly as the character is.

This is a book in which form mirrors content in a truly beautiful way. The writing is rhythmic and flowing, mirroring the ocean, which is omnipresent throughout the book. In every encounter, every scene, the ocean is present in one way or another, and back-and-forth progression of the story seems to match its tides.

Although I found the shifting from past tense to present tense to be occasionally a bit jarring — sometimes Oliver and companions appear in the present, despite the story taking place primarily in past tense — I quite liked that the chapters themselves shift back and forth through time. Smith does a great job establishing when in the story we are at the start of each chapter, so there’s no confusion, but in a large way, it also doesn’t matter.

There’s a sense of timelessness in the town and in Oliver’s story. In some ways, it’s unimportant that Oliver is eleven when he rescues Johnathan from the water, eighteen when he saves a floundering boat in the harbour. Oliver as a character feels out of time, out of step with the world around him and it works beautifully.

The queer coming-of-age story between Oliver and

A Seal of Salvage

Clayton B. Smith Breakwater Books

Johnathan was a surprisingly small part of the story. Johnathan is mentioned in the opening pages of the story as Rebecca’s eventual husband, so from the first moments in the story where we see a spark between him and Oliver, we know already that there is no happy ending for them. I was surprised, though, that there was barely even a story for them in the middle. Oliver is drawn to Johnathan, and their friendship approaches something more, but when the moment is stolen from them, it fades into the past.

I would have liked to see a bit more reflection from Oliver in the time that follows about how the encounter affected him. We see a bit of heartache as Johnathan and Rebecca’s relationship unfolds, but the homophobia he faces feels somewhat undeveloped. The book’s blurb posits the story as a “coming-of-age novel about unrequited love between adolescent boys,” but I would say that the love is not unrequited, at least in the moment, and it’s also not really what the story is about. The romance was a relatively minor part of the story, and I think readers looking for a queer coming-of-age novel might be disappointed as a result.

For what is was, though — a love letter to the ocean, an unromanticized picture of a Newfoundland town, a tapestry of folklore and mythology — A Seal of Salvage stole my heart. I loved how thoroughly the selkie mythology is engrained in the soul of the community: though the townsfolk might dismiss the folklore as mere stories, every person in the town has an innate suspicious about who Oliver is, long before he has any inkling himself.

I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a beautiful story set beside a stormy sea, anyone fascinated by folklore, anyone who knows what it is to feel the pull of the waves.

Content warnings in this book include: homophobia, suggestions of mental illness and postpartum depression, emotional neglect and parent death. None of these things is overly graphic, but readers with sensitivities to them should be prepared to encounter them within the pages. ■

MOLLY ROOKWOOD is a freelance editor, bookseller at the King’s Co-op Bookstore and Jewish romance writer based in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. When she’s not reading, writing, editing, or selling books, Molly sings, plays D&D and lectures unprompted about Jane Austen to anyone willing to listen.

Editor’s Picks

Raymond Fraser wrote poetry over a 50-year career that included eight books of verse (and 11 books of fiction and nonfiction). As he prepared for death in New Brunswick in 2018, he selected his finest poems for a post-death collection called Raymond Fraser: Collected Poems

“I can't really say what brought Ray back to his poetry near the end of his life,” his one-time wife and longtime friend Sharon Fraser told me. She’s worked on the collection as his literary executor and published it this spring.

“It always seemed to him that a poem was an ideal form of expression for both deep emotion or simple observation — and everything in between.”

In “Progress,” he writes:

How do I sign my name to this world when things I care about get mown under and what I don’t like rises up instead?

A question that has not faded as the world grows older. A loneliness floats through the pages, with the poet often watching the world, and wondering how he can mark it. In “Friends of Friends,” he writes:

Many friends have perpetrated no wars or revolutions compiled no astounding theories and explanations concerning man and God their names show up on tumbled down tombstones where grass and weeds grow over graveyards.

This end of dust plagues the poet. The cover of the book is a sketch of Fraser standing in water by a dory. Many of the poems made me wonder if he was looking at his reflection, trying to stare it into place as the waves washed it away.

In “Legacy,” he writes of a man who lives in an unassailable house surrounded by an invisible shield that “withers whatever touches it.”

Nothing can penetrate that shield, least of all men living as primitive as ourselves.

Fraser ends the poem by drawing our eyes to the sheer size of the barrier, and how

not even a bird can fly over the shield. If one does, he is destroyed, and falls in flames.

But who will burn — the bird or the bard?

There is a sense of counting days instead of making the days count. His uncertain desire to live forever has fallen short, but his poems still have a shot at immortality. We’ll end with words from “The More I Live,” where he observes that “though I hate to get up in the morning I want to live forever.”

It’s funny

When I was seventeen I was glad to settle for a thirty-five-year-old life and at twenty-two I thought forty-six would do and at twenty-four I thought fifty-six wasn’t bad and at another point I wouldn’t have minded the regulation sixty-seven But now it’s got to be a hundred and that’s only the beginning.

Reading Lorri Neilsen Glenn’s The Old Moon In Her Arms felt like having a quiet walk with myself. Glenn writes at 76, so I invited my 76-year-old self to sit down and read with middle-aged me.

“Time can create distance, even from ourselves; no straight line connects then and now,” she writes in the

opening pages. “In many ways, I am a stranger to my former selves.”

At times, she addresses her younger selves in the third person. I nodded as she discovered the writer within. “She wanted to read and write ‘true’ stories. They felt vital and they fed her curiosity about people ... She loved writing, this she knew, but was only beginning to see its power.”

As the father of two young people, I slowed as Glenn passed through her own parenthood. Yes, the utter delight of spending your days with a brand-new person, and the grind of “rinsing cloth diapers into small pails.”

And this? “When our son was little, I bought a neon plastic traffic cone at a dollar store. I said to my family, that means I’m busy writing. Please do not interupt me unless your hair is on fire or you’ve cut off your arm.”

Order me two traffic cones.

I stopped when she got to the harder parenting years, when “he and his father bared teeth like dogs.”

Do I bare my teeth? I wondered.

I stepped word by word when her children leave the nest to fly or fall, and their empty-nest parents “swam in grief and worry.”

How quickly does it shift from praying for a minute free of your children, to praying for a minute with your children? How in the heart do you turn a baby into an adult capable of operating a life?

I swam with relief when I read, “What our son learned in those years, we’ll never know, but he’s transformed into an empathetic, caring person, married, and with a steady job and a host of friends.”

Maybe I will be able to write such words one day.

The stories in this book float through time and perspective. It’s so hushed at moments they seem like things only Lorri and I remember. This is why I sometimes read books about sad things. The sorrow has been processed. The days of suffering, the days of joy and the days of daze, are placed beside each other and accounted for.

his regular gig is as a theoretical physicist at the Harvard University Physics Department who does research at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

His new book, Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean, “tells a startling tale of elementary particles, human experience, and empty space.” I figured Atlantic Canadians are also made out of elementary particles, human experience, and empty space, so I got a copy of the book and read it on our behalf.

“So what does it mean that we move through empty space — through the universe — without space resistance?” he asks early on. “Our drawings and descriptions of basic physics subtly lead us to imagine ourselves as made from ingredients that exist within the universe. But perhaps that’s not so. It seems as though we are made from waves of the universe. I don’t mean that in a spiritual or metaphorical sense, though there’s no harm in those resonances if you are inclined to hear them.”

That last line is what set this book apart from many other Big Science Ideas books for me. Often, I feel as though the author is amazed at how smart they are, and they are trying so hard to squeeze it down to something a layperson like me could understand. But Strassler’s book flies through space like a frictionless explorer. I got the sense that Strassler is trying just as hard to make sense of it all as any poet or novelist. He’s not trying to master what humans think we know about the universe — he’s trying to actually understand our human experience of the universe. It’s hard science written by a soft human being.

“I am suggesting that our very substance is the cosmos in action. From this perspective, we are not merely residents of the universe, living within it as we live within our homes and apartments. Nor do we swim through the universe as fish swim through the sea. We are aspects of the universe, as seismic waves are aspects of rock and as sound waves are aspects of the air.”

I heard author Matt Strassler on the Mindscape podcast and thought he was an excellent science journalist. He explained ideas about the cosmos with clarity, and on a human scale. But I slowly realized that no matter how deep a question host Sean Carroll came up with, Strassler could go deeper. And then he mentioned that while he does write about science,

You may find yourself humming “we are stardust” as you read, but know this, friend: we don’t have to get back to the garden; we are the garden. If you are a writer who enjoys using space and science facts or metaphors in your work, this book will leap you into the future and create new cosmic mysteries for your characters to ponder.

Strassler writes, “Reality is so obscured by the complexity of ordinary life that we need imagination to recognize how simple it truly is. In this, there is considerable irony.”

Waves in an Impossible Sea could be a pleasant spring read for you — or it could blow your mind and leave you gasping at stars and desperate to birth a new world of your own. ■

Young readers’ reviews

by Jo-Anne Elder and Lisa Doucet

Éli Labaki et les gouttes de pluie

Written by Diya Lim, illustrated by Jean-Luc Trudel Bouton d’or Acadie

Éli Labaki and his father, a widower, have come to Canada from Lebanon. In this book for four- to seven-year-olds, Éli, the young narrator, describes his experiences as a newcomer, as he and his father adapt to a new life. One night, the wind and rain wake him up and he runs to his father’s room, only to find what appear to be raindrops on his father’s cheeks. Éli wonders what is worrying his father. Will they have to move again? Return to Lebanon?

The next day, his father, who usually goes to work early, makes breakfast and takes him to the bus stop. And after school, his father takes him to a restaurant. What could have been another setback turns out to be a celebration: his father has lost his job and has decided to work as an artist and arts educator. Éli is thrilled with his father’s projects, which include guiding his schoolmates in painting a mural and organizing cultural activities. The two spend more time together, and enjoy the pleasures of a Canadian winter, watching hockey on TV and learning to skate. Their attachment to Lebanon is shown in their memories of Éli’s mother, who is buried under a cedar tree, and video calls with his grandparents.

Diya Lim, the author, has never been to Lebanon. Originally from Mauritius, she has drawn on her experiences as an immigrant and conversations with Lebanese friends to describe the loss, longing and discoveries of newcomers. Jean-Luc Trudel’s illustrations use soft and subdued colours, playful faces and subtle transitions from dark to light to reveal the range of Éli’s emotions. The book is a tender narrative from a young boy’s point of view, and invites readers to relate to universal fears and the desire to belong. At the same time, children will see unique features of Lebanese culture (food, dance, ceremony) and learn Arabic words (habibi, tabouli, jeddo) in the text and in the glossary at the end.

Sam SiXmoineauX, orthogaffeur

Written and illustrated by Danielle Loranger

Bouton d’or Acadie

Sam’s teachers seem to think that he has spelling problems. Certainly, dyslexia, dysgraphia and other issues are familiar to many children and parents. Sam SiXmoineauX, orthogaffeur, written and illustrated by Danielle Loranger, displays the numerous circles and words crossed out in red ink on Sam’s corrected tests and assignments. From the beginning of this book for readers 11 and over, though, there is something else going on. The first-person narrator writes that his name, Samuel Simoineau, is boring and that he prefers an alternate spelling, Sam SiXmoineauX.

The spelling Sam and his friends choose for his name “fits him like a glove,” because he is an “orthogaffeur”: a word based on spelling (“orthographe”) and joke or mistake. We discover that spelling is a game or an artform for Sam. Whether because of a learning difference or a sophisticated talent for language, Sam spontaneously combines words to invent imaginary objects or ideas, and then sketches them in his notebook. Here are some examples, roughly translated: fictionary (fiction and dictionary), garlamps (garland and lamps), xylofun (xylophone and fun) and masketeers (mask and musketeers). The invention of a portmanteau, a neologism that combines two existing words to create a new concept and label, is a practice used in English as well, in terms like “bromance” or “Brexit,” or by merging celebrity couples’ names.

Readers are invited to add their own inventions to a fictionary, and pages are provided to do so. The book needs to be read individually, and a classroom fictionary activity would be a fun and lively literacy exercise for francophone 1st and 2nd cycle secondary students and would also appeal to upper elementary students who particularly enjoy reading and writing. The humour and wordplay make this book high-interest material for FSL or FI high-school or advanced middle-school French students. Inventing their own words is a brilliant way for young people to both enhance their vocabulary and develop their interest in the creative possibilities of language.

Danielle Loranger is the author of Le trésor d’Elvis Bozec, previously reviewed here. She also wrote and illustrated Une etoile sur la dune, which deals with Loranger’s personal experiences with autism, and Un géant dans la tête, about her son’s experiences with hemophilia. A self-taught painter, she also illustrated S’ouvrir, a toolbox for inclusion in the classroom, and exhibits and sells her artwork. She shares her time between New Brunswick, and Newfoundland.

Pet Tales

Written by Heidi Tattrie Rushton Nevermore Press

While school is often a source of stress for Penny Maxwell, she is grateful for Valley Pets, the local pet shop and animal shelter where she volunteers. When she is helping take care of the animals Penny is at her best. She writes wonderful stories about the animals, imagining creative histories for each one. When she is there, she can almost forget about the social anxiety that makes other interactions so challenging for her. So when the owner of the store decides to close the animal shelter, Penny is devastated. When a girl who adopts one of the shelter cats comes up with a plan for the two of them to save the shelter, Penny is both excited and terrified. She is thrilled at the prospect of finally having a friend and working together to keep the shelter afloat but how can someone like Penny, with her panic attacks and her tremendous fear and agitation in social situations, help raise awareness of their plight? Can she somehow find the courage to share her stories to help save the animals?

Penny is an earnest, likeable protagonist whose lifelong struggles with debilitating anxiety and paralysing fear in social situations are portrayed with compassion and candour. The author’s descriptions of Penny’s physical and emotional reactions are thoughtful and accessible, and will help young readers to empathize with and better understand those who live with anxiety and how it affects their daily lives and relationships. The fact that Penny is able to open up to a few girls and make some friends who want to help and support her when they learn about her condition serves as a source of hope. And, while the story of a group of girls finding a way to save a much-needed pet shelter is heartwarming in and of itself, the fact that one of these girls has to overcome such major obstacles to do so makes it truly inspirational.

Beyond Amelia

Written by Heather Stemp Nimbus Publishing

Having earned an engineering degree and her pilot’s licence, Ginny Ross longs to join all her friends who have enlisted to be part of the efforts to stop Hitler from invading Britain. However, the military does not accept female pilots. So when she learns that a ferry service that will fly bombers to Britain is looking for experienced pilots, she concocts a plan to sign up. With the help of a few dear friends she transforms herself into Jimmy Ross and finds herself co-piloting planes across the North Atlantic. Jimmy soon discovers that the dangers are very real, but his/her ruse being discovered may be the biggest thing he/she needs to worry about. What will happen if Jimmy’s colleagues, many of whom have very strong feelings about women doing “men’s work”, learn the truth? And how long can Jimmy/Ginny be content living a lie and pretending to be someone he/she is not?

This third book in this series reminds readers of the plucky, spirited nature of this protagonist who chafes against the unfairness of the rules and societal norms of the day. The author creates a vivid portrait of wartime in North America, and the role of those who were trying to contribute to the war in Europe from afar. Her descriptions of the transatlantic flights and the preparations for them provide fascinating historical information for young readers, and her depictions of the deeply entrenched views about women and their roles are an important reminder of what women throughout history have faced. Ginny’s gradual realization that she isn’t actually achieving her dream of helping to create a place for women in the aviation industry if she has to disguise herself as a boy demonstrates her personal growth. Readers will enjoy these further adventures of Ginny’s and the significant life lessons that she learns from these experiences.

Bertie Stewart is Perfectly Imperfect

Written by Melanie Mosher

Nimbus Publishing

When Bertie’s grade six teacher announces that they will each be doing a presentation to the entire school she panics, knowing that there is absolutely no way that she will be able to do that assignment. And the voice in her head that keeps warning her of all the things that could go wrong reaffirms that opinion. Her best friend Kevin is sympathetic and tries to support her but he has problems of his own and even though Bertie longs to confide in him she can’t seem to help pushing him away. Convinced that she is a disappointment to her dad and Denise (her stepmother), the only place where Bertie feels comfortable being herself is at her Grammy’s. So when she learns that Grammy will be moving to a senior’s home, she is devastated. With the presentation looming, Grammy’s move and a rift that has arisen between her and Kevin, Bertie feels like things can’t get any worse. But when she finally sees a therapist who helps her to understand her inside voice a little better, she begins to see the other things in her life a bit differently too.

This touching and tender middle-grade novel explores the experience of anxiety from the perspective of a young girl who feels alone in her suffering in spite of the people all around her who genuinely want to help. The author perceptively describes Bertie’s fears and her belief that she can’t ever admit to the fact that she has this voice inside her that keeps reminding her of her every flaw and mistake. Her amazement when she discovers that Grammy also suffers from anxiety is heartwarming, and her relief when Dr. Bryan helps her to see that she isn’t the only one who experiences these things will resonate with many readers. Mosher is adept at portraying the thoughts and feelings of her young protagonists. She sensitively captures Bertie’s tumultuous feelings and describes them in ways that are highly relatable for her audience.

With a cart full of treasures in tow, Rumie is savouring a beautiful day in the forest, a day that would be just right for an adventure! Inspired by a ladybug that floats by on a leaf in the stream, Rumie comes up with the idea of building a raft. Uncle Hawthorne agrees and the two work to construct a seaworthy craft. Rumie is anxious to venture out on the stream as soon as possible, but Uncle Hawthorne says that they must first take it on a safety test. After a night of heavy rain, the stream is full and Rumie can’t wait to get on it! But as they wait (and wait and wait!) for Uncle Hawthorne to get up, they grow increasingly anxious. When Rumie decides to take the raft out for a little test they soon find themselves in the midst of a bigger adventure than they had bargained for ...

This gentle, idyllic tale of woodland whimsy is utterly charming and a visual delight! Rumie’s blissful meanderings in the forest and the joy they find in the natural world are heartwarming and the relationship between Rumie and Uncle Hawthorne is touching and grounded in mutual respect as well as love. And all of this is artfully captured in the exquisite photo illustrations! Lush, sun-dappled scenes are bursting with a myriad of details to pore over on each page. In several images, the gently blurred backgrounds focus the eye on Rumie, while Marentette’s skillful use of light throughout the book creates a truly immersive experience for the reader. Adults and children alike will be captivated by all the tiny, handmade treasures that were crafted and incorporated into the illustrations, and by Rumie and Uncle Hawthorne themselves, who are about as cute and cuddly a pair of protagonists as one could hope to find.

Rumie Goes Rafting

Written & illustrated by Meghan Marentette Owlkids Books

Wild Trails to the Sea

Written by Penelope Jackson, illustrated by Elena Skoreyko

Wagner

Nimbus

Publishing

“I hope you build your bonfires where the tide will reach them...” This gentle, wistful celebration of earth and sea and sky follows a family through the seasons as they joyfully experience the magic and mystery of the world around them, and as one parent muses on all that they might wish for for their children. From finding mayflowers and goldfinches and cranberries as well as the fastest racing stick to riding the waves and skipping across rocks and climbing tall hills that are cloaked in colour, this evocative poem invites children and adults alike to savour the beauty to be found in nature throughout the year.

Penelope Jackson’s lyrical and meditative text is filled with sensory delights that are magnificently rendered in Elena Skoreyko Wagner’s vibrant and dynamic illustrations. Written in a free-verse style, the story is introspective and also filled with the warmth and tenderness of a parent’s love for their children. It is a poetic exploration of the myriad of wonders to be found and experienced in the natural world, an invitation to take time to experience them joyfully and wholeheartedly ... and hopefully with someone to share them with. Skoreyko Wagner ’s colour-saturated and delightfully tactile illustrations are filled with energy and movement. Employing a collage style with beautifully layered compositions that provide depth and dimension, they capture the beauty of the landscapes and the flora and fauna that Jackson’s loving paean pays tribute to. Each scene is expressive and rich with colour and texture. Together, author and illustrator have created a beautiful book that is a wonderful wish for all children, and/or for anyone that you love.

Written by Bonnie Johnstone, illustrated by Veselina Tomova

Running the Goat Press

Ignatius the pig eagerly anticipates the scraps that will surely come his way when a trio of hungry fishermen sit down to their mid-day meal. Sure enough, a piping hot dumpling is soon sent soaring towards the pig pen where Ignatius snaps it out of the air. But to his dismay, it is indeed an extremely hot dumpling and it is now firmly lodged in his throat! In pain and panic, he takes off with a single thought in mind: to get to the ice cold ocean to ease his now-throbbing throat. As he barrels down the path, he meets an assortment of friends and neighbours who are untangling kites from rose bushes and carrying berry-filled pies and laying out fish to dry. He tears through a laundry line and a carefully packed pedlar’s tray and finally he finds relief ... while leaving a trail of chaos in his wake.

A playful, rollicking tale, this has a distinctly Newfoundland flavour that gives it a charm all of its own. Together, the breezy, conversational text and bold and energetic illustrations tell a jaunty tale of whimsy (and woe for poor Ignatius!). While Ignatius’s mad dash to the sea and the mayhem that it creates is riotously fun, there is also a strong sense of kinship and community underlying the story, and a true spirit of place that resonates throughout. Tomova’s richly textured and jewel-hued images brilliantly capture Ignatius’s panic and the pandemonium that he creates en route. The stylized illustrations feature thick, heavy brushstrokes that create a layered aesthetic that makes the reader want to reach out and touch each picture. This is a delightful romp with much to savour on each page.

The Pig and the Dumpling: A Tale of Witless Bay

Our Woolly Bear

Written & illustrated by Katie Arthur Owlkids Books

When two sisters find a “fuzzy black-andorange visitor” in their vegetable garden they bring her home and do everything they can think of to make her comfortable (even singing her all of their favourite songs!). Research reveals that their new friend is a Woolly Bear, a caterpillar who will sleep for the winter and transform into an Isabella Tiger Moth in the spring. The girls love looking for Woolly Bear when they get up each morning, and finding her in various spots in their yard and even further afield. Although Edie and Lou know what to expect, they are nonetheless sad when Woolly Bear disappears. But as they witness and immerse themselves in the rhythms of fall, the girls realize that they are ready for new adventures ... and take comfort in the knowledge that Woolly Bear is too.

In her debut picture book, author and illustrator Katie Arthur creates a quiet, lovely ode to nature’s bounty and our relationship to it. The understated story is simply told, and adeptly portrays the girls’ excitement over their discovery of this wee, new friend. The words and illustrations together capture the warmth of their family life and the joy they find in the natural world: in their garden, in their backyard and at the beach. In rich, autumnal hues, the warm-toned illustrations depict cosy scenes of home along with the beautifully rendered outdoor settings, sometimes seen through a window and other times featuring the brightly clad sisters boldly set against the moody November landscape. A spare and gentle story, this book speaks of tiny treasures, and the warmth and love of family, and the wisdom of opening oneself up to new things.

coloured fabrics, a young girl gazes all around her with awe and anticipation while the women in the background exchange joyful greetings. When one of the women begins to wrap the girl’s hair in magnificent swaths of fabric, the child is awash in feeling. She delights in this experience that links her with the past, that connects her to the traditions of African people from long ago as well as with women in contemporary times and places. “When I wrap, my roots run deep,” she muses, and she feels a sense of pride in herself and unity with the women who have done this same thing for generations, and who do it still. In both words and images, this book evokes one child’s joy as she celebrates her history and her heritage, and the powerful realization that she is surrounded and supported by a thousand grandmothers who “tell me I am beautiful. They tell me I am home.”

Shauntay Grant’s spare, evocative text is heartfelt and poignant, and it beautifully depicts the very big emotions that this girl is feeling, that this experience gives rise to. She magnificently captures the meaningfulness of this tradition and how it is able to be a source of pride and unity for her, as well as an act of remembering and honouring. Jenin Mohammed’s bold, jewel-toned and brightly saturated illustrations are joyous and expressionistic, depicting various landscapes of the past and present and a variety of styles of headwraps. A wondrous array of patterns and prints in a vibrant range of hues burst off of each page, portraying marketplace scenes as well as sidewalks and cityscapes. Filled with energy and emotion, this book is an inspiring and impassioned celebration that invites others to witness and be moved by the joy that fills this young girl’s heart.

When I Wrap My Hair

Written by Shauntay Grant, illustrated by Jenin Mohammed Harper Collins

In a shop that is filled with beautiful, brightly

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