BC BookWorld, Vol 39, No. 1, Spring 2025

Carol Anne Hilton

Octopus’s Garden

Mark Leiren-Young dives into the mysterious lives of these masters of camouflage and escape, blue bloods with big brains and eight arms.

See page 6

BC TOP SELLERS

Shelley Adams & Conner Adams

Whitewater Cooks: The Food We Love (Sandhill Book Marketing $38.95)

Daniel Marshall

Untold Tales of Old British Columbia (Ronsdale Press $24.95)

Marc Edge

Tomorrow’s News: How to Fix Canada’s Media (New Star $26)

Erin Steele

Sunrise Over Half-Built Houses: Love, Longing and Addiction in Suburbia (Caitlin $26)

Georgina Martin

Drumming our Way Home: Intergenerational Learning, Teaching, & Indigenous Ways of Knowing (UBC Press $29.95)

Elspeth Rae & Rowena Rae

Meg and Greg: Train Day! (Orca $16.95)

Howard White (series editor) Raincoast Chronicles Fifth Five (Harbour $60)

Richard Wagamese & Bridget George

The Animal People Choose a Leader (D&M $24.95)

Joanne Thomson

300 Mason Jars: Preserving History (Heritage House $34.95)

Mikaela Cannon

Foraging as a Way of Life: A Year-Round Field Guide to Wild Plants (New Society $44.99)

Mercedes Eng cop city swagger (Talonbooks $19.95)

Sarah Gilbert

Our Lady of Mile End (Anvil Press $20)

PEOPLE

ABlack History Month art challenge led Ruby Smith Diaz to Serafim “Joe” Fortes (1863–1922) as she looked for historical Black Canadians on the City of Vancouver Archives’ online portal. There weren’t many photographs of Black people, but one individual kept cropping up—Joe Fortes, a Trinidad native who became Vancouver’s first lifeguard and a much-loved local figure.

“How could he have been so loved by so many in a time of active segregation and white supremacist violence?” asks Diaz, a multidisciplinary artist, educator and personal trainer who wrote Searching for Serafim: The Life and Legacy of Serafim “Joe” Fortes (Arsenal $21.95).

Born to Chilean and Jamaican parents in Edmonton, Diaz reconstructs Fortes’ life through a contemporary Black lens, relating her Afrocaribeños background to his (“Did he have trouble finding sorrel out here?”). Employing archival research, personal narrative and poetry, Diaz brings new perspectives to Fortes, unravelling the “mirage of Serafim created by the white imagination” and recovering his first name, Serafim (the way he signed it), given to him by his Latina mother. 9781551529752

The

housed & the unhoused

arving out a life in Vancouver, the city with the most unhoused people in Canada and the most expensive housing (both renting and buying) is at the centre of Pat Dobie’s The Tenants (Anvil $18), winner of the 3-Day Novel Contest in 2024.

We meet Scott and Dave who initially appear to be living a comfortable life in their rental home near Victoria Drive and the Fraser River. Scott, an arborist, is the more outgoing one. “Between the two of us, I’m the conversationalist,” says Scott, later adding that Dave, who works from home, is “a remote worker and consultant slash contractor, which means no benefits, dental or otherwise.”

We learn that Dave works for a book publishing company—“He reads

collection of intersecting stories by Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence (Hamish Hamilton $29.95), explores Indigenous love, loneliness and connection. Set across Canada’s Prairies and the West Coast, its characters live in diverse places from reserves to university campuses as they grapple with the complexities of past, present and future colliding in a single instant. From a mother revealing a secret friendship to her son, to a poet confronting his own mediocrity, to a man adjusting to life post-prison.

This is Belcourt’s fifth book and second work of fiction. His debut novel, A Minor Chorus (Hamish Hamilton, 2022) won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. He won the Hubert Evans Prize for NonFiction for A History of My Brief Body (Hamish Hamilton, 2020), a collection of essays and vignettes on grief, colonial violence, joy, love and queerness.

9780735242036

His name was Serafim SECRETS & LIVES

books for a living, how’s that for easy?” remarks Scott as small underlying tensions between the two emerge.

Scott believes in “extreme frugal living” and shortly after moving in together, “has gone completely crouching tiger, hidden wallet,” bemoans Dave. Scott is saving for a down payment to buy a place, while Dave is happy to continue renting.

They meet Maeve, a homeless woman living in a tent in the bushes somewhere near their home.

She buys clothes from Value Village, steals wallets and eats wild berries and food left by people at bus stop benches.

Pat Dobie won her first 3-Day Novel Contest 35 years ago.

Vancouver-based Dobie weaves together their lives in this poignant portrait of housing struggles in a city that offers no easy solutions. It is her second winning manuscript for the 3-Day Novel Contest. Her first was Pawn to Queen: A Chris Prior Mystery (Arsenal Pulp, 1989). 9781772142297

Billy-Ray Belcourt, from the Driftpile Cree Nation in Northern Alberta, is an associate professor of creative writing at UBC.

Ruby Smith Diaz

Tha T Gun In Your h and:

The STranGe SaGa of ‘heY Joe’ and PoPular MuSIc’S hISTorY of VIolence

By Jason schneider

This is the story of a song. Yet, it is a song that binds nearly every strand of 20th Century American popular music. It was a time when new, original material was scarce, leading other singers to quickly adapt songs of quality in the spirit of folk music’s oral traditions. Thus began the long journey of “Hey Joe” from New York coffeehouses to the bars on L.A.’s Sunset Strip to the ears of a young guitarist named Jimi Hendrix who launched his career with his radical, electrified interpretation.

$22 | music | 256 pages | 978-1-77214-242-6

Pool S (a novel)

B y m artin West

“Anyone who wanted to be anybody in Vancouver had a pool by the summer of ’83.” Thus sets the scene for Pools, a novel that delves into themes of excess through the lens of the 1980s party culture. Shot through with irony and black humour, it weaves a rich tapestry of human experience, illustrating the often tragicomic elements of this thing we call life.

$22 | novel | 224 pages | 978-1-77214-244-0

Parade of S T or MS

B y e velyn l au

In her tenth volume of poetry, Parade of Storms, award-winning author Evelyn Lau turns her focus on the weather. Never having thought of herself as an environmental poet, the author found that under the strictures of the pandemic the recent effects of climate change became more and more intrusive and unavoidable. Weather, both physical and emotional, forms the backdrop to this new collection.

$18 | p oetry | 64 pages | 978-1-77214-245-7

c ar T ha GI n I an Peace & oT her S T or I e S

B y e vie c hristie

The stories in Carthaginian Peace & Other Stories are centred in the domestic and everyday. They follow youngish lovers and domestic partners attempting to find a cure for a cosmic loneliness in an unstable society. Mothers spurn guilt, couples seek pleasure alone, and friends sit topless in parks, slack off, or dream about building a shipping-container home, and look to the sky hoping to find a place for people like them.

$18 | s tories | 160 pages | 978-1-77214-212-9

nIG h T Mo V e S :

S T ree T Pho T o G ra P h Y of r odne Y d e c roo Fore W ord B y m ike u singer

Rodney DeCroo’s street photography project, Night Moves, is a gritty, touching, poignant, and truthful portrayal of contemporary urban life. With his poet’s eye for detail, he faithfully captures the living character of East Vancouver, especially the life and pulse of the Commercial Drive area that he has called home for the past thirty years.

$40 | p hotography 160 pages | 978-1-77214-239-6

PEOPLE

Tall, heavy wooden ladders were required to pick apples from the early varieties of large trees planted in the valley, from The Kelowna Story: An Okanagan History .

Sauntering

The original home of the S-Ookanhkchinx

First Nation, now known as Kelowna, has irrevocably changed since the first European settlers arrived. Europeans initially attracted by the fur trade later became homesteaders who raised cattle and grew orchards.

Incorporated on May 5, 1905, Kelowna’s “population has mushroomed as orchards have become townhouses, and wilderness mountaintops are suddenly laced with streets that deer comfortably saunter down in the middle of the day,” writes Sharron Simpson in The Kelowna Story: An

Okanagan History (Harbour $38.95).

A historian and former city councillor, Simpson offers a comprehensive background to what is now one of BC’s largest metro areas outside of the Lower Mainland. Stories include a well-attended opera house (it burned down in 1916); sternwheelers that plied Okanagan Lake waters from 1896–1936; British settlers who brought their English regatta traditions with them, running the Kelowna Regatta from 1906–1987; and the wine industry that arrived in 1931, which has overtaken the apple sector. Challenges remain (think wildfires) but Simpson says the magic and promise of earlier times still holds.

9781998526208

Normal Life vs Hidden TURBULENCE

Nothing is quite as it seems in

Erin Steele’s memoir, Sunrise over Half-Built Houses: Love, Longing and Addiction in Suburbia (Caitlin Press/Dagger Editions $26). She was a shy teen in the early 2000s navigating suburban life. Behind her seemingly normal existence, Steele skips class, struggles with her attraction to girls and falls into pill addiction.

Her journey unfolds amid secrets hidden in big houses and parties in forested outskirts. “[My] internal struggle between a so-called normal life and one of hidden turbulence is mirrored in the suburban neighbourhood where the narrative begins—pretty, but with a hidden underbelly,” Steele told BC BookWorld in an exclusive interview.

The stigma of drug addiction, and the damage it causes, was one of the motivations for Steele to write her memoir. “Political battles tinged with morality eclipse the fact that very real people are dying every single day [from illicit drug use],” she says. “My hope is that Sunrise over HalfBuilt Houses helps grow compassion for those caught in the crossfires of politics and morality.”

Kelowna-based Erin Steele writes On Being Human on Substack.

t

Erin Steele

When retired microbiologist W. “Tom” Thomson Martin hears someone responding to the growing environmental climate catastrophe with the notion “There is nothing we can do,” his response is a resounding “I disagree!”

In Cultural Transformations (Agio $9.99), Martin sets out his argument that each of us “has the potential to change history.” “Our evolution as a species starts with our individual behavioural change,” he says. “This is followed by social change in our community. Thus, we evolve and the world changes.”

Martin is under no illusion that this will be easy, citing stories of journalists fearing for their lives who now regularly wear bulletproof vests (“speaking truth to power can be dangerous,” he notes). Nonetheless, he says, “we humans need to STOP many of our behaviours and we need to STOP them now.” He lays out over 30 cultural shifts we can make to prevent global warming.

9781990335280

t9781773861500

Ann-Lee and Gordon Switzer met in a poetry class and fell in love over a dish of eggplant parmigiana. As a couple, cooking became a central part of their lives. They grew vegetables on their West Coast homestead, “Heronland,” and embraced a semi-vegetarian diet, drawing culinary inspiration from global cuisines long before fusion cooking became trendy. Seasonal eating was a core principle, with dishes like tomato quiche in summer and pumpkin-based meals in winter.

Their recipes impressed friends and family, who encouraged them to write a cookbook. Over the years, they compiled their favorite recipes, evolving from typewritten notes to computer drafts, continually revising and expanding the collection now published as the rustic Food Full of Life: Eating with the Cycle of the Seasons (Ti-Jean Press $35). The book shares vegetarian-forward recipes under basic meal categories such as breakfast, salad, soup, desserts and drinks. Many recipes are preceded by anecdotes from the authors’ childhoods, travels and culinary adventures. The Switzers now live in Victoria where they operate the book publishing company, Ti-Jean Press.

O9781896627342

Other noteworthy new cookbooks include Crust: Essential Sweets and Savories from Victoria’s Beloved Bakery (Random House $37.50) by Tom Moore, the co-founder of Victoria’s Crust Bakery on Fort Street—just look for the lineups; and Epiphany Bakes: 60 Sweet Recipes from our Cake Window to Your Kitchen (TouchWood $45) by Melissa Owen, the founder of Nelsonbased bakery Epiphany Cakes that has been supplying restaurants across the Kootenays for almost 20 years. Crust 9780525612384; Epiphany Bakes 9781771514255

Melissa Owen runs her bakery, Epiphany Cakes in Nelson’s Uphill neighbourhood. She has authored one of the three new cookbooks discussed below.

W. Thomson Martin

COVER REVIEW

BY BEVERLY CRAMP

The popular song, Octopus’s Garden written and sung by Ringo Starr of The Beatles, was inspired by a boating holiday Starr took in 1968 in Sardinia. The boat’s captain told Starr about octopuses collecting stones and other shiny objects to build gardens.

Ringo Starr hasn’t been the only person impressed by the intelligence and creativity of octopuses. In the 1980s, researchers at a Boston aquarium were mystified by the repeated disappearance of their rare fish. Then one morning the culprit was caught when a researcher showed up early for work to find one of their octopuses on top of a tank of rare fish, getting ready for a meal (yes, octopuses can exist out of water for limited time spans). The story is repeated in Mark Leiren-Young’s latest title about ocean creatures, Octopus Ocean: Geniuses of the Deep

“This octopus would sneak out of their tank, slide three feet along the floor, scale the other tank to grab a snack and then return home so their keepers wouldn’t catch on,” he writes.

Another story concerned a New Zealand octopus named Sid who figured out how to open his tank’s plastic doors in a marine studies centre. “Sid had been in the aquarium for only a few months before he found his way to the drains that pumped seawater into the aquarium tanks,” says LeirenYoung. “He made his way there several times and once spent five days in a

tTHE WEIRD & WONDROUS OCTOPUS

Yes, they have eight arms, three hearts, blue blood and can change their colour, shape and texture, but it’s all about brains and personalities.

drain. When Sid was returned to his tank—with increased precautions to prevent further escapes—he made his way out again. He also attempted multiple escapes while his tank was being cleaned. Sid was eventually returned to the ocean.”

Humans have finally discovered that octopuses are smart. “Every list I’ve found of the smartest animals on earth includes octopuses,” says Leiren-Young, adding “usually along with orcas, dolphins, elephants, pigs, ravens and various apes.”

Leiren-Young quotes Jane Goodall, primatologist and environmental leader: “We know how amazingly intelligent the octopus is—and they don’t even have a normal brain, more like a central nervous system.”

The soft-bodied invertebrate (animal without a backbone), which is part of the animal class called cephalopods, has a brain located behind its eyes that also loops around their stomachs. “So, [their brains are] shaped like donuts,” says Leiren-Young.

Also unique in octopuses is that two-thirds of their neurons are in their

arms. Octopuses can taste by touch with their arms, which can also sense light and colour. Octopuses can also see very well with their eyes, just not colours.

Octopuses have strong personalities according to one of the world’s foremost experts, Canadian scientist Jennifer Mather, who has found “huge differences” in individual octopuses while studying them to see how they open clams to eat, and other types of problem-solving.

In 2021, a snorkeler in South Africa, Craig Foster, met an octopus that he began to photograph. Foster was going through a difficult phase in his life and the octopus so enchanted him, that it helped him out of his funk. The little common female octopus got used to Foster and allowed him to see how she lived and caught food, even how she slept. He made a documentary movie, My Octopus Teacher, that introduced contemporary audiences to the notion that octopuses are individuals with unique personalities. “A lot of people say an octopus is like an alien,” says Foster. “But the strange thing is, as

you get closer to them, you realize that we’re very similar in a lot of ways.” Foster’s film went on to win the Academy Award for best documentary in 2021.

Many animals use tools, but octopuses also create weapons, shelters and armour. For example, some octopuses use jellyfish stingers as weapons to attack and catch prey. Leiren-Young describes a species, Octopus tetricus (nicknamed the gloomy octopus), that live near Australia and New Zealand, who “toss silt, shells and algae at uninvited guests approaching their homes. Some female octopuses toss objects at male octopuses when they’re not interested in them as potential mates.”

In general, octopuses are loners or, as Leiren-Young says, they “don’t play well with each other.” In fact, octopuses will eat other octopuses if they can.

Yet in 2013, an octopus nursery was discovered off the coast of Costa Rica, with over 100 brooding octopus mothers gathered, waiting for their eggs to hatch. Then another nursery was found nearby. And the gloomy octopus “lives in the octopus equivalent of apartment complexes,” says Leiren-Young. “These octopuses find their own holes to call home and pretty much mind their own business.” Leiren-Young adds that researchers have dubbed these communities “Octopolis” and “Octlantis.”

In fact, there are hundreds of species of octopuses and they live in every ocean. A common type found in the ocean near BC are known as the giant Pacific octopus. They are larger than most other species and live longer, up to four or five years, rather than one year.

We don’t know how many octopuses there are, we have only educated guesses says Leiren-Young. But we do know that the climate crisis and polluted oceans are destroying their habitat. “Octopuses can’t fight the climate crisis or clean up the oceans by throwing shells,” he says. “They can’t stop pollution by changing colours. That’s up to us.” Read this entertaining and informative book to learn more.

9781459838956

Octopus Ocean: Geniuses of the Deep by Mark Leiren-Young (Orca $24.95)

Octopus pallidus (pale octopus) sheltering in a discarded tin can.

Mark Leiren-Young

Hockey meets ballet in this steamy fakedating sports romance

An NHL star secretly in love with his best friend becomes her dating coach

More from Stephanie Archer

More from Bal Khabra

C LIMATE REVIEW

Anxious? Fearful? Overwhelmed by despair?

You

may be suffering from “Climate Anxiety.”

No, this isn’t an ad for some prescription panacea, though climate anxiety may be one major driver of antidepressant sales. As David Geselbracht observes in Climate Hope, “In an international survey of 10,000 young people, between the ages of 16 and 25, more than half believed that due to climate change ‘humanity is doomed’.” For many young people today, the pervasive gnawing fear of global environmental catastrophe has replaced the fear of nuclear war that haunted my generation.

The worst aspect of both fears is the feeling of being unable to do anything substantive to prevent them. Global warming is only one horn of the dilemma. Industrial pollution, deforestation and desertification, apocalyptic wildfires, “weather bomb” ice storms and mega-hurricanes, extinction of species on a scale unprecedented since the Cretaceous-Tertiary event 65 million years ago—the menu of interconnected potential global disasters is more intimidating than the wine list at a five-star restaurant. Reading about them is usually enough to drive most thinking persons down to the jar store for a case of Prozac-flavoured vodka.

In a book of only 224 pages, Geselbracht counters that sense of impotence. On a subject frequently muddled by scientific jargon and political equivocation he delivers clear and concise accounts of many of the overlapping issues bundled together as the “climate change” bogeyman. What sets Climate Hope apart from the usual gloom and doom literature on the subject is Geselbracht’s method of making it personal.

The best journalists listen to people they interview and let them tell the story instead of merely pillaging them for quotes or “talking head” clips to

by David Geselbracht (D&M $24.95)

BY JOHN MOORE

support their own editorializing. Before becoming an environmental lawyer, Geselbracht studied journalism. Obviously, he didn’t cut many classes. Instead of opening each chapter with a science lesson, he begins by introducing an individual who has dedicated his or her life to actively responding to the climate crisis. This approach immediately engages the reader as the audience of a dramatic dialogue, rather than as a student listening to a monologue lecture or social media polemic. Two fine examples are “Climate Evacuees” and “An Atomic Idea.” In the first, Geselbracht introduces Chief Patrick Michell of British Columbia’s Kanaka Bar Indian Band, whose traditional Fraser Canyon lands were ravaged by the 2021 wildfire that incinerated the town of Lytton. Michell is the kind of energetic “can-do” guy who improvises all kinds of ingenious methods of resisting a fire that prove as irresistible as any force of nature. He champions solutions that can be easily implemented.

ta national environmental NGO from the East Kootenays.

Geselbracht’s broader analysis of the largely human-made forces driving wildfires that even recently devastated Los Angeles is framed by Chief Michell’s poignant description of survivors dispersed in subsidized “evacuee hotels” during the government-speed process of reconstruction as “climate refugees.” Insurance assessments and government programs may replace destroyed physical infrastructure but Michell’s observation reminds us that restoring the nebulous network of daily social and cultural interaction at the heart of human communities fractured by disaster, natural or unnatural, is often beyond the skill-set of actuaries and bureaucrats.

In the most thought-provoking essay, “An Atomic Idea,” Geselbracht visits Josef Nylén, head of commu-

nications at Forsmark, largest of Sweden’s network of nuclear power plants established during the 1970s and 80s. During a tour of the plant, Nylén observes that we actually discovered the secret of generating unlimited energy without resorting to fossil fuels eighty years ago.

Regrettably, in the minds of my generation, nuclear energy will always be associated with “The Bomb.” Nuclear power plant accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima have been much rarer than major oil spills. Each incident stirred up fresh waves of nuclear fear, yet democratic Sweden has continued to safely use nuclear power to drastically reduce its dependence on foreign oil and, most critically, its carbon footprint.

Despite its brevity, there is a lot to unpack in each of the thirteen essays that make up Climate Hope . David Geselbracht may have saved a few trees by demonstrating that less can still be more. I hope he has a second volume in the works.

9781771624268

CLIMATE REPAIR, NOT DESPAIR

John Moore reads and reviews books in Garibaldi Highlands. His latest book, titled The Last Reel, an historical fiction sequel to the movie, Casablanca, was released this year by Ekstasis Editions.

David Geselbracht’s writing has appeared in  Canadian Geographic , The Globe and Mail  and  Broadview Magazine . He works as legal counsel for

Climate Hope: Stories of Action in an Age of Global Crisis

ECONOMICS EXCERPT

The Indigenous economy in Canada is on track to reach $100 billion despite the historic injustices and systemic barriers of the Indian Act as explained in Carol Anne Hilton’s The Rise of Indigenous Economic Power: Deconstructing Indian Act Economics

Previously, Hilton wrote Indigenomics: Taking a Seat at the Economic Table (New Society, 2021), which was shortlisted for The Donner Prize in 2022. The title of the book comes from the #Indigenomics hashtag that she coined on Twitter in 2012. Hilton is the founder and the CEO of The Indigenomics Institute and founder of the Global Centre of Indigenomics. She is a Hesquiaht woman of Nuu-chah-nulth descent from the west coast of Vancouver Island and is from the house of Mam’aayutch, a chief’s house, a name which means “on the edge.”

The following points are excerpted from her new book in a chapter titled “Twenty-five Moments of Indigenous Success that John A. Macdonald Would Never Have Seen Coming” (due to space limitations, only eight of the 25 points have been included).

The Rise of Indigenous Economic Power: Deconstructing Indian Act Economics by Carol Anne Hilton (New Society $23.99)

Constitutional Recognition

se C tion 35 is the part of the C onstit U tion a C t that recognizes and affirms Indigenous rights. Indigenous groups in Canada successfully fought to have their rights enshrined and protected. An important distinction is that Section 35 recognizes Aboriginal rights but did not create them—Indigenous rights have existed before Section 35 and before the establishment of Canada. Section 35 of the Constitution Act specifically states:

(1) The existing Aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed.

(2) In this Act, “Aboriginal peoples of Canada” includes the Indian, Inuit, and Métis peoples of Canada.

(3) For greater certainty, in subsection (1) “treaty rights” includes rights that now exist by way of land claims agreements or may be so acquired.

(4) Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, the Aboriginal and treaty rights referred to in subsection (1) are guaranteed equally to male and female persons. Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, recognizes and affirms existing Aboriginal rights but does not define them.

Modern Self-government Agreements

the modern treaty era Began in 1973 after the sUpreme Court of Canada Calder Decision, which recognized Indigenous rights for the first time. This decision led to the establishment of the first modern comprehensive agreement, which was signed in 1975 by the Cree Nation followed by agreements in the Nunavut Territory and a series of Nations in the Yukon. To date, Canada has negotiated and signed 26 modern treaties with Indigenous groups in Canada, 18 of which contain self-government provisions or agreements. Modern treaties recognize the Indigenous rights to:

• Ownership of over 600,000 square kilometres of the land base in Canada

• Protection of traditional cultures, languages, and heritage

• Access to resource development opportunities

• Stewardship of land and resource management decisions and structures

What John A. Macdonald didn’t see coming

tCarol Anne Hilton shows how far Indigenous people have come from the days when our first prime minister pushed through the Indian Act.

• Predictability or increased certainty with respect to land rights of close to 40 percent of Canada’s land base

• Defined self-government rights, definition, and political recognition

• Improved social development through better outcomes in health, education, and housing

• Increased access to economic development opportunities and achieving greater selfdetermination

Tŝilhqot’in Title Win in 2014, the s U preme C o U rt of C anada U phe L d the declaration of Aboriginal title to over 1,700 square kilometers of land in British Columbia to the Tŝilhqot’in Nation. This was the first time the highest court made such a ruling regarding Aboriginal land title. The case significantly impacted future economic and resource development on First Nations lands. Before this win, Canadian reality upheld two types of title—Crown and fee simple. John A. Macdonald would never have seen Indigenous title coming.

BC Implementation of UNDRIP Into Law in 2019, the L egis L ati V e assem BL y of B ritish C o LU m B ia unanimously adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act. The BC government was the first jurisdiction in Canada to uphold UNDRIP into law. Bill 41 affirms the application and implementation of UNDRIP into the laws of BC, referred to as DRIPA—Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act. John A. Macdonald would never have seen this coming in a million years.

Indigenous Legal Winning Streak indigenoUs nations haVe Created a formidaBLe Winning streak, with over 363 legal case wins to date (at the time of writing). This represents a significant shift in this country’s legal and economic relationship that was shaped by the wrongs of the original policy directive of the Indian Act. John A. Macdonald would definitely not have seen this coming!

Kamloops Residential Schools Graves Discovery in may 2021, the Chief of the tK’emLúps te seCWépemC Nation announced that through the use of groundpenetrating radar (GPR), the remains of 215 “missing children” had been located in unmarked graves on the site of the former residential school in Kamloops BC. This finding essentially woke Canada up to the realities of the residential school system. It set in motion the investigations of over 130 previous residential school sites across Canada, which have uncovered literally thousands of unmarked graves of Indigenous children who died at these residential schools. John A. Macdonald would never have seen this development coming and how it set in motion tangible efforts for building reconciliation outcomes with Indigenous peoples today.

An Indigenous Woman Justice Minister and Attorney General of Canada

jody wilson-raybould made history in 2019 When she was elected and appointed the first Indigenous federal minister of justice and attorney general in Canadian history. John A. Macdonald would never have seen this development coming.

Haida Gwaii “Given” Title in a re C ent de V e L opment , the pro V in C e of BC signed a title agreement with the Haida Nation. The “Rising Tide” title agreement shifted ownership and jurisdiction of lands and resources away from the Crown to the Haida Nation. The advancement of Indigenous title is a critical development in the timeline of the deconstruction of Indian Act economics. John A. Macdonald would never have seen this coming as the Indigenous relationship evolved from radical exclusion to increasing recognition and bridging inclusion and reconciliation.

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ADVENTURES NEAR AND FAR

Journeys to the Nearby

A Gardener Discovers the Gentle Art of Untravelling

Elspeth Bradbury

Inspired by adventures of world travellers but unwilling to rack up her fossil fuel consumption, Elspeth sets out to explore the world that exists in her own garden.

“I loved this book. Inspiring, timely, and charming, I savoured each exquisite journey.”

BETH POWNING, best-selling author of The Sister’s Tale 978-1-55380-724-7

Inside the House Inside

Rosalind Goldsmith

In this remarkable debut collection, cutting-edge prose, rich in compassion, captures lives lived in the margins. Homelessness, climate change, depression, anxiety, disease, or the trauma of abuse have pushed her characters beyond their limits. They survive outside the norm, living within the structures they have built within their own minds.

978-1-55380-726-1

Mad Sisters

Susan Grundy

A poignant memoir of a caregiver’s lifelong struggle to break through the barrier of her sibling’s mental illness.

“This gripping and heart-wrenching memoir weaves a powerful story of two sisters bound by love, torn by despair and obligation, and tested by the unyielding hardships of mental illness.”

SUSAN DOHERTY, author of The Ghost Garden

978-1-55380-718-6 (PB) | 978-1-55380-719-3 (EBOOK)

Untold Tales of Old

Daniel Marshall

A collection of

The Final Spire

‘Mystery Mountain’ Mania in the 1930s

Trevor Marc Hughes

For lovers of adventure and survival stories.

In 1934, four mountaineers from Manitoba piled into their Plymouth and pointed its headlights west to British Columbia. Their goal? To conquer B.C.’s tallest mountain. These young adventurers were following in the footsteps of the courageous, sometimes tragic, attempts made by other climbers to summit Mount Waddington.

978-1-55380-722-3

Keefer Street

David Spaner

Jake grows up on Keefer Street in Depression-era Vancouver but his rabble-rousing street politics lead him to join the volunteers fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War.

“Spaner has a gift for characterization and dialogue and creates a whole world of believable characters and interpersonal drama.

Highly recommended.”

VANCOUVER SUN

978-1-55380-720-9 (PB) | 978-1-55380-721-6

|

The Nothing Club

Cathy Beveridge

Four delinquent teens are inadvertently pulled into a criminal investigation that challenges their deepest values and misconceptions. Poor choices land four outlier teens in summertime mandatory community service. Deemed good-for- nothing by those who judge, they label themselves The Nothing Club.

Award-winning Cathy Beveridge has written six young reader books.

Treaties, Lies and Promises

How the Métis and First Nations shaped Canada

Tom Brodbeck

A riveting account of the links between the Red River Resistance and the numbered treaties.

978-1-55380-716-2 (PB) |

Brigades

Culture, conflict and perilous journeys of the fur trade

Nancy Marguerite Anderson

A lively recounting of the gruelling thousand-mile trail faced by the brigades.

allostatic load

Junie Désil

allostatic load explores the toll of systemic injustice, racialized stress, and global crises with both intimacy and urgency. Moving between personal reflection and reportage, Désil’s poems confront the weight of survival while seeking collective healing.

March 25, 2025

Crowd Source

Cecily Nicholson

Crowd Source follows the daily migration of Vancouver’s crows, weaving their intelligence and movement into a poetic exploration of ecology, human relations, and collective

To survive as a species, we must first choose to survive.

That choice has not yet been made by Homo sapiens. Cultural transformations will change everything: our stories; our beliefs; our economics; our politics; our behaviours; our relationships to nature and to each other

A new economic system is crucial for the survival of humanity It will focus on the authentic needs of people and show respect for nature and the Earth.

Agio Publishing House Gabriola, BC. V0R 1X4

Paperback: 978-1-990335-28-0

Ask retailer to order via Ingram. Or, order direct from Amazon.ca

eBook: 978-1-990335-29-7

DOGS REVIEW

Zazie Todd has tips for especially hard-to-train canines.

consider carefully while training dogs. “The parenting style that is widely seen as best for children is both having high expectations (being demanding) and taking account of the child’s needs (being responsive),” writes Todd. “This is known as an authoritative [versus an authoritarian] parenting style. An authoritative parenting style means showing warmth towards the child, giving them choices (within reasonable bounds), being willing to discuss things and negotiate with the child. This style is associated with better outcomes for the child in terms of resilience, optimism, self-esteem, and educational outcomes. Other common parenting styles are authoritarian (with strict rules, use of punishment, and little consideration of the child ’ s needs), permissive (indulgent), and uninvolved (neglectful).”

We learn how to de-escalate anxiety in a kind, consistent way and the vital role of exercise and play in every dog’s life. Paying attention to what our nonverbal furry friends are trying to tell us is of great importance, just as it is with human babies and toddlers. If we were dogs and needed to pee urgently, we’d all yelp and pull at our leashes, wouldn’t we? Especially if our oblivious human was glued to a (insert doggie expletive here) cell phone while plopped on a bench in a cement courtyard with grass—and sweet relief—too far out of reach. This is one of my own pet (sorry) peeves about inattentive humans. If I were such a dog, I’d bark at my owner: “Unglue your eyeballs from your allimportant phone and walk me over to the nearest patch of lovely green grass instead of yanking my neck none-toogently while I dance and yip non-stop to get my basic message across!”

TALKIES & WALKIES

BY CAROLINE WOODWARD

e’ve all seen, or tried to cope with, a dog behaving in an unseemly manner. Kicking up a fuss and barking very loudly while they’re at it. We may have been embarrassed by our dear pup’s transformation from adoring best buddy to a lunging, snarling “Cujowannabe” at the very sight of another dog. Even another well-behaved dog on a leash, trotting along, nose in air, paying no attention whatsoever to your slobbering Hound of the Baskervilles. It is a test of one’s patience, especially if the pair of you have already flunked out of dog obedience classes twice and perhaps even hired an expensive, self-described “dog whisperer” to no avail.

“Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen.”

Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Prize in Literature, 2006

Fear not—experienced, non-judgmental and compassionate help is at hand. Zazie Todd, best-selling author of Wag: The Science of Making Your Dog Happy (Greystone, 2020) and Purr: The Science of Making Your Cat Happy (Greystone, 2022) once again strikes just the right tone in Bark! to buoy up pet owners at the end of our own leashes. She clearly explains why some dogs are fearful and/or anxious, which usually does not end well when they are placed in stressful situations. She shows us how to “read” a dog’s facial expressions and body language bearing in mind some breeds have features, like eyes nearly hidden by long hair or

smiles which are hard to decipher. Is this a happy grin for a stranger cooing at your dog or is this a stress-induced grimace?

Todd, based in Maple Ridge, BC, is in demand internationally as an author and speaker. She has a PhD in Psychology from the University of Nottingham and a Masters in Creative Writing from UBC. In this well-written, science-based guide she establishes where humans must begin: with selfawareness. For starters, there are a lot of harmful myths about alpha dominance and punishment to dismiss. Todd outlines parenting styles for humans that she also recommends we

Understanding why your dog is stressed about other dogs and reacts to certain humans and loud noises like thunder or fireworks is key to retraining patiently and effectively. Then there’s the issue of vets with needles, which is much like humans who experience drastic spikes in blood pressure while waiting in their doctors’ offices, aka “white coat syndrome.” Bark! is jam-packed with highly effective strategies for helping pets suffering fear of abandonment as well as dog and human safety measures, pandemic pets, puppy mill socialization issues and situations where medication is most appropriate.

Just as with a human baby crying inconsolably, it is wise to check for physical issues first. Your dog may not have a little toe losing all circulation due to a loose thread inside the foot of her onesie forming a garrotte around the toe. The point is, your dog may be injured and in pain. Or extremely thirsty. Or needing immediate veterinary attention because they have gulped down a wad of tinfoil from a campfire.

Zazie Todd is very compassionate about helping us forgive ourselves (for most of us are blundering well-meaning humans), and firmly yet kindly marches us through problem-solving sessions with an improved attitude and a list of effective skills to help our dog feel safe, first and foremost.

9781778401367

Caroline Woodward has blundered but loved mightily all the dogs and cats in her life. She certainly could have used Zazie Todd’s books on animal (and human) behaviour many times over.

Bark!

The Science of Helping Your Anxious, Fearful, or Reactive Dog

by Zazie Todd (Greystone $36.95)

THE BEGINNING OF MY FILM CAREER

Simon Fraser University was conceived and built on Burnaby Mountain in the midst of the 1960s counterculture revolution. Getting its start in this era had a huge impact on SFU’s early years, especially its arts programs as described in A Magical Time: The Early Days of the Arts at Simon Fraser University

Containing stories from a number of contributors, the book captures the excitement of SFU’s first decade and the wide-open approach to “getting an education.” Some courses didn’t even give credits. The book’s focus is on the Centre for Communications and the Arts (CCA) and chronicles the bold steps taken in theatre, dance, film, photography, music and literary arts. One of those early artmakers was Sandy Wilson, who would go on to become one of BC’s well-known filmmakers. Here is an excerpt of her story.

9781998526062

IBY SANDY WILSON

was working as the switchboard operator in the SFU Transportation Centre at the entrance to campus when my friend Terri Nash told me there were some cute guys in the film workshop. So, I signed up.

It was September 1968, at the end of a long hot summer of protests, meetings, caucuses, conferences and endless debates on the SFU campus. We had been privileged to witness democracy in action at SFU, and guess what? It was work and it got boring.

1968 was not 1965.

In September 1965 SFU was a few concrete buildings, lots of steps and a vast muddy construction site. Cold, wet and remote. I was a charter student living on campus at Madge Hogarth

House. I was planning to get my BA in English and history, be a virgin until I married a cowboy, and then we’d live on a ranch, have a bunch of kids and I’d be an elementary school art teacher.

By September 1968 I’d given up on virginity and marriage, gone on the pill, ditched the bra and stockings, hiked up my skirts, dropped out of modern dance and signed up for film.

Well, you didn’t exactly sign up for film. There was no sign-up sheet or registration, or credits given or at-

tendance taken. You just showed up Thursday evenings at seven down in the basement of the theatre.

The theatre was the only comfortable place for students to hang out. It had a carpet, chairs and a colourful abstract mural called Theatres of the World. Even guys from the sciences hung out in the theatre. You’d have to walk through this gauntlet of theatre people and down more concrete stairs to get to the basement. The place was buzzing.

Stan Fox was in charge of the film workshop by 1968, and as soon as we found a space to hold the workshop, Stan said, “We’ve been given these brand-new Super 8 cameras and they want to see what you do with them. They’re the latest and the best. So go out and shoot your movies.”

Everybody took turns taking out a camera. Well, the guys took turns anyway.

Marshall McLuhan had said “the medium is the message” and I looked at the cameras and wondered what he meant. I was afraid I’d break something expensive so I stood by the exit and waited to see what would happen next.

The guys liked to talk about f-stops (I still don’t know what they are or how you get them), film stocks, cameras, camera speeds, ratios, chemical properties, colour density, definition, magazine loads, exposures and credits,

A Magical Time: The Early Days of the Arts at Simon Fraser University Contributors: Ann Cowan, Barry Truax, Bill Jeffries, Carole Gerson, Christine Hearn, Frances Atkinson, Francis Mansbridge, Hildegard Westerkamp, Max Wyman, Sandy Wilson, Tessa Perkins Deneault (Harbour $38)

Actress Margaret Langrick (left) with director Sandy Wilson on the set of her first major film, My American Cousin , 1985.

tMargaret Langrick and John Wildman in My American Cousin (1985). At the Genie Awards, the film won Best Picture, Best Director (Sandy Wilson), Best Original Screenplay (Sandy Wilson), Best Actor (John Wildman), Best Actress (Margaret Langrick) and Best Film Editing (Haida Paul).

There were about a dozen guys and a couple of girls in the film workshop. Peter Bryant was shooting a feature called Felix, and J. Andrew de Lilio Rymsza Jr. was working on a documentary about Pierre Trudeau called Reason Over Passion.

“By September 1968 I’d given up on virginity and marriage, gone on the pill, ditched the bra and stockings, hiked up my skirts, dropped out of modern dance and signed up for film.” — Sandy Wilson, filmmaker

and credentials and opportunities. I wasn’t sure if girls even talked about those sorts of things.

I would never have admitted it back then, but I love fun, glamour, beauty, makeup, hair, wardrobe, jewellery—all the things commonly referred to then as “the girlie bits” or “the pretty department,” and not in a good way.

The guys were crazy for European directors and the French New Wave.

I was crazy for French films too. Films like A Man and a Woman and Belle de Jour. I wanted to see girls like me, families and tribes like mine, up there on the big screen. My dad, Victor Wilson, took 16 mm home movies of us kids growing up at Paradise Ranch in the Okanagan Valley of BC. He’d rent a 16 mm projector and some documentary films from the NFB, and we’d watch NFB films and Dad’s home movies. We loved Dad’s home movies.

I’d see myself and think, “So that is what I look like.” And “I remember that coat and I remember that day too.”

I was drawn to that fine line between dramatic documentary and drama that looks as real as a documentary.

In those days there was still a hard line between documentary and drama. It was the same with the dividing line between amateurs and professionals. Amateurs were frowned upon, and girls were considered a distraction, if they were considered at all.

Of course, these lines were all about to dissolve into the mists of time.

I remember with affection most of the other guys: Bryan R. Small, David Scott (who changed his name to Zale Dalen), George Johnson (terrific producer at the NFB), Tony Westman (cameraman director), Mark Dolgoy, Trevor Whitford (a cowboy from Alberta) and Danny Singer (photographer of note). Several of the film workshop participants didn’t even go to SFU; they came up from downtown: Tom Shandel, Al Razutis, Al Sens and Dave Rimmer

And then there were the other girls— Terri Nash and Linda Johnston—but our paths didn’t cross at the film workshop. There were so few of us compared to the guys. Like me, they got involved when and where they could but were mostly relegated to the sidelines.

Finally, Stan Fox said, “Sandy, everyone’s shot something but you. Here’s a camera. Go out and shoot something. Anything. Here. Take it. Go.” And so, I did.

Holding that little camera in my hands made me feel as if anything was possible. I wasn’t sure exactly what was possible, but I knew something was.

It was the Thanksgiving long weekend, and I went back to Paradise Ranch and shot Super 8 mm footage of my sister Nonie frolicking about under the autumn leaves, with horses, down by the lake on a sparkling sunny day. I loved framing the shots and following the action.

The important thing is what is in the frame and what is not in the frame. You choose what you want to focus on and put a frame around it. I began to dream with a frame around everything. My dreams would start with a small TV frame, then I would gradually make it go up to the size of a drive-in movie screen.

Stan would send our Super 8 film cassettes to Seattle for processing, and when we got the cassettes back, we’d all sit together and watch our rushes and make comments. So, there we were, back in the basement, watching our raw footage, and suddenly there’s Nonie and the horses back at the ranch! It looked almost like a Hollywood Western to me. It looked like my dad’s home movies. My heart leapt. Stan said, “Whoever shot this has a good eye and a steady hand.” And I was hooked. It was a moment of breathtaking joy.

The movie poster for My American Cousin

The vagaries OF WAR

A month before her 35th birthday, reporter Michelle Lang was killed by an IED in Afghanistan that blew up the vehicle in which she was travelling.

Embedded:

The Irreconcilable Nature of War, Loss and Consequence by Catherine Lang (Caitlin Press $26)

BY TOM HAWTHORN

Presenters:

Gurjinder Basran

Eileen Cook

Tracy Cooper-Posey

Norma Dunning

Sarah Fox

M. D. Jackson

Miranda Krogstad

Patti Lefkos

Royden Lepp

Jenny

Natasha Mihell

Brandon

John

he news flashed across the globe: an improvised explosive device had destroyed a lightarmoured vehicle carrying 11 Canadians in Afghanistan.

TFour Canadian soldiers were killed in the bombing on the penultimate day of 2009 as was Michelle Lang, a reporter with the Calgary Herald. The journalist was midway through a sixweek embedded tour with Canadian armed forces personnel in the war-torn country.

The shocking news of her death a month before what would have been her 35th birthday caused grief in newsrooms across the land, most strikingly at the Herald. Only a year earlier, Michelle had won a National Newspaper Award, one of the top prizes for her profession, for her coverage on the health beat. Michelle’s vacated desk became a shrine with a magenta pashmina shawl wrapped around the back of a swivel chair in which no one ever sat.

The reporter’s death broke the hearts of her colleagues and shattered her family, including fiancé Michael Louie, brother Cameron and parents Sandy and Art. One of the grieving family members, an aunt who had once been a journalist, was driven to learn why her niece died in a dusty, far-off land.

“There was little I felt more passionate about than the senseless, devastating loss of Michelle, my niece who had gone where I had not in journalism,” Catherine Lang writes in Embedded: The Irreconcilable Nature of War, Loss and Consequence. “Michelle who was on an upward trajectory, Michelle who brought life and laughter into our lives.”

OBaCK in the earLy 1980s, Catherine Lang was a 29-year-old school secretary in Victoria when she decided to follow a

clairvoyant’s prediction by pursuing journalism as a profession. She studied creative writing at the University of Victoria and won a scholarship to the journalism program at Langara College before getting an internship at the Gulf Islands Driftwood on Salt Spring Island.

Lang later worked at the Ladysmith Chemainus Chronicle. One of the stories she covered for the Chronicle led to the publication of O-Bon in Chimunesu (Arsenal Pulp, 1996), which is based on personal narratives of the Japanese Canadian residents of Chemainus forced from their homes into camps during wartime. The book won the 1997 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction award at the BC Book Prizes.

Oin her grief , C atherine L ang ret U rned to the interviewing and researching techniques of her journalism days for Embedded

Michelle’s “death woke a restlessness in me,” she writes, “to go where she had connections, scouring up bits of information and getting glimpses into the life she was living.”

The aunt spent more than seven years writing and researching a book about her go-getter niece, “as if my writing is a vain attempt to resurrect her.”

Catherine Lang is nagged by doubts about her motivation.

“Was I doing this for Michelle or for me?” she asks with refreshing selfawareness. “Was my ego tainting their memory, their steadfast love of someone so dear as Michelle?”

The result is less a conventional biography and more of an exploration of grief. Every death leaves a void, but it is a peculiarity that in death an absent person becomes so overwhelming a presence in mind that on the street a grieving person mistakenly thinks they’ve spotted the dead person. The author has this experience, staring in intense disbelief at a Michelle lookalike in a café.

Lang travels across the country in pursuit of her niece’s story. She is on hand for the heart-wrenching repatriation ceremony at Canadian Forces Base Trenton, east of Toronto, when Michelle’s remains arrive from Afghanistan. She is touched by the strangers

who respectfully line the Highway of Heroes to honour the five fallen Canadians. Over time, the author pays her respects at the BC Afghanistan Memorial behind the law courts in Victoria and does the same when the marble Kandahar Cenotaph comes through the British Columbia capital on its way to a permanent home in Ottawa. Lang is there when a memorial plaque is unveiled at Magee Secondary in Vancouver, where Michelle once attended classes. (The aunt remembers having helped a young Michelle with a school project to design a newspaper front page.) She takes a long journey ending with a chartered floatplane flight with two of Michelle’s journalism buddies to an isolated lake in northeastern Saskatchewan on which a previously unnamed feature is now known as Lang Bay. They settle on a rock they dub “Michelle’s Landing”

to drink white wine, recite poetry and retell tales.

Lang interviews classmates, old boyfriends, military personnel, newsroom besties (including one whose son carries the middle name Lang after Michelle), and former CBC reporter Melissa Fung, who survived a kidnapping by a criminal gang supporting the Taliban, as well as Bushra Saeed-Khan, a civilian civil servant who sat across from Michelle inside the light-armoured vehicle, yet survived the explosion, albeit with grievous injuries.

Seat selection determined who lived and who died. Such are the vagaries of wartime. 9781773861517

Tom Hawthorn’s most recent book is The Year Canadians Lost Their Minds and Found Their Country: The Centennial of 1967 (D&M, 2017).

A Performance That Has Left Millions In Awe

world-class experience beyond your imagination! Bask in

and

that uplift and inspire. Not just another show but an enchantment you’ll cherish forever—the experience you’ve been waiting a lifetime for.

“Entertainment of the highest order... an exemplary display of excellence.”

—Stage Whispers

“Spiritually uplifting. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience and you must not miss it!”

—Coral Drouyn, theatre critic

“Life affirming and life-changing… It’s an experience that will stay with you long after the final curtain.”

—Stage Whispers

In one of the last photos taken of Michelle Lang (left) , she chats with Bushra Saeed-Khan, a civilian employee of the federal government, during a pre-deployment briefing at Camp Nathan Smith, Kandahar city, on December 30th, 2009.

china before communism

J AZZ

biography and an overview. A memoir and a patiently assembled collection of oral histories. One focused on a suave downtown bandleader with a larger following abroad than at home; the other mostly memorializing the beboppers and beatniks who assembled in East Vancouver and, for the most part, never left.

Chris Wong ’s Journeys to the Bandstand: Thirty Jazz Lives in Vancouver and the late Guy MacPherson’s Fraser MacPherson: I Don’t Have to Go Anywhere—I’m Already Here could not be more different. And yet, taken in concert with Marian Jago’s 2018 study Live at The Cellar: Vancouver’s Iconic Jazz Club and the Canadian Co-operative Jazz Scene in the 1950s and ‘60s (UBC Press) they create a symbiotic history of improvised music at the ends of the earth, as Vancouver must have seemed following the end of the Second World War.

A You’ve got to make your OWN scene

How did a rough-and-tumble resource port develop such a vital jazz community in just a few short years? How and why did the innovators of the 1950s set the scene for the resurgence of jazz in Vancouver, mostly taking place under the radar of an increasingly moribund music industry, that we’re seeing now? And who, anyway, was Fraser MacPherson?

These questions are not entirely answered by any one of these books, or even by all three taken together. But as a loose (and apparently unplanned) trilogy, they lay the groundwork for further histories to come, and they’re essential reading for anyone interested in Vancouver’s once and future cultural life.

Writer and comedy critic Guy MacPherson, one would think, would be the perfect person to write Fraser MacPherson’s biography: he was the great saxophonist’s son. As such, he had complete access to his dad’s archives, as well as the generous support of Fraser’s surviving friends and colleagues. It shows: at times, I Don’t Have to Go Anywhere—I’m Already Here approaches a day-to-day chronicle of the life of a working musician, an approach that is not without its merits. We’re taken into grimy and quite possibly wired Russian hotel rooms, as MacPherson senior becomes the first Western musician to enjoy multiple tours of the Soviet Union, slipping in through the Iron Curtain just as it is beginning to fray and rust. We get a look at life before streaming—and before quartets with amplifiers replaced big bands with horns—as we follow Fraser through a day of recording sessions, nightclub engagements and after-hours jam sessions. We also get a detailed sociological explanation of the somewhat porous borders between downtown Vancouver’s super-skilled session musicians in their Mad Men suits—MacPherson being one—and the looser, reefer-puffing free spirits who haunted the original Cellar, and

although some of the same characters recur.

Bandstand: Thirty Jazz Lives in Vancouver by Chris Wong (FriesenPress $32.99) BY ALEXANDER VARTY

before that Richmond’s even less formal Wailhouse.

Richmond, hotbed of the avantgarde. Who knew?

Having only one story to tell rather than 30, Guy MacPherson gets to go into more detail about these scenarios and so I’d recommend reading I Don’t Have to Go Anywhere—I’m Already Here first. It will certainly set you up well for the faster pace of Wong’s book, which begins during the same era but skews more towards the bohemians,

What we don’t fully get from Guy’s writing, however, is a deep sense of who Fraser was behind his saxophone and aviator shades. Perhaps that’s not surprising. There are few musical settings more intimate than a trio, but even MacPherson’s longtime bandmate Oliver Gannon, who played hundreds of shows with the saxophonist, found it difficult to dig beneath the older musician’s calculated reserve. “Being on the road with him, even as far from home as Russia, it’s like pulling teeth, trying to get to know him,” the guitarist reports. “He’d be very sparse with the words. Me, because I’m an Irishman, I’d tell you the whole story. But he was very, very guarded.”

Even with his own son, that circumspection was rarely breached. Obviously constrained by marriage, Fraser left his wife and their young children within months of Guy’s birth, main-

taining an apartment in Vancouver’s West End while the rest of the family decamped to Victoria. Guy relays some fond memories of vacationing with his father, but it’s telling that he was never told that he was loved until close to the end of Fraser’s life. (This, admittedly, is not uncommon in families of Scottish or English descent.)

Painful though this might be, it also humanizes I Don’t Have to Go Anywhere—I’m Already Here . MacPherson’s search for his father’s soul reads as a mystery as well as a biography. Undoubtedly driven by his own sense of mortality—he died of pancreatic cancer before his book was published—Guy MacPherson is open about his struggle to make sense of an absence in his life, and this lends emotional heft to what could have been a straightforward, fans-only chronicle. It’s not always comfortable reading, but it’s honest and heartfelt.

Oa sense of L oss is a L so pa L pa BL e in Journeys to the Bandstand , despite its apparently celebratory intent. As narrator, Chris Wong doesn’t play as large a role here, but it’s disquieting to reach the book’s last full chapter and discover a very personal encomium to the singer Natasha D’Agostino, who died in an automobile accident just prior to the release of her sole album as a bandleader, Endings Rarely Are. She was only 26. Ending on such a downbeat—although, again, heartfelt—note gives Wong’s book the air of a eulogy, especially given its focus on a generation of musicians who are rapidly fading from memory. A number of other sad stories are told here, too, including the late and much-missed Ross Taggart’s little-publicized struggle with depression, physical pain and substance abuse, and the effervescent singer Kate Hammett-Vaughan’s recent slide into early-onset Alzheimer’s.

I kept waiting for Wong to perk up

NatashaD’Agostino

and report that today, despite a spate of club closings and the economically unfulfilling life of the working musician, jazz and improvised music in Vancouver appear to be healthier than they have been for decades. But perhaps that’s a different book.

What we’re given here, however, is invaluable. Working primarily from in-person interviews, with occasional forays into the archives, Wong adds Vancouver-centric chapters to the lives of such notable visitors as the radical saxophonist-composer Ornette Coleman and the flamboyant organist Dr. Lonnie Smith, but centres his narrative on the local sparkplugs who kept the music going, even during the doldrums of the rock ’n’ roll 60s. Especially valuable are two welldeserved chapters on jazz impresario and saxophonist Cory Weeds , whose Cellar Live imprint has singlehandedly established Vancouver as one of the global centres of jazz recording. (Weeds is also responsible for ushering I Don’t Have to Go Anywhere— I’m Already Here into print, following Guy MacPherson’s death.)

Along with Coastal Jazz and Blues Society founders Ken Pickering and John Orysik (and, more recently, avant-garde champion Tim Reinert ), Weeds is an outstanding example of cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead’s famous adage, “Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world.” Without them, Vancouver’s cultural landscape would be far less vital than it is today.

The same could be said for a number of Wong’s other subjects, most notably the Wailhouse graduates who founded the original Cellar club, established a West Coast jazz connection that still

resonates here (from Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle to Vancouver), and whose impact extends beyond jazz into several other media, including painting and performance art. Particularly engaging is the story of saxophonist Dave Quarin, an exceptional musician and one of a handful of Cellar stalwarts to fully integrate themselves into the postmodern approach of a younger generation, in the demanding company of John Korsrud’s Hard Rubber Ensemble. Quarin ended his long life in selfimposed obscurity, having chosen Campbell River and the pursuit of Tyee salmon over diminished scales and the city, but it’s fascinating to see his contributions given proper credit. I doubt I’ll be alone in wishing I’d paid him more attention when he was still working—although, selfeffacing as he was, I’m not sure he would have appreciated a larger spotlight.

And that’s crucial to jazz in Vancouver, anyway. Local musicians—even those who, like Fraser MacPherson, won a degree of international acclaim—have generally operated from a sense of responsibility to the music and its listeners rather than chasing an illusion of wealth or fame. “You’ve got to make your own scene,” trombonist and educator Dave Robbins wisely told the young multi-instrumentalist Hugh Fraser, and by bringing the Vancouver scene into sharper focus, Chris Wong and Guy MacPherson have both done their part.

9781738248704 I Don’t Have to Go Anywhere 9781039161603 Journeys to the Bandstand

Senior West Coast arts journalist Alexander Varty lives on unceded Snuneymuxw territory.

MUSIC ROUNDUP

Here are five notable books on pop, punk and classical published in the last 15 months:

• We Oughta Know: How Céline, Shania, Alanis, and Sarah Ruled the ’90s and Changed Music (ECW, 2024) by Andrea Warner examines the legacies of four Canadian women who dominated ’90s music. 9781770417748

• No Means No: From Obscurity to Oblivion: An Oral History (PM Press, 2024) by Victoria-based Jason Lamb with Paul Prescott follows the 30-year career of NoMeansNo, a two-piece punk band formed in Victoria in 1979. Generously illustrated with photos, posters and memorabilia. 9798887440149

• Have Bassoon, Will Travel: Memoir of an Adventurous Life in Music (Ronsdale, 2024) by George Zukerman, known as both the Pablo Casals and the Eddie Van Halen of the bassoon. 978155380713-1

• Rise Up and Sing!: Power, Protest, and Activism in Music (Greystone, 2023) by Andrea Warner aims to show teens how music has impacted the fight for social justice. Featuring Beyoncé, Billie Eilish and Lady Gaga. 9781771648981

• Rubymusic: A Popular History of Women’s Music and Culture (Caitlin, 2023) by Connie Kuhns covers the Pacific Northwest’s women’s music scenes in the ’80s and ’90s including Vancouver’s punk rock scene. 9781773861012

IN CASH PRIZES

DEADLINE FOR ENTRIES: MAY 15, 2025

“It could best be described as ‘unafraid’ and as a result has some interesting surprises.” — the blog CanadIan Magaz I nes

Entry f EE : $30

(includes a one-year subscription to sub t errain Magazine) n o simultaneous submissions

e the 23rd Annu A l

Three books in the INLET PUBLISHING SERIES: COAST STORIES

Lonely battles to survive wild water, weather and wilderness. Reference to the geology, both above and below water line.

Yvonne Proctor’s stories of floathouse lives in the Broughton Archipelago & McKenzie Sound. And, why Grizzlies have returned to the Sunshine Coast.

Some history of Jervis Inlet’s peoples, geology, glaciers, floods. Taking back Princess Louisa Inlet. Shíshálh Nation’s amazing agriculture Loggers. Logging railroads imbedded in forest.

Rev Pringle; detailed stories of the Yukon Gold Rush, WWI, south BC Coast adventures with Mission ���� ���� ������� �������� �������� forest fires, and lives of isolated loggers and settlers. And of his son Rev. George Robert Pringle 19131943.

John Korsrud

Kate Hammett-Vaughan

NATURE REVIEW

TRAVELLING IN A GARDEN

BY CAROLINE WOODWARD

Journeys lend poignancy to our experience as Elspeth Bradbury notes in Journeys to the Nearby: “When we set foot on unfamiliar ground, all our senses shift into high gear,” she writes. “Our observations grow more acute and we make memories. We feel alive. Uncomfortable, possibly, miserable maybe, but alive.”

As those of us who have read her books know, especially the popular Garden Letters (Polestar Press, 1995), co-written with Judy Maddocks, the Scottish-born Bradbury has a captivating conversational voice. She invites you to settle into your favourite armchair with a beverage of your choice and to read—safely, comfortably—with a trusted guide at your side. This book, adorned with her pen and ink drawings of flora and fauna, is structured like the travel books of Bruce Chatwin, Dervla Murphy or Paul Theroux, only with Bradbury’s dispatches coming from excursions into her garden, not faraway places. Her wry sense of humour, often self-deprecating, makes for a highly relatable travel guide.

Her journey, like so many resolutions, begins in January and falters within the first five minutes as she stares at her bedraggled plants, huddled under chilly Vancouver rain. She discovers, thanks to her trained eye, how unusually the leaves of West Coast winter-hardy hellebores are formed and is smitten by the unexpected fragrance of sweet boxwood shrub blooms; small, white and quite unspectacular to look at but with a divine aroma so welcome to the senses in the midst of January.

Onward to the compost bins, redolent of rotting cabbage and banana peels! Bradbury entertains us with a recollection of marauding black bears which may alarm “tourists from bear-deficient countries,” she says. Bear awareness is now firmly front of mind for herself, fellow gardeners and orchardists but this early dispatch is a good reminder of why that citizen education first began.

Master Gardener, artist and author Elspeth Bradbury eloquently delivers her response to the increasingly urgent question: Why travel to exotic locations in this era of climate change? What can I do to replace the great joys—and certain irritations—of exotic travels?

trine. I dare you not to laugh out loud at this travesty!

It’s no great surprise to learn, as Elspeth Bradbury is a Master Gardener and volunteered as a guide at the acclaimed VanDusen Gardens in Vancouver, that her own garden is a microcosm inspired by great botanical gardens. She has plants from China to the Mediterranean, New Zealand to South America and South Africa as well as cool weather beauties from North America not to mention treasured plants from green-thumbed friends. We also witness Bradbury encountering her “garden” of overgrown salal under the remnants of second-growth forest when she and her family first moved to their West Vancouver home.

Journeys to the Nearby encourages the reader to leave that cozy armchair and to really look at the major and minor changes occurring in our own gardens or nearby parks, boulevards, riversides, beaches, coulees or wherever we can gain access to living plants and trees. What also makes this beautifully written and illustrated book so special is that we read about the author’s interesting life along the way, although

Standing near one of the hummingbird feeders, she writes another garden dispatch about Alf, the alpha Anna’s hummingbird, a “tiny tyrant” who guards his winter food source with all the sound and fury a four-gram winged warrior can muster. She takes us by the hand and makes us notice the footprints of squirrels and birds in the snow (“dainty hieroglyphs”) and helps us discover the meaning of the word “petrichor.” Hint: another sensual delight of early spring anywhere in Canada.

In another chapter, we ponder a pond. Then we observe a tasteful stone bird bath adorned with a turtle sculpture. Next, we nearly smell what happens when the neighbourhood racoons joyously use said bird bath as a communal la-

she wears her career accomplishments lightly, if at all. She also had a career as an architect and landscape architect. Gardens have anchored her life, given her literal and figurative roots, from the Shetland Islands to New Brunswick and then to British Columbia.

The seasons of the year are deftly interwoven with the seasons of her life, from young mother of three children under the age of five years old, to accomplished professional woman to concerned grandmother foregoing jet-fueled travels for a more contemplative lifestyle, resulting in this garden-themed memoir.

Read it to understand more about birds, mulch, ferns, fungi and rain, to grasp the resilience, adaptability and the signs of suffering emitted by both flora and fauna. Also read it to laugh well and often as when Bradbury’s Scottish thriftiness is completely undone by the sight of original Gastown paving stones. They can be read at random, these short lyrical essays, or read from start to finish, good to the last generous drop, bursting with colours, shapes, smells, history, literature and memories of children playing outdoors, creating whole other worlds with leaves and flowers and cones. Highly recommended!

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Caroline Woodward’s Light Years: Memoir of a Modern Lighthouse Keeper (Harbour, 2015) describes her own triumphs and foggy trials as a gardener in challenging conditions.

“… [Bradbury’s] garden is a microcosm inspired by great botanical gardens. She has plants from China to the Mediterranean, New Zealand to South America and South Africa as well as cool weather beauties from North America.”

Kelowna-based

Journeys to the Nearby: A Gardener Discovers the Gentle Art of Untravelling by Elspeth Bradbury (Ronsdale Press $26.95)

The Boss

paces to the right.

I’m standing on the deck where a red hummingbird feeder hangs directly outside the kitchen window. In front window box is filled with evergreens and sprigs of Christmassy arrangement is looking shabby, and I’m contemplating its removal when a sudden whirr warns me of an bird. I freeze. He hovers indecisively, decides I’m harmperches to feed only inches from my face.

see these Anna’s hummingbirds from inside the house, appear as dark silhouettes. Lit by the low sun behind shoulder, this bird flares into brilliant, iridescent colour. His shingled with tiny emerald feathers, and his ruby-red up over his head like a balaclava. tempting to describe hummingbirds as flying jewels, but rock don’t fizz with life. This bird’s entire body quivers pent-up energy, and as he drinks, his long threadlike tongue

Gardens • Bees • Plants ROUND UP

Victory Gardens for Bees

The newly revised and expanded edition of Victory Gardens for Bees (D&M $29.95), by Lori Weidenhammer empowers gardeners to support wild pollinators by creating vibrant, bee-friendly spaces. Originally published in 2016, the latest version includes refreshed planting guides and new community projects and resources offering more ways to combat the environmental stresses threatening bee populations.

Drawing inspiration from World War II Victory Gardens, the book emphasizes the power of collective action to transform gardens, fields and landscapes into essential habitats. Packed with DIY projects for nesting sites, tips on identifying various bee species and insights into beekeeping, the book provides readers with the tools and inspiration to make a meaningful impact.

Jennie Butchart: Gardener of Dreams

9781771624404

Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance

For those gardeners who mingle literature with natural history, Vin Nardizzi ’s book, Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance (UTP $120), re-examines John Gerard ’s famous English herbal book, The Herball (1597). Gerard’s natural history of plants is often deemed a failure in science but is nonetheless celebrated for its aesthetic value.

John van der Woude’s nuanced design of Journeys to the Nearby reflects Elspeth Bradbury’s observational writing.

tflickers in and out at lightning speed. I have a sudden urge to reach and cup this pulsing creature in my hands. What an odd reacIs it a protective instinct, to calm his incessant edginess, or relentless human desire for ownership or for some kind of relationship with other living creatures? Of course, the thought of picking a hummingbird off a feeder is beyond ludicrous. He doesn’t let his guard down for an instant and could take off like a rocket.

Jennie Butchart (1866–1950) turned a barren limestone quarry on Vancouver Island into the world-renowned Butchart Gardens. How many know that Butchart knew little about gardening before she began her amazing transformation?

Haley Healey’s Jennie Butchart: Gardener of Dreams (Heritage House $12.95) for ages 5-8, tells her story of turning an eyesore into a vibrant public space. Through research, seed gathering from around the world and collaboration with plant experts, Butchart created the garden.

Nardizzi offers a contemporary reading of Gerard’s work, focusing on leeks, laurels, tulips and potatoes. By blending speculative natural history with literary analysis, Nardizzi uncovers the intricate connections between humans and plants as described in Shakespeare’s plays. By exploring these “cross-kingdom” relationships, Nardizzi contributes to queer ecologies, framing plant natural history as a vital resource for rethinking expression in the early modern period.

9781487500702

Native Plants of British Columbia’s Coastal Dry Belt

Still standing inches from the feeder, I shift my weight, and the bird throws me a wary glance. He is almost certainly Alf, the neighbourhood’s alpha male, who considers it his duty to exercise exclusive rights over this handy source of nectar. From his favourite perch in the nearby star magnolia, he launches ferocious attacks on interlopers, who usually take off in a hurry. Only occasionally does a dare to make a stand and engage in a vertical skirmish, a brief battle of wills before the boss, flashing boastful colours, returns to twig in triumph.

This tiny tyrant seems in no hurry to leave. He sips, glances at sips again. For the last year, he’s been growing accustomed to presence as I refill the feeders or simply go about my business.

The book is illustrated by Kimiko Fraser, who also created the art for Her Courage Rises: 50 Trailblazing Women of British Columbia and the Yukon (Heritage House, 2022).

9781772034820

Ecologist Hans Roemer and photographer Mary Sanseverino combine their expertise in Native Plants of British Columbia’s Coastal Dry Belt (Harbour $29.95), an in-depth guide to the unique ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest’s rain shadow region. Covering areas such as southeast Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands and parts of the mainland coast, the book explores diverse habitats including Douglas fir forests, Garry oak woodlands and beach dunes. Organized by plant communities, it features detailed plant descriptions, vibrant photographs and ecological insights, making it a valuable resource for naturalists, students and enthusiasts. The guide aids plant identification and also highlights habitat significance.

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A wild pollinator in Victory Gardens for Bees (D&M) by Lori Weidenhammer

Jennie Butchart hangs on a bosun’s chair to plant ivy on the rocky sides of the quarry that she built into a garden. Art by Kimiko Fraser.

JOURNEYS TO THE NEARBY

FICTION REVIEW

A young graduate lives with her mother, her ancestors’ bones and the lingering trauma of an unresolved civil war in this debut novel by a Korean Canadian.

BY TREVOR CAROLAN

Korean authors have obsessed over the 1950-53 civil war that savaged their country, probing disturbing moral legacies that still lead to such incidents as the shocking declaration of martial law there recently (quickly repealed after popular protest). During the Korean War, Canada sent 26,000 soldiers against the Stalin-backed North Korean and Chinese invaders and 516 gave their lives. In the following years, 250,000 Korean-Canadians settled here.

Yeji Ham ’s novel The Invisible Hotel confronts the residual trauma of that conflict, serving as a counterpoint to North America’s fascination with Korean culture. Readers won’t mistake the book’s gruesome impact for Seoul’s trendy boy bands, soap operas and films: the Oscar-winning Parasite, the critically acclaimed TV series Pachinko, or rapper Psy’s hit song “Gangnam Style.” There’s an echo of Edgar Allen Poe in Ham’s novel that intones throughout her macabre tale.

Othe story Begins With yeji ham’s UniVersity student narrator’s last day at a smalltown convenience store job and someone with a North Korean dialect who needs a ride. Luckily, the narrator can borrow her elder sister’s car.

At home, life’s a mess: there’s a constant stink, rusted door handles and unpleasant associations. An elderly neighbour with a ravaged face roams the alleys lugging heavy doors. Inside, the mother gripes endlessly about needing more sponges for her obsessive bathroom washing of human bones. Not explained by Ham is the old East Asian custom of cleaning and preserving ancestor bones in ceramic jars during unstable times so they could travel with the family. Bones overwhelm this story as honouring one’s ancestors remains a core virtue in South Korea and throughout the Korean diaspora, too. However, nowadays, cremated ashes are often interred in large family burial mounds that are the focus of seasonal Confucian ceremonies.

Yeji Ham received her BA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University. t

The narrator’s mother worries about her son, Jae-hyun. “Please keep him safe,” the mother prays to the bones. Newly conscripted, Jae-hyun is serving in a front line army unit near the North Korean border, a deadly flashpoint. Angst is what you breathe here. Nobody is really happy.

Yet outside, grandmothers and aging aunties sit in front of shops, chatting and eternally cleaning dried fish and chopping greens for making kimchi pickle: “Their hands always stayed busy, working with whatever each season brought to them, preparing for what would come.”

WASHING IN KOREA BONES

The narrator yearns, we learn, to move to Seoul with her friend. Money is an issue, though; city rents are exorbitant. So the younger generation spend their time talking about the latest rom-coms, new theatres with comfy leather seats, about rib eye sandwiches and Thai soup in town. They scroll nighttime photo views of Seoul, gold glitter on red manicures— artificial fingernails “impossible to look away from.” There might even be a blind date ahead. These are girls used to spraying each other with Febreze before going out to mask the haunting smells of home, where births take place in bathtubs after the bones are washed. Being young there, we’re told, what you crave is a decent hot bath. With all the symbolism and no-exit imagery, readers might wonder exactly where we’re headed.

Real-life Seoul is a well functioning city where any space that a tree can be planted is greened, yet everyone knows it could vanish in a blink. Two hours’ drive north lies the border with a psychotic, belligerent state where terrorism is unleashed with impunity. Might those bones at home be asso-

ciated with South Korea’s pervading existential fear and dread? Allegorical passages abound in Ham’s story: recurrent dream sequences that lead to a kind of “invisible hotel”—a haunted place of many rooms and faces with no one in charge; and the old madman tirelessly carrying doors, seeking to rebuild a shattered landscape keeps reappearing. Young and aged alike are infected with confusion and grief. Even modernity is a shadow play between the real and surreal, Ham suggests.

The mysterious woman needing a ride is Ms. Han, an escapee from North Korea. Thousands of North Koreans risk their lives to flee via China—you might meet them in Beijing or Dalian; but don’t ask the women what horrors they might have endured enroute. “In the North,” says Ms. Han, “you can’t leave your hometown without a special permit. You die where you are born.”

Ham presents well drawn images of Korean domestic life, especially of food; the legacy of former wartime starvation lingers eternally. There’s neighbourhood gossip and the stories flow, slowly clarifying past nightmares. In Seoul that blind date becomes a def-

inite maybe, and the narrator locates a decent apartment, “finally a bath inside a bathtub.” Yet the stench of bones has already crept in. War trauma, she intuits, is sublimated, portable. Born into it, your life will be lived conditionally—there’s no escape.

When a stark, disruptive event creates real terror, the narrative becomes a crowded memory camp of bad dreams, photographs, everyone included. Without release from our birth conditions, is redemption conceivable? Perhaps.

Surprisingly, it’s the voice of a deceased father that intervenes, intimating, “You can be whoever you want to be.” There are conditions, naturally. As folk-singing legend Pete Seeger used to preach, even when the dogs of chaos and brutality are barking, “It’s community that will save us.” In dystopian times, looks like more than ever we still need each other.

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Trevor Carolan’s anthologies of Asian fiction include The Colours of Heaven (Vintage, 1992), Another Kind of Paradise (Cheng & Tsui, 2009) and The Lotus Singers (Cheng & Tsui, 2011).

The Invisible Hotel by Yeji Y. Ham (Doubleday $34)

“A

—Carol Barkwell

FICTION REVIEW

Hannah Calder was born in the U.K but now lives in Vernon. She earned her MA in English Literature in 2004 from Simon Fraser University.

Hannah Calder’s novel sets out to give voice to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester.

Hannah Calder’s novel sets out to give voice to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester.

IN SEARCH OF HESTER PRYNNE

IN SEARCH OF HESTER PRYNNE

BY SUSAN SANFORD BLADES

Hester Prynne, the main character and wearer of the infamous red “A” in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century novel, The Scarlet Letter, has been revisited in literature several times—from a prequel featuring Hawthorne himself, to a sequel narrating Hester’s life post-Scarlet Letter Hannah Calder’s third novel, Hester in Sunlight, beckons Hester Prynne back to the page, but does so in typical Calder fashion, which is to say, in a very atypical way.

Calder’s book features an unnamed author/narrator who is attempting to write a novel about Hester Prynne. This unnamed author creates a family to appear in their book that, they admit, is closely based on their real-life family. As the unnamed author struggles both with an increasing depression and with the task of writing a novel about Hester, they spend what began as a weekend but then stretches into an unknown number of days in the country with the above-mentioned family. It seems like it might be Christmas time at first, but the seasons and weather change at the author’s discretion. The book ping-pongs between story lines featuring Hester’s life and the author’s life in short, one- to two-page long chapters. I use the term “storyline” loosely here, since there is no real narrative arc to speak of in this exercise in metafiction. Throughout the book, the author dives into sections of The Scarlet Letter

and stews in them awhile, critiquing Hawthorne’s Hester and comparing Hester’s life to the author/narrator’s life. They note that we, in our twentyfirst century lives, are as constrained as seventeenth century Hester—only the shackles have changed. The author looks out their window into “the woods behind this dark life of rules and schedules and inboxes.” They liken their teenaged niece and nephew, stuck in “Internet quicksand” to Hawthorne’s Gossips, trapped in their attention-seeking Puritan blame game. Calder is most successful in making a connection between Hester and the author/narrator as people living outside the edges of societal acceptability. The author authentically captures the guilt, the shame, the illicit nature of a mother who writes. They wear a red “A” of their own when they continually remove themself from their family in order to work on this novel—an act misunderstood and begrudged by their husband and child. Interestingly, where Hester’s society is made aware of her sin through the fruits of her act

(her out-of-wedlock daughter, Pearl), the author’s act of writing is sinful, seemingly, because it often bears no tangible fruit.

The author also tackles the issue of gender identity, which is where this novel strays from its original task of comparison with The Scarlet Letter The author’s child is gender fluid, and the author comes out to their family as nonbinary. An “‘other man’,” they say, “lives inside [them] and berates [their] fleshy parts.” These are thoughtful meditations on gender, but they aren’t fleshed out enough to take the novel anywhere.

sentenCe By sentenCe, CaLder’s BooK is a triumph—her prose is elegant, with stunning imagery, diction and humour. But though its form, in its defiance of convention, suits its content, this book may be a victim of its own cleverness. With its many literary allusions—to Hawthorne, John Donne and others, it at times reads like an inside joke to those who hold English degrees and may alienate those who do not.

“... we, in our twenty-first century lives, are as constrained as seventeenth century Hester—only the shackles have changed.”

Beyond the sentence level, the book has no narrative arc to speak of. The author’s musings circle around a continuously postponed family picnic, one they can barely bring themselves to think about due to their depression and the repercussions of past family trauma that is only ever hinted at. This picnic would have been enough to bring the elements of the book together, to guide the reader to a climax of sorts, to some epiphanies about the author’s strained relationship with their family. But this picnic never happens. The author themself asserts, “these still images, these flashes of place and time, pine for narrative, pretend to be narrative” and calls their work an “un-story,” but I wonder if it’s a bit of a cop-out to write an un-story about a writer writing an un-story.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate unconventional novels. Sheila Heti ’s Alphabetical Diaries (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2024), in which she created a narrative by alphabetizing her diaries from a ten-year portion of her life, was one of my favourites of last year. My frustration with Hester in Sunlight lies in the fact that it does not accomplish what it set out to do. The author ostensibly embarked upon this project to give Hester a voice they believe Hawthorne did not allow her. “I want [Hester] to be alive,” they proclaim. But by creating this work that exists solely in the musings of the author, we never see Hester in a recreated scene, where she might actually use her voice, speak dialogue, take actions, change the course of her story. The author’s words, though beautiful, never actually bring Hester back to life. 9781554202102

Victoria-based Susan Sanford Blades published her debut novel, Fake It So Real, (Nightwood) in 2020.

Hester in Sunlight by Hannah Calder (New Star $22)

FICTION REVIEW

ALL in the FAMILY

INreal life, a family reunion might cause temporary discomfort— whether from a serving of Aunt Moira’s Five Can Casserole (“famous in two provinces”) or from Uncle John’s opinions about pronouns.

Then there are literary reunions. From Oedipus Rex onward, the news is rarely upbeat: antagonism, fateful revelations, maybe a patricide or two.

On the heels of After Elias (Dundurn, 2020) and The Rebellious Tide (Dundurn, 2021), Eddy Boudel Tan returns with The Tiger and the Cosmonaut, an engrossing tale that shows the long tradition of acrimonious reunions is alive and well in 2025.

Opening in Vancouver in a “sticky, breezeless September,” Boudel Tan’s novel introduces melancholic narrator Casper Han, a teacher and aspiring writer (with one dusty manuscript) who’s still enthralled by Anthony Melon, his boyfriend of four years. Still, Casper’s quite aware that life in general and their romance isn’t nearly as captivating or fulfilling as it might be. “Is That All There Is?” could be his theme song.

With an early morning phone call, Casper’s thrust into an uncertain future and an undesirable past. On the phone from San Francisco, his sister Nadia tells him, “Dad’s gone missing.”

Soon enough Nadia is trading barbs

with Casper in their hometown, the fictional Wilhelm, “a lonely place” about five hours north of Vancouver. Casper compares the deep and dark wilderness of the coastal town to a protective mother; even so, “residents know that the wild doesn’t love them as a mother would.”

In that same week, another brother, prickly globetrotter Ricky, returns to the family hometown. Sam, a third brother, is absent. As a child, he disappeared one night, years before, an apparent victim of the blanketing wilderness.

“So cute,” Anthony remarks of Wilhelm before he and Casper arrive at the Han family home, “which sits at the edge of town and the beginning of the wilderness.”

Casper knows to look beyond surfaces. For him, the quaintness of Wilhelm is subterfuge, a brazen lie. After all, his own “permanent otherness” and deep-seated fury, not to mention the frosty relations among family members, originates within the town’s boundaries. In contrast to the reputed qualities of coastal BC as an easygoing, effort-

BY BRETT JOSEF GRUBISIC

lessly diverse cultural mosaic, Boudel Tan’s portrait emphasizes divisions— and an entrenched social hierarchy with non-Anglo names at the bottom.

At home, too, surfaces suggest an unchanging ordinariness. Yet, within minutes, long-standing resentments— between siblings, between parent and child—flare.

And as search plans for their father, Sam, are formulated and armchair diagnoses made of his mental wellbeing, the Hans clash, collude and ally. At the home (which is characterized as set in amber since the night Sam vanished) the air is suffused with evasions, misunderstandings, half-truths, unanswered questions and purposeful silences with steely mother, Elizabeth often pitted against her outraged children.

As the novel unfolds, Boudel Tan moves the story further into town and toward the calamitous night of Sam’s disappearance.

A whiz with plotting, Boudel Tan capably balances past and present while also drawing readers toward Casper’s assorted relationships, particularly those with Anthony and with his father.

The crux of the story involves not only the mystery of Sam’s fate, but also the aftermath. In so doing, Boudel Tan clarifies the fraught dynamics of the family as well as Casper’s complex state of mind in the novel’s opening scenes.

Boudel Tan showed a fondness for page-turning action in The Rebellious Tide (with its class uprising aboard a luxury liner) and in The Tiger and the Cosmonaut he moves the story in the direction of both mystery fiction—with leads, clues, suspects, dead ends and red herrings—and thriller. As the siblings delve further into the past, unearth facts and learn of whispered arrangements, their collective reactions range from calls for justice to schemes for retaliation and retribution.

Part of the pleasure of The Tiger and the Cosmonaut is discovery. Masterful at reveal after reveal, Boudel Tan populates a “cute” small town with ostensibly law-abiding citizens so that with each threat, secret, trade-off or compromise, act of violence, instance of misguided parenting, saving of face, bending or breaking of the law, example of racism and homophobia, he turns what could be a sunshiny sketch of a little town into a toxic place that Canadian readers will find equally disturbing and provocative.

A layered story of family and community, as well as of lies, consequences and the burden of learning unpalatable truths, The Tiger and the Cosmonaut succeeds at every level. Engrossing till its final reveal, it’s a thoughtful book that’s not afraid to entertain with plot turns that hint at a future of rewarding screenplay efforts by Eddy Boudel Tan.

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The author of The Age of Cities and My Two-Faced Luck, Brett Josef Grubisic splits his time between islands: Salt Spring and Cape Breton.

Eddy Boudel Tan has been a finalist for the Edmund White Award, the ReLit Best Novel Award and the Ferro-Grumley Award. In 2021, he was named a Rising Star by Writers’ Trust of Canada.

The Tiger and the Cosmonaut by Eddy Boudel Tan (Viking $26.95)

Advance praise for New Life Joke Shop

“Wosk’s travels and observations in a field he calls psychogeography are modern echoes of the Ancient Mariner.”

– Trevor Carolan, author of Road Trips: Journeys in the Unspoiled World

“With wit and wisdom, Yosef Wosk has somehow managed to fold the equivalent of a dozen lives of adventure and philosophical study into the span of a single lifetime. Whether entering a hostile nation to assist persecuted Jews, or contemplating conflict, charity, beauty and mortality, he continues to reveal a life of astonishing explorations.”

– Rachel Rose, author of The Octopus Has Three Hearts, former Poet Laureate of Vancouver

“Yosef Wosk takes us on a sweeping odyssey of thought, travel, and adventure, defying conventional form and ideas. It’s brilliant!”

– Sasha Colby, author of The Matryoshka Memoirs, director, Graduate Liberal Studies, Simon Fraser University

by Fred Herzog

FICTION REVIEW

AS FILM GOES BY

Have you ever loved a favourite movie or novel so much that you wished a sequel could follow up on the characters?

BY GENE HOMEL

Given the iconic status of the 1942 movie Casablanca, considered one of the greatest and best-loved movies ever, it’s not surprising that someone has taken up the challenge of imagining a Casablanca sequel. That someone is novelist John Moore in The Last Reel

What might have happened years later after the war ended to the cynical Rick Blaine, the owner of the Moroccan saloon, Rick’s Café Americain, as played by Humphrey Bogart ? Or Ilsa Lund, the romantic young woman with whom Rick had an affair in Paris, played by Ingrid Bergman, or her husband, the heroic antiNazi resistance figure Victor Laszlo from Czechoslovakia as played by Paul Henreid ? What became of Louis Renault (played by Claude Rains), the corrupt police prefect in Casablanca who threw in his lot with the Resistance at the end? What of Sam, as played by Dooley Wilson , the club’s piano player who was ordered to perform the song As Time Goes By? (The famous phrase, “Play it again, Sam” was never uttered in the film.) And Signor Ferrari, an underworld figure always looking for criminal opportunities, as played by “fat man” Sydney Greenstreet?

Well, for John Moore, they all ended up in Paris twenty years later, in 1961, in a kind of grim reunion that would not end well for all of them.

Moore’s backdrop is the particularly fraught time France was experiencing in the early 1960s. President Charles de Gaulle was desperate to resolve the bloody revolution for independence in Algeria but was facing another uprising—that of some reactionary French generals in a secret army, furious with de Gaulle’s willingness to negotiate with the Algerian rebels.

In Moore’s version, Casablanca’s characters followed very different paths. Rick Blaine, having fought with Louis Renault for the Free French Forces against the Nazis, ended up as an assistant director of the CIA. He was in Paris to pave the way for a meeting between recently elected US President John Kennedy and de Gaulle, whose

politics of grandeur underscored a foreign policy independent from the United States and NATO military command. Victor Laszlo, devoted socialist, became Interior Minister and head of intelligence in his native Czechoslovakia, and aimed to become a turncoat against Soviet Communism in favour

of democratic socialism. Ilsa Lund, Laszlo’s now-divorced wife, signed on to the International Red Cross. Renault, predictably, is a top intelligence officer in Paris. Sam owns a successful jazz club in Paris. “These days, Rick, everyone goes to Sam’s” Renault tells Rick. Moore incorporates many familiar lines from Casablanca into his dialogue. Ferrari is actually Kasper Gutman (a corrupt, greedy character from the 1941 movie, The Maltese Falcon in which Humphrey Bogart also starred), who’s running a curio shop aiming to separate gullible tourists from their money. Young Strasser, the son of the

Nazi officer shot by Rick at the end of the movie, is an agent of Communist East Germany.

Other folks from real life also pop up in The Last Reel. Writer Albert Camus, raised in Algeria, had died in a car crash in 1960 so he couldn’t join the proceedings, but Moore suggests in his novel that the KGB caused the crash— a baseless theory. “Jimmy” Baldwin and jazz trumpeters, Chet Baker and Miles Davis, appear at Sam’s club; their “two horns flirted, fenced, fought and fucked in a symphonic struggle that put the crowd through the emotional wringer,” writes Moore.

Moore’s dialogue mirrors the movie’s characters. Rick Blaine’s lines are cynical and hard-boiled, in keeping with the Bogart character. The wordy and florid language of the Gutman character is likewise based on the movie—he avers that when he ends up in hell he’ll be “given nothing to drink but French beer and Bulgarian wine.”

Non-smokers beware. A thick cloud of tobacco smoke hangs over the novel. Blaine and Renault typically smoke their way through scene after scene in what Moore calls “a cloud of Cuban incense” and “smouldering weed.”

Moore clearly loves classic movies of the 1940s. His novel includes the desperately sought statue at the centre of the movie, The Maltese Falcon. “A scarred black statuette of a hawk,” writes Moore of the fake version, complete with knife cuts, that is present in Gutman’s curio shop, not for sale even to Rick as it has “great sentimental value” to Gutman.

The Last Reel is not just a sequel to Casablanca that will probably appeal to fans of the movie, it’s also an attempt at a cloak and dagger story set against Cold War intrigue in a “world on the brink of total annihilation,” writes Moore. I won’t reveal the ending in case you’d like to find out what Moore does with the characters, but I will suggest that doe-eyed Ilsa Lund is not what you might expect, Red Cross notwithstanding. Her life ends up amounting to less than “a hill of beans.” Blaine had told her, “We’d always have Paris,” but in the end, “Paris will always have her.” 9781771715140

Gene Homel has been a faculty member at universities, colleges and institutes since 1974.

tFilm poster designed by Bill Gold in 1942. He also designed posters for Strangers on a Train (1951), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Woodstock (1970), and The Exorcist (1973).

The Last Reel: A sequel to “Casablanca” by John Moore (Ekstasis $25.95)

Ice on the Amazon

STANLEY EVANS

ISBN 978-1-77171-504-1

A NOVEL 205 pages $25.95

Field Play

SUSAN MCCASLIN

ISBN 978-1-77171-570-6 Poetry 119 pages $26.95

The Slough At Albion

HANNAH MAINVAN DER KAMP

ISBN 978-1-77171-540-9 Poetry 148 pages $24.95

The Incidentals

MANOLIS ALIGIZAKIS

ISBN 978-1-77171-576-8Poetry 90 pages $23.95

Pole Shift and Other Poems

SEAN ARTHUR JOYCE

ISBN 978-1-77171-556-0 Poetry 118 pages $23.95

Keep on Working

JIM CHRISTY

ISBN 978-1-77171-586-7

Memoir 166 pages $25.95

The World You Now Own P,W, BRIDGEMAN

ISBN 978-1-77171-552-2 Fiction 109 pages $28.95

Old Roads New Ashes

ILYA TOURDIDAS

ISBN 978-1-77171-566-9 POETRY 100 pages $24.95

The Last Reel JOHN MOORE

ISBN 978-1-77171-514-0

A NOVEL 160 pages $23.95

Untamed EVA KOLASC

ISBN 978-1-77171-562-1 Poetry 74 pages $23.95

Shifting Towards Vitalism

RICHARD OLAFSON

ISBN 978-1-77171-544-7

Poetry 160 pages $24.95

New Life Joke Shop

JOSEF WOSK

ISBN 978-1-77171-580-5 Memooir 160 pages $26.95

Presenting a GROUNDBREAKING Anthology FOR OUR TIMES

Covid-19 Pandemonium

A Pandemic of Ignorance, Fear and Greed, The Capture of Our Institutions

STEVEN PELECH AND CHRIS SHAW

ISBN 978-1-77171-584-3

Featuring over 800 citations from 20 contributors, this new volume meticulously critiques the responses of governmental bodies, health organizations, and the media during the COVID-19 pandemic—an event that represented the most profound global trauma since World War II.

This sequel to Down the COVID-19 Rabbit Hole: Independent Scientists and Physicians Unmask the Pandemic chronologically explores the origins of the pandemic and the societal fractures it precipitated, revealing the shortcomings of our institutions.

The book highlights the human rights violations and the suppression of discourse throughout the pandemic and the resulting impacts on society as a whole, with specific emphasis on the impacts in the medical feild and governeing bodies.

As we contemplate the enduring ramifications of polarizing policies, the COVID-19 Pandemonium compels us to glean lessons from this tumultuous period to rejuvenate public trust and mend our fractured society

NON FICTION 456 pages $31.95 A PANDEMIC OF IGNORANCE, FEAR AND GREED, THE CAPTURE OF OUR INSTITUTIONS

INDIGENOUS REVIEW

BY ODETTE AUGER

Agranite cliff with over 160 images announces the nature power of the Stagyn (hidden place) Valley. The 50-foot-long section of rock art is only one of many sites in nɬeʔkepmxcin/ Nlaka’pamux (pronounced Ingla-kapma) territory.

“The roar of the river is constant— reverberating off steep valley walls as it rushes through the lower canyon,” Chris Arnett (Ngāi Tahu, Maori through his father) writes in Signs of the Times The valley was—and is—a place for the n ɬ e ʔ kepmxcin to quest for, or tap into nature power, Arnett explains.

Incisions, marks on rock, red ochre paintings— Signs of the Times details a wide range of purposes behind the rock art. Footprints in stone from when spték ʷɬ (origin stories/persons in those stories) walked the earth, gifting tools, directions and knowledge of the past, present and future.

“Against the backdrop of colonization, pictographs are signs of strategic resistance and resilience,” writes Arnett. The valley was literally saved by the descendants of those who painted their dreams on the rocks, when over 100,000 hectares with more than 50 rock art sites were protected in 1995.

I’ve been taught it’s our responsibility to question what we think we know and that art is a great place to begin. Arnett helps us with that responsibility as he explains each painting in the context of beliefs, values, symbolic language and ceremonies of the people who produced it. While many academic researchers treat the art work as a passive iconography to interpret symbolically, Arnett explains the art works are products “of active ritual and ceremony.”

ROCK ART POWER

Nlaka’pamux rock art is more than symbols, it is an integral source of cultural strength.

describing the relationship between vision states, connecting with spiritual beings and realms and the creation of rock art: “Most of them stories are being dreamed by other people and they dream it and write it,” she said.

Certain rock formations are painted intentionally, strategically, “because these places and their stories harboured power,” says Arnett. He emphasizes the xaʔxaʔ (nature power) of place comes before the art that recognizes the significance. Arnett poses the question early in the book, “Are paintings merely projected onto rock surfaces by the mind, or are they made in concert with other beings?” We learn of Elders in 1919 explaining to an early magistrate of Lytton that sneʔíʔ (ghosts) were “putting fresh paint on the images every spring. They still do.”

Arnett quotes Elders with intergenerational knowledge who refer to the land as “a living entity full of information and the caprice of human beings. Here people talk to the river, to the creeks that feed it, to the animals, plants and mountains.”

“It is important to do so,” Arnett adds.

Signs of the Times is not a light read but rather a thorough examination of archival, historic, ethnographic and

tarchaeological reports and studies. Arnett takes his readers by the hand for the deep dive by Indigenizing the work through Knowledge Keepers who carefully share contextual information. By offering only partial explanations at times, the art is protected. The reader learns how snéʔm means songs, but also power. The same word is used to describe rock art makers as holders of

“mysterious songs” and the “ghostly” or mysterious characteristics of some of the locations.

While some of the paintings relate to coming-of-age ceremonies, territory, laws and s ʔ ík ʷ lx ʷ (dreams), others speak about existence, reality and the nature of being.

Nlaka’pamux Elder and storyteller Annie York (1904–1991) is quoted

There are moments the reader feels a momentous change, as the settlers’ context slips away, with an opening sensation of awareness of the expanded time frame.

Long before the first Europeans arrived, Nlaka’pamux “prophets or dreamers visited the Chief of the Dead and returned to spread the word to meet the challenges of a changing world. Dancing, songs and media were some of the proactive measures employed by these specialists to address the emergency.” In this way, Arnett explains how rock art was “a form of perimeter defense…in an effort to keep European-introduced diseases at bay.”

Spirituality passes through academic passages in the book, highlighting deeper significance while Elders’ voices both brighten and ground the narrative. For example, in a discussion of the Prayer Rock, Rosie Fandrich shared a translation of a family prayer. Every member of her family offers up this prayer as they pass the Prayer Rock, which is marked with paintings.

“Oh my Grandfather, Grizzly Bear and my Grandmother, Black Bear. Take yourselves away from the paths that I will walk. I may startle you and you hurt me. I am looking for food like you are. Your grandchildren are hungry. So I am in your country seeking food to sustain us. I beg you to remember the promise that we made to the Great Spirit that we would respect each other. And I am in your country. Let me hear only your passing, as you will hear mine.” 9780774867962

Odette Auger, award-winning journalist and storyteller, is Sagamok Anishnawbek through her mother and lives as a guest in toq qaymɩxʷ (Klahoose), ɬəʔamɛn qaymɩxʷ (Tla’amin), ʔop qaymɩxʷ (Homalco) territories.

Chris Arnett, an archaeologist, researcher and writer who lives on Salt Spring Island, is a member of Ngāi Tahu Whānui of Murihiku, Te Wai Pounamu and a descendant of British and Scandinavian ancestors.

Signs of the Times: Nłe ʔ kepmx Resistance through Rock Art by Chris Arnett (UBC Press $39.95)

MEMOIR REVIEW

carcity defined daily life growing up in 1960s Communist Czechoslovakia as told in Jadzia Prenosil ’s memoir My Childhood Behind the Iron Curtain Everyday life was marked by restrictions and isolation from the West.

The “Iron Curtain,” as the Soviet Union borders were nicknamed, physically and ideologically divided Prenosil’s family and community from neighboring Austria, making any attempt to get away, even briefly, perilous and life-threatening.

Although life in the West was depicted negatively by their government, Czechoslovakians remained curious, catching rare glimpses of Western wealth and glamour through smuggled magazines or Austrian television broadcasts. Western goods like jeans, chocolate and chewing gum were seen as rare treasures. Prenosil recalls her excitement at receiving her first pair of jeans from an aunt who lived in Vancouver at the time, a small luxury that felt like a bridge to another world.

Fresh food was often unavailable, especially in winter, and luxuries like meat were a rare treat. Many families,

S Canadian Science Books is coming in 2026

A child in Communist Czechoslovakia

Fresh food was often unavailable, luxuries like meat a rare treat.

including the Prenosil’s, supplemented their diets by raising small animals and growing vegetables. Practicality and durability were essential in clothing, which was often plain, limited in colour and shared among siblings or friends. Bartering became a way of survival, with people exchanging goods and favours to secure basic necessities.

Prenosil’s parents had once known comfort and privilege before the Communist regime under the Soviet Union came to power, making the transition to a constrained life even more challenging. Yet, for the author and her sisters, Hanka and Nora, life was filled with simple joys—playing outdoors, learning household skills and finding

small ways to express creativity. “I often snuck out into the garden, where I strolled, murmuring to trees, flowers and birds,” writes Prenosil, adding that she transformed these creatures into her companions.

“At the age of six, seven I collected bundles of grass and dandelions for our rabbits, and live beetles for our chickens. Watching them eat these treats, which they could not find in the fenced yard, made me feel content and useful. I strolled up and down the well-kept rows of lettuce and tomatoes while munching on white peppery radishes that I pulled straight out of the ground. Everything was fascinating… as I poked at slimy earthworms, played with ladybugs, bit into unripe apricots and gathered flowers for Mama.”

As she grew older, Prenosil pushed the limits, venturing further from her family home “exploring orchards behind locked gates, a cemetery with ancient graves, and ending up in a meadow to play with my friends,” she recalls. “I came home starving, with my head full of impressions, a few scratches on me, but all in one piece. My head was full of memories of floating down a river with my best friend, Eva, in a leaking boat, talking to fishermen, observing my girlfriends’ fathers sneak into the pub right after their shift at the Matadorka rubber factory. Each day I gained a glimpse into a world that I could not learn about at home or at school. My outings fueled my imagination and my desire to travel far away.” These formative experiences, rooted in resilience and resourcefulness, would later help Prenosil adapt to a new life in Canada, where she could embrace opportunities that she had once only imagined.

9781778352454

From the team that brought you Mushrooms of British Columbia.

Pre-order our first book, Vascular Plants of Coastal British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest, by Jim Pojar, Andy MacKinnon, Jamie Fenneman and Leigh Joseph (Styawat), wherever you buy books.

Welcoming submissions, too. Learn more at cansciencebooks.ca

“This book is well researched and does a great job of placing Coleman’s story in a larger context of Canadian politics and the Liberal Party in particular. It’s most valuable as a Canadian political history that bucks the assumptions that many Americans have that Canada lacks political turmoil. It’s also useful as a comparative look at how the Canadian government dealt with issues affecting the country’s First Nations peoples, including how a pipeline building project affected their lands.” —Kirkus

Jadzia Prenosil (front) with her mother and sisters, Hanka (left) and Nora (right) i n 1956.

My Childhood Behind the Iron Curtain by Jadzia Prenosil (Island Blue Print $19.99)

POETRY REVIEW

ILeanne Dunic were an actual Renaissance woman, as in a woman living during the Renaissance, she would be a model— the subject rather than the creator of art. But I’m inclined to call her a Renaissance woman because she is a model, yes, but also an accomplished and prolific poet, photographer and leader of the band, The Deep Cove.

BY SUSAN SANFORD BLADES

Wet is Dunic’s third book, a lyric memoir that explores thirst in its many interpretations through the poems and photographs of a young woman modelling in Singapore. In Wet, the land thirsts for rain and the people and animals inhabiting it thirst for food, shelter, purpose and connection. The book is steeped in the desperation and unmet needs of those who fall on the losing side of capitalism.

Dunic, an American-born Chinese model, meditates on the hierarchies she witnesses and participates in. She has a university degree and models because it pays three times more than what she made previously as a server. Her non-American counterparts, however, model to send money home to their families, “to save for an escape.”

at a shoot. After saying no, Dunic wonders, “[w]ould my roommates have done the same thing?” Had she lived in the sardine-like conditions with the other models, she would’ve learned from them and been better equipped to navigate her job.

Her desire for human connection— both emotional and physical—takes over near the end of the book. Dunic craves a married man she sees at the river, an unrequited obsession that culminates in her wish for the violence the migrant workers enact on the land at the construction site to be enacted on her body. More than one desperate page is covered entirely with “fillholefillholefillholefillhole,” which successfully conveys the absurdity of desire, though I’m not certain that was Dunic’s intent. Dunic does make a friend, a filmmaker she names Strawberry Cheesecake, due to the friend’s propensity for eating sweet treats. In conversation with Strawberry Cheesecake, Dunic

A model in Singapore

“[Wet] is steeped in the desperation and unmet needs of those who fall on the losing side of capitalism.”

The apartment she pays more to live in alone (and away from the other models) is serviced by a maid and looks out onto a construction site where migrant workers earn twenty dollars a day to build luxury condos for the wealthy. Dunic contemplates the spectrum of need and worth—her stated need for the modelling money is “a truth, and it’s a lie.” She notes that the grey water the construction workers use to wash their hands becomes a beverage for the pigeons and that poisoned bread is left out for pests—stray cats, dogs, unhoused people—which leaves her to wonder, “[w]ho gets to survive?”

Though they seem to be the chosen few who are allowed to survive, any power Dunic and the models hold is precarious and rests on them following certain rules. They are encouraged to exercise and eat healthy foods, but they are also prevented from taking care of themselves in other ways—they can’t mask against the poor air quality, as this would leave lines on their faces. And the good modelling jobs, as well as the perks of those jobs, are given in return for sexual favours. Human connection, another scarce resource, is available only to those willing to live in cramped quarters. Dunic has opted to surrender more of her salary in order to live alone, but the downside to her space is apparent when a photographer tries to convince her to undress

lays out the undercurrent of existential anxiety that runs through her memoir. Strawberry appears to be privileged, as an artist who doesn’t have to work outside the home all day, but this privilege brings her “the luxury / of thinking about [her] / existence too much.” She envies the migrant construction workers their schedules and laid out tasks—their definable purpose. The reader is led to question who sits at the top of the social hierarchy after all.

Leanne Dunic’s voice is direct and unsentimental, her language mostly spare, with sprinklings of elegant metaphor, such as “a cotton-batten sky,” or her yearning for the man from the river’s “moult in my mouth / and mine / in his.” This memoir in verse is an accessible and thought-provoking balm to the anxieties that surely swarm the minds of many readers. Just when the earth “is forgetting what it feels like to be wet,” it does rain. “We bow to the beauty of this wet,” Dunic concludes when she and her new friend split an aloe plant to indulge in its gel. With this drop of moisture, Dunic leaves us with the small, but palpable satisfaction of connection to the earth and one another.

9781772016048

Victoria-based Susan Sanford Blades published her debut novel, Fake It So Real (Nightwood) in 2020.

Poet and multidisciplinary artist, Leanne Dunic is the fiction mentor at Simon Fraser University’s The Writer’s Studio and the fiction and hybrid forms editor at Tahoma Literary Review

Wet by Leanne Dunic (Talonbooks $21.95)

WHO’S WHO BRITISH COLUMBIA

A IS FOR ALAN

The 25th edition of the quintessentially BC series, Raincoast Chronicles: mamaɫa Goes Fishing (Harbour $24.95) intertwines Alan Haig-Brown’s early experiences as a deckhand on a We Wai Kai First Nation fishing boat with the history of the province’s commercial fishing industry and its relationship with Indigenous communities. Reflecting on the 1960s and 70s, Haig-Brown captures the daily life aboard—a mix of untangling purse seine nets, sailing in perilous waters and enjoying Mitzi Assu’s hearty salmon stews. Guided by skipper Herb Assu, Haig-Brown learns of the We Wai Kai people’s sustainable approach to the environment; and he highlights the camaraderie and challenges of a fishing life.

9781998526185

B IS FOR BAKER

The latest collection of short stories by Carleigh Baker, Last Woman (M&S $24.95), offers her irreverent yet empathetic reflections on today’s chaotic world. From environmental disasters and toxic culture to billionaire escapades in space, Baker’s characters grapple with fear, belonging and intergenerational tensions in bizarre and often misguided ways. Using humour, heartbreak and critique, Last Woman tackles poetic solitude, sinkhole paranoia, sisterhood and struggles with the absurdity of modern life. Baker’s debut story collection, Bad Endings (Anvil, 2017), won the City of Vancouver Book Award, and was also a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Indigenous Voices Award for fiction.

9780771004148

C IS FOR CRAIGIE

Gregor Craigie examines Canada’s worsening housing crisis and looks for answers from around the globe in Our Crumbling Foundation: How We Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis (Random House $25). Despite housing prices stabilizing in 2023, a severe shortage remains with an estimated shortfall of 3.5 million homes by 2030. Craigie, who lives in Victoria—one of Canada’s most expensive housing markets—shares insights from over 15 years of interviews with renters, homeowners and the homeless, revealing the human impact of the crisis. He also explores successful housing models from cities like Tokyo, Berlin and Helsinki, highlighting strategies that could work in Canada.

9781039009387

D IS FOR DONNER

Marsha Donner ’s book, Mending Abortion Trauma with Presence: a journal and guidebook into the canyon of silence (FriesenPress $18.49) addresses the oftenunacknowledged trauma of terminating an unplanned pregnancy and highlights the emotional numbness that can result from the silence and lack of support surrounding the experience. Through stories and reflective writing prompts, Donner invites readers to process and heal at their own pace, offering a journey of self-compassion and emotional restoration. The book emphasizes that, while the emotional consequences may linger, facing them in a supportive environment can lead to personal reclamation, the mending of emotional fractures and new possibilities for healing and growth. 9781038307804

E IS FOR EILEEN

Eileen Delehanty Pearkes’ A River Captured: The Columbia River Treaty and Catastrophic Change (RMB $25) examines the impact of this treaty on ecosystems, Indigenous peoples, culture and cross-border politics in the Pacific Northwest. The Columbia River Basin, spanning parts of the US and Canada, is key to hydroelectric projects but has created significant ecological and social disruption. The treaty is often praised for international cooperation to address displaced communities, destroyed archaeological sites and damaged fisheries. Delehanty Pearkes’ investigative work emphasizes the consequences of Canada selling water rights to the US and reflects on the past to address current treaty changes in 2024/25. 9781771605236

F IS FOR FRANCES

Following on from her three books for middle readers about beavers, grizzlies and owls, Frances Backhouse’s

latest title is Bison: Community Builders and Grassland Caretakers (Orca $24.95). At least 30 million bison once roamed the prairies until the 1800s when settlers slaughtered them to the point of extinction. Indigenous people who relied on bison for sustenance mourned the loss as expressed by Alaxchíia Ahú (Plenty Coups), chief of the Apsáalooke Nation who said in 1928, “But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again.” Now bison lovers of all backgrounds are bringing them back from the edge as documented by Backhouse. 9781459839236

Nanaimo activist

Larry Gambone ’s

Mary!: A Graphic Memoir (Red Lion $8) tells the story, in comic book form, of Mary, a woman he met in Vancouver in the early 1970s and their volatile friendship over the course of decades. Mary! depicts a dynamic yet troubled woman, from 1960s counterculture to the world of punk rock to tending bar at the Railway Club in Vancouver. It is a rollicking, tragic ode to a rebel who died at age 54. Mary! is drawn by Nelson-based artist Josh Wapp Previously, Gambone’s memoir No Regrets: Counter-culture and Anarchism in Vancouver (Black Cat Press, 2015) was nominated for the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness. 9781778354724

Carleigh Baker

Eileen Delehanty Pearkes

Alan Haig-Brown

Larry Gambone

Alaxchiia Ah ú

Marsha Donner

In his previous book about mountaineering, Trevor Marc Hughes wrote about the first ascent of BC’s Mount Logan, Capturing the Summit: Hamilton Mack Laing and the Mount Logan Expedition of 1925 (Ronsdale Press, 2023). Hughes tackles the story of another heroic mountain climb in The Final Spire: ‘Mystery Mountain’ Mania in the 1930s (Ronsdale $24.95). The goal: getting to the top of the central spire of Mount Waddington—a sheer column of barren rock encased in ice that had already taken many lives. Four men from Winnipeg took on the challenge during the Great Depression, attracting much local publicity and drawing public attention to their daring attempt.

9781553807223

Ayub, a man haunted by his past and isolated in cold, unfamiliar Toronto is the subject of Anosh Irani’s new play, Behind the Moon (Talonbooks $21.95). Ayub works in a Mughlai restaurant, where his routine is disrupted by a late-night visit from a mysterious stranger, forcing Ayub to confront his feelings for the family he left behind and the dreams he abandoned. Themes covered are love, loss, brotherhood and the complexities of starting anew.

9781772016383

After spending twelve years as a park facility officer, John Henry has written Guide to Backcountry Adventure in Cathedral Park (FriesenPress $22.49). Nestled between lush coastal forests and the dry Okanagan wine region, Cathedral Park boasts rich biodiversity, alpine landscapes and serene lakes. Henry provides detailed trail routes, natural history insights and species identification tips that cover plants, animals and fungi. This guide is geared for both beginners and experienced hikers, offering information required for safely exploring one of BC’s most treasured parks. 9781039177192

Haida storyteller, Ḵ ung Jaadee explores the relationships that tie us to our families, the earth and our ancestors in I am Connected (Medicine Wheel $22.99) for ages 6-9. Set against the landscapes of Haida Gwaii, this story invites children to reflect on the threads of connection that bind people across time and space. Jaadee emphasizes the importance of belonging and unity with the natural world and those who came before us. Illustrated by Carla Joseph, a Cree artist from Prince George.

9781778540639

SFU labour historian, Mark Leier, has co-authored with John-Henry Harter Roles of Resistance: Game Plans for Teachers and Troublemakers (Between the Lines $34.95). The thirteen lesson plans in this book focus on learning how to become (effective) troublemakers. Designed for educators and facilitators from the union hall to the lecture hall, Roles of Resistance teaches how to fight the power with people power. Publicity says these lessons, “are bound to create a vibrant learning experience, enriching debates and provide the main tool we need to change the world: collective action.”

9781771136280

Poet and faculty emeritus of Douglas College where she taught English and creative writing for twenty-three years, Susan McCaslin has written over twenty poetry collections. Her latest book of poetry, Field Play (Ekstasis Editions $26.95), weaves together four sections—Kith & Kin Fields, Gaia Fields, War Fields and Cosmic Fields—exploring interconnectedness in life and consciousness. The poems reflect on family bonds, humanity’s relationship with Earth, the darkness of war and the mysteries of the cosmos. Through themes of unknowing, McCaslin invites readers to embrace paradoxes, as in the final poem “Poesia,” where silence and song coexist as complementary forces.

9781771715706

By Daniel Anctil

Anosh Irani

Ḵ ung Jaadee

Susan McCaslin

WHO’S WHO BRITISH COLUMBIA

N IS FOR NYBO

Every day, countless dogs are abandoned at shelters, found roaming the streets or rescued from dangerous situations. Many of these dogs come from high-kill shelters, some have been left behind and others have tragically lost their human companions. Foster parent for dogs, Darcy Nybo interprets their stories of resilience in her book, Rescue Tails: Taken from the thoughts, diaries, and journals of foster dogs as they wait for their forever homes (Artistic Warrior $15.95). A portion of the book’s proceeds will benefit rescue organizations. Nybo resides in the Okanagan, where she works full-time as a writing coach, instructor and book editor.

9781987982701

O IS FOR OSTROWSKI

Growing up, Margaret Ostrowski of Vancouver knew virtually nothing about her Polish roots. After retiring, Ostrowski explored her ancestry as she tells in Lost Legacies: Learning from Ancestral Stories for Inspiration and Policy-Making Today (DC Books $21.95), following the trail of her grandmother and father from their home in the Russian Partition of Poland to their emigration to Canada. Her grandmother’s story includes the death of infants, a gold mine and a Canadian poet (Louis Dudek who was the stepbrother of Ostrowski’s father).

9781927599624

P IS FOR PRUDENCE

The fourth in the Priscilla Tempest mystery series, Curse of the Savoy (D&M $19.95), by the late Prudence Emery and Ron Base, unfolds in 1960s London amid the glamour of the Savoy Hotel. During an opulent dinner party hosted by Orson Welles, with notable guests such as Alfred Hitchcock and Christine Keeler, an ominous curse tied to the number thirteen casts a shadow. Ignoring superstition, the attendees find themselves entangled in a web of blackmail, betrayal and murder. As chaos ensues, Priscilla Tempest, the Savoy’s press officer, is drawn into the intrigue, uncovering secrets that reach the highest levels of society. 9781771624381

Q IS FOR QUINTANA

Set in a Mexican resort, the lives of Sarah, a cynical Canadian wedding guest, and Adriana, a perfectionist hotel floor manager, intersect in unexpected ways in Christine Quintana’s play, Espejos: Clean (Playwrights Canada $19.99). Sarah’s pessimism and Adriana’s quest for order mask deeper anxieties, which come to light as their parallel realities collide. The bilingual play explores female strength, solidarity and the struggles each woman faces in navigating her world. The play was adapted and translated into Spanish by Paula Zelaya-Cervantes 9780369104588

tOne-hundred-twentyfive-ton galena boulder with 200 ounces of silver, circa 1892. From Mining Camp Tales of the Silvery Slocan. Courtesy of Sandra Ostrom and the Royal BC Museum and Archives.

S IS FOR SMITH

There’s plenty to read about British Columbia’s past gold rushes, but silver rushes played a role in the province’s history too, as told in Peter Smith’s Mining Camp Tales of the Silvery Slocan: A History of British Columbia’s Silver Rush (Heritage $34.95).

Henry’s summer at mountain bike camp takes an unexpected turn when the head counselor, Shifty, prioritizes construction work over outdoor fun

in Whistler’s Rebecca Wood Barrett’s My Summer Camp Has Mega Sloths (Orca $14.95) for ages 9-12. Frustrated, Henry’s luck changes when he reunites with his extinct bear friend, Yarp, and discovers Ice Age-era mega sloths mistaken for lake monsters. Just as things start to improve, a forest fire threatens the camp. With Shifty missing, Henry, the campers and their prehistoric companions must work together to escape danger.

Illustrated by Jaimie MacGibbon

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“From 1891 to 1900, West Kootenay’s Slocan district pushed its way into the spotlight,” writes Smith, adding “the Slocan attracted thousands of pilgrims over the following years, lured by some of the richest silver deposits ever discovered. Despite several setbacks, the Slocan was by 1897 the most important and productive mining district in all BC.”

9781772035391

T IS FOR TAWAHUM

Following on from their well-received debut, Cut to Fortress: Poems (Nightwood Editions, 2022), Tawahum Bige’s second poetry collection, Stages of Tanning Words and Remembering Spells: Part 1: Scraping Lungs Like Hide (Nightwood $19.95), is about having a sense of belonging when you’re a Two-Spirit Dene youth living in a white culture. These poems show how voice emerges for a youth growing up in “so-called Surrey, BC,” far from his Łutsël K’é Dene territories. Whispers, cries, hollers and laughs are all part of growth from childhood to young adulthood.

9780889714601

Tawahum Bige has performed poetry and hip-hop at over 50 different venues in Canada.

Cover art by Jaime MacGibbon for My Summer Camp has Mega Sloths

Orson Welles, 1960s

NAITO PHOTO

Christine Quintana

WHO’S WHO BC

Lifelong resident of Ucluelet, the small town on the west coast of Vancouver Island (and now officially a Resort Municipality), Shirley Martin has written a history of the area beginning with pre-European contact Yuułu ʔ ił and tuk̓ʷaaʔatḥ, followed by fur traders, whalers and missionaries and the drastic changes they brought, to the stories of settlers in Calm Harbour, Turbulent Seas: A History of Ucluelet (Harbour $39.95). A director of the Ucluelet and Area Historical Society, Martin is steeped in stories about the resource town that turned to tourism as the mining, logging and fishing jobs began to disappear.

9781998526161

Vanessa Winn of Victoria has contributed to Métis Matriarchs: Agents of Transition (University of Regina Press $34.95), edited by Cheryl Troupe and Doris Jeanne MacKinnon . The book explores the crucial roles Métis women played in preserving their communities during the transition from the fur trade era to a more industrialized and agrarian economy in Western Canada. Covering the late 19th to mid-20th century, this collection highlights the lives of prominent Métis women, shedding light on how they navigated colonial impacts and challenging traditional views on Western Canadian settlement and Indigenous displacement. 9781779400116

In laget hiyt toxwum / Herring to Huckleberries (HighWater $24.95) by ošil (Betty Wilson ), the seasons change and the ɬagət (herring) return to the waters of the ɬaʔəmɩn Nation, marking the start of a busy year for ošil and her grandparents. Together, they fish, pick berries and dig for clams, gathering traditional foods from the sea

and land. This bilingual picture book for ages 6-8, written in ʔayʔajuθəm and English, draws from Wilson’s childhood memories about Indigenous foodgathering traditions. The book features a glossary, pronunciation guide, map and illustrations of the foods shared in the story.

9781774921180

Huxley the cat lives with his person, Robin, on a big island in a houseboat. He is well-cared for with kibbles to eat and a warm blanket to sleep on. One spring day, they go camping and Huxley gets lost. Robin desperately searches for him for two days but has to return home for work. But Huxley is determined to get back to Robin and thus begins his journey across the big island to get home as told in Huxley’s Island Adventure (Heritage $14.95), for ages 4-8 by Haley Healey and illustrated by Kimiko Fraser. Includes a flora and fauna guide of what Huxley encountered.

9781772035421

Shortlisted for the 2024 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize, sho Yamagushiku ’s debut poetry collection, shima (M&S $22.50) is an exploration of intergenerational witness, exile and cultural repair. Yamagushiku delves into the emotional and psychic toll of cultural displacement on himself and his Okinawan community. Anchored in ancestor veneration, the narrative spans his own life and a mythic parallel, navigating themes of memory, amnesia and the fragile bond between father and son. Yamagushiku probes the roots of a pillaged heritage while grappling with a homeland that remains an unattainable dream. 9780771010927

Edited by Zoe McKenna and Joshua Gillingham , That Witch Whispers (Black Cat $20) is the second issue of the Black Cat Anthology series, offering thirteen mystical tales of witches. Set against the lush landscapes of the Pacific Northwest, the stories unfold in rainy cities, old-growth forests, eerie shores and boutique shops (including a bookstore). Features writers from across Western Canada including Délani Valin, Haley Healey, Shanon Sinn and Joel McKay 9781739007225

Adventure a Mystery a Protest a Fishing

From Where I Stand by Jody Wilson-Raybould (UBC Press $24.95)

The Final Spire: “Mystery Mountain” Mania in the 1930s by Trevor Marc Hughes (Ronsdale $24.95)

Having shaken up federal politics when she went from being a senior cabinet minister in Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government to becoming an independent Member of Parliament, Indigenous leader Jody Wilson-Raybould has published a collection of her speeches and lectures from the past ten years. She is forthright in her analysis of Canada’s colonial past and her desire for a new era of recognition and reconciliation.

It was the middle of the Great Depression when four men from Manitoba set out to climb the fearsome central spire of Mount Waddington, BC’s highest mountain. Nicknamed Mystery Mountain, it had already claimed lives and attracted wide public attention. Were the mountaineers foolish or on the cusp of fame?

Every Little Scrap and Wonder: A Small-Town Childhood by Carla Funk (Greystone $29.95)

Blockade: Diaries of a Forest Defender by Christine Lowther (Caitlin $26)

Sockeye Silver, Saltchuck Blue by Roy Henry Vickers & Robert Budd (Harbour $9.95)

Christine Lowther was arrested in 1992 for lying across the Clayoquot Arm bridge while MacMillan Bloedel fallers tried to drive to work with their chainsaws and police menaced the protestors. Drawing from her daily journals of the time, Lowther retells of the tense struggles and victories of this historic movement.

With catchy rhymes married to Roy Henry Vickers signature artwork, this children’s board book is the third instalment in a series that started with Humpback! One Eagle Soaring The concepts of colours are linked to the changing seasons on the West Coast: red tones of huck leberries in summer, silver and red flashes of spawning salmon in fall, grey rain in winter, and the sprouting of green in spring.

Raincoast Chronicles 25: mamaɫa Goes Fishing by Alan Haig-Brown (Harbour $24.95)

The Survival Guide to British Columbia by Ian Ferguson (Heritage House $19.95)

As a young man in the 1960s and early 70s, Alan Haig-Brown worked as a deckhand on a fishing boat run by the Indigenous family he married into as a teenager. He vividly describes the hard, dangerous work where “there are no typical days” and much local knowledge is required. Haig-Brown is now an experienced international marine journalist. Illustrated with black and white photographs.

Set against 1960s London in the sumptuous Savoy Hotel, fourteen guests including Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock share a meal. They forget about a curse dooming the first guest to leave a dinner with thirteen others. Once again, Priscilla Tempest, the press office head is drawn into the intrigue and murder that follows.

Poet Carla Funk grew up in a Mennonite community in Vanderhoof. After publishing five books of poetry, this is her first memoir, a paean to childhood and rural life in British Columbia. Paying tributes to both her church-going mother and her truck-driving father, she uses rich language to create the world that shaped her as a person and writer.

Having moved to B.C., humorist Ian Ferguson finds the place pretty – but also pretty scary. Here’s his guide on surviving everything from the province’s politics, the locals and the weather, to our food and fashion sense. Some ‘Fergusonian’ wisdom: B.C. is located – “to the left of Alberta”; speaking to B.C.’ers, means “not saying anything beyond, ‘I love trees’ and ‘forgive me’; and, you can “tell an outsider (filled with enthusi asm and interest) from a local (full of resentment and ennui).”

ošil (Betty Wilson) author of laget hiyt toxwum / Herring to Huckleberries.

Shirley Martin

Vanessa Winn

Curse of the Savoy: A Priscilla Tempest Mystery, Book 4 by Prudence Emery and Ron Base (D&M $19.95)

C OMMUNITY

ne of BC’s senior publishing companies, New Star Books, has announced it will no longer be releasing new titles and will soon close.

“I have made the painful decision to wind down the operations of New Star Books,” owner and operator Rolf Maurer announced on the New Star website, January 13, 2025. “I have stopped acquiring new titles; the Fall 2024 program is the last that I will have seen through to press.”

The history of New Star goes back to 1969 when a group of writers at The Georgia Straight weekly began publishing an insert they called the Georgia Straight Writing Supplement. The initial list of contributors included Stan Persky, Milton Acorn, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser and Gladys Maria Hindmarch—who were later joined by bill bissett , Judith Copithorne , Fred Wah, Brian Fawcett, George Bowering and Daphne Marlatt—all major BC literary figures.

The press’s literary focus shifted in 1974 towards more non-fiction books about current affairs and politics under publisher, Lanny Beckman. Maurer joined New Star in June 1981 as an editor and was smitten. “I had found my calling,” he says.

Prior to book publishing, Maurer had worked at newspapers, first as an office “gofer” for the well-known Vancouver Sun entertainment reporter,

NEW STAR BOOKS

AFTER 55 YEARS

Jack Wasserman, and later as a cub reporter and copy editor at The Province

When Beckman left New Star in 1990, Maurer took over as majority owner and publisher. He continued with political books but also added quality literary titles by writers such as Roy Miki, Luanne Armstrong, George Stanley , Marie Annharte Baker ,

Rolf Maurer joined New Star Books in 1981, and became owner and publisher in 1990.

testament to BC life of those times… Working Harder Isn’t Working Gold Mountain: Chinese in the New World Fantasy Government: The Fall of Bill Vander Zalm and the Future of Social Credit This Ragged Place (by Terry Glavin). Caring for Profit: How Corporations are Taking over Canada’s Health Care Crossing the Line: Canada and Free Trade with Mexico (by Jim Sinclair). Highwire Act: Power, Pragmatism and the Harcourt Legacy Last Stands: A Journey through North America’s Vanishing Rainforests Pacific Press: The Unauthorized Story of Vancouver’s Newspaper Monopoly and Asper Nation: Canada’s Most Dangerous Media Company…hundreds of fearless, important books that took everyday issues and everyday people seriously and have helped shape the political climate of our times; books of the sort nobody else did then and almost nobody at all does today.”

In 2011, Maurer received the Jim Douglas Publisher of the Year Award in BC. At the ceremony, Harbour Publishing’s Howard White noted that New Star Books had published “some of the most necessary BC books that now stand as an unmatched historical

In his parting words, Maurer says he is grateful for the opportunity “to work with writers in bringing their books to readers,” adding that he is also “grateful to have lived and worked in an era when the value of the work we do, as publishers, writers, and others involved in publishing, was valued, and supported by citizens through the taxes they pay. I am proud of the role, however small, that New Star, over the last 55 years, has played in creating a dialogue in this country about how we live.”

Sharon Thesen, Michael Turner, Lisa Robertson and others.

QUICKIES

BULLETIN BOARD FOR INDEPENDENTS

Rainforest

by Norma Kerby Paintings by Joan Turecki

C OMMUNITY

Prudence Emery

Born in Nanaimo in 1936, Prudence Emery published her memoir Nanaimo Girl (Cormorant, 2020), which is mainly about her years as a Hollywood publicist. She went on to co-write with Ron Base four books for the Priscilla Tempest Mystery Series, the last title published posthumously.

by Marsha Donner

Prudence Emery died in Victoria on April 14, 2024. Her murder mysteries were based on the five years she spent as the Press and Public Relations Officer at the Savoy Hotel in England, hosting stars such as Sir Laurence Olivier, Marlene Dietrich, Noel Coward and Louis Armstrong In an interview with BC BookWorld, Emery said the hotel’s “rich history dating back to 1889, studded with royalty, celebrities and the odd scandal, set against the epitome of luxury, was perfect background fodder for a

Kerri Scott

Gary H. Karlsen

(1936 – 2024)

mystery novel.” The idea for the series came from Ron Base, based in Ontario, who had worked with Emery when he was a film critic and showbiz journalist. Their collaboration produced Death at the Savoy (D&M, 2022), Scandal at the Savoy (D&M, 2023), Princess at the Savoy (D&M, 2024) and Curse of the Savoy (D&M, 2025).

“There may be more fun than dropping famous names and dead bodies around a legendary luxury hotel, but I can’t imagine what it is,” said Emery. “Also, who knew that collaborating on a book [with Base] working four thousand miles apart could be such fun?”

In the field of literature, Emery’s longtime friendship with Krystyne and Scott Griffin is noteworthy, leading to her involvement with the launch of the Griffin Poetry Prize.

Maria Tippett (1944 – 2024)

Art historian, biographer and academic, Maria Tippett, whose book Emily Carr: A Biography (Oxford, 1979; Penguin, 1982; Stoddart, 1998; Fitzhenry and Whiteside 2002; Anansi, 2006) won the Governor General’s Award, died of pancreatic cancer on August 8, 2024.

Born in Victoria on December 9, 1944, Tippett became known for her accessible biographies of famous Canadian artists including Bill Reid, Yousuf Karsh and Frederick Varley. She also wrote books on Canadian war art, sculpture, a memoir and two collections of short stories.

the nature of BC’s distinct culture by profiling artists Emily Carr, Francis Rattenbury , Arthur Erickson, Jean Coulthard , George Woodcock and George Ryga. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Basil Stuart-Stubbs Book Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book on BC, as well as a Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize.

Tippett received her BA from Simon Fraser University in 1972 and her PhD from London University in 1982. She was a lecturer from 1977 to 1986 at SFU and UBC and Senior Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge University (1995-2004).

Field Marshall, not Admiral, Kitchener was Britain’s Secretary of State for War; he was on his way to meet with the Tsar of Russia when the ship on which he was travelling struck a mine, and he died (1916).

[Editor’s note: In our review in the Winter 2024-2025 issue titled “The Reckoning,” we mistakenly referred to the man whom Kitchener, Ontario is named after as an Admiral; Horatio Herbert Kitchener was a Field Marshall as pointed out by Professor Wynn.]

Graeme Wynn

UBC Professor Emeritus Vancouver

little)

Jack Shadbolt (1909–1998) was an important presence in my development as a young working writer and was generous in taking me under his wing in learning how to write about exhibits that were abstract in a way beyond me at that time [BC BookWorld review, “You Don’t Know Jack,” Winter 2024-2025 issue]. My wife and I went to Collioure deep in southern France near the Spanish border after Jack recommended it as a place to work. When he and Doris went to France in the 1950s, they’d ended up there themselves. It was a backwater and cheap. Jack looked at a studio across the road from the bay and told the landlady they’d take it. She said, “Oh, you’re a painter? We used to rent this studio to another artist, old Mr. Matisse!”

Trevor Carolan

Deep Cove

For many years, I’ve found BC BookWorld a wonderful source for finding something new to read. Thank you! I read Zia’s Story by Shahnaz Qayumi and found the story incredibly appealing [BC BookWorld review, Summer 2024]. It was the character’s voice that made the novel come alive, drawing me into a story that touched my heart and deepened my understanding of life for refugees.

Sophie Rosen Vancouver

After moving to Pender Island, Tippett completed Made in British Columbia: Eight Ways of Making Culture (Harbour, 2015) and Sculpture in Canada: A History (D&M, 2017). Made in British Columbia explored

Tippett was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1992 and received an LLD from Windsor University in 1992. She also received honorary doctorates from SFU and University of Victoria in 2006.

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Prudence Emery

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