BC BookWorld, Vol 39, No. 2, Summer 2025

Southern Gothic

Southern Gothic

artbyCarolLaFave

BC TOP SELLERS

Sarah Gilbert

Our Lady of Mile End (Anvil Press $20)

Kelly Hutchison & Dave Hutchison Vancouver Island: The Art of the Landscape (Sandhill Book Marketing $49.95)

Carol Anne Hilton

The Rise of Indigenous Economic Power (New Society $29.99)

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

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

Peter Smith Mining Camp Tales of the Silvery Slocan: A History of British Columbia’s Silver Rush (Heritage House $34.95)

Cecily Nicholson Crowd Source (Talonbooks $19.95)

Patrice Dutil Ballots and Brawls: The 1867 Canadian General Election (UBC Press $27.95)

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

Alan Haig-Brown Raincoast Chronicles 25: m am aɫa goes fishing (Harbour $24.95)

Richard Wagamese & Bridget George The Animal People Choose a Leader (D&M $24.95)

PEOPLE

tBill Gaston has won the Victoria/Butler Book Prize, the Writers’ Trust Timothy Findley Award (for a body of work, mid-career), the Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction and the National Post Book of the Year. He lives on Gabriola Island. He has also been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Giller Prize.

Busking baptism

In a road less travelled, Nelson’s Philip Seagram leaves his well-paying job—provincial court judgeship—to head across the country busking with his guitar as he tells in No Judgment And Other Busking Stories (Caitlin $24).

During the Covid pandemic, when Seagram was not yet sixty, he experiences “the sudden deaths of a number of friends and acquaintances, people who were about the same age as me, and like me, assumed they had many years left to do all the things they wanted to do while here. They left a lot on the table,” he writes.

M Dark

any of the characters in Bill Gaston’s eighth collection, Tunnel Island (Thistledown $24.95), have dark backstories. Others lead unconventional, eccentric lives. Loneliness is widespread.

Gaston describes the fictional island somewhere in the Salish Sea as “mostly forest, but a few thousand people lived here and it had a bit of everything. A village they called Downtown. A small college. Huge estates, but also a soup kitchen.”

The eleven stories begin with Jack, a handyman who does odd jobs. Jack is so good at fixing worn out lawn mowers, old boats and other miscellany that he’s nicknamed “the Junk Whisperer.” He’s seemingly trustworthy and many of the wealthy out-of-towners who own holiday residences pay Jack to look after their places while they sit empty. But Jack has a past that involves a marriage breakup and the loss of his daughter. He dreams of making a pile of money for his estranged child, which leads to a ruinous decision.

Other people in Gaston’s imagined coterie include a dying Wiccan and her loving partner; a transplanted New Brunswicker and loner who accidently made it big in the dot-com era; a couple torn apart after the tragic and surreal disappearance of their baby daughter, who later remarry; and a lonely woman whose secret lover is about to meet an unhappy end. Publicity says the stories immerse readers “in a world rendered tender and tolerable by human folly and our stumbling attempts at redemption.”

Corvid sensibility backstories

A common sight in Metro

Vancouver is the migration of thousands of crows flying west at dawn and then eastward at dusk, back from where they had come.

Poet and bird lover, Cecily Nicholson writes of this magical flow, “sometimes a cloak above Grandview Highway,” in her poetry book, Crowd Source (Talonbooks $19.95). She learns the crows are

So, Seagram quits his good job. He soon realizes that he needs “to do something to mark the end of this part of my life, to put some distance between it and me, to help me disengage.” He had not been across Canada, and being a novice musician, he decides that “a busking trip represented a real challenge, a step well outside my comfort zone.” Seagram’s handmade busking sign explains his intentions: “I’m playing for fun! Give or take what you need ($). Balance, Ukraine relief.” Along the way he learns a surprising lesson about performing songs and busking. 9781773861616

returning to their roosting place at Still Creek in Burnaby, a part of the ancient Brunette River watershed. Wrapped within this paean to crows is Nicholson’s attention to climate crisis. “Globally, the diminishing of wetlands is a slow-moving catastrophe,” she told Rob Taylor in an interview for Read Local BC. “Attending to a local example of this was within my grasp.”

Nicholson’s publisher describes this poetry collection as “a text for all concerned with practising ecological futurities befitting corvid sensibilities.”

Nicholson’s previous books have won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and a Governor General’s Award. 9781772016581

Social

Accounts: Ingela Kasparaitis

Consultants:

Deliveries:

Cecily Nicholson

Peter Smith

Sarah Gilbert

Philip Seagram

PEOPLE

Millennial GRANDMOTHER

“My grandson, coming of age in an age of anxiety,” says Arleen Paré of the focus of her attention in her book of narrative poems, Encrypted (Caitlin $20). She is writing of Fall, 2020 when her 19-year-old grandson had come to live in her basement to attend second year Computer Science studies.

Paré describes him as fresh and sweet with “… hair the colour of new coal,” adding, “your eyes / your dimpled face.”

But in less than two months, things go wrong when Paré’s grandson drops his coursework due to bouts of severe anxiety and depression.

She posits reasons for the downward spiral, including the impact of social media, climate crisis, over eight billion people worldwide, a video gaming addiction, endemic depression— all issues that other grandparents (and parents) worry about.

“You live in a fortified / video game,” writes Paré. “I don’t even know the town’s name.”

With empathetic words and allusions to a wide swath of other poets, Paré’s poems grapple with the contemporary life of youth today.

9781773861647

Origins of The Beachcombers

When asked by the CBC producer Philip Keatley (1929–2007) where to find a coastal village authentic enough for The Beachcombers TV series, publisher and writer Howard White spoke against Gibsons because he thought it was “too far gone even then, way back in the early 1970s.” Instead, White argued for Egmont, “a more unspoiled example of the traditional BC fishing village.” White adds, “a lot of people have reason to be grateful he ignored my counsel, since The Beachcombers, filmed in Gibsons, went on to enjoy a 19-year run as the most successful TV drama ever produced in Canada, while a later show called Ritter’s Cove, which Keatley did locate in Egmont, bombed after a few seasons.” This story and more are packed into The Sunshine Coast (Harbour $36.95), written by White with photography by the area’s talented photographers.

9781990776809

OAnother new coffee table book, this one covering Vancouver Island and the southern Gulf Islands, is Vancouver Island: The Art of the Landscape (Sandhill $49.95) featuring lush imagery by Dave Hutchison with text by Kelly Hutchison. The husband-and-wife team are selfdescribed dendrophiles (lovers of trees and forests)— and their passion shows.

Dallas Hunt is an assistant professor at UBC’s Department of English Language and Literatures. He has been nominated for a 2025 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.

9781738378609

Imagine no deer, moose or salmon

n his second poetry collection, Teeth (Nightwood $19.95), Dallas Hunt returns to themes of ongoing colonial destruction and violence on Indigenous peoples. His response to a news item about graves at a former Indigenous residential school is the poem, ‘169 “anomalies”’. The use of those words “… is a brutal / and brutalizing / way to end /a sentence /.” Hunt’s family were caught up in the brutality: “nuns used to break rulers / on my câpân’s hands” he writes, adding “and then your / family members / sit in an unmarked grave: / the enormity of this / is hard to comprehend / my ancestors were not / anomalies. they were / children navigating a / world made too cruel / for them.”

Hunt’s agony and anger are clear but so, too, are his pleas to be seen as a modern, urban Indigenous man in ‘there’s a poem for everyone’: “imagine a poem that wasn’t about deer, / moose or salmon. that we complained about how shitty the weather / was, how a bush didn’t offer the berries we wanted … / … a poem that sees us struggle / with our kin because we fight with one another. and once this colonial / edifice falls by the wayside we still have to grapple with the fact that / some of our relations are difficult.

9780889714526

Glaciers & grizzlies

arly in her career, Sarah Boon had to decide whether to be a writer or an academic researcher. A field trip to Hilda Glacier in the Canadian Rockies ignited her scientific passion, leading her to pursue a PhD in cold regions hydrology in the High Arctic while writing on the side.

There were adventurous times, such as traversing John Evans Glacier on Ellesmere Island—the northernmost island in Canada; building weather stations in northern British Columbia; and scaring away grizzlies and polar bears as she describes in Meltdown: The Making and Breaking of a Field Scientist (University of Alberta Press $27.99). Boon also weaves the role of women in science into the story, featuring historic and present-day women in exploration, such as Philadelphians Mary Schäffer Warren and Mary Vaux, and Canadian Phyllis Munday. But academia, departmental politics and being a woman in science took a toll on her, precipitating a mental health crisis that ultimately ended her research and pushed her into a writing career. She now lives on southern Vancouver Island and blogs at watershednotes.ca.

9781772127911

Molly’s Reach, an old liquor store refigured for the fictional café made famous in The Beachcombers , which became a real restaurant after the TV series ended.

Arleen Paré

Sarah Boon

P ROTEST REVIEW

Christine Lowther’s arrest in 1992: “Police walked into camp and arrested young people who continued to sing their hearts out even as they threw themselves in front of approaching company trucks … We were like hunted animals.”

BY SONJA PINTO

BRUTISH BEAUTIFUL

BRUTISH

S COLUMBIA

ome of the world’s largest remaining areas of oldgrowth forests are on Vancouver Island, including Ada’itsx/ Fairy Creek territory near Port Renfrew. Headlines were made there in recent years due to protesters defending against clearcut logging in what became the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history with over one thousand arrests. It’s a fight that goes back decades as Christine Lowther demonstrates in Blockade, a memoir detailing her early 1990s involvement in the fight to stop clearcutting in other parts of Vancouver Island. Lowther belongs to a group called The Friends of Clayoquot Sound, an organization that defends old-growth forests and holds values like consensus, non-violence and Indigenous self-determination. Her book is written from a settler activist’s perspective and Lowther reflects on the learning and mistakes that inevitably come with settler activism on unceded land.

Lowther learned about the blockades at Kaxi:ks/Walbran and Tlaoquiat/Clayoquot Sound by seeing posters stuck on utility poles. Bringing along two friends, Lowther traveled to join the blockade camp in the woods. “As soon as we hit the logging road, the contrast between the beauty of the forests and the gouged-out, desertified look of clear-cuts was shocking,” she says.

At camp, there were blockaders from all walks of life. Children as young as six participated with their parents alongside protesters in their 80s and all ages in between. Activists from around the world joined the blockade. Despite the camp’s diversity, the forest defenders were stereotyped as radicals, “just kids”, foreigners and welfare bums. Challenging these stereotypes, Lowther writes that most blockaders (including herself) had taken leave from their jobs to participate.

As industrial logging of old growth forests continues amidst protests, Christine Lowther bears witness to the blockade over thirty years ago in Clayoquot Sound.

She met people from surrounding Indigenous nations and gained insights from their teachings that shaped her own activism. Lowther tells how she discovered that the casual use of terminology downplays the devastation that human industrial activity does.

“For many years now Gisele Martin, a Tlaoquiaht woman, has been pointing out that the term ‘land use’ should be replaced by ‘land care,’” says Lowther.

Lowther kept extensive journals throughout her stay at the blockade.

“I wanted to record every detail: tents, kitchens, placards, people, art, children, dogs. A week felt like a month. Away from the city, time passed slowly.”

The camp conditions were often wet and cold, but there was a communal feeling among the defenders; everyone looked out for each other’s safety and contributed to the community’s wellbeing.

The blockade “offered the structure of workshops and trainings to better prepare participants for various scenarios with cops, media, and angry loggers,” says Lowther. An eye-opener is Lowther’s excerpts of the conversations the protesters had while roleplaying loggers and activists. Blockaders also collectively made signs with slogans like “One Forest, One Fate,” “Beautiful Brutish Columbia,” and “Pacific Plunderland” to aid their protest efforts. Despite the peaceful ambience of

camp, the blockaders’ interactions with cops and loggers were anything but peaceful. “Police walked into camp and arrested young people who continued to sing their hearts out even as they threw themselves in front of approaching company trucks,” recalls Lowther. “We were like hunted animals.”

She documents the non-violent tactics and strategies used by land defenders to deter loggers and police. Methods like U-locks, tripods and tree sitting were common tactics. Other strategies included planned strategic arrests and “support people” who provided emotional support and info for the planned arrestees. “Cops are meant to ignore support persons, not arrest them,” explains Lowther. However, this was not always the case. Lowther describes multiple instances where support people were also detained. “When arrested themselves, they can carry out none of this work.”

“The forest was full of cops watching us,” Lowther remembers. Cops wore video cameras and snooped through people’s bags. “Was that legal?” Lowther wonders. Yet, when confronted, some police seemed uncertain about their stance on old growth. “We’re not given a chance to think about it,” one officer told Lowther.

Blockaders were read injunctions and other confusing mandates. “The

“Our presence each morning was a victory. They would never be unwatched again!” Christine Lowther

legalese was baffling,” Lowther says. She and many other land defenders were hit with charges like contempt for court and drawn into lengthy legal battles for their protest actions. Lowther herself eventually got arrested. “I did not feel like I could go willingly from the destruction of the planet, so again I was painfully dragged [away by cops].” After this, she had to appear in court to defend herself and was banned from going near the blockades.

Lowther also details fraught interactions with loggers, who were predominantly working-class men. Many of them expressed apprehension about the work they were doing but ultimately they had to put food on the table for their families. Lowther emphasizes the need for retraining and support for loggers who, she notes, will be out of jobs anyway when there is no more old growth to log. “We have to green the economy without leaving anyone behind. It’s survival,” she says.

Despite all the challenges and obstacles, Lowther continued participating in the blockades and she gleaned insight from each day spent in the blockades. “The forest constantly changed as we hiked through it,” she says. The trees surrounding the blockade were constant reminders of the importance of their struggle. “At night the miracle of their existence was somehow closer to being within reach; in the darkness they seemed awake, watchful, and wise. We never forgot why we were there.”

Blockade features several photos from the 90s Clayoquot camp and aerial photos showing clearcuts as recent as 2024. This memoir is essential reading for understanding the current struggle to defend old growth on so-called Vancouver Island. Thirty years later, many of Lowther’s fellow blockaders keep in touch, commemorating anniversaries of mass arrests in group chats and reminiscing about the impact of their protests.

Despite the ongoing threats to oldgrowth forests that continue to this day, Lowther’s hope seems unwavering: “Our presence each morning was a victory. They would never be unwatched again!”

9781773861609

Sonja Pinto is a writer, photographer, printmaker and book reviewer. They reside on the unceded territories of the l

peoples (Victoria, BC).

Blockade:

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

O UTDOORS REVIEW

Climbing Mount Arrowsmith on Vancouver Island in the 1920s, Don and Phyllis Munday spotted a towering mountain range far to the east. The famous climbing couple resolved then to explore the peaks to be found between Knight and Bute Inlets. Their published accounts about attempting to climb one in particular, called Mystery Mountain, sparked a mania among mountaineers.

BY TOM HAWTHORN

Mystery Mountain was often obscured by cloud, by fog and by the haze of distant forest fires. It was in a remote, forbidding environment where potentially deadly squalls occurred even during the summer climbing season.

“It looked very forbidding,” Phyllis Munday noted on her first closeup view in 1926, “and far away with all the icefalls in front of it.”

They were to discover the summit was even more awe-inspiring.

“Only a few feet distant,” Don Munday wrote after their 1935 expedition, “the great spire poised in the void, an incredible nightmarish thing that must be seen to be believed, and then it is hard to believe; it is difficult to escape [the] appearance of exaggeration when dealing with a thing which in itself is an exaggeration.”

A photograph of the spire adorns the cover of The Final Spire. It is a rocky, craggy, ice- and snow-covered raised middle finger to any who dare to tame it.

And try the Mundays did. Again and again. Trevor

Marc Hughes tells a riveting story in The Final Spire about those who sought to conquer Mystery Mountain. The author of three previous books, including Capturing the Summit (Ronsdale, 2023) and Zero Avenue to Peace Park (Last Autograph, 2016), Hughes includes

helpful background on the elite groups of scientists and clergymen who pioneered mountaineering in the Alps during the Victorian era. Those early climbers did so to answer questions both scientific and theological, their proximity to the heavens accentuating the spiritual nature of their quest.

Hughes credits Don Munday’s writings in mountaineering newsletters for sparking several expeditions. “Munday was also developing the forbidding reputation of Mystery Mountain,” writes Hughes, “generating awe in readers but also throwing down the gauntlet, creating a romanticism and allure for this remote environment, inhospitable to all but the hardiest of regional mountaineers, and also piquing the interest of those who might come from farther afield than British Columbia.”

Omystery mountain stands 13,186-feet tall (4,019 metres), the tallest of British Columbia’s Coast Mountains and the tallest mountain to be entirely within the province. (Both Mount Fairweather and Mount Quincy Adams are taller, though they straddle the Alaska-British Columbia border.) In 1927, the government named it Mount Waddington after Alfred Waddington , the colonial politician and businessman who, in 1862, sought to build an ill-fated road connecting Bute Inlet to Fort Alexandria and the Cariboo gold fields beyond, sparking a war with the Tsilhqot’in people, who feared further devastation from smallpox. Of course, the local Indigenous people, the Homalco, also known as the Xwémalhkwu, have a name of their own for the mountain: Xwe7xw. To promote his road, Waddington hired the engraver Frederick Whymper to produce drawings and watercolours. These in turn were to be sold to the Illustrated London News to stimulate interest in possible investors for this new road in a far-off land. It was the artist’s younger brother, Edward, who first

Don and Phyllis Munday were the mountaineering couple of their day, best known for exploring and documenting Mount Waddington and the Coast Mountains. In 2022, one of the tunnel-boring machines for Vancouver’s Broadway Subway Project was named after Phyllis.

SURVIVING MYSTERY MOUNTAIN SURVIVING

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

The final tower of Mount Waddington (Mystery Mountain), as seen from the northwest peak.

tconquered the Matterhorn, though four men of his party died on the descent. In Whymper’s works, the author finds the connection between the Victorian mania for mountaineering and one sparked 70 years later in British Columbia.

The expeditions faced treacherous circumstances. “Threatening avalanches. Deep crevasses. Daunting icefalls. Collapsing ice and rock,” Hughes writes. “The overall impression for the [Mundays’] 1927 expedition is that of an environment that was not only inhospitable but presented a climb of excessive danger and challenge, even for the experienced climber.”

Mountaineering was never for the fainthearted. The Final Spire is littered with the names of climbers who died in falls and avalanches, their names added to geographic features as a memorial. In cheering on the exploits of those seeking to tame Waddington, a reader worries about the fate of climbers. The end can come suddenly, without warning.

“Only a few feet distant, the great spire poised in the void, an incredible nightmarish thing that must be seen to be believed, and then it is hard to believe...”

DON MUNDAY

Oin 1934, four friends from winnipeg drove a four-yearold Plymouth towing a trailer loaded with food and equipment west in an attempt to tame the mountain from the east. The Neave brothers—Ferris, 33, and Roger, 28—were joined by Campbell Secord, 21, and Arthur Davidson, the least experienced climber among them (though outfitted with new boots). In their famously flat province, the men had trained by climbing a rock quarry in running shoes.

In the days before the Trans-Canada Highway, even the drive from the Manitoba capital through the Rockies and into the British Columbia Interior was fraught. The car’s tires suffered blowouts, as did the burdened trailer. Rain turned roads west of Williams Lake into muddy gumbo. Gales turned a lake into a roiling sea. And the terrain was too treacherous for pack horses, forcing the men to cache supplies and equipment as they advanced to the mountain in stages.

Once on Mount Waddington, they faced true peril— all recounted in a diary which allows the author to take us along with the men as they gingerly seek a path across crevasses.

“One which remains in the memory,” Roger Neave wrote, “was spanned by a thin snow-bridge pierced by two holes through which the prone occupant got a stimulating view of the depths below. It was crossed by faith, eked out by a wriggling motion of the buttocks.”

The Winnipeggers don’t reach the summit, but they also survive—a miracle and a relief to the reader.

spoiler alert: mount waddington is finally conquered in 1936 after more than a dozen failed attempts. In the end, the journey to the top is far more interesting than being at the top. These were people “who longed to connect with nature,” Hughes writes, “not necessarily for their own glory, but to glorify and accentuate nature, and to further know themselves.”

9781553807223

Tom Hawthorn’s anecdotal history of professional baseball in Vancouver, Play Ball!, has been published by Echo Storytelling.

New books from BC and around the world

Find in the BC Ferries Gift Shop or Your Local Bookstore or at greystonebooks.com

children’s books adult nonfiction

Henry Charles & Shoshannah Greene

A beautifully illustrated reimagining of the origins of hockey from an Indigenous lens.

978-1-77840-175-6

Jana Curll

This hilarious new graphic novel explores the ecosystem of a bay and the marine creatures and plant life that call it home.

HC 978-1-77840-102-2

PB 978-1-77840-279-1

Stephen Hui

A must-have new edition of British Columbia’s bestselling hiking guidebook.

978-1-77840-226-5

Friederike Otto

A groundbreaking investigation into extreme weather from one of the world’s most celebrated thinkers on climate change.

978-1-77840-162-6

David Suzuki, Sarah Ellis & Sheena Lott

In this beautiful tribute to the Pacific rainforest, discover the surprising connection between salmon and the forest, and why they need each other.

978-1-77840-237-1

Alex McKeen and George Harwood Smith

Discover 100 amazing places to swim outdoors.

978-1-77840-133-6

Kallie George & Carmen Mok

A playful yet calming book about wonderful forest sounds.

978-1-77164-738-0 now in paperback!

Andreas Ammer

A beautifully illustrated celebration of the biology, culture, art, and taste of oysters.

978-1-77840-127-5

Don Munday makes a rope into a handrail, pulling it taut as Phyllis Munday, with a 60lb pack on her back, crosses Scar Creek on their way to Mount Waddington (Mystery Mountain).

MEMOIR INTERVIEW

arm-reduction activist and host of the awardwinning podcast Crackdown, Garth Mullins has written a memoir about his own addiction experiences and battles against societal oppression of drug addicts. Mullins is also a journalist, musician and organizer with the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users.

HBC BookWorld’s David Lester interviewed Mullins about his book, Crackdown: Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs 9780385674898

BC BOOKWORLD: What were the origins of your early activism?

GARTH MULLINS: I was born with albinism—no pigment in the skin, hair and eyes—and I’m blind. I identified with the underdog from a young age. I was radicalized when I found out that the superpowers were ready to blow us all up with nuclear weapons. I started a group at my school. We joined with other activists from around the city, borrowed a bunch of little boats and formed a picket line on the ocean in English Bay. Our little flotilla tried to stop a US nuclear warship from docking in Vancouver harbour. The ship blew right through us. After we got everyone safely back on shore, I realized I had a taste for organizing. I spent my life in the labour movement and community organizing against fascism, police brutality, global capitalism, colonialism and climate apocalypse.

BCBW: What about your experience as a drug user?

GM: Growing up, I started feeling like a ghost in my own life. I felt like a loser. I hated myself. I was even suicidal sometimes. I just didn’t want to exist. At age twelve, I started drinking and smoking weed. But one night on a San Francisco rooftop, I injected my first taste of black tar heroin, and I knew I was home. All my self-hate and that demon-haunted feeling just melted away. It was replaced with sunshine in my veins and a warm blanket wrapped around me.

For me, opioids were never about getting wrecked but about getting whole. I wasn’t getting high. I was accessing a calm, safe place of forgiveness and love. I felt good about myself. I felt normal. So of course, I would do anything to return to this place as often as I could.

Through it all, I felt deeply ashamed and tried not to let people know I had a habit. I tried to kick cold turkey. I tried to get on methadone. I tried 12-step. Nothing stuck. Now I only use prescribed opioids—mostly methadone. But it took me a long time to get here. Friends got locked up for long stretches. Many died. After so much death, my shame started to give way to grief and anger. And I joined the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) and started to put my anger into action. BCBW: How did the “war on drugs” fail society?

Garth Mullins t

from the front-lines of addiction & activism DISPATCHES

from the front-lines of addiction & activism DISPATCHES

GM: Fifty thousand people in Canada died from overdose in the last decade and it didn’t need to happen. The vast majority died from illicit street fentanyl. Politicians vow to stamp out drugs. Trump had Canada appoint a Fentanyl Czar. But this is a childish dream. You can get drugs anywhere. Even in jail. Police in Canada have been trying to stamp out drugs since the early twentieth century. Back then, people smoked opium. Once opium was outlawed, the drug supply chain innovated, creating smaller, more potent narcotics. Heroin

Latino. All communities do drugs, but some communities get over-policed.

BCBW: Any stories you can share about those you’ve worked with on the frontlines of the struggle?

GM:I have been an organizer with the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users for over a decade. I felt a lot of shame about being a drug user, but I was also angry that my friends and community were dying. Then I met Laura Shaver. I went with her to meetings with government officials. I watched her do interviews with the media and

Why the War on Drugs is failing and how Garth Mullins is fighting back.

gave users more bang for the buck and was easier to smuggle. But it was replaced by fentanyl, which itself is giving way to benzo-dope and tranqdope. The heavier the enforcement, the more potent the drugs get. Prohibition created the illegal drug market, where there is no regulation over potency or ingredients.

When I was 19, I was briefly locked up in a huge US jail for drug possession. As I got to know my fellow prisoners, I realized that most of us were in there for drug-related offenses. And most of the prisoners were Black or

speak to students. Laura’s a straight shooter. She talked about her own drug use without being embarrassed or ashamed. As an activist, I was pretty outspoken about many issues but not this one. Organizing alongside Laura, I was able to lose my shame and speak openly about my own life.

Hugh Lampkin , another VANDU leader, told me “VANDU is a place of redemption. No matter who you were before, this is where you become who you were supposed to be. As we make the world new, we make ourselves new, too.” I knew I was in the right place.

BCBW: Crackdown asks us to reimagine our response to drug use. What is the way forward?

GM: As a society, we have to recognize that human beings have always done drugs. We have to grow up and abandon infantile dreams about a drug-free world.

We need to rip up the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. The illicit drug supply is a Wild West. With alcohol, there are rules around age, potency, business hours, taxation. But with drugs there are no rules. That’s why people die. To stop the mass death, prescribed pharmaceutical alternatives to illicit street drugs need to be available. This will starve organized crime and greatly reduce fatalities.

Simple drug possession should not mean arrest. Criminalization has made drug users into pariahs who are forced to live outside of society and to hide our drug use in the shadows and alleys. True decriminalization is an invitation back into society.

Before our governments thump their chests and talk about involuntary treatment, there needs to be voluntary treatment—culturally safe, properly regulated, trauma-informed and patient-centred and available on demand. Mental health should be covered under the Canada Health Act. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) treatment was huge for me, but I could only access it because I have a union job with extended benefits. Otherwise, you have to pay out-of-pocket.

Crackdown: Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs by Garth Mullins (Doubleday Canada $34.95).

Journeys to the Nearby

A Gardener Discovers the Gentle Art of Untravelling

ELSPETH BRADBURY

Inspired by world travellers, Elspeth sets out to explore the world that exists in her own garden.

“Her wry sense of humour, often self-deprecating, makes for a highly-relatable travel guide. Highly recommended!”

978-1-55380-724-7

Inside the House Inside

ROSALIND GOLDSMITH

For lovers of gritty short, short fiction.

A remarkable debut collection of cutting-edge prose, rich in compassion.

“The stories are bite-size wonders. They explode once ingested, like swallowing whole worlds.”

ANNE FLEMING, author of Giller-nominated Curiosities

978-1-55380-726-1

Keefer Street

DAVID SPANER

Jake leaves Vancouver to fight 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.”

The Final Spire

‘Mystery Mountain’ Mania in the 1930s

TREVOR MARC HUGHES

For fans of adventure and survival stories.

In 1934, four mountaineers from Manitoba headed west to British Columbia. Their goal? To conquer B.C.’s tallest mountain.

978-1-55380-722-3 | 6 x 9 | 240 pp | $24.95 |

The Nothing Club

CATHY BEVERIDGE

Four delinquent teens are inadvertently pulled into a criminal investigation that challenges their deepest values and misconceptions.

“A focus on spirituality freshens this tale of a group of misfits who develop unlikely friendships.” KIRKUS

978-1-55380-728-5 | 978-1-55380-729-2 (e-book)

Untold Tales of Old British Columbia

DANIEL MARSHALL

“An exciting tour de force. Marshall has achieved a considerable feat — he tells a vast history in succinct, yet engaging, ways.” BC STUDIES

|

Powerful BC books showcasing stories of

Nominated: Western Canada Jewish Book Award for Fiction

Nominated: Bill Duthie Booksellers Choice Award

Nominated: George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Lit

COMICS REVIEW

The Germans had quotas that determined the number of civilians to be killed in response to the deaths or wounding of German soldiers.

In November, 1942, the resistance blows up the Gorgopotamos railway bridge that linked northern and southern Greece.

Partisans:

A Graphic History of Anti-Fascist Resistance edited by Raymond Tyler & Paul Buhle (Between the Lines $34.95)

BY ROBIN M c CONNELL

here is a concept around studying history that it helps us understand our past and the present. Furthermore, when we better understand social movements through time, it can provide us with the tools to succeed in the future.

TThe study of history can also be devastatingly profound. Just over 100 years ago, there was a rise of fascism throughout Europe, starting in Italy in 1922, and spreading to Spain and Germany and into World War II. Fascism did not end with the fall of Berlin and the defeat of the Nazis in 1945. Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco ruled until his passing in 1975. Throughout, ordinary people with little power or resources resisted in whatever ways they could, a lesson for those now who are disturbed by the current streams of authoritarian governments emerging in the Western world.

O working with a range of experienced writers and car toonists, editors Paul Buhle and Raymond Tyler explore groups that fought against European fascist governments and movements in the 1930s and early 1940s as the world became engulfed in war, in Partisans: A Graphic History of Anti-Fascist Resistance. These early partisans were made up of diverse and disparate groups of predominantly everyday civilians

The brutality only increases support and recruits for the partisans.

RISING UP FASCISM

In Northern Greece, Axis collaborationist death squads ravage towns and villages with random acts of violence.

political chaos in ten simple pages. It’s an excellent example of how comics can effectively convey complex ideas in a way that is easy to understand while respecting readers’ intelligence. Legendary underground cartoonist, Sharon Rudahl, whose work is iconic and singularly stylistic, contributes a more comfort-

Soviet Partisans, story by Raymond Tyler with art by Gary and Laura Dumm

Tito’s Partisans, story and art by Seth Tobocman

The Hungarian Resistance, story by Sander Feinberg with art by Summer McClinton

art by Sharon Rudahl

Andartiko: Fighting Fascism in Greece, story and art by David Lester

based story of the great resistance work of singer Josephine Baker. Using lush colours and an illustrative sense of whimsy, Rudahl joyously shares the way that Baker was able to utilize her status as a popular performer to surreptitiously distribute information to resistance fighters during a tour in North Africa. Her work was key in allowing local militias to prepare for the allied invasion through North Africa that provided the first step towards the liberation of Europe, moving from Egypt to Sicily and up through Italy. Her story is steeped in horrible irony as Baker, a Black American, had initially moved to France because of the oppression and racism in America. Bak er continues to be recognized and celebrated in France with high state honors.

Partisans also contains shocking examples of atroci ties committed to maintain brutal control over occupied and civilian populations, including: David Lasky

Uprising: A Jewish Partisan in Eastern Europe; Trina Robbins other legendary cartoonist, who died in 2024 at age 85—tells the story of Dutch Girls: Teenage Partisans in Hol land with art by Anne Timmons

Andartiko: Fighting Fascism in Greece by David Lester

Other stories in this collection cover acts of resistance: Freedom or Death: The French Partisans

The Hungarian Resistance Feinberg with art by Clinton; resistance against

used regular people and natural settings to tell stories of common struggle. Roberto Rosellini’s Paisan is a series of cinematic short stories about resistance to Italian and German fascism in Italy. A theme connects the graphic novel, Partisans, and the movie, Paisan, which leads to a greater understanding of the stark reality of World War II. In there is a tragic deadly battle in the winter of 1944 with the war ending just six months later. Partisans puts names to the people and remembers the sacrifices. While looking back, we see how the war ended with these great battles, but it’s the courage of committed, everyday people that kept things going internally and paved the metaphorical roads to

Partisans is a book about the strength and resilience in everyday people. It shows how people can make singular differences in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges. There is a recognition of the magnitude of human loss through war and a celebration of perseverance, comradery and the ultimate goal—making things better for your community, which improves your own conditions as well.

9781771136525

Robin McConnell is a comic book historian specializing in the Canadian Underground. He hosted the long running dcast where he interviewed over 600 cartoonists, many collected in (Conundrum, 2010).

Three Dutch Girls: Teenage Partisans in Holland, with art by Anne Timmons and a story by Trina Robbins (the first woman to draw Wonder Woman ).

Uprising: A Jewish Partisan in Eastern Europe, story and art by David Lasky

Best of BC ROAD TRIPS

20 Epic Adventures in British Columbia & Beyond

Sam Burkhart, ed

Explore BC by car this summer - from Vancouver Island to Watson Lake in the Far North and to Osoyoos in the South. Travel through iconic areas of the Kootenays, northward through the Rockies and onward. Includes detailed maps, insider tips as well as dozens of pit stops offering fun and interesting things to see and do. A great book for weekend getaways or longer holidays!

9781777876449 pb 194 pp, maps, colour photos. $24.95 OP Media Group

Common MAMMALS of the Northwest

J.Duane Sept

You'll need this in your backwoods exploring - use it to identify species and learn what makes each species unique, from home building to diet or vocal calls. Sept's clear images of the animals will help identify 82 species in the field. Don't leave home without it!

9780995226647 $14.95 all colour Calypso Publishing

VANCOUVER ISLAND THE ART OF THE LANDSCAPE

Dave Hutchison & Kelly Hutchison

Here's a spectacular visual journey and celebration of this beautiful island and adjacent Gulf Islands, as seen by awardwinning nature photographer Dave Hutchison, with text by Kelly Hutchison. Featuring 150 colour images capturing the islands’ diverse landscapes, flora, fauna, cityscapes and wildlife, this book invites readers to immerse themselves in its beauty. A very special gift for visitors to the Island.

9781738378609 hc, 224 pp, $49.95 Two Trees Art Publishing

Wild Harvest BC

A Forager’s Guide to Edible Plants of British Columbia

Linda Gabris

Both a useful field guide and a recipe book, this is the perfect companion to take foraging with excellent colour photos and descriptions of wild edible foodstuffs while over 70 recipes will turn your foraging finds into delicious,hearty meals. The book includes identification and recipes for greens , berries, tree Fruits and nuts, mushrooms and more...BC Bestseller!

9781777876425 pb all colour 162 pp $24.95 OP Media Group

SOUNDS of the FERRY

Sara Leach

Full of detail, recurring characters and colorful marine life, this rhyming picture book takes children aged two to six on an entertaining ferry ride full of things that churn, hum, hiss, roar, groan, zip, screech, splash and clang - lots of fun!. Available in BC Ferry gift shops.

9780978281823 pb $11.99 Poppy Productions

WHITEWATER COOKS the food we love

Shelley Adams and Conner Adams

The seventh title in this bestselling cookbook series welcomes Conner, the adult son of Shelley Adams. Whitewater Cooks superfans and newcomers will love these recipes. Shelley's Kootenay mountain-style tradition meets Conner's Californiastyle culinary creations to result in new healthy, easy to make and delicious meals. Over 10,000 copies sold since Oct '24!

9780981142456 $38.95 pb french flaps Alicon Holdings

British Columbia MAP BOOK

GM Johnson Maps

No internet? Want the larger picture? Keep this excellent map book handy! Also available are the Vancouver Island Map Book and the Greater Vancouver/Fraser Valley Map Book. Large print and great colour makes finding roads and directions easy! Prices vary by edition.

9781774492895 $21.95 pb GM Johnson

BURROWING OWL Estate Winery Cookbook

Jennifer Schell Lirag

This may be the first cookbook to profile a single BC winery and its founding family. A collection of more that 50 delicious recipes, favourites of the Wyse family, also showcase the varietals and award winning wines produced at their winery in Osoyoos. 9780995851306 $38.95 pb Burrowing Owl Vineyards Ltd

Let's Go Biking Easy Rides, Hikes,Walks and Runs

Colleen MacDonald

This series offers a wide variety of trails to lead you through fabulous scenery from wineries in the south Okanagan to Island vistas and Vancouver byways -

• Let's Go Biking Okanagan 9781775308126 $19.95

• Let's Go Biking Vancouver 9781775308102 $24.95

• Let's Go Biking Vancouver Island 9781775308164 $22.95

COAST SALISH REVIEW

tBLUES

BY ODETTE AUGER

One of the last of this breed was collected as a specimen in the later 1800s and held in the Smithsonian in Washington DC with the nickname, “Mutton,” as detailed in this book.

But Sqʷəmey (pronounced “skwum ey”) would be a more appropriate title for this book. As contributor xʷə lməxʷ Kerrie Charnley (Katzie) notes of the use of “Mutton”: “this name is questionable and not appropriate within the Coast Salish People’s knowledge system and protocols.”

The repetition in explaining the obvious origins of the collector who nicknamed one of these special sqʷəmey Mutton, could have been better spent expanding on the deep loss of these esteemed dogs. Mountain goats don’t live on Vancouver Island, so lacking animal fibre, having sqʷəmey intentionally bred for its wool made it a very valuable resource for First Nation weavers.

Chapter six explores the ancient origins of the Woolly Dog, with detailed DNA science refuting any doubt that this breed existed. Hand in hand with DNA science, the book really shines when it centres Indigenous voices to illuminate the story of sq ʷə me y Fourteen Knowledge Keepers, weavers and Elders are acknowledged as coauthors, bringing Musqueam, Squamish, Stó:lō, Suquamish, Cowichan, Katzie, Snuneymuxw and Skokomish narratives of science to this episode of devastating colonial impacts.

Master weaver Elizabeth Hammond-Kaarremaa lives in Snuneymuxw territory and was researching the unique tools, techniques and fibres of Coast Salish spinning that led to her discovering a sqʷəmey pelt at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. She struggles with the question of whether Mutton died a natural death and became a specimen, “or if he was killed before his time for the purpose of becoming a specimen. In either case, we now have his remains, from which we can learn a great deal.”

A subcurrent theme weaves through the book, chronicling amateur anthropologists pillaging communities and

Now extinct, the Coast Salish Woolly Dog was a beloved companion, sacred kin and valuable textile source as its silky, light-coloured, wooly coat provided exceptional fibre. These dogs became so rare around the beginning of the 20th century, they were declared a lost breed.

getting Indigenous people to sell culturally significant items to collectors and museums. There’s a marked attempt to soften the reality, acknowledged by Hammond-Kaarremaa when she says, “I don’t like the idea that his life ended prematurely, solely so that he could be ‘collected.’”

The teachings of sq ʷə me y range from recognizing Indigenous science to ancestral knowledge. Only a page digs into the actual weaving techniques, but the ninth chapter outlines the interesting processing of the Woolly Dog hair, with the following chapter detailing “What did the Woolly Dogs look like?” qwustenuxun Jared Williams (Co-

wichan) shares the beginning of the relationship between humans and the Woolly Dog. The first ancestor Stutsun walked the mountains and valleys, alone, and prayed and sang to his Creator for a friend. “Creator had seen fit to gift him with the most sacred human companion, a dog.”

Indigenous place names and family histories remember the value of sq ʷə me y , but the lack of who, how and why the dogs were destroyed en masse seems odd in a book dedicated to sqʷəmey Hammond-Kaarremaa paraphrases teachings shared with her, including that some of the knowledge passed Sqʷəmey

down is for specific families and, therefore, private or has been interrupted by colonial violence. Smallpox killed over two-thirds of Coast Salish people within two years, with some saying dogs were released to fend for themselves, leading to interbreeding and the loss of Woolly Dogs. “There have been attempts to say that the reason for the extinction of the Salish Woolly Dog is that we merely allowed them to breed out, die off or otherwise disappear,” writes snumithia’ Violet Elliott, (snuneymuxw, Cowichan). “In my educated opinion, that would not have been allowed to happen. These dogs were sacred beings; they were not a mere resource, but an integral part of our being and community. They were just as much family as our human kin.” snumithia’ refers to an archaeological dig in Nanaimo where the Civic Arena used to be and that prior to contact that site was known as Squmeyulqun, or Dog Island. “At that site, they unearthed hundreds of dog bones, piled up,” says snumithia’. “Evidence points toward those dogs being slaughtered.” Throughout colonization there is a common thread, she says: “Settler colonizers killed off that which Indigenous Peoples held dear and important to survive, whether that be physically, culturally, emotionally or spiritually.” She compares this destruction with that of the buffalo and the banning of the potlatch. For context, note that the smallpox epidemic of 1862–1863 was immediately followed by British Columbia abandoning the treaty process and simply taking Indigenous land outright.

Although we can’t watch sqʷəmey run and play, and weavers no longer have the silky, woolly hair to weave, Knowledge Keeper snumithia’ teaches, “that our Ancestors’ learnings from being in connection to them [sqʷəmey] have lived on.” In this way, The Teachings of Mutton is a helper to this knowledge continuing.

A documentary about the Coast Salish Woolly Dog is set to release in the Fall of 2025. 9781998526024

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.

The Teachings of Mutton:

A Coast Salish Woolly Dog by Liz Hammond-Kaarremaa and Coast Salish contributors (Harbour $36.95)

Selisya Charlie, spinning wool, was a Cowichan woman who married into the Musqueam Nation. The photo was taken by Dr. Charles Newcombe on November 5, 1915.

Possible Woolly Dog, Tulalip, Washington circa early 1900s

MEMOIR REVIEW

Soul of the Earth

BY GENE HOMEL

well-known Vancouver philanthropist, Yosef

Wosk is the scion of the family behind Wosk’s, a business empire that was a prominent part of the Vancouver retail-appliance and real-estate-development scene for many decades.

But he is far more than a philanthropist. An ordained rabbi with doctorate degrees, he was also instrumental in developing the Philosophers’ Café, an informal conversation program that meets at various venues. And he has a long-standing relationship with Simon Fraser University.

New Life Joke Shop is a compendium of his observations and comments on a wide variety of topics of

interest to him. Other stories were recently featured in his collection, Naked in a Pyramid: Travels and Observations (Anvil, 2023).

What’s the New Life Joke Shop? It was a small confectionery on Columbia Street near Hastings Street, a Chinatown hole-in-thewall near a Wosk’s store decades ago. New Life’s window advertised jokes and novelties, along with the usual pop, smokes and magazines.

The late Fred Herzog, an esteemed Vancouver photographer of the cityscape, took a striking photo of the place in 1957, which graces the cover of Wosk’s new book.

For Wosk, the “Joke Shop is the world,” and it’s an invitation to enter other places and times. His book, he says, “mimics the

shop window” and offers his own “confections, jokes, reflections and novelties…. You have nothing to lose but your sanity and nothing to gain but your mind.”

There’s really nothing to challenge a reader’s sanity here. Much of the content consists of talks that Wosk gave to various organizations, talks resulting from the gifts that he’s provided, such as to libraries and museums. There’s also some correspondence with a couple of Wosk’s well-known BC friends.

As a young man, he writes, he desired “to become a philanthropist in order to assist others achieve their goals.” Charity, he writes “is simply doing the right thing at the right time with the right attitude.”

It’s also a family tradition. His father Morris Wosk reportedly gave away $50 million in his lifetime, and his grandfather advised that if you make ten dollars, give a dollar to charity, place another in your pocket, and spend eight dollars if you must.

Yosef Wosk offers readers many observations and here are a few:

“There is no greater charitable act than becoming a friend to someone in need.” “Wrestling with Reality, we become real. That is the essence of art.” “Books, and all they represent, are our friends.” “Poetry is a mystic art.”

Wosk has a strongly spiritual nature, according to his writing, which is no surprise, given his background as a rabbi. He says that he “was blessed with my father’s emotional and financial support so that I could travel and search the world for teachers in forests or Holy Cities, in mountain monasteries or in red brick Ivy League schools, in rustic sanctu-

“His book, he says, ‘mimics the [joke] shop window’ and offers his own ‘confections, jokes, reflections and novelties …. You have nothing to lose but your sanity and nothing to gain but your mind.’”

aries or urban spiritual communities.”

He mixes quotes from the Bible and rabbinical literature with insights gleaned from Eastern religions. He suggests that “our entire lives are a pilgrimage, a personal journey through the unfolding of a greater continuum,” and that it “could be argued that everyone— even everything—possesses a guiding spirit.”

Wosk’s term “psychogeography,” he says, “is the psyche, or soul, of the earth,” and it relates to how the earth affects us and how we influence the planet. “Our bodies may be a temporary abode but our psyches fly on the wings of forever.” Wosk speculates that “God, Transcendent Numinosity or secular Eternity, fills [and yet is also separate from] the Spacetime Continuum and serves as host to all that ever was, is or will be.”

For this reader, the more engaging section of the book is by far the briefest: reflections on his family background, occasioned on turning seventy—he was born in 1949. Wosk’s father’s family left Odessa, then in the Soviet Union, in 1928, when his father and his father’s brother were almost killed

in attacks “by the marauding Cossacks.”

Wosk writes that as a young person, “it seems like I had a rather active ego but I did not consider myself an arrogant person.” He says he knew he was Jewish, as his family was quite active in Vancouver’s Orthodox Jewish life. But privately he says he was “somewhat embarrassed” to be Jewish, “probably because of subtle emotional messages I received from my parents who, as children, had to escape the antisemitic pogroms of Eastern Europe …. I developed an unconscious visceral cognition that I carried in my bones. As a defense mechanism—emotional as much as physical—I learned to hide …. Consequently, I’ve spent most of my life hiding in plain sight.”

Wosk enlarged on his idea of hiding in an Afterword he wrote for Alan Twigg’s book Out of Hiding. Holocaust Literature of British Columbia (Ronsdale, 2022).

Hiding, however, is not really his public style, as New Life Joke Shop will attest. 9781771715805

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

Yosef Wosk t

OUTDOORS REVIEW

THE SECRETS OF COOL FUN IN THE S

Swimming Holes and Beaches of Southwestern British Columbia by Alex McKeen and George Harwood Smith (Greystone $26.95)

BY GRAHAM CHANDLER

o are you all ready for a BC summer? You might think you are. If so, we’d suggest checking out these four volumes before you finalize plans and hit the road— the descriptions and advice just may prompt a revision or two. Or, things to add as the plan progresses. Or, even a whole new plan.

For starters, few BC summer holidays are complete without a swim. If your vacation will be in the southwestern part of the province, Alex McKeen and George Harwood Smith have a book you won’t want to overlook. Both avid swimmers, they visited 100 spots and wrote up a comprehensive and detailed guide covering all you need to know. Swimming Holes and Beaches of Southwestern British Columbia opens with basic advice like how to be aware of tides, fast-moving waters and cold-water shock; things that should be common sense, but still every year there are fatalities.

Covering Sea-to-Sky, Metro Vancouver, Fraser Valley, Sunshine Coast, Southern Gulf Islands, Southern Vancouver Island and Central Vancouver Island, this well-researched tome also lists the “Best for” areas, from “Best for Long Swims” to “Best for Cold Dips”—even “Best for Clothing-Optional Swims.” The authors have clearly done their fieldwork as well as their homework. Each swimming hole description offers water depth, amenities, difficulty level, distance

SUMMERTIME

tThe Wally Creek potholes often appear in online lists of “secret swims” in BC, but they are in fact a well-known and visible stopover on the highway to the popular surfing town of Tofino.

to swim, a detailed description, how to get there (including all mileages, turns and colour maps) and how to extend your trip (mountain biking, fishing, camping, picnicking, hiking). Many sites also include local First Nation names and backgrounds, geology features, local histories and even some poetry.

Take, for example, the poetic introduction to Savary Island: “Lo, an island! a world of wings / (Dipping and flashing and fluttering wings) / Of gulls and linnets and singing things / All singing different tunes” written by Alice Brewer in Spring in Savary (Ryerson Press) back in 1926. Her words still capture the feeling of vacationing on Savary Island—this oasis of white sand and warm blue water that would be at home on any tropical island—and yet here it is in southwestern BC. At just 7.5 km (4.7 mi) long and 1 km (0.6 mi) wide, Savary is a great place to unwind: its dirt roads, lack of electricity and water-only access make for simpler living—leaving you more time to admire the views and dip in and out of the water. Or to do absolutely nothing as you relax and ponder life.

A short ferry ride carries you to the distinct ecologies and unmatched cultures of other Gulf Islands. Located between the mainland and Vancouver Island, these islands brim with Arbutus trees and second-growth Douglas fir forests. The Southern Gulf Islands—Saturna, Pender, Mayne, Galiano and Salt Spring—lie in

the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains in the US, making the islands’ climate distinctly Mediterranean. If you’re visiting from the mainland or Central Vancouver Island, you’re sure to notice the dry, warm conditions. You’ll also notice that people adopt an islander’s way of life—the pace is slow and the weather is fine. The star attractions on the Gulf Islands are usually—but not always—their stunning ocean beaches. Here you’ll have some of the best opportunities to see seals, sea lions and otters in quiet bays like Salt Spring Island’s Vesuvius Bay and Galiano Island’s Montague Harbour. If you’re lucky, you may catch sight of orcas playing or swimming by. You’re also likely to see some beautiful and fascinating birds including great blue herons, piping plovers and playful singers like kingfishers and oystercatchers. 9781778401336

The New Beachcomber’s Guide to the Pacific Northwest: Second Revised Edition by J. Duane Sept (Harbour $34.95)

observing wildlife and other living things is , in fact, a good reason to thumb through The New Beachcomber’s Guide to the Pacific Northwest: Second Revised Edition by J. Duane Sept , a biologist, writer, professional photographer and environmental consultant based on the Sunshine Coast of BC. The Pacific Northwest coast is home to one of the most diverse displays of intertidal marine life in the world including sponges, clams, snails, crabs, sea stars, sea anemones, jellies, fishes, seaweeds and more. The New Beachcomber’s Guide to the Pacific Northwest is a portable and

Orange Finger Sponge Guide to the Pacific

easy-to-use reference for searching out and identifying the hundreds of species of seashore life found on the beaches of BC, Washington, Oregon, Northern California and Southeast Alaska. Along with a colour photo, each entry indicates the original name giver, other names, a meticulous description, size, habitat, range and other relevant notes.

The book is packed with fun facts as well—at least fun to the unfamiliar. For example, try and pick up a ribbon worm. Before you can let it go, it has broken into several smaller pieces. Did you know what happens to each of those pieces? Each one grows into a new identical worm! That’s how they multiply. Or, take how the Japanese Oyster Drill prepares its meals. It feeds on Olympic Oysters and Pacific Oysters by drilling a small hole into the shell and rasping out the soft body inside. Sounds a somewhat more desirable dinner than that of flatworms, which feed themselves through a mouth on their underside but which unfortunately lack an important piece of anatomy — an anus. So…back comes the pooh to be expelled through the mouth.

But did you know there are also tasty edible kelps for us humans? Take for example Winged Kelp which lives in the waters from Kodiak Island, Alaska to Point Conception, California. It’s dried and used in soups and stews as a substitute for kombu in Japan. It is also deep fried and eaten like potato chips, and the midrib can be eaten fresh in salads or added to spaghetti sauce. You can eat Giant Perennial Kelp, too, which loves the same geographical range plus Mexico, Peru, Chile, Tasmania, New Zealand and the subarctic

islands. Did you know this variety of kelp sports another impressive distinction? Some researchers say it’s the fastest growing organism in the world. Indeed, its amazing gallop of 14 inches (35 cm) per day may be enough to stake the claim. It has a business advantage, too. Giant Perennial Kelp is harvested for algin, a hydrophilic colloid (impress your friends: that’s a fancy term meaning its dispersed particles love water which in turn helps stabilize a mixture and prevent particles from clumping) used as an emulsifying, stabilizing and suspending agent in a broad range of commercial products including ice cream, chocolate milk, icings, salad dressings, toothpaste, film emulsions, paint, insecticides and oil-drilling mud.

There’s lots more useful information in this book. A large full-colour glossary diagram of most of the categories, such as the common barnacle, clearly shows the tergum, the carina, the rostrum and much more. And hundreds of definitions, from “acontia” to “zooids,” all assist in discovering the marine life on BC beaches.

9781990776731

Okanagan, Kootenay Rockies, Cariboo Chilcotin and northern BC. Each drive includes a map showing the route, distance, duration and an “Off-the-Beaten-Track” rating from 1 to 5 stars. Each trip is a chapter jam-packed with what to see, do and learn as well as important stops and highlights along the way. A plethora of colour photos whet the travel appetite.

With all this background, description and history selectively explored, you’ll surely be feeling like you know a whole lot more about our great province. Memories will no doubt linger as certainly happened with the author of our next volume, A Season in the Okanagan by Bill Arnott. Arnott has written and published six other books. In 2022 he combined his landscape paintings and short travel essays of his road trip around Vancouver Island and nearby smaller islands in A Season on Vancouver Island (RMB). He’s now followed that up with a road trip to the area where he grew up in A Season in the Okanagan

“A tour not planned but envisioned,” he describes the book. “A loosely pencilled agenda, knowing the area I want to explore… key sites that I’d like to experience, and yet, open-ended and unconstrained. The way I prefer to explore, finding magic when it’s most unexpected.”

“My research plays out like an old film cliché, pages blown from a calendar, to about two million years ago,” he writes. “The end of that ice age creates the long lake and, by extension, the childhood home for a lot of us.”

did you know powell river has the oldest continuously operating cinema in Canada? It’s an example of the many “well, I’ll be darned” surprises you’ll discover as you take one of the well chosen road trips in Best of BC Road Trips: 20 Epic Adventures in British Columbia & Beyond introduced and edited by Sam Burkhart And while you’re there, surprise yourself a little more. Stroll around Powell River’s historic townsite. Unusual for a company town, the early forestry companies responsible for the initial built environment designed many of the houses to then-current (early 1900s) architectural designs rooted in the Garden City Design Movement and the Arts & Crafts philosophy. Many of these are still standing and now collectively form a National Historic District. Top off your visit with a night at the historic Rodmay Hotel or the lovingly restored Old Courthouse Inn. Or, special treats for outdoorsy types include the Sunshine Coast Trail, the qathet Canoe Route and world class rock climbing opportunities in the Eldred Valley.

After a night’s rest, you’re all set for your next BC road adventure. There’s plenty to choose from Burkhart’s book. The 20 trips are spread across the BC map, which he’s divided into six regions: Coast & Mountains, the Islands, Thompson

A bit of bathroom humour entertains. “No doubt the stories I’ve been reading about wind triggered this memory. And embracing new mechanization—the tape recorder.” Boys being boys, Arnott and his friends soon realized they could keep records of their flatulent gusts. “Which quickly turned somewhat competitive,” he recalls. “Volume. Duration. Vibrato.”

“With these warm memories, I head out, eager to find an opportunity to put my newfound knowledge of wind, actual wind, into practice,” he writes. The book is chock full of the scientific terminology that fascinates Arnott as well as arts and entertainment topics like his trip through Summerland where he happened upon a special literary house: “The space was the home of the late George Ryga, Canadian playwright, poet and novelist,” he writes.

Well worth a leisurely read, Arnott’s writing is a pleasure: evoking a sense of place, state of mind, nostalgia, history—and a little fun.

Best of BC Road Trips 9781777876449

A Season in the Okanagan 9781771607247

Vancouver freelancer Graham Chandler has visited more than 50 countries but British Columbia remains one of his favourite places.

A fork in the road. Photo by Bill Arnott from his book, A Season in the Okanagan

Best of BC Road Trips:

20 Epic Adventures in British Columbia & Beyond edited by Sam Burkhart (OP Media Group $24.95)

• A Season in the Okanagan by Bill Arnott (RMB $20)

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.

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 survival.

Future Works

Jeff Derksen

Future Works navigates time’s contradictions with wit and urgency, exploring labour, ecology, and decolonial futures through poetry infused with militant joy and unexpected optimism.

Hajer Mirwali

Educator

reuben quinn introduces the spirit marker writing system as a powerful framework for learning

nêhîyawewin. Rooted in fortyfour spirit markers, this system offers guiding laws that nurture balance with fire, land, water, and air— foundations for living well in relation to all beings.

spring 2025!

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 : The 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

FICTION REVIEW

BY SUSAN SANFORD BLADES

the story begins during the 1980 s , several months after the oil rig that fifteen-year-old Jesse’s father, Emmett, worked on as a roughneck exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. That job had been a saving grace for Emmett; the first time he could provide for his family. As Jesse laments on the first Christmas after his father got that job, “for once I felt like we were a regular family.”

The rig’s explosion, Emmett’s job loss, and the questionable role he played in his coworker’s death, has left Emmett angry, abusive and drunk, “like a man who didn’t know how to be alive anymore”—not to mention destitute.

What follows is Jesse’s quest to become not only a man, but a Southern man. In order to do so, it seems he needs to please and, perhaps an even more difficult a task, understand his father, who drops in and out of his life throughout the novel. On the very first page, Jesse tells us, “I’m not the son my father wants.” Ostensibly, this is because he is a virgin who is not “obsessed with killing things.” After his father suddenly leaves the family, Jesse makes a series of failed attempts at providing for his Mama and younger sister, Willow Rose. Any time Jesse takes a step forward, he’s pushed two steps backward. Throughout the book, Jesse makes no headway in dealing with the same abusive in-and-out father, the same depressed mother,

S

et in a “four-room shack with … rotting wood and peeling paint” in swampy middleof-nowhere Louisiana, be prepared to read about hu-

man misery in Jill Yonit Goldberg’s debut novel, After We Drowned.

the same headstrong sister, the same terrorizing boss. And all of the abuses and setbacks the family suffers are blamed on Jesse.

The entire novel acts as a comment on the patriarchal southern United States. Being a Southern man purportedly entails taking responsibility for the bad things that happen to one’s family but, rather than righting these wrongs, a Southern man behaves like a dog who’s peed on the good carpet—he runs away to hide and self-destruct. Yonit Goldberg offers a few chapters written from Emmett’s point of view, which were actually my favourite chapters of the novel. Here, we see beneath his angry exterior and gain some insight into how what happened on the rig has misshapen him. He tells us he was happy as a roughneck, distracting himself by working hard and drinking, but realizes, “a man can’t escape himself.” I wish we’d been given a hint as to what problems previous to the explosion Em-

mett was trying to escape so we could gain deeper insight into the psyche of this book’s patriarch.

Jesse and his family’s miserable existence is also a comment on the consumerism and greed that encompass the oil business, and how it is destroying our world and all of us. Due to “all that dredging for oil,” the bayou’s waters increasingly encroach on those

“The entire novel acts as a comment on the patriarchal southern United States.”

not wealthy enough to live on higher ground. “Everything’s going to drown here someday,” Jesse’s uncle PJ’s friend tells him. The oysters that used to keep PJ fed and housed are now all sick and inedible, drenched in oil.

There is a bit of light in this book. Its chapter headings, for instance, are named after song titles from the 80s. This adds a sense of fun, and they do work in that the content of the chapter relates to its title, but they would’ve been even more meaningful had music served as an escape for Jesse or played a more central role in his life rather than only being mentioned in the background of the novel. I also very much enjoyed a playful moment Jesse and Willow Rose shared, mimicking Tammy Faye Bakker on television one Christmas Day and the other mentions of 1980s culture, like a “Let’s Make America Great Again” mug featuring Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. (Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign was the first time that slogan was used). There are also some lovely images in the beginning of the novel, for instance when Jesse’s mother “smiles in a way that feels like a little piece of glass in [his] heart.”

We read in order to broaden our worlds and, if they can steel themselves against the endless punishment thrown at its characters, After We Drowned will certainly transport any BC-based reader into a completely different world.

9781772142273

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

Southern MAN

After We Drowned by Jill Yonit Goldberg (Anvil $22)

Jill Yonit Goldberg and a southern American oil rig.

F ICTION REVIEW

n Sam Wiebe’s latest Dave Wakeland mystery, The Last Exile, Wakeland returns to Vancouver after an eighteen-month “retirement/exile” in Montreal, where he’d been getting stale as a day-old baguette. An urgent call from criminal defence lawyer Shuzhen Chen, cousin of his former business partner Jeff Chen, shakes the apathy and ennui out of him faster than a feral cat can snap the neck of a Ballantyne Pier rat.

I

The Chens are “family” in a way his own never was, especially Shuzhen, with whom he has “history,” as former lovers say when attempting to brag discreetly. To rumple the sheets further, Jeff has gone AWOL, leaving his pregnant wife at the helm of Wakeland & Chen Security, about to founder in a sea of debt thanks to a cynical client who refuses to pay, assuming they’ll go under before he has to pony up.

Welcome home, Dave.

Shuzhen’s client, Maggie Zito, a hard-assed take-no-shit Eastside single mom who runs a landscaping firm, has a different kind of history with the Exiles MC, a Vancouver biker outfit patched-over and connected to a major global biker criminal organization. Decades ago, Maggie’s brother Beau, was savagely murdered by Exiles bikers after a beer parlour incident in the town of Hope.

Maggie publicly vowed revenge and she’s the kind of woman whose word you take lightly at your peril. When senior Exiles Budd Stack and his wife Jan are brutally murdered on their False Creek houseboat, the reflex police investigation of Maggie is validated by the discovery of an axe and a machete covered in their blood in her toolshed. Cops and the Crown assume it’s a coffee-and-donuts case that won’t come to trial because Exiles members present at the arraignment make it clear Maggie will miss her day in court due to being shanked in the snake pit of pre-trial jail. Initially sceptical, Wakeland catches the nasty whiff of a frame-up and dives headfirst back into

MY CITY IS GONE

MY CITY IS GONE

“Old” Vancouver is getting replaced by ruthless money-driven development and Dave Wakeland’s detective agency is on the verge of insolvency.

the oil-scummy waters of low tide in Vancouver, where big dogfish eat little dogfish and dream of becoming Great White sharks.

After sixty years of evolving into major drug-and-gun-running organizations, the brotherly veneer of biker culture has worn thinner than an old Sixties denim “cut” whose bold colours have faded to grey. Biker club presidents ride Range Rovers instead of Harleys and spend more time at exclusive golf clubhouses than the MC hangout,

but the polo shirts barely disguise men (and women) hardened by half a century of viciousness who have substantial financial interests to protect. Like the generations of hard-boiled private investigators he’s descended from, Wakeland gets a refresher course to remind him that when a poodle noses the backside of a pit bull, the result is likely to be mayhem, maiming or worse.

Oin four previous wakeland novels and in The Last Exile, Sam Wiebe has shown

he has the feet to fill the heel-worn gumshoes of the inventors of modern noir fiction, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler . He’s mastered their method of the “wandering plot” —a reaction against the formulaic murder mystery perfected by Agatha Christie a generation before. Christie understood the power of Aristotle’s “dramatic unities” of time, place and action. In her best novels, all characters/suspects are introduced and confined in a setting—an English country house, on a steamboat on the Nile or on the Orient Express train—where the action unfolds in consecutive time, usually with a surprising twist at the finale.

Hammett and Chandler broke the rules by having detectives pursue more realistic investigations that stumble, stagger and sometimes reel from one clue and setting to another at opposing ends of the social spectrum, encountering characters unlikely to assemble in a drawing room for a Big Reveal where the detective names the murderer. Like Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, Dave Wakeland is the domestic version of the morally compromised international spy created by Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene, and refined by John le Carré

The tone of The Last Exile is deeply elegiac. Though Wakeland has only been away from Vancouver for eighteen months, Wiebe’s narrative is peppered with references to the “lost” city of Vancouver, rapidly being replaced by ruthless money-driven development. It’s like listening to The Skydiggers’ Andy Maize sing his lament for his hometown, Toronto — “My City Is Gone” — on repeat play.

Almost all the characters in The Last Exile are aging out. Even the young biker prospect, Felix Ramos, seems to have second thoughts about a criminal career after hanging out with Wakeland, as if he senses he might’ve pinned his hopes on a stale-dated vision of a future about to be erased by corporate interests who wouldn’t hire him as a doorman.

Is The Last Exile the last Dave Wakeland novel? Let’s hope not.

9781998526086

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

The Last Exile: A Wakeland Novel by Sam Wiebe (Harbour $24.95)

BY JOHN MOORE

Sam Wiebe

Raymond Chandler

Agatha Christie Dashiell Hammet

F ICTION REVIEW

BY TREVOR CAROLAN

Having published widely in magazines such as Granta and The Atlantic , Maria Reva ’s new novel, Endling arrives, as realtors say, “with good bones.” Acclaim greeted her previous debut collection of short fiction, Good Citizens Need Not Fear (Vintage, 2021) with its title borrowed from “funnyman” Josef Stalin .The omens look good for this BC-Ukrainian author’s road trip tale overshadowed by Russia’s monstrous invasion of her family homeland.

Three women—one a mollusk researcher —who work in the escort/romance business in Ukraine, kidnap some of their customers just as Russia invades.

She’s a loner who knows everyone is tired of her ecological concerns—“Even Yeva was tired of Yeva.” One catch: impassioned about saving snails from extinction, and the owner of an aging RV mobile lab, she’s a self-funded scientist. But government and NGO research grants are drying up. Weary of grovelling after research support, and needing cash, she’s joined the stilettos and shapewear romance tour circus herself, dressing up for aging bachelors at grotty receptions, and drinking wine

tour “bachelors” in a frantic search for their mother, Yeva searches for a mate for her beloved snail, Lefty, possibly the last survivor of his kind and, hence an “endling.” The crowded lab of duped bachelors who dream of finding The One, we learn, are simply media bait. They’ll lure out the sisters’ lost mother, a former incendiary anti-romance tour activist. Collectively, these road warriors bounce absurdly along.

We’re in Eastern Europe remember, with its clunky attempts to catch up to

dangerous LOVERS in a time dangerous LOVERS in a time

proofreader notes and blank pages, then we’re back in Ukraine where three women have locked up thirteen foreign bachelors, shunting them around a country at war. Oddly, even amidst panic and explosions, Yeva can hear family voices urging her to settle and raise children. Ah, the Old-World charm! “If your new husband goes down fighting, well, at least you’ll have tried,” her mother says. “Better to be the stoic widow of a war hero than a spinster.”

There’s flight to the mountains, military convoys nearby, new chaos and concern for the now-risky bachelors—perfect timing for an impulsive detour to save a relative in embattled Kherson. Notes enter from what we’re told was a genuine author visit to the combat zone. Air raid sirens wail. There’s full-out war. Teslas drive past with generators strapped on top. What’s real? A fake Russian liberation video shoot clarifies little. Everyone is roped in, even the snails. There’s a fateful family encounter.

At times, this tale reads partly like a grad school stage play where the author

A prologue sketches the mild 2022 pre-invasion landscape: “In the cities, buildings still stood whole…Beyond the fields, sky. A sturdy solid blue, like a freshly painted ceiling.” Two of the three main characters appear— Anastasia, nicknamed Nastia, who is starlet pretty, and Yeva, an independent scholar researching snails. Nastia and her third-wheel sister Solomiya (Sol) work in Ukraine’s robust, pre-invasion “Romance Tour” industry. Their RomeoMeets-Yulia agency bosses suggest that heaven is indeed near for foreign male suitors aching for a compliant, pre-feminist era wife. From Manila to Kyiv and Bangkok, it’s an industry that coins solid gold from loneliness. Yeva takes the spotlight. Uninterested in rescuing Nastia or Sol from the Brides for Sale biz, she has her own worries—“mollusk conservation… the Russian tanks amassing at the border and how no one believed anything would come of it except Yeva.”

that “tastes like acid reflux.”

Unfamiliar with the tours? Actual boogie-woogie is only ever hinted at. It’s more a case of “sell the sizzle, not the steak.” Yet, customers come back for more. With no shortage of tour “brides” or “bachelors” willing to participate, the boss lady, we learn, operates not from Kyiv but from what sounds suspiciously, to this native son, like “The Royal City” of New Westminster. Queen Victoria would not be amused. Plot is but one of Reva’s technical considerations. There’s a story alright, with authorial interventions that speak directly to readers, two endings, jumbled narrative sequences, autobiographical fictions/non-fictions, quirky author-agent discussions, misplaced wacky end-of-book matter—the lot. At times, it’s chop-and-chancy writing. There’s also the horror underway of invading thugs from the Steppes. While the sisters hustle Yeva into a harebrained scheme involving kidnapped

Ukraine-born Maria Reva grew up in Vancouver. She has an MFA in fiction and playwriting from the Michener Center at the University of Texas. She also works as an opera librettist.

“the rotten late capitalist West.” Posh restaurants serve pizza and sushi, while laptops feed reports of buildings in flames and tanks battering Kyiv’s eastern gateway. “Ossetia, Grozny, Aleppo. The Russians have done all of this before,” Yeva recalls. It’s early in the war, but we too remember the Trojan defenders of Mariupol and Kharkiv. Reflecting on her snail preservation, Yeva realizes her, “earlier snail rescues were but rehearsals for the real thing, with people.”

Unconventionally, the author includes a travel grant application of her own for a Ukraine visit. Real-life seekers after same will recognize the pro forma bureaucratic language involved. Quickly, a mid-book ending looms with

can’t get out of it, switches to lecturing, then back again. Readers need to be agile, recognize crazy wisdom when an aged loved one can refuse to leave the madness of war because, “It’s where he feels safe.” There’s a love scene between snails that’s raunchier and more tender than ninety per cent of the CanLit erotica being generated as we speak. Even the trapped bachelors ask is it “wrong to look for love in a time of war? The search [isn’t] any easier in peacetime.”

Reva’s book is the product of a fantastic imagination. She doesn’t make it easy. What’s it like when your original homeland is war-torn? “You become like a lizard,” one bachelor says, “where there’s no past or future, where everything’s trained on the present.” Elbows up, Canada. 9780735278448

New Westminster-raised poet, author and reviewer, Trevor Carolan, is recently returned from an Eastern Europe trip.

Endling by Maria Reva (Knopf $36)

anya

chibis

New from MQUP

Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles and Forgotten Work SCAR/CITY

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

POETRY INTERVIEW

Born and raised in New Westminster, Jeff Derksen received the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 1991 for his first poetry collection, Down Time (Talonbooks, 1990). He has long been associated with the Vancouver writers collective, the Kootenay School of Writing. Derksen was a research Fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at City University of New York before joining Simon Fraser University, where he is now a professor in the English Department. He divides his time between Vancouver and Vienna, Austria. BC BookWorld’s Beverly Cramp interviewed Derksen upon the release of his eighth poetry collection, Future Works

BC BookWorld: When did you start writing poetry and how would you describe your early poems?

Jeff Derksen: After high school in New Westminster, I started writing poetry when I was at Douglas College (and working at the Shell self-serve gas station across the street) and was lucky enough to get into a creative writing course with Leona Gom. My very early poems were shaped by (or were bad imitations of) Pat Lowther, Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje and CanLit of the late seventies. Later, when I went to the fabulous David Thompson University Centre in Nelson, I worked with Fred Wah, Pauline Butling, Tom Wayman, Colin Browne and Seán Virgo so I picked up on influences, which were pretty varied, from them, like the New American poetry, working-class writers, the poetics of place and Asian-Canadian writers.

BCBW: What were your early themes and have they changed?

JD: I had travelled in Latin America at that point and the liberation struggle in Nicaragua was going on, so no doubt I wrote about that naively. In Vancouver there was the cultural hub of La Quena on Commercial Drive, so those politics were in the air. The poetry of witness, as Carolyn Forché called it, was a model to think through the larger political moment and solidarities. Living on the Drive in the mid-eighties was really dynamic and I was influenced by the speed of changes in everyday life and by the young writers and artists in the city. So, themes like the city and work, and the contradictions in everyday life started to shape my poetry. These are things I still write about, but the stakes feel greater today.

BCBW: You are also involved in the visual arts community. How does that intersect with your written poetry?

JD: In any of the cities I’ve lived in— Vancouver, Nelson, Calgary, New York and Vienna (Austria)—I’ve always been part of those two communities—artists and writers—and that sparked a

When a tree

Jeff Derksen’s new poems consider work, human rights inclusions

exclusions and what it means when an urban tree is cut down.

lot of friendships and collaborations. I will say that, of any of those cities, Vancouver has, in my experience, the strongest connections between poetry and art. Being part of two communities in that way, I’ve never felt like an isolated or solo poet and the ideas and dynamics of contemporary art have definitely shaped how I write poetry and how I think about poetry in the world. For me, it has been communities of writers and artists and others who have influenced my work, more than an individual writer.

BCBW: How did Future Works come into being?

JD: Future Works took more than 10 years to put together. For five years, I was dean of Graduate Studies at SFU because I believe in the possibilities of universities and students—during that time I found it difficult to write poetry for a bunch of tedious reasons. But that time lag put me in a reflective place and so Future Works works forward through the past decade with the new social movements that took shape, how work changed, how Covid left an impact, how cities and everyday life changed and how time changed. The book looks ahead to a different future, one where notions of mutual aid expand.

BCBW : A large section of Future Works is about trees, urban trees in particular. Should trees and wildlife have legal rights like people?

JD: I started the Urban Trees poems because from our balcony I saw the trees in Stanley Park (still an odd name for a park on unceded Indigenous territory) being cut down. Despite the city justifying this culling with the health of the trees and the safety of the park, etc., areas that homeless folks use during the day or sleep at night—mostly in the summer—were cleared, so it seemed to me that the clearing of trees is also about clearing homeless folks out of the park. So, the rights of trees and the rights of people are tied together. You see this tragically in cities and areas that are being bombed, such as Kyiv and Gaza. Do trees also have the right to not be bombed? Trees help bombed cities and people recover. In the urban tree poems (and other poems in the book), I am trying to think through the horrible contradiction of how human rights cre-

VIEW FROM A BALCONY: Jeff Derksen lives on the edge of Stanley Park where he has witnessed the loss of many urban trees due to a controversial tree culling program.

ate exclusions and inclusions. Particularly at this moment in history when so many people are excluded! Trees add an incredible amount to city life and they need their own rights, otherwise they will be managed as a nuisance or as timber. Visiting various cities—from Dresden to Cairo—and talking to folks about trees, there is an incredible amount of love for urban trees and that love is also tied up with how we want our cities and our lives to be. Poetry felt like a good way to get at that.

BCBW: Looking back at your youthful dreams, would you say you are optimistic about the future?

JD: Being from the working class, the dreams of my youth, I think, were narrowly pragmatic, such as to have a

in the city…

job and one I liked. Poetry opened up a world for me, led me to universities where I had a great experience and to a job I like—so pretty good on that front. On a day like today, where the news is filled with a tanking world economy and forms of hatred as governmentality, optimism has to be historically grounded. Working with students, particularly graduate students and Indigenous students, and being involved in some movements around housing and urban rights, generates a very future-oriented optimism that I feel a part of. I hope Future Works shows that.

Future Works by Jeff Derksen (Talonbooks $18.95)

KIDLIT REVIEW

The Bears and the Magic Masks by Joseph Dandurand with illustrations by Elinor Atkins (Nightwood $15.95)

Ages 6–8

• The Game by Henry Charles with illustrations by Shoshannah Greene (Greystone $23.95)

Ages 4–8

BY BEVERLY CRAMP

nimals play a key role in traditional life of the Kwantlen First Nation people says Joseph Dandurand , author of a series of children’s books that have previously featured birds, sturgeon and sasquatches.

In an interview with BC BookWorld, Dandurand said that he has always used animals in his work since he wrote his first story 30 years ago. His children’s books include animals, “both real and mythical,” he says, adding “within our culture, animals are very important to us. We feel that they are just like us, wanting to survive. Animals allow me to create characters and tell simple stories. This is what we have done since our time began.”

A BEARING WITNESS

TO THE POWER OF STORYTELLING

The fourth book in Dandurand’s “Then and Now” series, The Bears and the Magic Masks, tells of the relationship between the Kwantlen First Nation and bears. He writes of bears living near a large Kwantlen village and how they exist in harmony with the people. When a Kwantlen master carver is rescued by bears after falling into the nearby river, the carver expresses his gratitude by creating masks for the bears as a gift. The carver leaves the masks hanging in trees where the bears are hibernating so that they will find them when they awake.

Eventually the bears learn these masks hold magical powers. With Dandurand’s words and the colourful, whimsical illustrations of Elinor Atkins, the story describes how the bears dance with the masks and absorb their powers while wearing the masks. What the bears do with their newfound powers is spellbinding and heartwarming.

Dandurand brings the story back around to the Kwantlen people as the bear wearing a Sasquatch magic mask comes into the village to thank the carver. It is a joyful scene before the bear takes off the mask and returns to the woods.

Both Dandurand and Atkins are members of the Kwantlen First Nation. Dandurand is an award-winning writer and poet as well as the director of the Kwantlen Cultural Centre. Atkins’ Indigenous name is Miməwqθelət which translates as “the first bird to sing in the morning.”

“Smallpox wiped out 80% of the Kwantlen,” says Dandurand. “Additional factors like residential schools led to the loss of our language. We are an oral-based people and therefore our history and stories were not written in

Joseph Dandurand’s bears discover the magical powers of masks; while a Vancouver Canucks game leads Henry Charles to depict the origins of hockey through an Indigenous viewpoint.

a book. These factors shape our stories today as we have nothing to pull our stories from: no books; no living elders with knowledge of past stories. We teach each of our children that we all have a gift. There are some who are good fishermen. There are some who make the fires. I wish to believe that my gift is the gift of storytelling. All of my stories come from my imagination alone.”

9780889714748

Oin a retelling of the origins of hockey through an Indigenous viewpoint, the late Musqueam elder and storyteller Henry Charles (1955–2017) wrote The Game, which he planned to get into print but never had the opportunity. Now a group of Charles’ family and friends have come together and had the manuscript published.

The story came to Charles when he was watching the Vancouver Canucks play in a historic Stanley Cup final in 2011. Afterwards, Charles drafted a written scenario about an argument between a brown bear and a killer whale in the place known as Senáḵw. Each animal thought that they could beat the other at any challenge.

A Musqueam man, the powerful Mena, heard them and came up with the idea to create a special game to settle the argument. Mena envisaged a competition on ice played with sticks, nets made from Musqueam fishing nets and a star for a puck.

“Mena reached into the heavens and pulled a small star down from the sky,” wrote Charles. “‘When this star is hit into your goal, it will flash,’ said Mena.”

Hundreds of Musqueam villagers as well as people from Tsleil-Waututh, who arrived by canoe, come to watch. The game finally ends in the evening, after which the killer whale and the brown bear graciously thank each other for the game and go their ways.

Illustrations for the story are by the Haida artist, Shoshannah Greene, a two-time Emerging Artist Scholarship recipient.

The foreword was written by Peter Leech , a longtime friend of Henry Charles and former professional hockey player and member of the St’át’imc Nation. “The Game is a true reflection of Henry, who was a fierce competitor when he played sports,” says Leech. “Off the field he was gentle and firm with his teachings so that children could have a better and clearer understanding of the world we live in. He believed in Peace and Harmony for all Human Beings.” 9781778401756

Shoshannah Greene illustration in The Game by Henry Charles.

Elinor Atkins’ illustration in The Bears and the Magic Masks by Joseph Dandurand.

WHO’S WHO BRITISH COLUMBIA

A IS FOR APPLETON

The story of Belle Jane, a woman who ran one of Canada’s largest cattlethieving gangs in the 1920s, is told in I Want to Die in My Boots (Brindle & Glass $26) by Vernon-based Natalie Appleton. Part fiction, part non-fiction, Appleton chronicles Belle Jane’s life as she leaves Montana for a third husband and the ranch she’d always wanted. Settling in Saskatchewan, Belle Jane would marry twice more and spend her last years in Penticton, “reading tarot cards for strangers.” Appleton’s travel memoir, I Have Something to Tell You (Ravenscrag, 2018) followed the publication of an essay in The New York Times. She also won Room’s Creative Non-Fiction Contest. 9781990071270

B IS FOR BRAID

Some know Kate Braid for her poetry about artists Emily Carr and Georgia O’Keeffe. Some are more familiar with her feminist memoirs on being a journeywoman carpenter. Now Braid explores women and aging in The Erotics of Cutting Grass: Recollections from a Well-Loved Life (Caitlin $24). As her publisher blurbs: “From weightlifting in her senior years to questioning why older people in love are seen as ‘cute,’ but not ‘hot,’ … Kate’s stories are a refreshing take on what it means to age with audacity.” Braid’s keen observations are on display. 9781773861623

father dies, he and his mother move in with his grandfather. As his mother descends into a deep depression, Wolfie struggles to adjust. A new friend, Jimmy, gets Wolfie on the local hockey team. Wolfie soon learns that in trying times, friendship, hope and hockey can keep things going.

9781459838161

D IS FOR D É SIL C IS FOR CRAIGIE

The host of CBC Radio’s On the Island in Victoria, Gregor Craigie has released a middle reader title, Saving Wolfgang (Orca $14.95), for ages 9 to 12. It tackles the difficult subject of addiction and suicide through the eyes of Wolfgang, or Wolfie as close family and friends call him. After Wolfie’s

Following on from her breakout poetry collection about zombies, eat salt/gaze at the ocean (Talonbooks, 2020), which was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, Junie Désil’s allostatic load (Talonbooks $18.95) delves into the ongoing wear and tear of

global racial tensions and systemic injustice. These new poems advocate for healing despite an inhospitable world.

A UBC graduate, Désil has worked in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and is currently employed at a financial organization as manager of diversity, equity, inclusion and reconciliation. She is also a mentor for The Writer’s Studio at SFU. 9781772016062

E IS FOR EVE

and sank near the mouth of the St. Lawrence. Over a thousand people died—the worst peacetime maritime disaster in Canadian history. Each ship claimed the other was responsible. A commission eventually ruled in favour of the Empress of Ireland but it is still controversial. Investigative journalist Eve Lazarus weighs in on the debate with Beneath Dark Waters: The Legacy of the Empress of Ireland Shipwreck (Arsenal Pulp $26.95). 9781551529738

Early on May 29, 1914, the ocean liner Empress of Ireland , enroute from Quebec City to Liverpool, England, collided in thick fog with the Norwegian cargo ship Storstad

In The Microbiome Master Key: Unlock Whole-Body Health and Lifelong Vitality by Harnessing the Microbes Living In, On, and All Around You (D&M $21.95), Brett Finlay, a microbiologist, and Jessica Finlay , an expert on aging, explore how the microbiome—microbes living in and around us—plays a crucial role in lifelong health and aging. While traditional health practices emphasize eliminating germs, new research suggests that embracing and nurturing beneficial microbes can improve sleep, cognition, mood, heart health and even reduce the risk of dementia, diabetes and cancer. The book covers diet, hygiene, exercise, stress and probiotics while promoting how simple lifestyle changes can enhance well-being.

9781771624428

Kate Braid

Cover art, Saving Wolfgang

Eve Lazarus explores the legacy of the sinking of the ocean liner Empress of Ireland in 1914.

Junie Désil

Natalie Appleton

Jessica Finlay and Brett Finlay

G IS FOR GONNEVILLE

For grades 6-8, Maddy’s Sash (Gabriel Dumont Inst. $17.50) by Marion Gonneville with illustrations by Kate Boyer, is the story of a young girl who connects with her Métis roots while she spends time with her Moshôm, Kohkom and their special dog Max (who talks to Maddy). Maddy’s adventures include visiting her grandparent’s farm in northern Saskatchewan, picking berries, canoeing and going to a barn dance where she learns to jig. Gonneville, a great-granddaughter of Northwest Resistance fighters and a seventh generation Michif, studied Creative Writing at UBC. She teaches jigging and Métis history in schools, colleges and Métis associations around BC. She lives in Vancouver.

9781988011356

Alyssa Hall’s fifth mystery, And Then I Heard the Quiet (FriesenPress $19.99), follows Valerie Russo as she tries to escape her troubled past in Fort Langley during the 2010 Olympics where she takes up a house sitting position. Valerie does finds peace until she’s unwittingly drawn into a drug trafficking scheme. A long-hidden murder resurfaces, entangling her further. As she grapples with her past, a surprising romance blossoms. Will her pursuit of redemption succeed or will she recede deeper into the shadows of her past?

9781038303431

Wildlife photographer and filmmaker Isabelle Groc’s A Hummingbird on my Balcony (Orca $21.95) for ages 3 to 5, tells of a boy living with his family on the 22nd floor of an apartment building who takes notice of an Anna’s hummingbird building a nest on the balcony. He watches as the bird lays eggs and raises her young. The book contains educational information about where Anna’s hummingbirds live and environmental threats to them. It also contains simple actions to help hummingbirds survive in urban areas. Groc has a journalism degree from Columbia University. 9781459831667

Jody Wilson-Raybould and Roshan Danesh explore oral histories of Canada, blending Indigenous and non-Indigenous voices in Reconciling History: A Story of Canada (M&S $39.95). Using the totem pole as a metaphor, the book reexamines Canada’s history, encouraging readers to view it from new per-

spectives, embracing its complexities and understanding that the past must be retold to uncover deeper meaning and build strength for the future. This book highlights stories that challenge mainstream narratives and traditional accounts of Canadian history.

9780771017230

K IS FOR KHABRA

Vancouver-based Bal Khabra has released Spiral (Viking $24.95), the second in a series that combines romance with hockey. In this title, a media-shy hockey player “fake-dates” an aspiring ballerina to keep the paparazzi at bay. But then the dating gets serious. Khabra published her first book in 2024— Collide (Vintage) about an honours student who is thrust together with the school hockey captain for a psychology experiment. Khabra’s stories contain references to her South Asian roots as well as celebrating western culture.

9780735250468

L IS FOR LOUISE

Ten-year-old Robbie finds an abandoned wild mallard duckling that he cares for, naming her Wild One in Louise Sidley’s debut novel Project Wild One (Red Deer Press $14.95) for ages 8 to 12. Then Robbie’s granddad— a former duck hunter—arrives and challenges Robbie’s ideas about life and death in the natural world. By the end of the summer, solitary Robbie has made friends with another boy and they take action to save Wild One’s pond from destruction. Retired teacher-librarian and MFA graduate, Louise Sidley lives and writes in Rossland.

9780889957633

M IS FOR MANOLIS

Tradition’s influence on human behaviour and societal constraints is at the heart of Manolis Aligizakis’ The Incidentals (Ekstasis Editions $23.95). He honours unsung heroes—coal vendors, priests, shepherds—living unnoticed lives shaped by societal expectations and their own humility. Through imagery and philosophical reflection, the poems question what’s behind servitude and social degradation while highlighting resilience and hope for redemption in the afterlife. 9781771715560

Jody Wilson-Raybould

History a Foraging Thriller a Landscape

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

Aged 21, William Brown left Scotland for Rupert’s Land to work for the Hudson’s Bay Company during a turbulent period. Rivalry with the North West Company grew violent (think hand-to-hand combat and ambushes) until the two merged in 1821. Brown’s experiences in the land that became Canada depicts what life was like then.

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

A passionate “wildcrafter” Mikaela Cannon shares a year spent harvesting food from the wild, often with her family, in this guide to nature’s pantry. Includes photos, detailed profiles of wild plants, tips for safe and sustainable harvesting, and recipes. It’s also a good way to connect with nature.

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.

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

In Sam Wiebe’s 6th Wakeland Novel about a Vancouver-based detective, Dave Wakeland seeks to prove a single mother didn’t kill the leader of a local bike gang. It’s set against a backdrop of bikers who drive Range Rovers instead of Harleys and a city being ruined by ruthless money-driven development.

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.

Vancouver Island: The Art of the Landscape by Dave Hutchison and Kelly Hutchison (Two Trees Art/ Sandhill $49.95)

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

With images by nature and wildlife photographer Dave Hutchison and writing by Kelly Hutchison, this book features more than 150 colour pictures of Vancouver Island and its adjacent Gulf Islands. The inspiration for the images comes from Dave’s experiences scouting coastlines, waterfalls and ancient trees over a 20-year period. Includes cityscapes, flora, fauna and wildlife. The goal: to create a fine art book that preserves and honours the landscape in time.

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).”

Louise Sidley

Isabelle Groc

A Gentleman of Considerable Talent: William Brown and the Fur Trade, 1811–1827 by Geoff Mynett (Caitlin $26)

Foraging as a Way of Life by Mikaela Cannon (New Society $44.99)

The Last Exile by Sam Wiebe (Harbour $24.95)

WHO’S WHO BRITISH COLUMBIA

Terrace’s Norma Kerby has written Hidden Waters: A Love Letter to Water in the Temperate Rainforest (self-published $39.95), a full colour 80-page book with photographs, paintings, prose and poetry that presents an ecological and poetic exploration of the coastal rainforests of British Columbia. “It is in the details, the small and less-noticed, that we understand webs of connections in rainforests, and the essential roles that these forests serve in an uncertain future of climate change and losses in biodiversity,” says Kerby. Paintings by Joan Turecki 9780986931345

O IS FOR OERTEL

In Bea Oertel’s futuristic sci-fi fantasy novel, The Warehouse (FriesenPress $13.49), wars and drought have created food scarcity and the world has fallen under the control of a tyrannical regime suppressing freedom and enforcing conformity. Teenager Kim escapes from a labour camp where her family has been held for ten years. She finds a community of dissidents who have become self-sufficient. Joining their resistance, Kim learns to fight the government-created robots used to control citizens. Then she learns her sister is in a detention centre for brainwashing people. Can Kim save her sister before it’s too late? 9781038315236

P IS FOR PRENDERGAST

Q IS FOR QUEERNESS N

Sixteen-year-old Poppy lives on a farm near Enderby with her father and brother Jed in Gabrielle Prendergast’s YA title Under Fire (Orca $10.95). They moved there after Poppy and Jed’s mother died of cancer. Jed has a disability and their father believes the farm is good for him. For a time, the farm has worked well for the family. Then a wildfire flares up nearby and Poppy’s father goes to fight it. He leaves Poppy in charge. Suddenly the fire changes direction and heads for the farm. Poppy must find a way to get

Jed and the animals to safety. Prendergast worked in social welfare and the music and film industries, before she devoted herself to writing books. She lives in East Vancouver. 9781459838222

The editor of two books about what good health care for LGBTQ+ people looks like, Zena Sharman has now written a memoir in essays, Staying Power: On Queerness, Inheritances, and the Families We Choose (Arsenal Pulp $24.95), about raising three children in a four-parent queer family. She covers topics such as care work, grief, parenting and chosen fam -

TO EVERYTHING THERE IS A SEASON... IN THE KITCHEN!

FOOD FULL OF LIFE:

Eating with the Cycle of the Seasons: memoirs and recipes by Ann-Lee and Gordon Switzer ISBN: 978-1-896627-34-2

Bring the seasons of the year into the kitchen, month by month. Learn what’s happening in nature and the garden, and what locally sourced foods are ready to cook. Find very easy-to-follow recipes for breakfast, desserts, dinner, drinks. Anecdotes and illustrations will entertain as well. Bon appétit!

344 pages with index $35 paper bound Published by Ti-Jean Press www.tijeanpress.ca www.amazon.ca

ily in the wake of intergenerational trauma. The publisher promises that this portrait of parenting as a queer femme “doesn’t leave out the messy or the erotic.”

9781834050164

Chilliwack-based Heather Ramsay sets her debut novel, A Room in the Forest (Caitlin $25), in Haida Gwaii, where she worked as a reporter for ten years. The coming-of-age story follows nineteen-year-old Lily when she leaves Alberta for a job in the ancient forests of Haida Gwaii. As Lily settles into her new environment, she sees a mysterious man who disappeared into the forest years before. Each local has their own version of what happened. Lily discovers secrets about her own estranged mother’s experience in the area. Looking for answers, Lily dives deeper into the forest.

9781773861678

The latest addition to the Little Explorers series by Sarah Grindler, Ocean Secrets: A Guidebook for Little Underwater Adventurers (Nimbus $16.95), introduces young readers to the ocean’s wonders, from the shore to further depths underwater. The book answers questions about ocean life, tides and corals while exploring ecosystems like kelp forests and the sunlight and abyssal zones. Readers learn about glowing sea creatures, sharks of varying sizes and the mysteries of the deep. Filled with realistic illustrations (also by Grindler).

9781774713600

Teacher and writer, Tanya Boteju is committed to anti-oppressive teaching and learning. One way to combat oppression is to cultivate being an ally, or caring for others in meaningful ways, which Boteju explains in Allyship as Action: 7 Ways to Advocate for Others (Orca $19.95) for ages 9 to 12. “Allyship is a complicated matter,” she writes, “so be prepared to get a little messy here.” She admits to making mistakes herself and that learning is ongoing. With illustrations by Bithi Sutradhar, this book is part of the nonfiction Orca Take Action series for middle-grade readers.

9781459840478

Zena Sharman

Sarah Grindler

Heather Ramsay

Tanya Boteju

Gabrielle Prendergast

WHO’S WHO BC

Multidisciplinary artist, performer and writer, Robert Dayton, published Cold Glitter: The Untold Story of Canadian Glam (Feral House $39.95) about the role that Canada played in glam rock. Fort St. John-raised Dayton spent years researching and interviewing Canadian musicians who participated in this music movement known for flamboyant styles, makeup, glitter and what was then considered by some to be transgressive actions. Groups include Vancouver band Sweeney Todd and their lead singer, Nick Gilder (and his replacement, a then-unknown 16-year-old Bryan Adams), and underground groups like The Dishes. 9781627311540

Daughter of Evelyn Vanderhoop and granddaughter of renowned Haida weaver, Delores Churchill , Carrie Anne Vanderhoop grew up in Neope, also known as Martha’s Vineyard, Mas-

sachusetts where her father, David Vanderhoop, who is Aquinnah Wampanoag, is from. She now lives on Haida Gwaii and has written Wampanoag Seasons: Seeqan, Neepun, Keepun, Pupoon (Tradewind $24.95), the story of a young Wampanoag child as he experiences seasons and cultural traditions in the town of Aquinnah on Neope. This book for ages 4 – 7 is about the original stewards of the land, the first peoples of Turtle Island. Illustrations by Mangeshig Pawis-Steckley 9781926890418

A prolific writer of more than 20 poetry books, Tom Wayman reflects upon the 21st century in his latest poetry collection, Out of the Ordinary: New Poems (Harbour $22.95). Divided into six segments, Wayman’s poems pay tribute to those he sees navigating the dysfunction of this century’s first quarter with its “wide and ever-growing financial and social gap between the super-rich

and the rest of us, permanent war overseas, catastrophic climate events and their consequences (fire, flood, drought, forced migration), and more.” He describes a poem as “a moment brought into focus out of the blur of everyday life.” Wayman lives in Appledale, near Winlaw. 9781998526123

BC-based outdoor enthusiast and community activist, Nicole Maple Coenen has a passion for chopping wood. Nicknamed the Lesbian Lumberjack, she has built a following of over 6 million on social media with her images of splitting large blocks of firewood. She shares her knowledge of living “slowly” (her approach is meditative says her publisher) and connecting with nature in Axe in Hand: A Woodchop-

per’s Guide to Blades, Wood & Fire (Quarto $33). The former filmmaker also advocates for LGBTQ+ issues and environmental sustainability.

9780760392676

Clea Young’s second collection of short fiction, Welcome to the Neighbourhood: Stories (Astoria/Anansi $22.99), explores the intricacies of human connection set against the backdrop of Vancouver and the Pacific Northwest. Young examines themes of loneliness, love and self-sabotage in stories such as a couple’s dinner gone wrong, a widow seeking revenge on mountain trails and a single mother navigating life in a housing co-op while teenage fugitives lurk nearby. Raised in Victoria, Young is a graduate of UBC’s Creative Writing program and previously worked as an artistic associate at the Vancouver Writers Fest.

9781487013196

A former skin care content creator, Liann Zhang has written a debut thriller about a character in the business, Chloe VanHuusen, a popular influencer who dies suddenly (and secretly). Her estranged twin, Julie Chan, who finds the body, assumes Chloe’s identity in Julie Chan is Dead (Atria $28.99). The twins had been separated as children and hardly knew each other. But Julie finds it easy to become Chloe along with the benefits of millions of adoring fans and the luxurious life of a successful influencer. Then Julie realizes she might be the next murder victim. Zhang is a second-generation Chinese Canadian who splits her time between Vancouver and Toronto.

9781668067895

Carrie Anne Vanderhoop

Tom Wayman

Nick Gilder

YOGA EXCERPT

Yogalands:

In Search of Practice on the Mat and in the World

by Paul Bramadat (MQUP $29.95)

a runner and recreational soccer player, Paul Bramadat discovered at the age of forty-five that he had, he says, “the knees of a seventy-year-old.” At the suggestion of a friend, he went to his first yoga studio and paid for a class despite being deeply ambivalent.

“Why enter an environment where I was likely to be aggravated by a banal spirituality, the creeping tendrils of capitalism, impossible beauty standards and the appropriation of South Asian religions?”

Bramadat, who is the director of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria, admits he became a convert. Years later, he received a grant to research the definition of “modern” yoga. He conducted in-depth formal interviews with 83 teachers, informal interviews with 34 teachers and students, and 12 focus groups. He also conducted an online survey of 650 yoga students and teachers from across Canada and the US.

The result is Yogalands, written in language to appeal to all yoga practitioners as well as academics who study yoga. Bramadat covers topics such as cultural appropriation, authority, colonialism, sexual misconduct, trauma, feminism, socioeconomic factors and racism as they relate to yoga.

The following is an excerpt by Bramadat from the book’s conclusion.

One day in Los Angeles, an Ashtanga teacher asked sixteen of us to come to the top of our mats in a large airy room on the second floor of a commercial building. This is always one of my favourite moments in a led practice. I know that I am about to join others in doing something difficult and wonderful, and finally, after more than a decade of committed practice, I have a decent sense of what to do. I looked past the teacher and out the window

OVrishchikasana (scorpion pose), from Yogalands

Just breathe

Why the centuries-old

cific Ocean through the palm trees. I drew my attention from the natural splendour of California into the room, where I allowed my Drishti (gaze) to wander. I took in the well-coordinated clothing, the expensive mats, and the cork floor. I admired the taut, tanned, and tattooed bodies and equanimous faces of people I would never meet again, but who were, for the next ninety minutes, kin. We would breathe and move together, and then we would return to our lives.

The teacher waited for all of us to settle into samasthiti (equal standing

centre, eyes closed, expecting her to begin the opening chant. Once the room was silent, she did something teachers almost never do. She asked, “What is the most difficult asana [posture]?”

We all looked at her over the tips of our fingers. One student at the front of the class answered, “Kapotasana?” —the pigeon pose—assuming that the deep backbend, with knees bent, shins and forearms on the ground, and one’s hands on the bottoms of one’s feet, would be a likely candidate. “Oh god, yes! Kapo’s brutal,” a possible supermodel to my left whispered. I had only been given the first few postures

from the Ashtanga intermediate series and privately hoped that my teachers would know better than to ask me to try this one.

The teacher smiled, tilted her head slightly, and asked, “Anyone else?”

A practitioner in the middle of the room said, “Vrishchikasana, no question”—referring to the scorpion pose. An inversion with one’s weight balanced on parallel forearms, combined with a backbend in which one’s feet touch one’s head, it is a wonder to behold. A student in Indianapolis referred to it as “very Cirque du Soleil.”

“Anyone else?”

We had figured out the trick. “Shavasana”” (corpse pose) a fidgety student at the back of the room offered.

Paul Bramadat:

“I am interested in determining not what yoga really is but what it also is.”

“Yes, exactly. It can be hard, though not impossible, to have profound insights when we are trying to do complicated things with our bodies. That’s why shavasana is so hard—because we don’t get distracted from what Patanjali meant by chitta vritti—all the fluctuations of the mind.” She let that sink in. “Okay. Now, let’s breathe.” After four breaths, we intoned, “Om,” chanted the opening invocation, “Vande Gurunam …,” and we were off. As I inhaled and raised my hands high above my head for the first surya namaskara (sun salutation pose), I thought about how these Californians would have puzzled ancient Patanjali, late medieval Svatmarama, and likely even modern Tirumalai Krishnamacharya. My focus in this book has not been the history of yoga but the meanings that contemporary North Americans give to this practice. As I mentioned earlier, I am interested in determining not what yoga really is but what it also is.

There are moments in a studio— when non-Sanskrit readers chant Sanskrit mantras, when students treat their teachers with extreme reverence, or when teachers stand right beside a statue of Ganesh and say that the practice has nothing to do with religion— when the distinctive features of contemporary yoga really stand out. Now that we are entering the shavasana phase, we can pause to integrate what we have learned about these people, their practices and the societies that shape postural yoga today.

9780228023746

Seventy-four years after the suspicious death of an unidentified man at a South African beach, the police open a cold-case investigation into the crime. Sixteen thousand kilometers away, a Canadian woman begins a search for her biological family. When a public database DNA match connects her search to the police investigation, it triggers an alert at the British spy agency, MI6. Inspired by real events, The Blood Labyrinth is B.R. Bentley’s latest captivating international mystery.

(Hardcover)

QUICKIES

A LITERARY BULLETIN BOARD FOR INDEPENDENTS

QUICKIES is an affordable advertising vehicle for authors & books. For info on how to be included: bookworld@telus.net

Donner

C OMMUNITY

Alma Lee (1940 – 2025)

Described by poet, Lorna Crozier as someone “powerful as a bundle of dynamite,” Alma Lee , the founding artistic director of the Vancouver Writers Fest, died on March 28, 2025 at the age of 84.

Originally from Scotland, when Lee arrived in Vancouver in 1984 via Toronto, she already had many contacts in the CanLit field after helping establish the Writers’ Union of Canada and the Writers’ Trust of Canada.

Alma Lee, Vancouver Writers Fest, 2004

Joyce Nelson (1945 – 2022)

H. Karlsen

Anvil Press...20

Banyen Books...33

Bayko, Faye...32

BC Ferries Books...29

BC & Yukon Book Prizes...4

Bentley, BR...32

Books On Mayne...33

Caitlin Press...11

Douglas & McIntyre...6

Ekstasis Editions...24

She quickly saw Vancouver was in need of a Canadian writers’ showcase for their many readers here. Lee had a vision of what a writers’ festival could be on Granville Island but it took years to make it happen.

The festival launched in the third week of October, 1988 with Lee as its founding artistic director. The first writer to confirm their participation was Alma’s friend, Timothy Findley; the lineup went on to include Anne Cameron, Angela Carter, Tomson Highway, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood and the BC publisher/ author Howard White

“Alma was one of those essential figures in the arts who work tirelessly in the background making things happen,” says White. “In her case, big, important things like the Writers Union and the Vancouver Festival. She leaves an admirable legacy.”

Lee ran the Vancouver Writers Fest for the next 18 years, growing it into

EVENT Magazine...13

Festival of the Written Arts...2

Filidh Publishing...30

Friesens Printers...35

Galiano Island Books...33

Greystone Books...9

Harbour Publishing...36

Marquis Book Printing...35

McGill-Queen’s University Press...24

McLellan, Don...26

a thriving and internationally recognized literary extravaganza. Some of the special events that she created include the Afternoon Tea and the Literary Cabaret—still going strong after almost 40 years. The festival draws 30,000 attendees annually, according to its website.

Past authors who have graced the festival stages include Martin Amis, Maeve Binchy , John Irving , P.D. James , Frank McCourt , Rohinton Mistry, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje , J.K. Rowling , Salman Rushdie, Carol Shields and Miriam Toews

Lee not only forged invaluable connections in the literary world with well-known national and international icons, she helped launch the careers of local writers such as Kevin Chong, Billeh Nickerson , Aislinn Hunter and Ivan E. Coyote

She retired in 2005, but was never far away from the event she created.

“Long after her retirement, Alma was a constant presence at the festival, sitting in the front row for most events, and often showing up for a cup of tea on Tuesday afternoons when she’d be at Granville Island to do her weekly market shop,” says Leslie Hurtig , the current artistic director of the festival. “She remained, until the end, beautifully opinionated, admirably activated for the right causes, and keenly interested in new books and authors. I shall miss her a great deal.”

Alma Lee’s awards and accolades include the Order of BC, the Order of Canada, an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Simon Fraser University and the Commemorative Medal for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee.

It has recently come to our attention that US-born Joyce Nelson, a longtime investigative journalist and author active in BC, died in Toronto after a brief illness on January 4, 2022. Nelson was an award-winning freelance writer/researcher whose seventh book Bypassing Dystopia: Hope-filled challenges to Corporate rule (Watershed Sentinel, 2018), was a sequel to Beyond Banksters: Resisting the New Feudalism (Watershed Sentinel, 2016), which went into several printings. Her written work has been anthologized in ten books published in both Canada and the US. In addition, Nelson created 23 hours of radio documentary for CBC’s Ideas and she won second prize for Radio Drama in the CBC Literary Prize competition (1983). She also taught at the University of Victoria and Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Thank you for featuring Wet (Talonbooks) by Leanne Dunic in the [BCBW Spring 2025] edition! The review is so lovely (“a thought-provoking balm”? Love it). However, the review seems to be treating Dunic as the narrator of Wet. The poetry collection is certainly based on Leanne’s experiences, but the narrator isn’t Leanne.

Erin Kirsh

Marketing & Communications Talonbooks, Vancouver

25,000 not 200

Thanks very much for referencing my book, Mining Camp Tales of the Silvery Slocan (Heritage House) in your Who’s Who section in the Spring 2025 edition of BC BookWorld. With reference to the photo caption of the 125-ton galena boulder, it should read the boulder contains 200 ounces of silver to the ton. So, the boulder holds an estimated 25,000 ounces of silver [not 200].

Peter Smith Ladysmith

Tanglewood Books...33

Thornapple Press...17

Three-Day Novel Contest...13

TI-Jean Press...30

University of Alberta Press...17

Vancouver Desktop...26 WORD

Rowberry, Richard...16

Sandhill Book Marketing...14

Talonbooks...20

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