Caitlin Press – förlag

Brian Smith cuts to the chase, offering the reader and fly tier over eighty flies with recipes and instructions for each. In his third book, Smith shares the results of his more than fifty years of experimentation and research developing and refining fly patterns that are proven fish-catchers. Some of the patterns are world standards, but many have been tweaked and altered by Smith through his observations and studies of insects, including where they live in lakes and streams and what triggers are responsible to entice fish to eat the fly. The book provides details for tying the most important insect imitations in their various stages of lifeforms and is full of Smiths important tips about their pattern developments. The fly-tying tips in the book have been perfected over Smiths countless hours of fun at the vise and are uniquely designed to simplify the process of tying replica fly patterns that are consistent in appearance, size, shape and attitude.

In the late fifties, Ann Kujundzic, her husband and artist Zeljko, and three children -- with a fourth on the way -- packed up their lives in post-war Edinburgh and emigrated to the Kootenays in BC, seeking adventure and opportunity. In Nelson, Ann was involved in establishing the Kootenay School of Art in 1960, a remarkable institution whose history has yet to be documented in the way it merits -- until now. This is the extraordinary memoir of a feminist, artist and activist who fought for change no matter her circumstance. The Kootenay School of Art was the first of its kind in the region, but it only marked the beginning of what would become Kujundzics life-long journey to strengthen the artistic and political environment of BC. She and Zeljko established the Kelowna Art Centre, collaborated with George and Norma Ryga, joined the Voice of Women, lived and worked on a co-op farm, fought for womens reproductive rights and social justice, and joined the Raging Grannies to fight against the militarys recruitment of the youth, all while juggling the roles inherent of motherhood. She travelled the world -- often alone, with nothing but a phrase book to aid her -- to places like Nunavut, Yugoslavia, Bethlehem and Hong Kong to keep her politics globally sound. Honest, intelligent and brave, New Ground shares the life of a remarkable woman whose efforts in the political and artistic communities of BC are still being felt today.

How do you establish trust and meaningful connection with a sibling who suffers from schizophrenia? In an attempt to rekindle her relationship with her estranged brother Steve, Joan takes him to art the Art Studios in Vancouver, where he takes part in art classes for individuals with a mental illness in a safe, supportive environment. This marks the beginning of a remarkable journey into the healing power of art. Schizophrenia had already done its worst, confounding Steve with voices, hallucinations and delusions. At fifty-five, Steve was in a burn-out phase of schizophrenia with a hunger for creativity. Joans efforts to connect with him through art soon become the vehicle of change. Over the next eight years, Steve progresses both artistically and personally. Together, Steve and Joan explore their art, drawing upon their own resources as they learn to trust one another. Steves artwork provides a glimpse into his perspective, at once both troubled and beautiful. His paintings and drawings are eventually displayed in two solo exhibits at Basic Inquiry Gallery. He attended what would become his final solo show shortly before his death in 2013. One in five North Americans experiences a serious mental health crisis; DrawBridge: Drawing Alongside My Brothers Schizophrenia offers a path of hope for the afflicted and for their advocates. In memory of her brother, Joan has established the Stephen A. Corcoran Memorial Award at Emily Carr University of Art and Design to assist students coping with mental health issues.

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

Irene Kelleher lived all her life in the shadow of her inheritance. Her local community in British Columbias Fraser Valley all too often treated her as if she was invisible. The combination of white and Indigenous descent that Irene embodied was beyond the bounds of acceptability by a dominant white society. To be mixed was to not belong. Attracted to the future British Columbia by a gold rush beginning in 1858, Irenes white grandfathers had families with Indigenous women. Theirs was not an uncommon story. Some of the earliest newcomers to do so were in the employ of the fur trading Hudsons Bay Company at Fort Langley. And yet, more than one hundred and fifty years later, the descendants of these early pioneers are still waiting for their stories to be heard. Through meticulous research, family records and a personal connection to Irene, Governor General award-winning historian Jean Barman explores this aspect of British Columbias history and the deeply rooted prejudice faced by families who helped to build Canada. Invisible Generations evokes the Catholic residential school that Irenes parents and so many other mixed blood children attended. Among Irenes family and friends we meet Josephine, who was separated as a child from her beloved upwardly mobile politician father. When her presence in his socially charged household became untenable, Josephine was dispatched to the same Fraser Valley boarding school. The transition from genteel Victoria to St. Marys Mission was horrendous, she wrote. Yet individuals and families survived as best they could, building good lives for themselves and those around them. Irene was determined to be a schoolteacher and taught across the farthest reaches of the province, including Doukhobor children at a time when the community was vehemently opposed to their offspring attending school. Stories like that of Irene and of her family and friends have been largely forgotten, but in Invisible Generations Barman brings this important conversation into focus, shedding light on a common history across British Columbia and Canada. It is, in Irenes words, time to tell the story.

Surveying the 120th Meridian and the Great Divide is the second book of a two-part series describing the initial Alberta-BC boundary survey undertaken between 19131924. Surveying the 120th Meridian focuses on the years 19181924, when the Alberta crew continued the survey of the 120th meridian while the BC crew split off to continue mapping the Great (Continental) Divide. The Alberta-BC boundary survey was a unique Canadian project that combined talented surveyors, high-tech surveying equipment, rugged crew members and Canadian wilderness. This is a story of adventure and danger: the crew climbed mountains and surveyed from the peaks of the Canadian Rockies; slogged through the muskeg north of the Peace River; occasionally crossed rivers at high water; and often worked in the rain, snow or cold. The boundary survey produced the first detailed maps of the terrain along the divide and the first pictures of the northern Canadian Rockies taken from an airplane. But the most important legacy of this project is the collection of approximately 5,000 photographs developed from high-quality glass plate negatives. These photographs provide full panoramas of the Rocky Mountain landscape as it looked over a century ago. Surveying the 120th Meridian and the Great Divide combines the best of these photographs, diary entries and government documents to recount the astonishing journey of the surveyors and their crew members as they explored Canadas most dramatic landscape.

Through poems that celebrate the overlooked beauty in the everyday or that mourn human incursions upon the natural world, Fiona Tinwei Lam weaves polythematic threads into a shimmering tapestry that reveals the complexities of being human in an environment under threat. Inspired by Pablo Nerudas Elemental Odes, this wide-ranging and diverse collection plays with the yin and yang of everyday existence, employing lyricism, narrative, humour and an occasional dash of irreverence and fun through visual play with text and typography.

Francine Cunningham lives with constant reminders that she doesnt fit the desired expectations of the world: she is a white-passing, city-raised Indigenous woman with mental illness who has lost her mother. In her debut poetry collection On/Me, Cunningham explores, with keen attention and poise, what it means to be forced to exist within the margins. Cunningham does not hold back: she holds a lens to residential schools, intergenerational trauma, Indigenous Peoples forcibly sent to sanatoriums, systemic racism and mental illness, and translates these topics into lived experiences that are nuanced, emotional, funny and heartbreaking all at once. On/Me is an encyclopedia of Cunningham, who shares some of her most sacred moments with the hope to spark a conversation that needs to be had.

In her debut collection of poetry, Lisa Baird explores themes of trauma and recovery, everyday violence and queerness from a personal point of view as well as a wider political scope. These poems bear witness to the resilience of bodies and sexualities and are grounded in an earthy humour. Baird's poetic style shifts from lyric to deeply personal to fantastical: an old woman plants broken light bulbs and harvests dark flowers; two sisters grow feathers in a nest in the backyard maple; a mother turns into a deer and escapes the unspeakable through a kitchen window. These are poems of disruption, discovery, and witness-they balance brutal honesty with a welcoming intensity. They want you to come close.

On a dreary morning in April, 1893, John Marshall, a Portuguese immigrant and successful farmer on Sumas Prairie in British Columbia, was found lying sprawled across the veranda of his farmhouse, his body cold and lifeless. The farmers face was a mess, his nose smashed in and cracked blood covering his forehead around a jagged black hole. The shocked and unfortunate neighbour who discovered the body rushed to Huntingdon railway station to summon the authorities. An autopsy, coroners inquest and murder investigation followed. Only two days later, a local handyman named Albert Stroebel was arrested for Marshalls murder. Stroebel was an unlikely killer: short and physically disabled, locals considered him a harmless boy who seemed much younger than his 20 years. The young man the community knew was not capable of murder, and they were shocked to imagine that he could have killed the man who had treated him like family. But something had gone tragically wrong on the night Marshall died. Unravelling the mystery would take nine months and two lengthy trials that seized the attention of local communities on both sides of the Canadian-American border, splitting them into pro- and anti-Stroebel factions. Newspapers devoted page after page of coverage and throngs of spectators squeezed into the courtroom galleries. The first trial in New Westminster ended with the jury hopelessly deadlocked, the second in Victoria found him guilty and set an impending date for his execution. The heaviest hitters of BCs political and legal establishment took part including former and current premiers, an Attorney General, and a future Supreme Court justice. When the second trial ended with a guilty verdict and death sentence many in the public howled in protest, convinced that a young man had been condemned to die for a crime he did not commit. And the dramatic events would not stop there. With the condemned man sitting on death row, the case would take more twists and turns that would lead Albert Stroebel to the shadow of the gallows.

Pop culture stereotypes, shopping frustrations, fat jokes, and misconceptions about health are all ways society systemically rejects large bodies. BIG is a collection of personal and intimate experiences of plus size women, non-binary and trans people in a society obsessed with thinness. Revealing insights that are both funny and traumatic, surprising and challenging, familiar and unexpected, 26 writers explore themes as diverse as self perception, body image, fashion, fat activism, food, sexuality, diet culture, motherhood and more. These stories offer a closer look at what it means to navigate a world designed to fit bodies of a certain size (sometimes literally) and, in turn, invites readers to ask questions about -- and ultimately reconsider -- our collective and individual obsession with womens bodies. Contributors include Dr. Rohini Bannerjee, Amanda Scriver, Cassie Stocks, Jo Jefferson, Layla Cameron, Rabbit Richards, Sonja Boon, Simone Blais, Tracy Manrell and other writers from across Canada, the US, and the UK.

1950s, New Denver: Pavel and Nina are among 200 Russian Doukhobor children separated from their families and community, and placed in a residential facility in the Kootenay region of BC. Forcibly removed from their homes by the RCMP, the children attend mandatory school. They must speak in English and observe Canadian customs and religious practices. Seeking to protect the younger children and suffering mistreatment at the hands of the officials, Pavel and Nina struggle to keep their culture alive and remain resilient. 2018, Vancouver: After more than ten years in business, William has rejected his Doukhobor heritage and is now adept at juggling the demands of his business importing sporting goods. Surrounded by the material wealth he has amassed, William feels justified in enjoying his prosperity -- even if he is emotionally distant from his wife and barely knows his daughter -- he has made sacrifices to succeed in life as well as making some shady deals. When a cycling accident ends with William in the hospital with a concussion, doctors discover a mass on his brain. He is rushed into surgery, but instead of improving after his operation, Williams life starts to tumble out of control: he loses his grasp on the illegitimate side of his business arrangements, an affair threatens his marriage, an employee turns up dead, and then the police come knocking. These two stories converge as Pavel and Nina leave New Denver and struggle to build a life outside the dormitory walls, while William begins to question his own values, motivations, and accountability. A powerful and emotional novel, The Kissing Fence examines generational trauma through one familys story of obligation, justice, and belonging. A story of conflicting cultural tensions that questions how we define success, identity, and our community.

In the early days of British Columbia, pack trains of horses or mules were a lifeline for the early pioneer population. Explorers, trappers, traders, miners, merchants, workers and settlers and relied on them for the materials needed to live and work. Packers were also vital to the building of railways, roads, and telegraph lines. Pack mule train drivers followed trails created over the years by the First Nations people and later by the fur trading companies, to travel between settlements in the rugged backcountry. The most famous of all the men who ran the pack trains was Jean Caux, who would enter British Columbias history as the legendary packer Cataline. Cataline came to North America from Southern France with his brother, eventually landing in British Columbia in 1858. Having learned the trade from Mexican packers in California and Washington, Cataline established a pack train operation that grew to be one of the most well-known and reliable in the province, including securing contracts with the government and Hudsons Bay Company. Cataline witnessed many of the pioneering events that shaped the province, including the Fraser River Gold Rush of 1858, the Cariboo Gold Rush of 1862, the coming of the railway to Ashcroft in 1886, and the Grand Trunk Pacific to Hazelton in 1912. Cataline also crossed paths with significant historical figures such as Judge Matthew Begbie, famed anthropologist James Teit, and Amelia York (née Paul, daughter of Chief Kowpelst (Telxkn) of the Nlakapamux people of Spuzzum), a world-famous First Nations basketmaker, with whom Cataline had two children. In Cataline, the legend and life of the man has been remembered in the words of his friends, his family, and those who chronicled the times and development of the province.

After moving to Vancouvers West End in 2014, The Human is drawn to a small body of water called Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park. Daytime visits, with a surprising array of wildlife, are quietly revelatory; but so is suddenly waking in the night when owl hoots, or geese startle in alarm at otter on the prowl. The Human savours this up-close relationship between wildlife and fast-paced urban living, questioning the interface between the urban and natural world. Upon learning the lagoon was named by nineteenth century Canadian author E. Pauline Johnson, of Mohawk and English origin, Johnson then becomes a presence in the narrative. Pauline Johnson wrote evocatively about it: Among the wild rice in the still lagoon/In monotone the lizard shrills his tune. During five years of intimate counterpoint between urban living and wildlife, The Humans notions are challenged and altered. Questions of how significant the specificity of place is to story, how our relationship to nature is altered by urban living, and how we might return to the natural world. Reminiscent of Henry Thoreaus Walden Pond, perceptions about nurturing, fear, inventiveness, delight, death, protection, humour, even tenderness change as the lagoon has exposed what being human in the twenty-first century actually means.

Devolution is Kim Goldbergs eighth book and her personal act of extinction rebellion. The poems and fables span the Anthropocene, speaking to ecological unraveling, social confusion, private pilgrimage, urbanization and wildness. Using absurdism, surrealism and satire, Goldberg offers up businessmen who loft away as crows, a town that reshapes itself each night, a journey through caves so narrow we must become centipedes to pass. Goldbergs canvas holds both the personal and the political at once, offering rich layers of meaning, but with a playfulness reminiscent of Calvino or Borges. Each imaginative narrative will haunt the reader long after the book has been put down.

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

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

For fans of Alice Munro and Carol Shields comes an emotional and hopeful collection of short stories that delve into the tragedies that befall each of us in the search for goodness and meaning. The English poet, William Blake said, joy and woe are woven fine. So it is in The Crooked Thing. A collection of intense and emotional stories, there are traumas and betrayals, loves and losses, missed opportunities and discoveries, and above all, hope. In tales delicate and steely, a troubled young ferryman finds himself with an unexpected passenger, a songbird finds its voice, a mother learns to let go of her son and, after a chance encounter, an aging ballerina dances again. In her debut story collection, Mary MacDonald brings each narrator to face their own existence, taking the reader into darkness, passing through fear and resistance, to seek redemption and freedom. At their core these are love stories; they move us, disturb us, and upend our beliefs, to show us characters not all that different from ourselves.

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

With tenderness and affection, Finding Heartstone captures the psychological, physical, and emotional impact of wilderness living and family tragedy. When Cathy Sosnowsky, her husband Woldy, and their little boy Alex first joined the Hemming Bay Community, a cooperative formed to preserve a large piece of wilderness on a remote coastal island of British Columbia, she found the idea of owning part of an island appealing. But the paradise she envisioned reveals itself as a harsh and hostile environment -- the water too cold to swim, the beaches rocky and jagged. After increasing her family with the adoption of two children, and the building of a communal lodge, Cathy began to recognize the joys a wild environment offers. But when their lives take a tragic turn with the loss of their son Alex to a fatal accident and his siblings to addiction, the couple begins to drift apart. Determined to find a way through the anguish and alienation, Woldy finds his recipe for healing by building Heartstone Lodge with his brother Vic, while Cathy pursues a healing journey through her writing. Ironically, the writing becomes her link to Heartstone Lodge, drawing her back to the support of the community and the wilderness she shared with her children. Through anecdotes of living in nature and the stories of the people and animals of Hemming Bay, a different type of family emerges and Cathy reflects on the imposing presence of those who have departed, some by way of death. After their son Michael returns from eight years in a Chinese jail with a longing for Hemming Bay fish and chips, their family begins to rebuild, re-establishing their tradition of sharing meals as a reminder of summer days spent in the wild. With quiet strength and conviction, Cathy confronts her emotions and reflects on the healing power of nature in this tender memoir.

A moving and inspiring memoir of a same-sex couple as they create a life together, adopt twins, and overcome challenges, from outside and within, to build their family. Rarely do we know what life will hold. When starting the adoption process, Jane Byers and her wife could not have predicted the illuminating and challenging experience of living for two weeks with the Evangelical Christian foster parents of their soon-to-be adopted twins. Parenthood becomes even more daunting when homophobia threatens their beginnings as a family, seeping in from places both unexpected and familiar. But Jane and Amy are up for the challenge. In this moving and poetic memoir, Byers draws readers into her own tumultuous beginnings: her coming out years, finding love, and the start of her parenting journey. Love imprints itself where loneliness lived, but sometimes love, alone, is not enough to overcome trauma. Little did Byers know that her experiences when coming out was merely training for becoming an adoptive parent of racialized twins. Small Courage: A Queer Memoir of Finding Love and Conceiving Family is a thoughtful and heart-warming examination of love, queerness and what it means to be a family.

At eight years old, Grace Eiko Nishikihama was forcibly removed from her Vancouver home and interned with her parents and siblings in the BC Interior. It was 1942 and more than 22,000 Japanese Canadians on the West Coast were interned and had their belongings, property and homes confiscated, and then sold off by the Government of Canada. After the war ended, restrictions on Japanese Canadians movement continued for another four years and the Government ordered anyone of Japanese ancestry to move east of the Rockies, or be deported to Japan. There was nothing on the West Coast to return to, so the Nishikihama family moved first to rural Manitoba and, when government restrictions were lifted, later to Winnipeg. While translating her mothers journal, Grace began to add her own experiences alongside her mothers, exploring how generational trauma can endure, and how differently she and her mother interpreted those years of struggle. As an advocate for reconciliation, she openly shares her story with the next generations; throughout, Grace returns to her mothers teachings of hope and resilience symbolised in the cherry blossoms around what was once their home.

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

At thirty-eight years old, Ruthie finds herself newly unemployed, freshly single, sleeping on a friends couch and downing a bottle of wine each night. Having overstayed her welcome and desperate for a job, Ruthie responds to Davids ad: hes looking for someone to drive his aging mother, Kay, and her belongings from PEI to Vancouver. Ruthie thinks its the perfect chance for a brief escape and a much-needed boost for her empty bank account. But once theyre on the road, Kay reveals that shes got a list of stops along the way thats equal parts sightseeing tour, sexual bucket-list, and trip down memory lane. As David prods for updates and a speedy arrival to his home in Vancouver, Kay begins to share details about a long-lost love and Ruthie takes a detour to play matchmaker, but finds herself caught up in a web of well-intentioned lies. With the road ahead uncertain, and the past and present colliding, will Ruthie be able to forge a new path? Heartfelt and humorous, THE LIST OF LAST CHANCES follows a pair of reluctant travel companions across the country, into an unexpected friendship, new adventures, and the rare gift of second chances.

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

On a cold night in February, 1884, just metres north of the border on Sumas Prairie, BC, an Indigenous boy named Louie Sam was lynched by a mob of mounted vigilantes. The vigilantes had ridden up from Nooksack Valley in Washington Territory, hell-bent on avenging the murder of one of their neighbours, which they had pinned on Sam. The American origin of the mob, and the fact Sam's murder was one of only two recorded lynchings in Canadian history, have led historians and writers to represent it as an isolated and foreign incident -- disconnected from people and events north of the border and an aberration from the norm of Canadian history. When placed within the historical context of that time and place, the vigilante murder of Sam no longer appears to be an isolated and foreign incident. Rather, it emerges as the result of a series of events and causes on both sides of the border, with the active participation of locals in both BC and Washington Territory. DEADLY NEIGHBOURS takes a closer look at the lynching, and in so doing reveals a more complex and disturbing chronicle of the deadly grip the leading White settlers in Nooksack and Sumas held over the area -- and most notably, over their Indigenous neighbours.

At the age of five, Luanne Armstrong fell in love with the beauty of the land -- the late afternoon sun on a field of emerald-green grass, the clucking of hungry chickens as she spread seed for their meals. Her growing years were spent subsistence farming with her family, living closely with the animals of the farm and immersing herself in the surrounding wilderness. Now, at seventy-two, she continues to garden -- albeit a bit more slowly and on a much smaller scale -- and to observe the world around her, both human and animal. GOING TO GROUND is a deeply intimate and meditative collection of personal essays exploring the intersections of chronic pain, the myths and stories that make us human, and the unexpected magic of finding your rage and joy reflected back to you by nature. Through these brave and vulnerable vignettes brimming with a lifetime's worth of wisdom and filled with astonishing prose, Luanne Armstrong gets deeply personal about what it means to recover from traumatic brain injuries, grow older when you have fallen in love with being needed, and slow down enough to listen to nature, even when the message isnt what you were expecting to hear. In this mix of self-reflection, nature-inspired philosophy, and social critique, Armstrong helps us make sense of the complicated relationships between aging parents and their adult children, the changes brought about by climate change and technology, and the slow, surprising process of getting older when you belong to the generation that lived by the motto, Never trust anyone over 30.

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