On South Mountain The Dark Secrets of the Goler Clan
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$27.95Stories of South Mountain and its notorious Goler Clan are often told in whispers–or not at all.
For over a century, a gruesome pattern of sexual and physical abuse, incest, and psychological torture defined the isolated mountain community, and residents of the nearby Annapolis Valley turned a blind eye. But when a fourteen-year-old South Mountain girl finally spoke up, the story and its ensuing investigation captivated the country.
In this twentieth-anniversary edition of the bestselling book The Vancouver Sun called “a terrible story, beautifully told,” acclaimed authors David Cruise and Alison Griffiths return to South Mountain with a new Preface and the original, startling text.
Mona Parsons From Privilege to Prison, From Nova Scotia to Nazi Europe
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95Even as a young girl growing up in Nova Scotia, Mona Louise Parsons stood out for her elegance and theatrical flair. But the life of this Wolfville native has always overshadowed her stage roles. From a Nova Scotian childhood, she became a 1920s New York chorus girl, a Depression-era nurse, a prisoner of the Nazis, and an escaped, emaciated fugitive who walked across Nazi Germany in the dying months of World War II.
The process of uncovering the story of Mona Parsons took almost as many twists and turns as the life it was piecing together. This book traces the author’s own journey as she follows clues from Wolfville to New York to Europe and back, leaping across oceans and decades with imagination and grace.
The Hermit of Gully Lake The Life and Times of William Kitchener MacDonald
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95The world knew him as the Hermit of Gully Lake, a lean and bearded elderly man in rags who lived on his own for more than half a century in the deep woods wilderness of northern Nova Scotia. By the time he disappeared in December 2003, his legend had spread across Canada and beyond.
The Race to the Bottom How Scuba Diving in Nova Scotia Saved My Life
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95This is the story of one man’s hobby and its overwhelmingly positive effect physically, emotionally, socially, and mentally on his life. The hobby is scuba diving, but not on the reefs of southern seas. This is about diving in Halifax Harbour. Diving summer and winter in one of the biggest and deepest harbours in the world has given Bob a view of history that few will ever witness.
Inquisitive and energetic, the author spins yarns about the strange and fascinating objects he finds and the hair-raising moments he has experienced, from coming to the surface and seeing the boat drifting out of sight to arriving on the surface in a snowstorm and having to navigate by compass to find the shore.
The bottom of Halifax Harbour has collected artifacts over the centuries from around the world. Each find gets picked up, cleaned, researched, and documented. The author’s database is a gold mine of little details about what arrived, eventually got dumped into the ocean, and is now sitting on display at home and in museums as a reminder of what once was.
The author takes the reader under warships, container ships, and tugboats, through huge docks, and under the ice. Along the way, he reflects on the toll that our civilization is taking on the ocean, of seagulls trying to break open golf balls to find food, of crabs trapped inside tires, and fish that take refuge in castoff bottles and grow too big to stay in but also too big to get out.
Ode to the Unpraised Stories and Lessons from Women I Know
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95In The Way We Hold On, Abena writes, “This life can be a poem if you let it.” Ode to the Unpraised is a demonstration of those words. It is an invitation to readers to see their own lives as treasure troves based on real people with whom they rub shoulders in present time. It is a reminder to revel in the noteworthiness of those among them and a call to see the fortitude of their own lived and explored lives.
Insightful and experimental, Ode to the Unpraised explores the practical knowledge, life lessons, and personal essence of women in Canada and Ghana through conversation, prose, and poems. Those featured are located in Nova Scotia, Ontario and Ghana. This book was born out of Abena’s curiosity about her late grandmother’s humble yet textured life as a wife, homemaker, and respected community member.
After a missed opportunity to gather her grandmother’s personal reflections, Abena extended her reach to elders, peers, and other relatives to collect their experiences. She discovered captivating figures, expressed through first-person reflection, second-person narration, and poetry in parallel. Ode to the Unpraised is a rewarding concoction of multigenerational missteps, wisdom, and pleasures. It includes a Ghanaian returnee’s lament about the plastic waste on Accra’s streets, a mother’s conviction to preserve local languages, and a farmer’s humble collaboration with both heaven and earth.
Against the Grain A Biography of Dr. John Savage
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95John Savage was ready to leave Wales. Fed up with the National Health System, his frustrations grew daily. The back of a medical journal advertised that the town of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, was seeking medical professionals, and John was ready for a fresh start.
Many knew Dr. Savage as their physician. Others speak about his time as mayor of Dartmouth. Yet most remember him as Nova Scotia’s twenty-third premier. He entered politics because he didn’t like the way things were done. He had ideas, opinions, and a vision to transform a province drowning in debt and stuck in old ways. He was responsible for an amalgamation that is still of great debate, a controversial harmonized sales tax, a world-renowned emergency health system, two new casinos that met with petitions and scandal, and the list goes on. And while all of these historic reforms will forever be linked to John Savage, this is just a small fragment of a much larger legacy.
John Savage orchestrated the building of ball fields and medical clinics and pushed for sex education in the schools. Locally, he worked with addicts and alcoholics, but he also brought medical supplies and assistance to countries lacking basic necessities. He was never interested in doing what was popular. From tackling the health and education systems to making turn-the-province-on-its head decisions while premier, John was determined to change the way things were done. Against the Grain chronicles how he fought the status quo with unwavering conviction to leave a lasting legacy that would change the province of Nova Scotia forever.
In Two Voices A Patient and a Neurosurgeon Tell their Story
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95For a decade, Linda Clarke and Dr. Michael Cusimano had offices across from one another at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. She worked in Clinical Ethics and he was a staff neurosurgeon. They knew one another to say hello, to nod as they passed one another on the stairs, to wish each other a Merry Christmas. Michael’s patients sat in the chairs along that shared hallway, waiting for their appointment with him. For ten years, Linda heard their talk outside her door, smiled at them as she passed by, tried to give them their privacy. She was always impressed by the things people endured.
Ten years into her work, Linda got sick; she left her job and, weeks later, she sat in one of those hallway chairs, waiting for her appointment with Dr. Cusimano. In the blink of an eye, she was a neurosurgery patient and he was her surgeon.
Linda and Michael wrote In Two Voices together: it is the intimate account of Linda’s surgery with Michael as her surgeon. The story builds a piece at a time as Linda and Michael tell each other their experience and then respond to one another’s writing. As the relationship shifts from one of patient and surgeon to one of Linda and Michael as colleagues and friends, they encounter surprises as their trust and mutual understanding develop. Here is an unprecedented view into the experiences of illness, care, and compassion, an intimate picture of the experiences, challenges, skills, and commitment of a surgeon. The worlds of both surgeon and patient are framed by a most critical and delicate surgical procedure.
Threads in the Acadian Fabric Nine Generations of an Acadian Family
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Threads in the Acadian Fabric tells the story of the author’s paternal family, her line of ancestors that stretches back nine generations to the first Poirier who arrived from France and settled in Port Royal in the 1640s.
One Strong Girl
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95One Strong Girl is a mother’s vivid account of what it is like to lose her daughter, India, to a rare debilitating disease. The story is a bold description of what it means to deal with deep sorrow and still find balance and beauty in an age steeped in the denial of death. At ten, India climbed the highest on the rope at gymnastics, yet by sixteen was so weak she was unable to even dress herself. The narrative follows the six-year fight for answers from the medical community. Finally, after the genetic testing of India’s DNA, it was discovered there were two mutations on her ASAH1 gene, a deadly combination. Today her cells are alive in a research lab at the University of Ottawa. This is a legacy that cuts both ways, a point of pride and pain. One Strong Girl is a story of what it’s like to outlive an only child. It describes the intensity of loving a dying child and most importantly, the joy to be found, even amidst the sorrow.
Louisbourg or Bust A Surfer’s Wild Ride Down Nova Scotia’s Drowned Coast
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95A rickety surf rig on wheels. A guide named Don Quixote. No cellphone. Louisbourg or Bust is RC Shaw’s spandex-free pilgrimage up a haunted coastline. Fuelled by Hungry Man Stew and blind optimism, Shaw battles potholed hills and remote waves en route to the Fortress of Louisbourg.
With a Nova Scotia road map in one hand and a fat copy of Don Quixote in the other, Shaw hatches a plan. He builds The Rig, a Frankenstein-inspired bicycle-plus-trailer to haul his camping gear and surf stuff. Then he circles Louisbourg with a black Sharpie and vows to take the fortress back from its malevolent tourist occupiers. Finally, on a clear June morning, he kisses his family goodbye and creaks off down the road in search of adventure for adventure’s sake. No cellphone, no safety net. Just the restless pulse of the Atlantic Ocean as it rips and tears at the coastline of the Eastern Shore.
As the lark gets real, Shaw is forever changed by the gnarly soul of Nova Scotia’s fogbound, fading coastline.
It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time Ten Years of Misadventures in Coffee
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Annabel’s coffee adventures took her from a wet, dreary market in northern England to the Canadian Prairies via a PhD in Central America. She gradually mastered the art of juggling a start-up business, her thesis, and a five-month-old baby at the same time, and negotiated emigration bureaucracy, a few disastrous business relationships, and the brutality of Canadian winters. This is the real story of coffee entrepreneurship, with all the grim, impossible, frustrating, and messy bits left in. Because they all seemed like a good idea at the time.
Where Duty Lies A New Brunswick Soldier in the Trenches of World War I
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Frank Grimmer did not set out to earn honours on the field of battle nor did he readily choose to go to war. World powers were shifting. The future of nations was deemed dependant on their armies. It was left to the young men to face the gunfire of other young men who could have been friends under the right circumstances and in times of peace. Where Duty Lies tells the story of how a 23-year-old St. Andrews, New Brunswick, man ended up in the quicksand-like mud of Passchendaele labouring under heavy artillery fire helping construct supply lines that supported the Canadian advance during the Third Battle of Ypres, often referred to as the most horrific in a war of horrific battles.
Waking Up in my Own Backyard
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Join Sandra Phinney as she embarks on 31-day summer odyssey that takes place within a 100 kilometre radius from her home in rural Nova Scotia. This memoir is a journey of self-discovery wherein the author experiences the adventure of a lifetime in her own backyard. Two powerful themes flow throughout the narrative: the importance of friendships and the richness of rural living.
You won’t find what’s included in Waking Up In My Own Backyard in a typical visitor’s guide, but it will undoubtedly become an indispensable guide for locals and travellers alike. Phinney is an extraordinary tour guide. You will want to follow in her footsteps.
Random Shots
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Random Shots tells the stories of survival against the odds, the life of a well-travelled risking-taking Maritime son. Fortunate to have survived numerous near misses during the lead-up to his eightieth trip around the Sun, Mossman has much to be grateful for along the paths taken to adventure.
As a strong defense over the passage of time, memory is everything. As narrator, Mossman, aided by diaries and recordings across the years, shares with vivid insight his travelling experiences in and around Lesotho, Northwest Territories, Gabon, the Bay of Fundy, Australia, the Congo, Zambia, Nunavut, New Zealand, the offshore Atlantic Ocean, Ontario, and Brazil.
Survival–the act of staying alive despite the odds–is the theme of the book. Many of these stories of adventure took place in a world far from the one with which most people are familiar. They are at once both startling and revealing and told with a bold style and wit that the author’s fans will immediately recognize.
Unpacked From PEI to Palawan
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95“I hadn’t always been lost, but Prince Edward Island had suddenly become too small for my grief. My grief needed the whole world.”
In 2008, Maureen and Mitch Cobb took drastic action in the wake of the stillbirth death of their second child, Tya. They packed up two-year-old Leila and set out on a journey through Southeast Asia, a trip of courage, love, and, ultimately, redemption.
Unpacked is the inspiring story of a mother in search of herself, a husband and wife fighting for a marriage, a young daughter who rises from confusion, and the scenes and revelations that bring Mo out of her paralyzing grief and into the perspective of a new world.
The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers
Editor: Julia Swan, Lesley ChoycePublisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95In this poignant, often funny, and heartfelt collection, Nova Scotia authors and artists put to the page their thoughts and emotions about their fathers, who raised, inspired, loved, and taught them–and occasionally drove them crazy. As well as MacLeod, Bruneau, and Murray, The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers includes stories by Harry Thurston, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Frank Cameron, Joan Baxter, Jon Tattrie, Bruce Graham, Lesley Choyce, Lenore Zann, David Mossman, Janice Landry, Lindsay Ruck, Ian Colford, Julia Swan, Craig Flinn, and Daniel Paul.
Here are fathers of all kinds: quiet, thoughtful, wise men; stubborn and headstrong men; and men whose careers and circumstances called forth public bravery and heroism. Included too are fathers whose mark on the world is more private but just as compelling, just as fearless, just as noteworthy. They embody the strength everyone needs to weather the storms of life, the humour that helps us to laugh at crucial moments, and the stalwart vision it takes to raise daughters and sons and send them out into the world.
Daniel Paul Mi’kmaw Elder
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Born in a log cabin during a raging blizzard on Indian Brook Reserve in 1938, Mi’kmaw elder Daniel N. Paul rose to the top of a Canadian society that denied his people’s civilization. When he was named to the Order of Canada, his citation called him a “powerful and passionate advocate for social justice and the eradication of racial discrimination.” His Order of Nova Scotia honour said he “gives a voice to his people by revealing a past that the standard histories have chosen to ignore.”
But long before the acclaim, there was the Indian Agent denying food to his begging mother. There was the education system that taught him his people were savages. There was the Department of Indian Affairs that frustrated his work to bring justice to his people.
Now, for the first time, here is the full story of his personal journey of transformation, a story that will inspire Canadians to recognize and respect their First Nations as equal and enlightened civilizations.
Angel Lady of the Maritimes
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95How does someone go from being a military nurse to a professional medium talking to angels and dead people? Read Karen’s enthralling autobiography portraying her spiritual journey and fascinating career change. Karen, The Angel Lady, didn’t talk to dead people as a child, nor is she a third-generation psychic. She didn’t grow up thinking, “I want to talk to angels for a living,” but looking back on her life, there were definitely clues she would.
Along the way, Karen had many frank chats with God while trying to stay on her life path, looking for divine guidance and help along the way. Discover the secrets of working as a professional medium and the realities of communicating with heavenly beings. It sometimes means persuading dead people to quiet down and allow her some private time.
As she recounts some hair-raising experiences in her life, Karen offers up helpful advice about knowing which angels are around you. With humour and a down-to-earth approach, Karen discusses her first ghostly encounter during a military tour of Gettysburg. She also writes of the startling first time a dead person spoke to her directly – a soldier killed in Afghanistan. And she tells of an angelic visitation at her military workplace informing her it was time to move on to the next phase in honouring her life path.
With warmth, Karen shares her angelic encounters: how Archangel Michael took over driving her car in a dangerous situation; how she sees the glowing presence of angels; how her deceased father grabs her attention from heaven; and what common messages your angels have for you.
Be inspired to fearlessly follow your life path. Know you are not alone in this world.
The Price We Pay
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Decision-making happens throughout our lives. Some decisions we are proud of, others we regret, but they shape our lives. This book examines extraordinary events told to the author by more than 25 remarkable people. The men and women are police officers, firefighters, Canadian military personnel, Emergency Health Services (EHS) attendants, grief counsellors, social workers and ordinary citizens. All have faced adversity. Some have been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and that is an important part of their story.
These are stories of hope and healing in the face of regret, challenge, and, in some cases, life and death. One high-ranking Canadian police officer reveals to the author, for the first time publicly, that he has been diagnosed with PTSD. The diagnosis came after years of demanding first responder work both in Canada and abroad, including devastating earthquake and flood recovery and relief efforts.
In another case, a former Ontario paramedic describes how a decision he made at a murder scene left him reeling. He has since started a non-profit organization in the victim’s honour and travelled coast to coast in Canada raising awareness that “Heroes are Human.”
A mother of two describes her split-second decision to drive her car, at high speed, into a ditch alongside a Nova Scotia highway. When her car malfunctioned and a head-on collision was imminent, she acted selflessly to avoid killing or injuring anyone. Her near-death experience and dramatic roadside rescue by two members of the military will haunt readers of this true story.
Underpinning the work is Landry’s interview with the man who accidentally caused the horrific house fire which was the focus of her previous work, The Sixty Second Story. That book pays homage to her late father, Baz Landry, a Canadian Medal of Bravery recipient, and his Halifax firefighting peers. Together they rescued an eight-week-old infant from a burning home in 1978.
Travels With Farley
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$24.95After living in a remote Newfoundland outport and returning to Port Hope, Ontario, Claire and Farley Mowat abandoned the comforts of the mainland to live in the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. They moved into a small isolated community and eventually bought a home there.
Claire Mowat writes of the ups and downs of being outsiders on their island but also of their love affair with the Magdalens, with its windswept dunes, endless beaches and raw beauty. It was a rugged life by the sea for the Mowats and sometimes a life of isolation, but they attracted visitors from far and wide, including Pierre and Margaret Trudeau, who arrived by helicopter from Charlottetown. The Mowats eventually gave the Trudeaus one of the puppies they raised. The Trudeaus, fittingly, named the dog Farley. He lived at 24 Sussex with the prime minister’s family, enjoying the comforts of civilization his namesake often eschewed.
Travels With Farley picks up where Claire’s best-selling The Outport People left off. It gives insight into her own writing life as well as Farley’s during the time when he was crafting A Whale for the Killing and researching Sea of Slaughter.
This is a warm and haunting tale of two writers whose lives were woven together by love, adversity and adventure. The book will appeal to both those already familiar with Farley Mowat, one of Canada’s iconic literary figures, and to those who have yet to meet this legendary and often controversial environmentalist.
I Owe It All to Rock & Roll(and the CBC)
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95In this hilarious and insightful memoir, Frank Cameron takes readers from his childhood to his professional days at CHNS and then the CBC and on to his present life, hosting a show at Seaside FM. Frank just can’t get radio out of his blood. In between is a satisfying chronicle of a media personality who never takes himself too seriously. Frank is funny, but he also doesn’t shy away from stating his opinions and telling it like it is.
Paddy Boy
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$17.95Paddy Boy is Patrick O’Flaherty’s lively memoir of childhood in a small secluded Newfoundland community, covering the years 1939-54. This time is most unique because it is a bridge between the old Newfoundland with its curious links to England, Ireland, and Scotland, and its new status, after 1949, as a province of Canada. O’Flaherty reimagines just what that lost world was like, how children figured into it, how his family and other families functioned and what part religion played.
Coastal Lives
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95She was 37, a single, sad freelance fisheries reporter and writer living in Vancouver, on Canada’s West Coast. He was 59, a widowed, heartbroken journalist and author, living in a small village on Isle Madame, Cape Breton, on Canada’s East Coast. The life paths of Marjorie Simmins and Silver Donald Cameron took many years to cross – but when they did, their worlds changed forever. Award-winning writer and journalist, Marjorie Simmins tells a story of love and resistance with humour and candour.
Pulling No Punches The Sam Langford Story
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey called Sam Langford from Weymouth Falls, Nova Scotia, “The greatest fighter we’ve ever had.” And champion Jack Johnson stated he “he was the toughest little son-of-a-bitch that ever lived.” Celebrated New York boxing writer Hype Igoe said he was “the greatest fighter, pound for pound, who ever lived,” while New York sports writer Joe Williams said he “was probably the best the ring ever saw.” Langford was so good that many boxers refused to fight him, so good that he took bouts with bigger men just to get a match, so good that he once fought the greatest boxer of his age, Jack Johnson, who was forty pounds heavier and a good foot taller—and still went the distance.
Yet, for all the ferocity of his talent, Sam Langford (1883-1956) could not outbox fistic fate. From his first bout in 1902 until his last a quarter century later, he battled boxing’s colour barrier that kept him from being world champion in three different weight classes. Still, he refused to be knocked down and relentlessly pursued a title shot until he was nearly forty. When, in 1923, he approached Jack Kearns, the manager of then heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, for a title bout, the wily Kearns looked over the nearly blind, well-past-his-prime boxer, and shook his head. “We were looking for someone easier,” he sighed. He was just that good. When Langford could no longer get his title shot, he retired from the ring in 1926 and soon faded from the public mind—until the serious compilers of lists that recognize boxing’s all-time greatest began including his name, and he found himself becoming a legend.
His official record says he fought 250 bouts, but he remembered fighting more than 500. And he loved to talk about them all, loved the stories that shaped the contours of his life and loved the absolute truth and less-than-certain tales that wove themselves into his boxing legend. Of course, this was as it should have been, because for him, great boxing was as much about the battles’ tales as it was about the battles themselves. This is the story of Sam Langford.
Walking the Earth’s Spine A 2700 Kilometer Solo Hike Through the Himalayas
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$22.95This is the adventure story of the first man to walk alone along the length of the highest mountains on earth; it is also an account of one person’s interaction with the Himalayas’ three great religions. It is a meditation on the joy of walking and as its heart, it is a literary confirmation of humankind’s ability to come to terms with the loss of a loved one.
The tragic death of Jono Lineen’s younger brother becomes the catalyst for him to move to the Himalayas and spend eight years among the world’s highest mountains. The experience culminates in a four-month, 2,700-kilometer, solo trekking odyssey from Pakistan to Nepal. No one had ever attempted to walk the length of the Western Himalayas alone, but Lineen’s intentions were more psychological than physical. The trek was about immersing himself in the Himalayan culture he had grown to love, assimilating the wisdom of the place and using it to come to terms with his brother’s death.
High Spots The Seagoing Memoirs of Captain James Wilbur Johnston
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95James Wilbur Johnston was born in 1854 in Great Village, Nova Scotia. Family oral history related that in the latter part of the 18th- or early 19th-century his grandfather was kidnapped (or “pressed” by the English Navy) from the streets of an Irish port city and forced to work as a crew member on board a sailing vessel bound for North America. Arriving at the port of Halifax, he was able to jump ship and escape to Colchester County.Wilbur was born into the world of sailing men and sailing ships that he had inherited from his grandfather. He had many adventures at sea and a thousand stories to tell. This memoir of his early days at sea was written as an intimate and revealing story for his children and his grandchildren, written in the 1930s to record the “high spots” of his time as a sailor and a captain.As Bruce Graham notes in his introduction, “What a story it is! The captain of cool temperament reveals tales of spell-binding voyages and dangerous adventure in understated tones. There is no bragging here, no ego on the pages, no huffing and puffing and it is exactly this playing down of danger, this off-handedness of high adventure and life-threatening misadventure, that give his words such a fascinating legacy. Captain Johnston is no teller of tall tales. He reveals his experiences as if his was an ordinary life. He witnessed murders, experienced ship wrecks, survived wicked winds, explored tropical islands and far-off lands. But it is more – much more than that. This is not your typical seagoing story. Turning the pages, you actually get a sense of this man, as if he is in the room with you. Seldom is a reader granted such an experience.A man like Captain Johnston was accustomed to the stinging whip of a North Atlantic gale as well as the windless lulls of southern climates, where a ship could lay idle for days or weeks waiting for trade winds. These men knew lonely days with restless. A good captain was all things to his crew; disciplinarian, doctor, barber, pastor and yes, when necessary, even pacifier. He cut their hair, blessed the dead and demanded life-threatening risks of the living. It was a dangerous life and the crew either adored and loved their captain or detested every breath he took. The captain had shipmates but no friends at sea.”At the close of Wilbur’s seagoing adventures in the manuscript, in 1886, he went home to Great Village married his village sweetheart and they moved to the U.S. But his adventures did not end there.High Spots appears in print for the public to read for the first time.
Righting the Wrongs Gus Wedderburn’s Quest for Social Justice in Nova Scotia
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$17.95Mary Riley was born and brought up in Nova Scotia. After graduating from Mount Saint Vincent and Carleton universities she worked as a journalist for the Calgary Herald and for the Canadian Press in Ottawa. In 1970 she went to West Africa with CUSO where she taught at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, and the University of Ghana. Following graduate work at Simon Fraser University, she taught in the public relations program at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax until her retirement in 2008.
Hermit of Africville
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Jon Tattrie is a journalist and writer. After a decade in Europe, he took a job on the Halifax Daily News in 2006. When the paper closed in 2008, he became a full-time freelancer, writing for Metro Canada, Transcontinental Media, the Chronicle-Herald, Halifax and Progress magazines, and other publications. He’s sweated in a Mi’kmaq lodge, sailed a tall ship, explored a nuclear bunker and spent Christmas at the Halifax Stanfield International Airport. Black Snow, his first novel, is a love story set during the Halifax Explosion. He lives with his fiancée in Halifax.
Island Year
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95As they neared retirement, Greg Brown and his wife Anne gave up their life in the U.S. to settle on a windswept Nova Scotia island inhabited by wild sheep and deer, where harbour seals sing in the fog and an old lighthouse still keeps watch over the North Atlantic. Island Year: Finding Nova Scotia tells the story of the surprises, challenges and discoveries of their first year alone on an island as they restored an old fisherman’s house, explored the island, and began to learn how to live a Nova Scotia way of life.
This is a story for anyone who dreams of exchanging a fast-paced, high-tech life for something slower and just maybe more meaningful. This is a story about the night sky and the dawn chorus, lobsters and wild raspberries, a famous pirate, the kindness of others, and getting in touch with yourself again. Funny and inspiring, this book redefines what a rich life can mean.If I Knew Then What I Know Now
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Carol Ann Cole is an author, a professional speaker and the founder of the Comfort Heart Initiative. She is a member of the Order of Canada and has received numerous additional awards including the Golden Jubilee Medal, the elite Maclean’s Honour Role and the Terry Fox Citation of Honour to name a few.
