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Down Home for Christmas – Holiday Stories from Atlantic Canada
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Down Home for Christmas offers a rich tapestry of seasonal stories from some of Pottersfield Press’s most talented and beloved authors and is sure to touch both those who love Christmas and those who enjoy the entire winter season in our rugged Down East region.
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When A Parent is Sick Helping Parents Explain Serious Illness to Children
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$17.95This books provides parents and other caregivers with suggestions on how to approach children with the information that their parent is seriously ill. There are many examples of how and what to say to children and teens.
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Peggy’s Cove The Amazing History of a Coastal Village
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95A history of Peggy’s Cove from the formation of the rocks through settlement and on to the present day. A story of sea, fish, settlers, sea monster, rogues, heroes, storms, artists, tragedy and tourism of one of the world?s most famous coastal communities.
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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.
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Wild Green Light
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Wild Green Light is a collaboration that brings together the poetry of acclaimed author David Adams Richards and award-winning writer Margo Wheaton. Drawing upon a fiercely shared passion for the natural world—as well as a literary friendship that has spanned more than two decades—each of these New Brunswick-born writers pays powerful tribute to a rapidly disappearing rural way of life. Atmospheric and spare, these poems take us into a world of deep woods, abandoned fields, kitchen tables, and back roads.
The book is divided into two sections, representing the unique voice and perspective of each author. Wheaton’s section consists of two elegant lyric poems, as well as a fifteen-part sequence written in a poetic form known as “ghazals.” Sorrowing and precise, the poems in this sequence survey the remains of her working-class childhood home, a once-thriving place, ravaged by family alcoholism and despair. Both celebratory and grieving, these poems grapple intensely with larger issues of working-class poverty, limited choices, and the chaotic legacy of addiction.
The book’s opening section gathers together twenty lyric poems by Richards, each one steeped in his own direct, visceral experience of his beloved Miramichi. Bold, plain-spoken, and elegiac, these deeply felt poems explore the grand terrain of love and loss and are marked with the same purposefulness, acuity, and compassion that appear in Richards’ fiction.
Alike and different, these two writers share a devotion to the physical landscapes of New Brunswick and call us to fiercely cherish the beauty of rural life and experience.
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Unspoken Truth Unmuted and Unfiltered
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95With strength and resilience, Africans have persevered through the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and were able to rebuild a life after slavery while enduring the inhumane conditions of the civil rights Jim Crow era forced upon them by the African diaspora. The lack of acknowledgement of the generational trauma these events have had on their descendants continues to create further injury. Even today, barriers prevent their healing and transition from survival to a thriving existence.
Unspoken Truth is a bold collection of poetry highlighting the generational pain of Africans living in the diaspora. Through her poems, Bowden creates a panoramic view of the terrible conditions they endured for centuries. Deliberately, with dignity, she brings the trauma stories of African Nova Scotians told around kitchen tables for decades to the homes of readers while restoring the balance of humanity and royalty from which the African journey began. Despite all odds, they were able to preserve their lineage and lean on the resilience buried deep in their souls while passing this pride, culture, and strength on to future generations so they may one day fulfill the hopes and the dreams of the former slaves.
This collection seeks to spark the necessary conversations the larger society needs to engage in around the perseverance of systemic racism, a society now grappling to make the connections between historical trauma and current-day conditions of inequality. It summons the conscience of every reader to acknowledge the truth and reconcile it with their own dissonance. The poems pay homage to the ancestors, honour the elders, and provide inspiration for the youth so they can heal from this historical inheritance and build upon their own narratives.
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The Perfect Day and Other Stories
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Favourably reviewing Harry Bruce’s Down Home: Notes of a Native Son more than 30 years ago, a critic in The Globe and Mail reported that it was from this book he’d learned that Nova Scotians often judged people or things on an ascending scale of merit that went like this: “good, some good, right some good, or right some Jesus good.” Down Home, he decided, was “right some good.”
Other critics have been less reticent. Bruce’s writing has inspired them to call him no less than “a consummate storyteller”; to marvel over his “magnetic style and marvelous command of the language”; to declare his prose “highly entertaining and gloriously informative”; and to insist that “only the spiritually dead or terminally obtuse could fail to come away from it richer for the experience.” About one collection of his works a reviewer decided, “We are obviously in the hands of a master.” Surely a master is right some Jesus good.
And now, The Perfect Day and Other Stories offers the best of Bruce’s best essays. From the sweet pain of first love and leaving home to the horrors of killer wasps, bloodthirsty flies, and marauding mice, from the relief experienced in every outhouse in the pines to the joy resounding from neighbourhood curling on a Scottish laird’s frozen pond, from the magic mist that sneaks into a ghost village on an abandoned island off Lunenburg to the sheer glory that parades of tall ships grant to great ports around the world, from fogs, bats, cats, and coyotes to the whales, thrones, stags, and steeples that make Atlantic Canada unique…they’re all here, and more, in Harry’s latest collection.
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Nova Scotia Politics 1945-2020 From Macdonald to MacNeil
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Who has held political power in Nova Scotia? How did they get it? And what did they do with it? In his latest book, best-selling author and former cabinet minister Graham Steele takes us on a roller-coaster ride through seventy-five years of Nova Scotia politics from 1945 to 2020.
The story ranges from Angus L. Macdonald, who won a crushing election victory in 1945 after a bitter falling-out with prime minister Mackenzie King, to Stephen McNeil, who provoked the first-ever teachers’ strike yet won the first back-to-back majorities in thirty years. It covers premiers from the calm intellectual Robert Stanfield, to the acerbic outsider Donald Cameron, to the aloof reformer John Savage, and highlights trailblazers like Gladys Porter, Wayne Adams, and Donald Marshall Jr.
Nova Scotia politics has seen an almost unnatural focus on jobs, roads, and corruption. Steele doesn’t shy away from the controversial parts of our political history: the trial of Gerald Regan for sexual crimes; the political pressure that led to the opening of the ill-starred Westray mine; and the environmental racism that pumped effluent into Boat Harbour for fifty years.
This is a book for anyone interested in modern Nova Scotia history or politics. It’s for the avid politics-watcher, of course, but also for the new voter, the newcomer, the new parent, the newly retired—anyone who wants some historical depth by which to understand today’s politics.
Steele pulls together the threads of history, adding original stories and archival research to the existing rich vein of historical writing, and then applies his own political experience to find the through lines that tie together past, present, and future.
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No Thanks, I Want to Walk Two Months on Foot Around New Brunswick and the Gaspé
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95“I found that the landscape had a deep effect on my mood: cliffs towering above, a narrow strip of earth to follow, the vast ocean opening up before me. I felt changed.”
After completing a 3,000-kilometre hike of coastal Nova Scotia and making a number of dramatic changes in her life, Emily Taylor Smith is compelled to undertake another Maritime journey on foot, this time following the coastline of New Brunswick and the Gaspé all the way to Quebec City.
She plans a solitary trip, searching for life lessons along the way and carrying everything she needs with her on her back. Emily severely underestimates the Fundy Footpath, struggles to communicate in French, nearly throws in the towel at the tip of Kouchibouguac Park, and survives a sleepless night in a collapsed tent on the windy Gaspé shore.
What she doesn’t count on is the support which appears daily in the form of roadside messages, random gifts of ice cream, generous postmistresses and flag collectors, and help that comes from within. The challenging regimen of 45 kilometres a day for two months is transcended by a growing spiritual bond with the landscape that keeps her moving forward.
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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.
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The Hermit of Africville The Life of Eddie Carvery
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95As Black Lives Matter protests swept the world, one of Canada’s greatest anti-racism fighters returned to reclaim the Black space and Black history to which he’s dedicated his life.
Eddie Carvery’s Africville protest reached its 50th year in 2020. He was just 23 when the City of Halifax bulldozed Africville, an African Nova Scotian village on the shores of the Bedford Basin. Under the disguise of “urban renewal” and using lies of a “home for a home,” the city destroyed every house and business before finally smashing the church in the middle of the night.
In the city, he found drugs, violence, and ultimately prison. His life was engulfed in tragedy and he hurt those he loved most. But in Africville, the land of his ancestors, he developed a great strength. His mind cleared and he saw the purpose of his life was to stand for Africville.
On a fine summer day in 1970, Eddie walked out to Africville, looked in sorrow at the ruins of his world, and decided to fight back. He pitched a tent and vowed to stay until everyone saw what he saw: that it was racist and wrong to destroy Africville, and that Halifax ought to give it back to its people.
Standing alone in Africville, he endured as racists set fire to his home, shot bullets at him, and tried again and again to drive him off the land.
This updated edition of The Hermit of Africville includes an introduction from Eddie himself reflecting on 50 years of fighting racism and his vision for a Canada that embraces all its peoples.
100% of the royalties from The Hermit of Africville go to Eddie Carvery and his Africville protest.
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Working from Home for a Harmonious Life
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Since Luc Desroches began working from his home office in 2016, he has been writing about how the move has allowed him to create a more harmonious life for both himself and his family. This book was mostly written pre-COVID-19, when working from home was more the exception than the rule. With almost every employee on the planet being encouraged to work from home where possible, COVID-19 has made the necessary transition from office to home more important than ever. Although there’s an explosion of teleworking articles with best practice tips, the author delves much deeper into the personal experience as he reflects on the values and teachings of the Mi’kmaq people who have worked from their homes for over ten thousand years.
The deeper messages of the book are perennial, which is what we need as we face unprecedented challenges. Now is an opportunity for millions of people to make a more informed decision on whether they should continue working from home or return to their pre-COVID workplaces. Now is a potential tipping point that could lead to a happier and healthier life for the individual and for society as a whole.
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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.
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The Silence of the Vessel A Novel
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95“I want to be a nun.”
Elspeth, recently retired from Cape Breton University’s Celtic Culture Department, is not sure how to deal with her teenage daughter Cecelia’s outdated and strangely troubling post-secondary plans. Maybe the spiritual inclination Cecelia has would have been welcomed in the past, but with all the scandals the Catholic Church has been going through during recent decades, all Elspeth can do is wonder if it is too early in the day for a glass of wine before responding.
Cecelia has always been a quiet, sometimes even cold child, and Elspeth worries once again if she and Andrew had been too old to raise a menopausal baby. Now as Cecelia approaches high school graduation, and all the decisions that come with that transition, the gap between them seems to be more than merely an age thing.
As she tries to understand her strange desire to become a nun, Cecelia befriends an aging Sister at the Notre Dame congregation at the convent in Mabou. Madonna, a fitting name for a woman who lived a life devoted to God, is in a time of transition as well, struggling with ailments of an aging mind and body. Because of Cecelia’s interest, she tries to piece together the reasons she became a bride of Christ.
Faith, family, and fate bring these three women together. Cecelia is looking for hope in an increasingly fragile world but Madonna’s past, if she can face it, may challenge all of them.
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Boy With a Problem
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95“…giant storytelling talent unleashed.” —Jon Tattrie, Atlantic Books Today
The daughter of an alcoholic desperate to be loved.
A father reliving a failed dream though his teenaged son.
A struggling immigrant surprised to discover that money does not buy happiness.
A creative boy struggling to please his dead father.
An eco-warrior defying her entire town for what she believes is right.
A father unable to reconcile the assault of his daughter with the world he raised her to believe in.
A gay pastor in self-imposed exile from church and family.
A stranger in a Santa suit dispensing fatherly advice.
A granddaughter who must end the life of the woman who raised her.
A survivor of a small-town drug addict determined to save her cousin from terrifying dreams.
An anxiety sufferer who finds refuge in sadomasochism.
A university student looking for love in all the wrong animal liberation schemes.In sharp, insightful prose, Boy With a Problem taps into the heart of our deeply human fear of failing to truly connect with others. The fissures that erupt between us, how quickly they widen from cracks to chasms—this is the thread running through these wise, raw, and tender stories.
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The Painted Province Nova Scotia Through an Artist’s Eyes
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$24.95“I gain a strong sense of interconnectedness and belonging when I look at her work. There is a universality and humanity Joy finds every time.” —Sheree Fitch
Since 1972, Joy Laking has lived and painted in Nova Scotia, capturing beauty in watercolours, oils, and acrylics in many locations. She sees beauty in both the usual and the unusual. The Painted Province lets the reader see Nova Scotia through an artist’s eyes.
Here, Joy has grouped some of her favourite paintings into forty regions, each with her personal commentary. In each of the regions, one of the images will have its GPS coordinates. You are encouraged to bring this book along in your travels to find some of the places where she created paintings. When you discover the exact spot, please take a photo. Then email it to her and she will post it on her website.
Joy constantly finds ways to enhance her own creativity. Every year, she paints in unfamiliar countries, such as Bolivia, Ghana, India, and Sri Lanka, to return home to see Nova Scotia through fresh eyes. Joy has also written a play, children’s books, articles about rural life, and work for the CBC.
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Halifax and Me
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95In 1971, Harry Bruce, recognized as one of Canada’s top non-fiction writers, lost his mind—according to his peers—when he left bustling, lucrative Toronto and moved his family to the tough little seaport of Halifax.
Harry was already acquainted with Halifax; at eighteen, he lived at HMCS Stadacona as an officer-cadet in the Royal Canadian Navy. He joined the navy chiefly to lose his virginity. “For what finer way could there be to serve queen and country?” Though he did not achieve his goal, that summer gave him his first whiffs of the port whose magnetism he would one day find irresistible.
He settled in Halifax—and he moved away. Several times, in fact, even going as far as Vancouver. Yet he kept returning to Halifax. Each time he found it had changed for the better and was a little less like the “racist, boring, City of the Living Dead” that comedian Cathy Jones called it forty years ago, and a little more like the lively, welcoming, cosmopolitan town he hoped it would be.
For the past fifty years, Harry Bruce has been working as what The Concise Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature calls “an impassioned advocate for the Maritimes and an essayist of great charm and perception.” Here, writing more charmingly and perceptively than ever, he celebrates the blossoming of Halifax as “A City to Dance In.”
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Daring, Devious and Deadly True Tales of Crime and Justice from Nova Scotia’s Past
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Welcome to a rogues’ gallery of murderers and pirates, a pair of brazen bank robbers and a fraud artist who fooled Halifax’s elite. A supporting cast includes a wise-cracking Cape Breton judge, legendary journalist-turned-politician Joseph Howe, circus showman P.T. Barnum, and future prime minister John Thompson. Daring, Devious and Deadly is a collection of fifteen true tales of crime and justice that spans more than 150 years of Nova Scotia’s history, from a triple murder in 1791 at a farm near Lunenburg to 1947, when Angus Walters, skipper of the racing schooner Bluenose, was attacked in the pages of an American magazine.
The stories are drawn from communities across the province, from Sydney and Amherst to Halifax, from the rugged coast of the Eastern Shore to the historic town of Annapolis Royal. Filled with surprising twists and courtroom drama, these stories of greed, murder and vengeance offer a window on the past. But justice can be far from blind. Religious hatred, partisan rivalry, social status, ethnicity, or political corruption sometimes invaded the courtroom, threatening to upset the delicate balance between guilt and innocence. Was justice done in each of these cases? You be the judge.
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While Crossing the Field
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95While Crossing the Field is Deborah Banks’s debut book of poetry. Her poems take us out onto the land where experiences in the natural world are filtered through the internal landscape of longing, presence, gratitude, and attentiveness. From the lowly spider to the vast expanse of the Atlantic below her house, the poet invites us to consider who we are when everything in our bustling world is removed and we are left with the greatest expanse of all: the Now and how it can inform our every breath.
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Waiting for the Small Ship of Desire
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95This latest collection of Cooper’s poetry includes some of his most personal poems, including revelations to him after the death of his mother and sharply etched emotional memories of childhood and grandparents. It includes other verse as well inspired by Robert Bly, John Keats, and the Urdu poet Ghalib, among others.
Readers return to Allan Cooper’s poems to be reminded of the quiet power of nature and how it can shape our lives and provide sustenance, vision, and even salvation when necessary. Here are poems to be read slowly and cherished.
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Rum Tales Down Home Yarns Around a Pot-Bellied Stove
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Welcome to The Shop.
Arthur Benjamin Lohnes was proprietor of a small country store known locally as The Shop in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, from 1919 through 1957. AB, as he was called, provided a welcoming haven to people eager to indulge in the venerable art of loafing and storytelling. The yarns were spun by some of the most colourful characters of the first half of the twentieth century.
With the blessing of their wives, menfolk met there regularly around the warmth of AB?s pot-bellied stove, a cozy forum in which to relate experiences and share their concerns of the day. The practice was carried out almost to the point of ceremony. Starring actors in this pageant of patriarchs ranged from grizzled old blue water sea captains through ordinary seamen to shore fishermen, a preacher, store owner, and a part-time postmaster. The tales are spliced with a biographical narrative – glimpses of adventures and misadventures ? of a gentle, kindly woman, once a child, to whom the book is dedicated.
The tales recounted within the walls of AB?s store take the reader back to a bygone era of daily poverty and everyday adventures in a coastal Nova Scotian community. Thanks to these storytellers, the past survives and comes alive for the modern reader.
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Mean Streets In Search of Forgotten Halifax, 1953-1967
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Following the Second World War, a new generation of politicians and planners across North America set out to reimagine their cities. With great verve and vision, they conceived of brave new urban landscapes filled with elevated highways, modern housing, thriving businesses, and engaging public spaces. All it would take, they said, was a deep collective capacity to dream and a determined willingness to wipe away the past.
And the idea caught on.
With great enthusiasm, these politicians and planners set out to realize their grand vision. They proposed that cities tear down great swaths of their aged, derelict, and decaying homes; destroy antiquated, dilapidated buildings; and tear up sordid streets in an effort they called “slum clearance.” Of course, these “slums” were also communities often populated by the most vulnerable members of the city, the desperately poor and people of colour, those who had little power to make their own decisions and determine their own fate. The whole process was called urban renewal.
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Teaching at the Top of the World
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95This memoir is a love story of sorts that expresses great respect for Inuit people, their culture, and the magnificent Arctic landscape. It is told from the perspective of a non-Inuit woman, who has lived and worked within an isolated, cross-cultural environment. Odette and YoAnne learned quickly that to be successful northern teachers, you must enter into the lives of your students and their rich culture in meaningful and significant ways. Outside of their regular school day, they enthusiastically participated in community activities; they ate Northern foods; they snowmobiled out onto the land to take part in camping, fishing, and hunting activities; and they learned as much Inuktitut language as they could. In turn, the author and her partner were warmly welcomed and they were deeply touched by their complete acceptance as a lesbian couple in these remote places.
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Memoir Conversations and Craft
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Memoir opens doors we could never ordinarily walk through—into the lives of Olympians, queens, victims of war and other tragedies, teenage rock stars, former streetwalkers or geishas—along with the doors to the lives of extraordinary/ordinary people. The best memoirs are maps of the heart and mind, and Marjorie Simmins invites you to explore the map of your own life. Here are the probing questions and dynamic writing ideas, coupled with inspirational interviews with best-selling memoirists, to light your own imagination afire. How do you access the details of your earliest memories, make them immediate and dramatic? How do you drive the story forward? How do you make a stranger care about your life?
Memoir: Conversations and Craft is intended for any reader or writer who is fascinated by the renegade memoir form—personal life stories that demand to be read, refuse to be forgotten. Whether you wish to compile memories from childhood to share with grandchildren, or whether you burn with the makings of a literary memoir, this reflection on writing can galvanize you.
Donna Morrissey, Linden MacIntyre, Plum Johnson, Lawrence Hill, Edmund Metatawabin, Diane Schoemperlen, and Claire Mowat—some of Canada’s top fiction and non-fiction writers—speak with candour, humour, and compassion about their journeys to memoir. Often touching, always helpful and frank, the interviews cover a broad spectrum of the writing experience. The time to write a memoir is always now—and the benefits are transformative.
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Green Ghost, Blue Ocean No Fixed Address
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Green Ghost, Blue Ocean is a travel memoir about a 40,000 nautical mile adventure that spans seventeen years. Early in their careers, Jennifer and her husband Nik come to realize that the rewards in the corporate world will always be the same—more money to buy more things, but never time off for self-discovery. When they begin to imagine a life outside the norm, they seize on the idea of long-distance sailing as the perfect way to journey down a road less travelled.
Green Ghost, Blue Ocean is a story about taking time and taking a risk, about unwittingly losing your identity while simultaneously redefining yourself in ways never imagined. It is a story about the importance of starting and the acceptance of an imperfect plan. It is a tale of the triumph of conviction: if you believe that you?ll figure it out when you get there, it?s amazing how far you can go.
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Halifax Nocturne A Novel
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95December 1954: the old city in winter wears its two hundred years of grime and vice without any shame. The paint peels from ramshackle homes, and the streets congeal with snow and mud. Weary pedestrians trudge through the bleakness with chins tucked below the collars of threadbare coats. Nothing comes easy to the old city, and nothing ever changes — too many tangled secrets and too many unspoken debts. And yet a new suspension bridge, being built out over the harbour to Dartmouth and set to open in the spring, promises a better tomorrow. Such promised are not easy to keep.
On the street, hard-drinking Halifax police detective Ray Vargas has an unfailing habit for finding trouble, and when a man is found shot to death in the back of a Chevy truck, Vargas finds more trouble than he can handle — the murdered man is his oldest friend and the husband of his lover.
Frank’s death reminds Ray of an unspoken debt left unpaid. He sets off to find a killer in a city that doesn’t much want a killer to be found. At every turn, he encounters lies and danger. With his partner Artie Brennan and friends Ezekiel Dixon and jazz great Louis Armstrong, Ray tries to make sense of the deepening mystery, but hope is hard to come by — at least until he meets Lee White, Frank’s one-time assistant, who might just be his own bridge to a better tomorrow.
Nothing in Halifax is what it seems. As the tension builds, and the stakes grow higher, Ray knows that his own future with Lee depends on his solving the mystery. But to do that, he must make a difficult choice: cross a bridge — or burn it.
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Silver Linings Stories of Gratitude, Resiliency and Growth Through Adversity
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Silver Linings author Janice Landry asks the very tough question, “What are you the most grateful for?” to fifteen inspiring Canadians from five provinces and two esteemed guests from the United States. One of seventeen is Dr. Bob Emmons, considered to be the world’s pre-eminent expert in the study of gratitude.
Gratitude and resiliency are key cornerstones in the field of mental health. Science-based evidence, discussed by Dr. Emmons and others, underlines the importance of developing and practising gratitude. Research proves being grateful is good for us, both mentally and physically. Gratitude can improve our resiliency before challenges occur in our lives, which they inevitably do.
Let’s face it: it’s easy to be grateful when things are running smoothly. The people in Silver Linings have discovered that gifts may actually emerge from life’s toughest challenges. Landry’s own gratitude practice was shaken to its core when both her mother and a close friend, assisted-death advocate Audrey Parker, died within weeks of one another while she was writing Silver Linings.
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Doing Time Writing Workshops in Prison
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Poetry can address our most intimate, frightened, hopeful selves. Langille found this to be true as she introduced poems to men and women in prison and gave writing assignments based on the discussions these poems inspired. Over and over participants shared private moments of self-awareness. The support they gave each other and the stories they told were profound. This book puts to rest many of the myths we have about inmates. It confirms both that people cannot be reduced to their worst deeds and that creative expression has a central place in the process of rehabilitation. Most pointedly, Langille’s work reveals how, by failing the men and women behind bars, the prison system harms us all.
Participants in these workshops were complicated people. As Bryan Stevenson, an attorney who fights for the wrongfully accused on death row, says, “People are more than the worst thing we’ve ever done … Even if you kill someone, you’re not just a killer.” Doing Time makes us rethink the myths we have about inmates and gives us insights into the force of trauma and the power of dignity. We get a glimpse of what goes on in a prison system and we learn, as Langille learned, from the men and women she worked with.
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An Imperfect Healer The Gifts of a Medical Life
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95“She said she would pray for me. I asked her why. She said she prayed for many people. I asked her why. Stooped and frail, she wore the lassitude of ninety-seven years as transparently as she wore the pale blue wool sweater that seemed to grow from her shoulders. I had seen her before in the hurried and harried rounds I make here. My progress notes say repeatedly, ‘No problems reported.’ But today I took the time to listen.”
Every patient tells a story. Drawing on a forty-year medical career, Dr. Larry Kramer has written about some of the people he has met along the way. The stories chronicle love and loss, tragedy and comedy, and empathetically observe patients who live and die, some with courage and some with fear. These accounts frame the story of one physician’s life and how it was shaped, changed, and guided by those he encountered every day. The young, the old, the happy, the sad, and the suffering all bring gifts beyond measure.
Narratives of medicine are increasingly recognized as key components of the therapeutic experience. The Journal of the American Medical Association suggested in 2001, “Narrative medicine can examine and illuminate four of medicine’s central narrative situations: physician and patient, physician and self, physician and colleagues, and physician and society.” It enables patients, physicians, and others to be moved by stories of illness. Thus we share a common humanity. We all have stories. Our heroes are among us.
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Colours in Winter
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$14.95Colours in Winter is a whimsical children’s picture book. The child, with her two bird friends, initially wishes that the giant fantastic snowflakes were coloured. Everything is too white. She thinks of green frogs in the spring, enormous red strawberries in the summer, and heaps of yellow and brown leaves in the autumn. But her desire becomes true and the snowflakes are suddenly all different colours. “Too much colour!” she gasps.
When everything turns back to white, she makes a wonderful discovery: there is colour everywhere in the winter — blue sky and green conifers, red rose hips and yellow beech tree leaves. The child and her bird friends reunite in a joyous celebration.
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Fixing Broken Things
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95George Elliott Clarke writes of Gregory Cook’s poetry, “… a poignant, elegiac tone haunts these lyrics, whether Cook speaks of love or nature or family. Any risk of sentimentality is cut by his usage of hard particulars.”
Fixing Broken Things is Cook’s seventh book of poems. He has served as Chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada and as a member of the executive of The League of Canadian Poets. He was also a founder and first secretary the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (ACCESS).
In Fixing Broken Things, Cook offers contemplative glances and lingering views on everyday life, as if observed through a window on the weather, landscape, and appearance or disappearance of things that matter. These observations act as mirrors that reflect the self and allow the merging of inner and outer worlds. The poet’s rewards are discoveries of self and other in the magic visions and sounds that arise in combinations of words, like bits of winter ice reflecting prisms of light, life, and vision.
Moments from travel in Europe, Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand appear here, as much at home as his life in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Fixing Broken Things harvests nature, memory, love, astonishment, as well as a life of altered consciousness.
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Sculpting Towards the Light
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95“Stone carving is a slow, meditative experience. The process can be transformative. Each of my projects has taken life’s rough moments and opens them up to the discovery of our shared humanity. The finished work may be the sculpture, but the creative process is never ending.”
Sculpting Towards the Light is an intimate and insightful story of a sculptor and his work. It follows the paths of imagination and activity which gave birth to a very unique work of art. The paths are diverse and unexpected, twisting into personal history, racing forward into the future, and then resting in the euphoric moments when the mind and its thoughts no longer exist and the carving occurs as if of its own accord.
The author writes, “There is a point in each sculpture where my energies collide. At first there is the initial inspirational emotion, full of conviction, demanding that I communicate its essence. The emotion has been concretely felt but the sculptural representation of that emotion remains vague. It is as if I am sleepwalking, unaware of where I am going. I can also feel playful in a place of excitement where there are no time pressures and few expectations. My mind becomes an elevator with predetermined automatic stops: journal writing, pencil sketches, listening to music, reading and meditative walking in nature. Eventually, a three-dimensional structure materializes from the midst of this contemplation.”
Here is a unique story about play and work, imagination and action. Costanzo looks at the past that has shaped him and his future as an artist working in an ancient medium, while the world races toward digital Armageddon.
