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A Photographer’s Guide to Prince Edward Island
Photographer: John Sylvester, Stephen DesRochesPublisher: Acorn Press$24.95New by award-winning photographer team.
There are very few places as photogenic as Prince Edward Island. With its sweeping landscapes, scenic vistas and miles upon miles of beaches, the Island is a haven for photographers. Taking advantage of potential stunning images of the Island in all seasons, these two award-winning photographers know the best places to set up, when and how best to photograph each corner of the Island and how to get there. The thousands of visitors from all over the world who travel to the Island learn the secrets of these two seasoned experts.
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Comment Naquirent un poulain,cinq chatons et la Confederation
Artist: Brenda JonesPublisher: Acorn Press$12.95L’action du dernier roman de l’auteure primée de livres pour enfants Deirdre Kessler se déroule à l’été de 1864. Les jumeaux Gabriel et Grace, de neuf ans, aident leurs parents à l’écurie familiale de la rue Great George, à Charlottetown. Ils assistent à toute l’excitation provoquée par la venue d’un cirque en ville et l’arrivée par bateau de politiciens des Maritimes et de la province du Canada-Uni. Les jumeaux suivent des leçons de dessin de leur ami, l’artiste Robert Harris, de quatorze ans, qui joue dans l’orchestre chargé de divertir les délégués lors du grand bal et du banquet offerts à l’édifice colonial. Mais les jumeaux sont plus excités à cause de leur cheval préféré, qui va bientàt donner naissance à son premier poulain.
Remontez dans le temps et parcourez les rues de Charlottetown pour jeter un regard sur les réunions ayant mené à la Confédération, avec ce livre magnifiquement illustré par l’artiste primée Brenda Jones.
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Prince Edward Island National Park Past and Present
Publisher: Acorn Press$16.95Since Prince Edward Island National Park was first created in 1937 it has welcomed visitors from around the world, captivating the hearts of all who experience its serene and tranquil beauty. Stretching for about 40 km along the north shore of Prince Edward Island between New London and Tracadie Bays and the tip of the Greenwich Peninsula in St. Peters Bay, this dynamic coastal landscape is constantly changing, shaped by the wind and waves. The sand dunes and beaches, wetlands and forests provide a home for many plants and animals. Wildflowers add colour everywhere and marram grass glistens in the sunlight, rippled by the coastal breezes. Great blue herons grace the ponds and marshes and shorebirds feed along the water’s edge. Several species at risk are protected in the park, including the endangered piping plover. People have been part of this coastal landscape for thousands of years. At Greenwich, archaeological evidence reveals 10,000 years of cultural history, from early Aboriginal peoples to the Mi’kmaq, early French and Acadian settlers and immigrants from the British Isles. Once an elegant summer home built in 1896, Dalvay-by-the-Sea National Historic Site is now a heritage inn. Green Gables Heritage Place, also part of L. M. Montgomery`s Cavendish National Historic site, inspired L.M. Montgomery’s setting for Anne of Green Gables. This book, with stunning new photography by the Island’s best photgraphers complimented with archival photos, captures the essence of this special place, preserved and protected for you to return to again and again.
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This Navy Doctor Came Ashore
Publisher: Acorn Press$17.95Dr. Read entered the Royal Canadian Navy in 1943 and worked for three years as a flight surgeon. When the war was winding down, he realized that his career as a flight surgeon was also over. But he remembered how much he had enjoyed the three weeks he spent in Charlottetown when he relieved the medical officer at HMCS Queen Charlotte. This city of 20,000, in which this landship was ‘moored’, was much to his liking partly because he had grown up in Amherst, Nova Scotia, just across the Northumberland Strait, where he thought the culture was very similar. He also knew that as the only medical officer there would be independence, significant responsibility and virtual freedom from naval protocol and politics. One couldn’t ask for more. But this was during prohibition on the Island and little did he know that a great deal of his time would be spent writing “prescriptions” for alcohol so that the officers could be allowed to drink. Nor did he know that because of the lack of family physicians on the Island, he would be asked to open a general practice in a rural area of the province. For a flight surgeon who had little experience in family medicine, this would be a whole new adventure. This book chronicles some of the noteworthy events of the time he spent spent as a country doctor.
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I am an Islander
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95No man is a Prince Edward Island. That’s a good thing, because the tiny province is eroding a metre per year. In the collection I am An Islander, Patrick Ledwell explores the hilarity of life viewed from the country’s crumbling Eastern edge. Raised in a big family, the Island comedian looks back at his rural roots and asks: I am an Islander is a funny and heartfelt stockpile of standup, sketches, and rants, banked up to defend your good humour against everything that might erode it.
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Riptides New Island Fiction
Publisher: Acorn Press$21.95A call was sent out asking writers to submit unpublished short stories for a fiction anthology featuring newer writers with a significant P.E.I. connection. There were no boundaries for setting or genre, only a limit of 5,000 words. PEI is strong on tradition, which includes out-migration and immigration. Thus, its culture and demographics are changing, and these PEI writers both are Island-born and hail from away – Australia and Calgary, Newfoundland and Ukraine. The result is twenty-three stories, which take the reader from a ritual gathering of PEI widows to Chernobyl in the nuclear disaster’s aftermath, from a menacing marital game of hide-and-seek through the Maritime landscape to gender clashes on an outback sheep ranch, from a religious commune in Alberta to the Enlightenment Tour bus into Quebec. Whether the characters are struggling for dear life in breaking surf, gasping for emotional air at a ladies’ candle party or fearing the Tall Tailor’s scissors, the authors demonstrate a rich variety of fictional talent and imagination emerging from what Island poet Milton Acorn called the “red tongue…In the ranged jaws of the Gulf,” and revising our perception of “the land of Anne.”
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What Really Happened is This A Poetry Memoir
Publisher: Acorn Press$18.95This collection of moving poetry puts into words the heartbreak and triumphs of looking after ailing parents.What Really Happened is This is a poetry memoir that focuses on the ten-year journey of an adult “only child” as her beloved parents face declining health and death. The wry, poignant, humorous, and sometimes heartbreaking, poems chronicle the poet’s struggle to find balance in her life, as she juggles the needs of her family with her own work and creative life. The poems touch on the universal in specific experiences, as the poet faces the death of each parent, and realizes she is now next in line.
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Great Day Fer Livin’
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95After living in Australia for 18 years, Juliet Wilson returned to Prince Edward Island for an extended stay. The Island’s allure hit her front on: not just the vibration of the gently rolling landscape, with its patchwork quilt of red soil and emerald fields, but the beauty of the people who make up the rich fabric of the Island, their sense of place, and their way of being.She spent the summer of 2009 driving the back roads of Prince Edward Island, introducing herself to people she met on the wharves and in the fields and in their shops, and getting to know them by listening to their stories and eventually photographing them. Like an informal anthropological study, this 48-page book gives a glimpse into the culture, belief, and practices of the primary producers who make up the backbone of Prince Edward Island.
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Mud, Sweat and Tears
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Mud, Sweat and Tears tells the story of Bud Ings’ adventures as a rural veterinarian in the 1950s. As one of Prince Edward Island’s first professionally trained veterinarians, Ings set up his practice in the eastern town of Souris before moving to Montague.
Farms were rarely close at hand, however, and the sight of Bud Ings behind the wheel of his Volkswagen Bug became a familiar one on the Island’s highways and muddy back roads. And whether he was helping to deliver a calf, giving shots of penicillin to a pig, or putting down a beloved horse, Ings treated each animal- and each farmer- with dignity and respect.
Ings’ memoir is a rich, often humorous account of his first decade as a vet, at time when there were few vacations, no modern tools of the trade, and no request too strange to attend to. It’s also the story of a past era, when PEI’s farms flourished and the animals were not only the backbone of the economy, but part of the family.
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Jean Pierre Roma (French)
Publisher: Acorn Press$9.95This is the French translation of Jean Pierre Roma and the Company of the East of Isle-Saint Jean.
In the 1700s, Jean Pierre Roma brought settlers to carve an international trading empire out of the virgin forests of Isle St. Jean — now known as Prince Edward Island. A successful entrepreneur in a thriving community, he saw all his accomplishments destroyed by privateers in 1745. Yet the story of Roma lives on as an inspiration and a cautionary tale to leaders and builders. This new edition of a monograph originally published in 1977 ensures that Roma is not forgotten.
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Growing Up With Julie
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Growing Up With Julie is the story of Gerry Steele’s childhood with a French-speaking mother in an English-speaking community. Set in Miscouche, near Summerside, Prince Edward Island, in the early part of the 20th century, the story is an historical snapshot of a life heavily influenced by the Catholic church, poverty and the Depression, alcoholism, and cultural tensions between the Acadians and the Scots. At the head of the family is Steele’s grandmother, a woman unwavering in her beliefs—regardless of their merit, validity, or tendency to offend. It is also a story of one woman’s determination to educate her children in a hard-living rural society coming to terms with modernity.
Gifted with an excellent memory for detail, Gerry Steele delivers a story that is rich in integrity and precision, with a good dose of humour to brighten up the dark corners.
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Acadian Legends, Folktales and Songs
Publisher: Acorn Press$18.95Island historian and folklorist Georges Arsenault has been collecting songs and stories from Acadian Prince Edward Island since his student days in the 1970s: words gathered by lamplight in the early part of the 20th century, when the local men and women would pass on what they’d learned from elders long gone. His 17 informants were mostly hard-working parents of very large families, some well-educated and some not. Included in this collection are 8 stories, 13 legends and 23 songs with lyrics and musical notation, mainly reproduced from taped interviews. Originally published as Contes, legendes et chansons de l’Île-du-Prince-Edouard, this English translation by Sally Ross includes footnotes and a bibliography, as well as photos of his informants
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A Bountiful Harvest
Editor: Alice Anna ReesePublisher: Acorn Press$22.95Little did organizers know when they planted the seed 15 years ago that the Literary Awards would reap such a bountiful harvest. This collection of over 35 first-prize short stories, poetry, and writing for children represents the best new writing in Prince Edward Island. Readers will recognize several of the names – people who have gone on to be published or produced – including Rai Berzins, Lesley-Anne Bourne, Judy Gaudet, Elaine Hammond, Hugh MacDonald, Brent MacLaine, Steve McOrmond, Dianne Hicks Morrow, Melissa Mullen, Libby Oughton, and Nancy Russell.
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Landmarks: An Anthology
Editor: Brent MacLainePublisher: Acorn Press$16.95Poetry by 50 of the Atlantic region’s finest poets
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Tales From Willowshade Farm
Publisher: Acorn Press$3.99Betty Howatt has spent half a century on her family’s fruit farm in Prince Edward Island, within sight and sound of the Northumberland Strait. In this collection of stories, she shares her gardening lore, her memories of days gone by, and her prodigious knowledge of the flora and fauna around her. Told with wisdom, humour, and a refreshing lack of sentimentality, these chronicles are both entertaining and informative, and give the reader a tantalizing glimpse into a fast disappearing world of peace and beauty on a small family farm.
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Long Reach Home
Publisher: Acorn Press$15.95Reaching back through a family full of stories and characters, from Newfoundland on her mother’s side to New Brunswick on her father’s, the poems in Long Reach Home are characteristically personal, warm, and accessible- by turns humorous, by turns enraged- but always engaged with the world, distilling simple pleasures and fundamental human struggles from everyday experience.
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Dip & Veer Reflections on the Art of Alex Colville
Publisher: Acorn Press$14.95Frank Ledwell has previously published one volume of prose and poetry, The North Shore of Home (Acorn Press, 2002) and two collections of poetry, Crowbush and Other Poems (Ragweed, 1990) and Dip & Veer: Reflections on the Art of Alex Colville (Acorn Press, 1996). He has performed as a popular storyteller in venues across Prince Edward Island. Frank Ledwell is a Professor Emeritus of the English Department of the University of Prince Edward Island, where he taught creative writing for many years. He was the first recipient of the PEI Council of the Arts’ Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Literary Arts, and for many years was known as the Island’s unofficial poet laureate.
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Beautiful Veins
Publisher: Acorn Press$15.95A Canadian poet’s last wordsA sense of ego-urgency has seemingly sucked hard on any high octane left in my system, and what used to take me a decade and more to accomplish as a writer has suddenly fruited within a 12-month time frame.- Joe Sherman, December 2005The result is Beautiful Veins, Joe Sherman’s final book of poems. Joseph Sherman, author of seven books of poetry, editor, and supporter of the arts, died on January 9, 2006, in Charlottetown. He was 60.Beautiful Veins begins with the picture of a child, of “one life with all the promise of its beautiful veins.” Some of the poems catch details of domestic life and its indwelling spirit and glancing irony; they explore the cache of memory. Others evoke history and landscape, opening them up to careful consideration. Always there is a love of language and its quirks, oddities, split-levels, riches. Out of the intricate and elliptical syntax, moments of joy are discovered, named against the threat of time and illness.
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And My Name Is Stories from the Quilt
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95In this, Margie Carmichael’s first collection of short stories, ordinary women have extraordinary skills, gifts and strengths; they are women who live next door or in the distance, shadowed by fear or absence of recognition. Age, race, and culture connect in the timeless fabric of the quilt, with craft, patience, and faith connecting the women through the threads of their diversity.Anna tells of life after residential school; Irini reflects on her life in war-torn Afghanistan. In Tansie, two adults survive childhood abandonment. Freelance cosmetician to the dead Flora Hill offers insight into the lighter side of love, marriage, and death.Featuring illustrations by Dale McNevin, the book is a collaboration that began with an original painting and companion poem first published in the Maritime Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health 2000 Calendar.
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A Wholesome Horror Poor Houses in Nova Scotia
Publisher: SSP Publications$15.95Brenda Thompson’s poignant treatise on the treatment of the poor in Nova Scotia and the evolution of private and government-subsidized poor houses. None of these 32 buildings remain. This is a very important book that makes us pause and ask serious questions.
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Place Between the Tides
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95Based upon childhood memory and his naturalist’s journals, A Place between the Tides is the story of Harry Thurston’s return to the beloved environment of his boyhood when he moves to the Old Marsh on the banks of the Tidnish River in Nova Scotia. The book describes the seasons in the life of the marsh as filtered through two decades of Thurston’s living there.Blending acute analysis and a poet’s lyricism, Thurston explores and examines one of the most productive and biologically diverse habitats on Earth. This is a story of the salt marsh, but it is also the story of a personal odyssey, a homecoming for Thurston as a naturalist, culminating in the re-discovery of the bounty of nature where land meets sea.
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By The Sweat of My Brow The Life of a Newfoundland Logger
Publisher: John Kitchen$19.95This is the story of a young outport Newfoundlander who went into the lumberwoods at an early age to harvest trees to feed the paper mill at Grand Falls. It tells of his experiences at various phases of wood’s work: cutting trees, transporting them to the waterways, driving them to the mill, cooking meals, building dams, teaming horses, driving tractors, trucks, and other wood’s machinery.It tells of lumbermen’s living and working conditions-the hard-ships of working in all weathers, enduring heat, rain, snow, frost and flies. The camaraderie of camp life, the food served, the bunkhouse and beds they had to sleep on, the lice, the smells, and the changes brought about by the I.W.A strike.It chronicles the history of the log harvest of the Paper Company’s Millertown Division, from the start-up in the first decade of the 1900’s to the present.
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Come Walk With Me
Publisher: John Kitchen$9.50This book is a descriptive and informative account the author’s backpacking experiences, complemented by nearly 300 coloured photographs.Walk with the author around Newfoundland visiting outport settlement; photographing caribou in wilderness areas; and hiking the 909 kilometers accross the province.Experience, also his adventures in England as ge wanders the designated trails and and pathways all the way from the Scottish border, sotuyh to the English Channel.His trips to aboriginal areas of Nprthern Ontario and Manitoba, too, will give you viewings of some amazing scenery.A quick flip through the book will show you what to expect and enjoy. Happy reading!
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The Newfoundland Beothuk Termination of a Tribe
Publisher: John Kitchen$18.95This is an account of the final 100 years of Beothuks in Newfoundland during the years of increasing settlement of Notre Dame Bay, their last place of refuge from the Europeans’ advancement. It chronicles the conflict between the two races that led to the eventual end of the Beothuks–through the killing of their people, diseases, and denial of food.
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All Afire! Ore Miners of Newfoundland and Labrador
Publisher: John Kitchen$19.95The book’s title – ‘All Afire!’ was the cry shouted when miners were ready to light their fuses for a blast, warning other workers to seek shelter. This is a story about the life of a miner, focusing on Buchans, with comparisons to other Newfoundland and Labrador mining communities. It explains how a miner goes about the various mining jobs, from mucking ore, to drilling, to being a shift-boss, and the many other jobs in between. It also discusses the hazards and dangers associated with mining – the falls of ground, the dust, the gas, moving machinery, dynamite, etc.
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The Beothuk Way Living With Nature
Publisher: John Kitchen$18.85A story about the Beothuk way of life in Newfoundland before the coming of settlement by “White” people in early 1700s Notre Dame Bay. Told through the eyes of a young Beothuk boy, it tells of his people, hunting, ceremonies,trapping, cooking, shelters, weapons, tools, canoes and of their nomadic ways.
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Who’s Who in Black Canada 2nd Edition
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$35.99In this second edition of Who’s Who in Black Canada, Dawn Williams updates her tome of Black achievements and success in Canada, with over 730 entries. Province by province, this indispensable educational and networking tool puts the spotlight on the impressive range of achievements of Blacks in Canada- from business leaders to musicians to engineers, artists, doctors, judges and filmmakers. Filled with information and inspiration, Who’s Who in Black Canada 2 is an excellent resource for schools, libraries, professionals and those working with youth.
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Historic Houses of Prince Edward Island
Publisher: SSP Publications$19.95The first of its kind, this fully illustrated book examines the evolution of domestic architecture on Prince Edward Island up until the advent of WWI. It describes 82 of the most significant heritage houses on the Island and includes the exquisite black and white and colour photography of Lionel Stevenson, floor plans of selected buildings and interesting aerial photographs of some of these houses in their rural context. Author Scott Smith has won several awards and is himself an historian, publisher and architect.
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Le chandail de Chéticamp
Artist: Joycelyne DoironPublisher: Bouton d'or Acadie$10.95It’s time for spring cleaning in Chéticamp. With the help of his parents, Eric is reluctantly cleaning out his wardrobe. To his chagrin, Eric’s favourite sweater, belt, and pants wind up being given to a complete stranger… who doesn’t even have kids! What is Mr. Delaney planning to do with all those clothes?
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Historic Architecture of Prince Edward Island
Publisher: SSP Publications$34.95Architect Scott Smith has complied a thorough and fascinating description of Prince Edward Island’s unique pre-1914 built heritage. From lighthouses to churches, picturesque houses to stately civic buildings, this is the only comprehensive study of architectural history in The Garden of the Gulf.
Seen through the eyes of an architect, this limited edition volume s meticulously detailed in its description and beautifully illustrated with black and white and color photography, drawings and archival material.
The Historic Architecture of Prince Edward Island is a must have for historians, collectors, students and anyone interested in the material history of this special place.
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Flavours of Halifax and Road Trips
Photographer: Heidi JirotkaPublisher: MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc.$34.95Whether you consider yourself a foodie or you only dine out a couple of times a year, Flavours of Halifax and Road Trips offers you a window into the best food the city has to offer.
In Flavours of Halifax and Road Trips, the best of the region’s epicurean leaders take food lovers on a culinary journey through the city’s emerging hotspots. Quite simply, it is a celebration of the culinary scene in all its resplendent glory.
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Nova Scotia Shaped by the Sea
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$24.95The history of Nova Scotia is an amazing story of a land and people shaped by the waves, the tides, the wind and the wonder of the North Atlantic. Lesley Choyce weaves the legacy of this unique coastal province, piecing together the stories written in the rocks, the wrecks and the record books of human glory and error. In this true-life adventure, he provides a down-to-earth journey through the natural and man-made history that is both refreshing and revealing. The story begins after the retreat of the glaciers when the first people arrived, and over thousands of years evolved the highly civilized Mi’kmaq culture. The arrival of the Europeans disrupted their life, unleashing tumultuous conflicts that would last centuries. Then came the power struggle between France and England, which was fought at sea as well as on land. As England emerged the victor, the Acadians were driven from the land they loved. Once the wars subsided, the pirates and privateers still plundered the seas, but the honest sailors and shipbuilders of Nova Scotia led the province into a flourishing world trade. During the First World War, Nova Scotia was again thrust into military action, resulting in one of the most devastating explosions ever to rip through a city. Decades later, Halifax was torn apart again, this time by military riots. Here in the new century, it is clear that the way of life along this coast is changing. But while the wealth of the sea has been plundered by human greed, the dreams of life in harmony with the fierce yet beautiful North Atlantic live on, even as the coastline continues to be carved away by the restless surge of the waves
