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Dykes & Aboiteaux
Publisher: Societe de Grand-Pre$5.95Sally Ross studied in France and taught the history and culture of French Canada for ten years and now works as an author, translator, and consultant.
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Whales of Bay of Fundy
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$6.95A concise guide to the various whales of the Bay of Fundy.
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Blacks
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$14.00This book documents the experience of the Blacks in the Maritimes, the difficulties they encountered and the institutions that sustained them. It profiles a selection of prominent individuals who overcame the prejudice and discrimination of a dominant culture to become outstanding in their careers while contributing to the greater good of society.
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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 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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The Peddlers The Fuller Brush Man, the Lords of Liniment and Door to Door Heroes in Nova Scotia and Beyond
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95The Peddlers is the story of the leading roles some Nova Scotians played in the North American door-to-door sales profession in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It starts with the life of Nova Scotia-born Alfred C. Fuller, the Fuller Brush Man, whose humble upbringing in the Annapolis Valley laid the foundation for what became one of the biggest businesses of its type in the world.
It also follows the career of Yarmouth County’s Frank Stanley Beveridge, who co-founded the highly successful Stanley Home Products company. From the tough times of the 1920s and 1930s, the story showcases the Lebanese immigrant backpack peddler Herman Rofihe who established a quality men’s wear store that served three generations.
The Peddlers takes you on a door-to-door tour of the origins of household brands like Minard’s and Sloan’s Liniment, JR Watkins and Rawleigh Products, Fraser’s Liniment, Gates Little Gem Pills, Buckley Cough Syrups, Muskol, and other medicinal enterprises founded by peddlers, many of them Nova Scotians. It also chronicles a century-old Hants County murder case involving two young peddlers — one the victim, the other the perpetrator.
Filled with these fascinating stories of Nova Scotia’s history in the door-to-door trade, The Peddlers is a tribute to the men and women of a bygone era in merchandising, the likes of which will never be seen again.
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The Legend of Gladee’s Canteen Down Home on a Nova Scotia Beach
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95“Everyone remembers the famous food at Gladee’s Canteen, especially Gladee’s fish and chips and her coconut cream pie.” — Calvin Trillin
Gladee’s Canteen, several times voted as one of the ten best restaurants in Canada, was a special example of co-operative and communal spirit. At the centre of the operation were Gladee and her sister Flossie, supported by the extended Hirtle family. They offered a warm welcome and a memorable menu, in a setting brashly open to the forces of nature.
The Legend of Gladee’s Canteen tells the story of a popular Nova Scotia beach and a pioneer family who, against the odds, constructed a simple canteen at Hirtle’s Beach in1951 and ran it for forty years. The book draws on the author’s family associations, personal memory, and the outlying stockpile of collective recollections — a tapestry of events woven through the evolutionary fabric of a small, relatively isolated Maritime coastal community.
The era of Gladee’s Canteen is remarkable story that takes place in a small coastal Nova Scotia community blessed with a spectacularly dynamic living beach. In its time, the Hirtle family and its sparkling enterprise thrived in spite of relative isolation, uncertain funding, and domestic demons. As a Nova Scotia epic, the success story of Gladee’s Canteen mirrors the recent history of Hirtle’s Beach, exemplifying the twists and turns locked up in legend.
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Afraid of the Dark
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Through prose and poetry, Guyleigh Johnson tells the story of sixteen-year-old Kahlua Thomas. With a hard life at home, on the streets, and in school she finds an escape during her grade ten history class through writing poetry. Hiding in the back of the class, she writes, passionately expressing and releasing emotions about identity, home, community, culture, and forgiveness. All Kahlua wants is freedom, whatever that really means.
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The Smeltdog Man
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95“I brushed the crumbs off of the fish and back onto the counter, threw the smelts in the frying pan while I got the eggs out of the fridge and cracked one.”
The Smeltdog Man is the story of how a Cape Bretoner marshalled his accidental invention, a marijuana-induced, munchie-inspired Smeltdog, into the most successful fast food franchise in Canada. As president of his newly formed Good Karma Corporation, he tells the tale of how his business empire grows beyond his control, turning him into a billionaire.
While the business booms and the narrator’s wisdom is being constantly tapped for new ideas and strategies, he consults his Granddaddy Blue, whose pragmatic mixture of horse-trader economics and 1960s hippie ideals provide his grandson with the guiding principles and necessary scams he needs to survive in the corporate world.
From the simplicity of its origins to the ecological disaster of its success, The Smeltdog Man details the influences of country music on our narrator’s understanding of himself, the longing of unrequited love and the accumulation of wealth possessing more zeros than our hero can count.
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Through Sunlight and Shadows
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Through Sunlight and Shadows is an autobiographical novel about a young boy set in the small New Brunswick town of Bannonbridge in the 1940s and 1950s. The story is told from the perspective of an older man, Walt Macbride, a character well known to readers of other Raymond Fraser novels.
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The Other Side of the Sun The True Story of One Refugee’s Journey
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95As one of the boat people refugees, Thien escaped war-torn Vietnam on a harrowing journey that landed him in a Malaysian refugee camp. Thien Tang had an ordinary childhood living in South Vietnam until it became a Communist state. His father feared persecution of his family and sent his fourteen-year-old son into hiding for over a year. Upon his return, Thien attended a local high school and found a classmate sweetheart. Life once again was good. But it wasn’t meant to last. Thien was forced to go back into hiding again with no hope of return. Like thousands of others, he fled Vietnam on a crowded boat in search of a new life. But first he had to cross the treacherous South China Sea to reach Malaysia.
Thien’s ship was attacked by pirates and shot at by police. On land, he and his fellow refuges were jailed, starved, and beaten, but survival only brought on tougher challenges. The soldiers forced them at gunpoint back into their damaged boat to be towed to sea. He sought asylum in the United States but found the refuge he was seeking in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, where he lives today.
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Never Speak of This Again
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95It is 1917 and Nellie, seventeen years old and pregnant, has just returned to Cape Breton from Boston to find her lover. Instead of a safe haven, she encounters rejection and humiliation and is told to clear out and never speak of this again. Nellie’s story reflects the lives of many Nova Scotia women who found their way to Boston. Her world becomes a matter of daily survival, while so many in the world, including the stranger from Truro, try to survive the catastrophic chaos of WWI and the Spanish Flu. Never Speak of This Again takes the reader from eastern Canada to western Canada, to Europe, and back again.
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Lucy Cloud
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Filled with engaging characters, with their unique and lively Cape Breton voices, Lucy Cloud follows the fortunes and heartaches of a family with secrets and the intense longing to live fully. Anne Lévesque delivers an authentic tale of a time and a place, where people must be strong and inventive to make a good life.
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Shipwrecks and Sailors of Prince Edward Island
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95It has been estimated that between fifteen to twenty thousand ships have meet their end along Canada’s eastern seaboard. Many of these wrecks happened between the 1800s to the mid-1900s when the season of bark, brig, brigantine and schooner came and went. This era left behind literally a vast volume – both recorded in print and preserved in local tales – of heroism and tragedy of mariners young and old.Prince Edward Island’s legacy of tales from the era of all-sail is great: from the wreck of the immigrant-laden Elizabeth at Cascumpec where the castaways were saved by a native; to the unique tale of PEI’s Jessy thrown onto St. Paul’s Island; to the strange tale of Rival caught in the “Yankee Gale” and the SS Quebec’s demise in the death-dealing tides of East Point, Shipwrecks and Sailors of Prince Edward Island, Volume I will fascinate and educate.Then again, island ships were involved with mystery, mayhem and wreck in practically all parts of the North Atlantic: gripped in sandbars of Sable Island, plundered on the rugged coasts of Newfoundland, drifting with no crew off Ireland, wrecked on Nova Scotia’s shores, stranded on the Magdalenes, and “Lost with Crew” in the vast Atlantic.Anything that could happen to a ship has happened to a Prince Edward Island hull and scores of tales within Shipwrecks and Sailors of Prince Edward Island present those weird and wonderful epics. Arranged chronologically, the stories are full of names of our seafaring ancestors, plus descriptions of the local ports that sheltered the ships.For over a hundred years the wooden sailing ship was an important and vital transportation link along the shores of Prince Edward Island. Its maritime records are full of stories in which local ships and their crews played an essential role. Self-sacrifice, daring, skill, wreck and rescue are all part of a fabric which makes up the history of the ships and the heritage of the villages that knew them. Shipwrecks and Sailors of Prince Edward Island has all this and more!
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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.
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Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Steven Laffoley has been a writer, teacher, and dues-paying member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. He is the author of Mr. Bush, Angus and Me, the award-nominated Hunting Halifax: In Search of History, Mystery and Murder, and Death Ship of Halifax Harbour.
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The Mi’kmaq Anthology Volume 2 In Celebration of the Life of Rita Joe
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Theresa Meuse is the former chief of Bear River First Nation and has worked in various jobs with Mi’kmaq organizations. She is an educator and advisor and author of a children’s book, The Sharing Circle. Lesley Choyce is the publisher of Pottersfield Press, an English instructor in Dalhousie University’s Transition Year Program and the author of several books.
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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.
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Under the Electric Sky
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Christopher A. Walsh is an award-winning freelance journalist based in Calgary, Alberta. His work has appeared in the Edmonton Journal and the Halifax Chronicle-Herald and on CBC Radio in Nova Scotia. A native of Halifax, he has covered major political stories across the country and spent a few feverish weeks running with the Maritime carnival in towns throughout the region. This is his first book.
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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. -
Skipper
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$15.95Frances Jewel Dickson is a native of Quebec. She has held management positions in human resources administration, written personnel policy for the Speaker of the House of Commons in Ottawa and led audit teams in evaluating the performance of government departments across Canada. Her first book, The DEW Line Years, was published in 2007 by Pottersfield Press. Frances has lived on Nova Scotia’s South Shore since 1987.
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Gold Rush Ghost Towns of Nova Scotia
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$24.95Gold Rush Ghost Towns of Nova Scotia tells the fascinating stories of abandoned communities, not haunted buildings and paranormal encounters, although the occasional resident spirit does make an appearance. Ghost towns generally begin as industry-based communities of convenience for mining but when resources were depleted, marks slumped or demand outstripped production, their reason for being ended.
The story of mining in Nova Scotia is one of Canada’s oldest, yet is perhaps the province’s best kept heritage secret. More gold was mined worldwide in the 1800s than during the previous five thousand years. Since Canada was one of the worlds largest gold producers, auriferous tales and legends abound from that era of motherlodes found and fortunes lost. Nova Scotia heralded the first of its three gold rushes 37 years before men braved Yukon’s Chilkoot Pass heading to the Klondike. Adventurers from the world over were drawn to Nova Scotia’s burgeoning nineteenth-century gold districts as was “a motley crew of day labourers, farmers, fishermen, ruined mechanics, drunkards and gamblers.”
An air of mysticism shrouding ghost towns holds a fascination for historians, social scientists, treasure and relic hunters, geocachers and nostalgia buffs. Mike Parker tells the story of characters and con men, industry and labour, prosperity and recession. Although abandoned gold mining settlements are the book’s central theme, ghost towns built upon coal, iron ore and copper are featured as well. Scores of exhaustively researched images, supported by informative, entertaining text, tell the sad story of a great heritage that has been nearly erased from our history books.
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Giants of Nova Scotia
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$16.95This double biography depicts the lives of the famed Nova Scotia giantess Anna Swan (1846-88) and the celebrated Cape Breton giant Angus McAskill (1825-63). These two splendid and singular celebrities toured the world entertaining royalty and impressing audiences from town halls to palaces. Angus and Anna’s Scottish influences were deeply embedded from childhood and although it was unlikely the two ever met, the similarities in their lives were uncanny. During their adventures, both giants worked with and met many unusual characters. Both met Queen Victoria. Anna married an American giant and the two toured as “The Tallest Married Couple in the World.” The book explores the causes of gigantism and how this rare condition shaped the lives and personalities of these two Nova Scotians. Anna and Angus were born to normal-sized, hard-working parents and grew up in rural surroundings but rose to great stardom on the world stage. Both were regarded for their kind hearts and compassion for others. They have left a meaningful message for readers that resonates more than a century after their deaths. Both are honoured at museums in Nova Scotia that house their artifacts. Thousands of people flock to these sites to learn about these great giants.
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Anchorman
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Stewart Donovan is professor of English at St. Thomas University. His recent book The Forgotten World of R.J. MacSween: a life, was shortlisted for two Atlantic Book Awards.
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Life and Times of Joe Casey
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Joe Casey’s quick wit and indomitable spirit have enabled him to take risks in every job he ever undertook. Born in Annapolis County in1918 and still going strong, he will make you laugh your way through the many dramatic events if his active life. As a boy, he delivered his mother’s loaves of bread up and down the Victoria Beach Road and later in life he would break bread with the rich and famous. As a third-generation harbour pilot, he faced many dangers piloting munitions-laden ships through Digby Gap during the war and piloting ships of all kinds in the most severe weather.
Joe’s life story, filled with anecdotes and humour, mirrors the history of Nova Scotia in the twentieth century. It shows how that history shaped the man and how the man shaped history –as harbour pilot, fisherman, fish plant owner, lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Navy, hotel owner as well as member and Deputy Speaker of Nova Scotia Legislature.
Joe has pitted his storytelling skills against some of the best, including American actor James Cagney. On another occasion, a sailing trip down the East Coast, Joe’s spirit of competition led him to trade tales with Robert Ripley of Believe it or not fame. In this volume, his rich stories bring the past alive.
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Richard Zurawski’s Book of Maritime Weather
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$18.95Richard Zurawski’s Book of Maritime Weather is a compendium of fascinating weather facts, myths, climatological oddities, weather science, folklore and observations of the diverse and oftentimes frustrating topic of Canadian Maritime weather. Whether you just like to watch the clouds go by or if you are a serious student of meteorology, there is plenty to entertain you in this volume.
There’s virtually everything here you’d like to know about the how and why of our regional weather. What makes our weather the way it is? What drives this ceaseless cycle of hot and cold, dry and wet? Zurawski brings the reader up to date on the modern science of forecasting but also includes historical perspectives about the weather before people made the study of weather into a science. Folklore, myths and anecdotes from days past are included with the modern facts and records of our climate. Weather sayings are not only presented, but scrutinized for their basis and value. Before the days of the super-computer and Environment Canada, the sea-bound skipper was the forecaster of his era and his innate and intimate knowledge of Maritime weather shifts could mean the difference between life and death.
Even with the aid of computers, satellites and ultra modern communications, the weather is still as much an art as it is a science. Zurawski’s Book of Maritime Weather taps the wisdom of the past and the present to give a holistic view of the fascinating and sometimes bizarre world of Maritime weather. -
Green Horizons
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$22.95Veteran journalist Jim Lotz tells the history of how the forests of the province have been both ravaged and occasionally preserved over the centuries. It begins with the Mi’kmaq people who relied on the woods for game and useful products. Green Horizons then traces the history of the forests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the ethic of “cut and run” ran rampant, destroying huge numbers of trees as did massive forest fires. The story moves on to the time of saw millers who “took the best and left the rest.”
In the first decade of the twentieth century, concern arose among those in the forest industries that the province would run out of wood to sustain them. The first scientific survey by a forester revealed the deplorable state of the province’s woodlands because the government’s policy towards the forests was one of benign neglect.
Green Horizons also recounts the history of the past 50 years in Nova Scotia’s forests through interviews of those directly involved in forestry. Environmentalists add their perspective to the debate that still rages today about fair use of our forests. In recent years, the woodlands of Nova Scotia have been the scene of conflicts and tensions between those who seek to preserve them and others who simply see trees as sources of wealth, to be cut down and made into commercial products.
Born in Liverpool, England in 1929, Jim Lotz has held 25 different jobs ranging from grouse beater in the Scottish Highlands to glacial meteorologist in the Arctic. Coming to Canada in 1954, he was fired from his first job (for just cause) and crashed his car on same day. Since 1960, he has been actively engaged in community-based development and has taught at the Coady International Institute. His travels in search of learning have taken him from Alaska to Slovakia and from the High Arctic to Lesotho. He has written 20 books. -
The Frenchy’s Connection
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$13.95With a wonderful dash of humour, the authors take us on a trip for fashion that doesn’t cost the earth.
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The Mi’kmaq Anthology
Editor: Rita JoePublisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95A varied and spiritual collection of work by the Mi’kmaq writers of Atlantic Canada. Both young and old stories and storytellers combine talents to produce short stories, poetry, and personal essays.
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Lush Dreams, Blue Exile
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$9.95These poems range from a personal evocation of Black Nova Scotian history to an intense, intimate response to world events in the last thirty years. All are “fugitive poems” evolving from 1979 to 1991.
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Save the World for Me
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$8.95Maxine Tynes is a poet who has lived all her life in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. She is the author of ‘Borrowed Beauty’ and ‘Woman Talking Woman’. In 1988, Maxine was named the Milton Acorn People’s Poet of Canada for her lively and intense writing. She teaches English at Cole Harbour High School.
