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The Bygone Days Folklore, Traditions & Toenails
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Reginald—better known as “Dutch”—Thompson is a multi-faceted storyteller with unforgettable voices—those of Roy from Murray Harbour North, Adelaide from Bunbury, Gus from Chepstow, and countless others—to tell the stories of the Bygone days in Prince Edward Island [sometimes NS, too]. Stories that, without Dutch’s talent and care, might be remembered only by family and close friends or lost altogether.
Remember when the train ran from tip to tip and along all the small branches, taking goods, people, and baseball teams to other parts of the Island? How about when ice cream and two pieces of cakes cost 10 cents at White’s Ice Cream Parlour on Kent Street? When lobster was not the gourmet’s delight it is now and the backs were used to fertilize the crops? That butchering the pig before a full moon will mean less fat on the meat? Or that it was bad luck to cut your nails on Sundays.
From CBC Radio to the pages of this book, you’ll hear Dutch’s voice encouraging these informative, illuminating, poignant, and hilarious stories from the minds and hearts of Maritimers born between 1895 and 1925, almost as if they were all still here and telling them to you.
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Somewhere North of Where I Was
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Somewhere North of Where I Was is the heartrending story of a young girl whose childhood innocence was stolen. Retold with the reflective voice of a woman who has survived and transcended the trauma of childhood poverty, neglect, and abuse, Spence’s wisdom and poignant storytelling abilities suck you into the world of a little girl whose tragic circumstances are tempered with fond family memories. One may be left to wonder how it is a child can survive and move beyond such experiences.
With brazen honesty and a driving spirit of hope, perseverance and sometimes sheer stubborn will, Spence brings the reader into her world as she lived it, moving us along, pulling us apart, compelling us to continue reading. In the years of being shuffled from one alcoholic parent to another and finally into foster care, Spence becomes a little girl we cry for, love and and cheer for. Spence is everybody’s child.
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Our Sable Island Home
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Our Sable Island Home is a personal story that does not shy away from the perils of life in an isolated locale, interwoven with maritime history that centres around the iconic island. The story will take you on a journey more than sixty years back into the past, to a time when Sable Island was referred to as “the Graveyard of the Atlantic.”
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Making a Life Twenty-five Years of Hooking Rugs
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$34.95Celebrated textile artist Deanne Fitzpatrick learned early that traditional rug-hooking is so much more than just making mats for old houses. This intricate art form has given her the chance to speak without words. It has built her a supportive community, a successful business, and an international reputation. But most of all, hooking rugs has allowed Deanne to live a life she loves.
Reflecting on her twenty-five-year career, Deanne shares lessons gleaned both at the frame and away from her studio. Whether it’s dealing with an artistic block, or balancing running a business and raising a family, Deanne has navigated it all with frank humour and grace. Containing over 75 full-colour photos of projects past and present, Making a Life is an ode to the joys of leading a creative life.
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Sailing in Circles, Goin’ Somewhere Not Your Typical Boat Story
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95Not all dreams have happy endings. Sailing in Circles, Goin’ Somewhere is the funny, bittersweet memoir of a Prince Edward Island man who, over seven years, builds a classic 1930s wooden sailboat and, in 2004, attempts to circumnavigate eastern North America. The author leaves a small fishing port on the Island and tracks along the rugged coast, up the St. Lawrence River, and through the Great Lakes. Alone, he encounters heavy fog, near-collisions with freighters, mechanical breakdowns, enormous seas, several brushes with disaster, and even a hostile reception at one French-speaking port. He meets odd and curious people. It all comes to an inglorious and mundane end when the author and his boat, the Arja D., are stuck in, of all places, Peoria, Illinois. Was it worth it? Maybe.
Written by Finley Martin, a respected Island fiction writer, this finely crafted and humorous book will appeal to adventurers, sailors, and lovers of a good yarn.
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Better Off Dead Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the Canadian Armed Forces
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Fred Doucette always wanted to be a soldier. In the 1960s he joined the Canadian Armed Forces and served in Cyprus in the 1970s and ’80s and Bosnia in the 1990s. When he returned home to New Brunswick in 1999 after his last overseas tour, he was diagnosed with severe chronic post-traumatic stress disorder. Eventually released from the army, Fred found a position with the Operational Stress Injury Social Support (OSISS) program, where he supported serving soldiers and veterans for ten years.
Better Off Dead chronicles Fred’s efforts in helping to rehabilitate and support soldiers and veterans suffering from what the military terms “operational stress injuries.” We meet Ted, saved from a suicide attempt by a timely phone call; Bob, at wit’s end and reluctantly seeking help to overcome severe PTSD; Roger, caught in a cycle of violence and drug and alcohol abuse; and Jane, diagnosed with PTSD after having been sexually assaulted while on a tour of duty in Afghanistan. These accounts are raw, desperate, and often angry, but as Doucette shows, there is hope and real progress for those able to obtain proper diagnosis and treatment. Includes a colour insert with 15 photos.
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The Birth and the Babyhood of the Telephone A Talk to Telephone Pioneers by The Other Man on the Line
Publisher: Breton Books$16.95While Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, Thomas A. Watson was the craftsman who gave the telephone life. Model after model, night and day, together they battled disappointment, and were spurred on by hints of success. Then in 1875, Watson’s hands created the first telephone that actually carried the human voice.
Yet the world barely remembers Thomas Watson beyond the first sentence transmitted over the telephone: “Mr. Watson—come here—I want you.”
In this classic book, restored and expanded, The Birth and Babyhood of the Telephone delivers both a detailed record of the development of the first telephone as it also reveals the very human story of the relationship between Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson. We see the younger Watson grow up through the guidance of the better educated and more sophisticated A. G. Bell, as Watson receives books, and lessons in elocution and even table manners.
This moving first-person account keeps alive the story of a relationship between two brilliant, impassioned men who changed the world.
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Deep Water Pearls A Collection of Women’s Memoir
Editor: Kathleen HamiltonPublisher: Acorn Press$22.95Thirteen writers dive into the deep emotional waters of their lives to write their most personal, honest stories. In doing so they transform the grit of female experience into pearls of truth and beauty.
Guided by memoir coach and editor Kathleen Hamilton, the writers reveal the most intimate turning points in their lives, memories deeply charged with meaning, moments after which their lives were never the same.
The stories are diverse: we meet a PEI farm girl exploring her early intuitive knowings, a tattooed millennial struggling with PTSD, a mature academic rebounding from the betrayal of her marriage, and a bride whose wedding day is a triumph over a treacherous past.
In The Strength it Took to Ditch You, a woman reveals her years in an abusive same-sex relationship. High School Reunion is set in Unit 9, a psych ward in Charlottetown. In The Waiting Place, a young mother from western PEI explores the meaning of home.
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We Keep A Light
$15.95In We Keep A Light, Evelyn M. Richardson describes how she and her husband bought tiny Bon Portage Island and built a happy life there for themselves and their three children. On an isolated lighthouse station off the southern tip of Nova Scotia, the Richardsons shared the responsibilities and pleasures of island living, from carrying water and collecting firewood to making preserves and studying at home. The close-knit family didn’t mind their isolation, and found delight in the variety and beauty of island life.
We Keep A Light is much more than a memoir. It is an exquisitely written, engrossing record of family life set against a glowing lighthouse, the enduring shores of Nova Scotia, and the ever-changing sea.
