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True Meaning of Crumbfest
Artist: Dale McNevinPublisher: Acorn Press$12.95“Winner of the Ann Connor Brimer Award for Children’s Literature; over 17,000 copies in print; animated Christmas special on TELETOON, with the spin-off series Eckhart, The True Meaning of Crumbfest is the story of a curious little mouse named Ekhart, who sets off to discover the truth about that most abundant time of year called ‘Crumbfest,’ when bounteous crumbs miraculously appear in the old Prince Edward Island farmhouse in which he lives. Much anthologized — particularly by CBC Radio’s ‘Fireside Al’— this a heartwarming tale of the magic that happens when the ‘Outside’ and the ‘Inside’ come together.”
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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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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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Taste of Water
Publisher: Acorn Press$15.95The taste of water is something we all know but need to be reminded of once in a while: how it tastes of shared memory, and of what it means to be human, and of the earth.Prince Edward Island’s second Poet Laureate, Frank Ledwell, invites us to enter his words and world, seeking to share a sense of our common humanity and our interdependent fates, and to recognize communal experience in the particularities of personal experience.The traditional role of the Poet Laureate is to mark occasions, and Ledwell’s poems masterfully make quotidian Island events and lives into special occasions that sing with the “spirit of the spoken word taking hold.”
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Bridging Islands
Editor: Godfrey BaldacchinoPublisher: Acorn Press$29.95An island is a piece of land surrounded by water. But: what happens when bridges, causeways, tunnels- “fixed links”- irrevocably connect islands to mainlands? Is insularity, and its way of life, threatened? Or is it saved by virtue of a stronger integration with the world at large?Bridging Islands is a critical, interdisciplinary scoreboard of the pros and cons of bridging islands to mainlands. Internationally recognized scholars review the assorted socio-cultural, economic and political impacts of fixed links on small island communities. Included are chapters on Prince Edward Island’s Confederation Bridge (celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2007), Cape Breton’s Canso Causeway, islands in Quebec and Newfoundland, the Florida Keys, Ireland, France, Scotland, Sweden, and Singapore.
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Bubba Begonia, You’ll Be Sorry
Artist: Brenda JonesPublisher: Acorn Press$8.95Bubba Begonia is a young boy who desperately wants to make a good impression on the first day at his new school. But Bubba is nervous. Very nervous. And when he gets nervous his finger just seems to naturally head to his nose. “Bubba! Don’t be messin’ with your nose,” admonishes his mother. “Your finger’ll get stuck and then you’ll be sorry!”But Deerwatson Elementary isn’t your ordinary school. And Bubba’s classmates aren’t your ordinary students. In meeting the zaniest bunch of kids ever assembled, Bubba makes a memorable first impression when his mother’s words of warning come true.In his first chapter book (ages 8 and up), Gerry O’Brien creates an hilarious story of a young boy who overcomes an embarrassing personal habit with the help of his equally embarrassing little sister.
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Enchanted House
Publisher: Acorn Press$15.95Charlottetown poet Beth E. Janzen’s work has appeared in journals such as The Malahat Review and Grain. Her chapbook Night Vanishes was published by Saturday Morning Chapbooks in 2004. The Enchanted House is her first full collection of poems.
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Her Teeth are Stones
Publisher: Acorn Press$15.95Each of Judy Gaudet’s poems is a path to somewhere resonant, redolent of memories and anticipations both bittersweet and beautiful. She traces the paths the mind and body takes purposefully, as well as those it happens onto, by chance or consequence. The poems light on home and history, travel afar, return again. They are marked by the toughness of wholly looking and experiencing and are leavened by wry humour and true gratitude for the beauty and magic that touch the earth’s days — and our human ones, tripping over the stones of her path. Her Teeth Are Stones is Judy Gaudet’s first full-length poetry book, following her chapbook Poems, you say.
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Last Tomato
Publisher: Acorn Press$15.95Jane Ledwell grew up in Prince Edward Island. She won first prize for both prose and poetry in the Atlantic Writing Awards in 2001, and has been published in journals such as blueSHIFT and anthologies such as Landmarks and A Bountiful Harvest. She lives and writes in Charlottetown.
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Kindred Spirits
Publisher: Acorn Press$24.95Who is your kindred spirit? Who kindles the fire in your soul?
Driven by curiosity about her own intense friendships and soul-to-soul connections, Dianne Hicks Morrow devoted the last 10 years to asking Atlantic Canadians these questions.
In Kindred Spirits, people as diverse as composer Norman Campbell, lyricist Elaine Campbell, country doctor Jim Bowen, author Sheree Fitch, photographer Freeman Patterson, comedian dentist Marina Sexton, theatre director Duncan McIntosh, minister Elizabeth Stevenson, university president Wade MacLauchlan, and actor Deb Allen reveal their passionate connections to the people, places, and animals that inspire their deepest trust, their most intimate contact, and their unconditional love.
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Who Departed This Life
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95George Wright has had a long history of interest in the Burying Ground, with at least nine direct ancestors buried there (great-great-great- and great-great-grandparents). The launch of the book coincides with the 150th anniversary of the founding of the City of Charlottetown.
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Jean Pierre Roma
Publisher: Acorn Press$9.95During the four years poet Jill MacLean lived in Prince Edward Island, she researched Jean Pierre Roma’s settlement at Trois Rivières. Her first collection, The Brevity of Red, was published in 2003. She now lives in Bedford, Nova Scotia.
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Fireflies in the Magnolia Grove
Publisher: Acorn Press$15.95In this, John Smith’s sixth book of poetry, Prince Edward Island’s inaugural Poet Laureate offers up a dialogue about “being,” in the intellectual context of modern times. He explores stages of being, as an individual, as one in relationship to others, and as a part of the earth and of the universe. The poet’s acquaintance with physics, algebra, and geometry collides with his own philosophical questionings, using language to bridge the ephemeral and the infinite. The poems are the distilled, heady musings of a writer whose poetic voice spans millennia.
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Betrayer
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Inspired by the last murder in Prince Edward Island for which capital punishment was exacted- and the theory that a third man was involved in the crime- The Betrayer conjures the fictional life of this “third man” in an intimate psychological profile of a man who, quite literally, gets away with murder. With a deft hand, Hennessey takes us down the darker streets of mid-20th-century Charlottetown, capturing the city’s gritty west end with the brushstrokes of someone who has lived it. He also takes us down into the darkest recesses of the human spirit, into the mind and soul of a murderer.
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Island Sketchbook
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95With characteristic warmth, generosity, and humour, Frank Ledwell seamlessly weaves personal memoir and communal folk wisdom into 60 prose sketches of Island characters, anecdotes, and traditions. The stories are based on real people or incidents; others are fictionalized, evoking the true, remembered landscape of Ledwell’s childhood at St. Peter’s Bay on the North Shore of Prince Edward Island, his experience as a student, teacher, and professor at St. Dunstan’s University, and his later life as a professor, husband, and parent in rural Queen’s County. The sketches also evoke the author’s love of people and place and mark his point of view as that of an inveterate Islander.
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North Shore of Home
Publisher: Acorn Press$18.95Since it was first published in 1986, Frank Ledwell’s The North Shore of Home has had an enduring place in Island literature. In warm-hearted prose and poetry, in a voice keenly tuned to the music of Prince Edward Island English, Ledwell explores the Island’s North Shore, and especially the richly historied community of St. Peter’s Bay. Taken together, his poems and stories create a portrait of a community surviving through the Depression and the Second World War – a community at the Island’s edge and at the very cusp of the dramatic changes that would affect all small Prince Edward Island communities in the postwar years.
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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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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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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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A Long Way From the Road
Publisher: Acorn Press$13.95A collection of 77 anecdotes, this book is humorous and sardonic, insightful and witty, with the warmth and charm for which Atlantic Canada has become famous. Subjects that come under the microscope include politics, religion, sex, human foibles, and insularity that can come from living on a small island.
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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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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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Three Tall Trees
Artist: Dale McNevinPublisher: Acorn Press$7.95Narrated by Enigma the Crow, this charming picture book for children aged four to seven, is a delightful rhyming fable that tells the story of three tall trees. Living in close proximity in the woods, the ancient trees “bump and collide constantly.” Jacob claims that his roots are the deepest. Paul brags that his branches are wider, while Elijah Ali insists that his sap is the purest of all. There is “war in the forest” until Enigma observes a basic truth: the trees aren’t three trees at all. They’re part of the very same tree. With its gentle humour and heartfelt message about the connectedness of all living things, Three Tall Trees is certain to captivate young readers.
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Everything That Shines
Artist: Dale McNevinPublisher: Acorn Press$9.95This is a magical tale about a girl, Maddie, and her horse, Shekinah, and the bonds of family and friendship. It’s also about growing up and having those you love grow old and leave you, and about the magical light that shines in everything when you love something very, very much- even after they’re gone.
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Along Lot Seven Shore
Publisher: Acorn Press$14.95Often, folksongs are left to stand alone, with no record as to the events, visions and principles that inspired them. Rarely do we get a glimpse of the poet’s view of the community and people he or she writes about. However, Donnie Doyle, in wanting to give something back to his community, has done just that. Along Lot Seven Shore is a fascinating combination of memoir, anecdote, narrative song and poetry, created by someone who has experienced that which he has written. In so doing, he shares glimpses of a way of life that makes and defines “community”; this particular community happens to be along Lot Seven Shore of Prince Edward Island (named so when the Island was divided into 67 lots and given in a Land Lottery to the English King’s patrons in 1767), but it could be anywhere in rural Canada.
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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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Acadian Christmas Traditions
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Based on written sources and interviews with Acadians throughout the Maritimes, Acadian Christmas Traditions offers a fascinating look at the evolution of Christmas. This very readable book shows how customs, both spiritual and secular, take hold in families, in villages, and in a culture as a whole. Georges Arsenault, the well-known historian and folklorist, examines all the aspects of the feast of Christmas, from midnight mass to holiday foods. As he chronicles the cultural changes that have taken place over the centuries, he proves that Acadian Christmas today is the result of a wonderful blending of old, new, and borrowed traditions.
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Shape of Things to Come
Editor: Richard LemmPublisher: Acorn Press$19.95In this new collection, Richard Lemm traces his own journey from the west coast of North America to the east coast of Canada with his first foray into the world of short fiction. His hard-living characters follow their own paths through relationships with parents and siblings, friends and lovers, discovering and sometimes crossing their limits as they try to find their own way in the world. A thirty-something man takes a chance on finding love after he encounters an exotic opera singer on an airplane. Two brothers face their own ghosts as they come to terms with the death of their father. A young man tries to live with his friends’ idea of justice after one of them crosses the line. The stories are decidedly masculine – sometimes apologetically so – but always honest. They resonate long after the pages are closed, offering a fresh voice from one of Atlantic Canada’s finest poets.
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Bounce and Beans and Burn
Publisher: Acorn Press$7.95After breakfast Sam is so excited that he’s bouncing off the walls. His mother tells him to go out to the garden to play. At lunch he’s so full of beans that all he can get up to is mischief. His grandmother tells him to go out to the garden to play. After supper he has so much energy to burn that he can’t sit still. His father tells him to go out to the garden to play. Little do they know that when Sam does, he turns into a ferocious Samurai, goes on an adventure with Jack and the Beanstalk, and meets a fire-breathing dragon. Bounce & Beans & Burn follows Sam through an ordinary day of extraordinary adventure.
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Bubba Begonia and the Mudmen of the Koola Boola
Artist: Dale McNevinPublisher: Acorn Press$7.95Bubba Begonia’s back! This time he and his two pals, Harold Haymow and Rad Chad Disco, learn the hard way that if you’re going to mess with the colourful and unpredictable Moonbaby Orbit, then you’d better be prepared to pay the price.After playing a wildly successful practical joke on Moonbaby and her sidekick, Margo Marvelous, the boys find themselves out in the middle of nowhere, drenched in stinky perfume and watching helplessly as Moonbaby and Margo run off with their clothes. The boys’ journey back to civilization is a zany adventure that ends when the boys, dressed in mud and rhubarb leaves, enlist the help of Hippo, The Black-Nosed Rottenweiler to invade Camp What-A-Girl to find their missing clothes.
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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.
