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The Gold of the Yukon Dawson City and the Klondike After the Gold Rush
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95The Gold of the Yukon tells the story of the decline of Dawson City and the state of gold mining in the early 1960s; and The Moral Equivalent of War (The Working Centre) examines ways in which human energy is being directed to peaceful pursuits in development, highlighting the role of social and community entrepreneurs.
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Walking the Earth’s Spine A 2700 Kilometer Solo Hike Through the Himalayas
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$22.95This is the adventure story of the first man to walk alone along the length of the highest mountains on earth; it is also an account of one person’s interaction with the Himalayas’ three great religions. It is a meditation on the joy of walking and as its heart, it is a literary confirmation of humankind’s ability to come to terms with the loss of a loved one.
The tragic death of Jono Lineen’s younger brother becomes the catalyst for him to move to the Himalayas and spend eight years among the world’s highest mountains. The experience culminates in a four-month, 2,700-kilometer, solo trekking odyssey from Pakistan to Nepal. No one had ever attempted to walk the length of the Western Himalayas alone, but Lineen’s intentions were more psychological than physical. The trek was about immersing himself in the Himalayan culture he had grown to love, assimilating the wisdom of the place and using it to come to terms with his brother’s death.
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Into the Deep Unknown
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$24.95Unspoiled woods and waters, abundant game and legendary guides were the cornerstones upon which early tourism was built in Nova Scotia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many entertaining and informative accounts were written by visiting sportsmen of that era; the most widely read and enduring is The Tent Dwellers, penned in 1908 by Albert Bigelow Paine in which the American humorist light-heartedly recounted a camping and fishing expedition through what today constitutes the “Toby” and “Keji.” A more recent work of wide popular appeal was published in 1990 by Mike Parker, whospent four years conducting extensive, groundbreaking research interviewing the last of the old-time woodsmenwhose reminiscences and tales formed the basis for Guides of the North Woods, a compilation of oral and writtenhistory documenting Nova Scotia’s guiding tradition.Into The Deep Unknown is both a stand-alone book and a companion to The Tent Dwellers and Guides of theNorth Woods. It continues Mike Parker’s ongoing quest to preserve our historical past and heritage. A richlyillustrated sporting journal, it interweaves the first-person account of a 1910 canoe “pilgrimage” through the Landof the Tent Dwellers with more than 424 vintage photographs and text.
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Cornwallis The Violent Birth of Halifax
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95In June of 1749, Edward Cornwallis set into motion events that would determine the destiny of tens of thousands of people across half a continent. His actions in the following three years would also determine the future of not only Nova Scotia, but of the vast land that would become Canada.To the Mi’kmaq people, the British governor stood on their ancestral home of “Mi’kma’ki” – the millennial-old name for the Seven Districts that comprised the main Mi’kmaq government in what is today Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and parts of Maine. For France, Cornwallis was entering “Acadie,” heartland of their territorialambitions on the New World. For Cornwallis, and for the British crown he represented, it was Nova Scotia – territory France had ceded to Britain on paper in 1713 and a land heintended to claim in the flesh with his massive influx of soldiers and settlers.Steeped in a brutal militaristic philosophy he learned in the bloody fields of Scotland’s Battle of Culloden, Cornwallis devised a plan to force the Acadians and Mi’kmaq to swear loyalty to his king, be forced off the land, or face massacre. His conquest of Nova Scotia laid the groundwork for the Expulsion of the Acadians and createdthe conditions that allowed his close colleague, James Wolfe, to claim a final British victory over France on thePlains of Abraham a decade later. His conquest also pushed the Mi’kmaq toward the brink of extinction.But who was Edward Cornwallis? He remains an elusive, controversial figure to this day, but his full story hasnever been told. This in-depth biography makes use of Cornwallis’s own words to tell his story. It also draws ona range of sources to provide a detailed account of his life, with rare first-hand accounts of his childhood growingup with the future king of Britain; his rise in the military; the formative Pacification mission he led to successfully suppress Scotland’s Highland rebellion; his central role in the birth of Halifax; the military disasters that saw himface the threat of execution by his own government and that compelled Voltaire to write of “a million regimentedassassins” tormenting Europe; and Cornwallis’s death in exile on Gibraltar.Whether you see Cornwallis as the heroic founder of Halifax or a genocidaltyrant who ruthlessly destroyed those who dared stand against him, you cannotdeny his crucial role in Canadian history. This book presents the evidence ofhis life: it is up to the reader to make the final judgment.
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Runaway Horses
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95In the middle of the nineteenth century, a dozen young NovaScotian wild riders were an essential link between the capitalsof the Old World and the New. A news syndicate called theAssociated Press made a deal with Cunard Steamship Linesthat the Royal Mail Ships would carry a news packet to betelegraphed to New York City. A steam launch would speed thepacket across the Bay of Fundy to the nearest telegraph station,at Saint John, New Brunwick. But, despite the modern miraclesof steam power and electromagnetism, the fastest way to carrythe news packet from the Halifax docks to the Fundy shorewould still be relays of galloping horses. The Halifax Expressneeded riders who were light in the saddle yet long-limbed andstrong enough to handle the monster thoroughbreds of the day.Seana McCann is a sixteen-year-old Irish immigrant whosefather’s been killed in a far-off war and whose mother sees anescape from potato-grubbing poverty by marrying a wealthyfarmer. It seems clear to Seana that the old farmer’s notjust interested in getting a ready-made family, but in havinga teenage stepdaughter who belongs to him until she turnstwenty-one. But her mother won’t listen to her and intends togo ahead with the marriage. Seana sees no way out, nowhere to run.In another part of the province, a teenage orphan feels that one of the orphanage school priests is taking anunhealthy interest. It seems like a trap with no escape. Then word goes out that a new enterprise called TheHalifax Express is looking for lithe and limber young riders who are good with horses and willing to galloppunishing distances. It seems like an operation that won’t ask too many questions, so long as you can do the job.Maybe a youthful runaway could disappear into the Halifax Express and squirrel away enough wages to have afuture. Maybe even a gawky girl too tall for her age could shear her hair off and pretend to be a boy.Like all of Alfred Silver’s historical novels, Runaway Horsessticks within the historical record and incorporates documentedevents. This story might well have happened exactly as it’s told.A
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Two More Solitudes
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$22.95Sheldon Currie plumbs new depths in this novel inspired byHugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes. Ian MacDonald is searchingfor himself, for a career, for home, and for redemption. YetIan, a man with a talent for baseball, seems to find himselfin “the suicide squeeze” all too often as he runs from onewoman to another. Set in Nova Scotia and Quebec, Currie’snovel follows Ian’s quest through his encounters with a torchsingingnun, an old flame, and a woman who seeks more thanfriendship.As Ian struggles to find his place, for a time literally notknowing who he is, Currie guides readers through a journeyfull of eccentric but fully human characters, all trying tolive in worlds that do not always accommodate their dreamsand desires. Two More Solitudes resonates with the burdensof memory, disappointment, uncertainty, death – and mostparticularly with the pleasures and pains of life itself. At timesfunny and poignant, Two More Solitudes is also a rich andsubtle exploration of how Ian and those around him find theirway – in the world, with themselves, and with others.
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Sixty Second Story When Lives are on the Line
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95The Sixty Second Story is a gripping and emotional tribute to Canada’s first responders – the professionals and volunteers who repeatedly risk their lives in the face of danger and death.
The book pays homage to a father, to the fallen, and to those who respond when the alarm sounds. It also frankly discusses the impact of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and critical incident stress (CIS) on both first responders and their families. Discussions with veteran firefighters and a former Halifax police officer take the reader back to incidents dating from the 1950s like they happened yesterday. The police officer’s suicide attempt led him to a second career helping first responders living with PTSD and CIS.
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Pulling No Punches The Sam Langford Story
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey called Sam Langford from Weymouth Falls, Nova Scotia, “The greatest fighter we’ve ever had.” And champion Jack Johnson stated he “he was the toughest little son-of-a-bitch that ever lived.” Celebrated New York boxing writer Hype Igoe said he was “the greatest fighter, pound for pound, who ever lived,” while New York sports writer Joe Williams said he “was probably the best the ring ever saw.” Langford was so good that many boxers refused to fight him, so good that he took bouts with bigger men just to get a match, so good that he once fought the greatest boxer of his age, Jack Johnson, who was forty pounds heavier and a good foot taller—and still went the distance.
Yet, for all the ferocity of his talent, Sam Langford (1883-1956) could not outbox fistic fate. From his first bout in 1902 until his last a quarter century later, he battled boxing’s colour barrier that kept him from being world champion in three different weight classes. Still, he refused to be knocked down and relentlessly pursued a title shot until he was nearly forty. When, in 1923, he approached Jack Kearns, the manager of then heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, for a title bout, the wily Kearns looked over the nearly blind, well-past-his-prime boxer, and shook his head. “We were looking for someone easier,” he sighed. He was just that good. When Langford could no longer get his title shot, he retired from the ring in 1926 and soon faded from the public mind—until the serious compilers of lists that recognize boxing’s all-time greatest began including his name, and he found himself becoming a legend.
His official record says he fought 250 bouts, but he remembered fighting more than 500. And he loved to talk about them all, loved the stories that shaped the contours of his life and loved the absolute truth and less-than-certain tales that wove themselves into his boxing legend. Of course, this was as it should have been, because for him, great boxing was as much about the battles’ tales as it was about the battles themselves. This is the story of Sam Langford.
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Duddy Doesn’t Live Here Anymore A Novel
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Duddy McGill is a dreamer –a man who turns his back on reality so often he falls from one disaster into the next. Occasionally, he is given an opportunity, so when no one wants the job, Duddy is appointed the town’s temporary police chief. It’s only for a week but in the first day of the job, Duddy arrests Mrs. Truman Taylor for shoplifting. A prominent citizen, Mrs. Taylor is humiliated and horrified. She resists and ensuing struggle, a dance down Main Street to the jail, happens in front for the astonished townspeople. Unfortunately for Duddy, he has arrested the wrong woman.
He doesn’t have much better luck with Jugs Henderson, who sues him when she falls off her clothesline platform into the petunia patch, or with Mrs. Gordon McKenzie, a widowed schoolteacher who he ends up propositioning. Then there is Mary Lou Weaver, recently moved to Parrsboro because she always wanted to live by the sea. She definitely ends up looking at the water –stuck high above the ground in Duddy’s truck. No wonder Duddy has a few prospects and a very suspicious wife.
Finally, Duddy’s long-suffering wife Minnie has had enough. Out goes her husband and her old life. Yet despite it all, Duddy McGill tries to help people. He is the go-between for the man from Michigan, who has big plans to build a croquet factory in the town, and the local woman he has been searching for. Duddy really wants to do right. He assists his friends when possible. He builds a new deck for Royal after his friend suffers another tragedy and when Mink Martin goes to war with the bureaucracy, Duddy is there to help.
Duddy McGill is a man worthy of salvation. The problem is, he’ll have to do it himself. But fate has a way of intervening, of picking up a small-town guy and making him an international hero. Here is a story of love, absurdity and people with warm hearts. Few writers could make a funeral funny, but it happens here in this story of human folly where you’ll never stop laughing.
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From Nova Scotia to North Africa
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95When Canada went to war in 1939, the life of twenty-year-old Clayton Graham changed in a heartbeat. From a small rural community, he never expected he would travel the world so extensively or under such circumstances.
From Nova Scotia to North Africa is a largely first-person account of Clayton’s experiences and adventures as a pilot in the Royal Air Force. He recounts in detail the sometimes exhilarating but often terrifying process of learning to fly fighter aircraft, training first in Canada, then in England and later flying with #250 Squadron in Africa and the Middle East: performing spins and loops, becoming adept with Hurricanes and Spitfires, evading enemy aircraft, flying on dangerous missions. He survives bombings on the ground and dogfights in the air. He sees comrades die in service to their country and the devastation war brings to ordinary people swept up in historic events.
Along the way, Clayton manages to get engaged, carrying the engagement ring around with him before he mails it back to his sweetheart in Canada. Shot down while serving in North Africa, it seems Clayton may not get back to marry the woman he loves.
Told with humour and insight, and packed with historical information about places, public figures, and events, From Nova Scotia to North Africa chronicles an important part of Nova Scotia, Canadian, and world history, capturing in a veteran’s own words the experience of war.
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Coastal Lives
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95She was 37, a single, sad freelance fisheries reporter and writer living in Vancouver, on Canada’s West Coast. He was 59, a widowed, heartbroken journalist and author, living in a small village on Isle Madame, Cape Breton, on Canada’s East Coast. The life paths of Marjorie Simmins and Silver Donald Cameron took many years to cross – but when they did, their worlds changed forever. Award-winning writer and journalist, Marjorie Simmins tells a story of love and resistance with humour and candour.
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Down the Coaltown Road
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$22.95In Down the Coaltown Road, Sheldon Currie uses two narrative voices to explore the effect of international affairs on a small, ethnically mixed Cape Breton coal mining community during the summer of 1940. Mussolini has just thrown his support behind Hitler, bringing Italy into the war, and Prime Minister Mackenzie King has rendered a list of Italian-Canadians who can be classified as possible dissidents. Tomassio, one of the town’s most hardworking miners, is among those rounded up for an internment camp in either New Brunswick or Ontario. Tomassio uses his customary ingenuity to escape the confines of the local jail where he and his friends are temporarily held – but his freedom does not last for long. Anna, Tomassio’s resourceful wife who has an unerring ability to get what she wants from the men in her life, tells her story, which begins in Italy when she identifies the athletic, if quite arrogant, Tomassio as her best chance for immigration to Canada.
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An Ordinary Hero Story of David Goldberg, WWII Canadian Spitfire Pilot
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Imagine you are a pilot, shot from the sky, alone in enemy territory where no one speaks your language. It is winter, and soon will be dark. You could freeze to death, starve or be captured by the Nazis. And you are a Jew. This is David Goldberg’s predicament on March 8, 1944. An Ordinary Hero is Goldberg’s account of how, assisted by the French Underground, he made his way through occupied France and Spain and evaded capture by the enemy. He returned to combat in ground support as a dive-bomber to become the decorated (Distinguished Flying Cross) commander of the only Canadian fighter squadron in Italy.
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Winds of Change Life and Legacy of Calvin W. Ruck
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$16.95Calvin Woodrow Ruck, born in Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Bajan immigrants, saw roadblocks not as barriers, but as hurdles that he would eventually leap over.
From working in the steel plant and as a sleeping car porter to being awarded the Order of Canada and appointed to the Senate of Canada, Calvin worked diligently to ensure that his children, and his children’s children, wouldn’t have to go through the same things he went through. Although he was turned away from many opportunities, he was determined to provide for his family and took on a heavy workload in the Halifax community.
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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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Blue Tattoo A Novel
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Filled with a cast of unforgettable characters – from Boston mayor James Michael Curley to Group of Seven painter Arthur Lismer – The Blue Tattoo tells the sweeping story of the lives caught up in the unbelievable devastation of the Halifax Explosion.
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Going Over A Nova Scotian Soldier in World War I
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Going Over is the biography of Titus Mossman, a veteran of the “Great War” who served with the 85th Canadian Infantry Battalion (Nova Scotia Highlanders) on the Western Front. This book blends social, political and historical issues of those turbulent times with the story of one young Canadian turned soldier, caught at the sharp edge of history.
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Tapestry of Green A Novel
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Carl Cocking had two worthy ambitions: to restore his father’s battered reputation and bring his mother and brothers to some agreement whereby they could call themselves a family. Tapestry of Green is the story of one Englishman who traces the last months of his father’s life through the dark streets of Victorian London to the sampans and opium dens of China. During a quest that he cannot abandon, Carl witnesses the brutality of British trading ships, the Great Trek by the Dutch in South Africa and the beginning of the Opium Wars.
The story takes place in England and China between 1837 and 1843, in the era when hot air and gas balloons were creating great interest in aviation. Artist and inventor Robert Cocking often took his young son Carl on balloon excursions over the English countryside and the city of London where they could look down on a world filled with great filth and great beauty. Carl escapes the unravelling of his family and only returns to London when his father makes aviation history by becoming the first Englishman killed in a parachute accident.
“He is the greatest fool in England, they wrote in their horrid penny papers, and I would not let my father be so remembered.”
Carl tries to reconstruct the last months of his father’s life. His investigation takes him through London’s gentlemen clubs and shabby tenements and on a voyage to the other side of the world to the one man who helped his father design his unique parachute. Carl arrives in China just as the Chinese are rebelling over British intrusions and the supplying of opium to the masses of Chinese.
“On the second day on the Canton River thousands of dead fish floated by, killed by white powder seeping into the water from smashed wooden chests.”
Although Carl is fictional, his father Robert and the Opium Wars are very real.
Bruce Graham is a Nova Scotia writer and former broadcaster who, for many years, was the face of the evening TV news in Maritime homes. He is the author of seven books, three of which have been transformed into stage plays. Ivor Johnson’s Neighbours is being developed into a television series. His last book, Duddy Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, was published in 2013, and is now being prepared for the stage. Bruce lives in his hometown of Parrsboro with his wife Helen.
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Sleigh Tracks in New Snow Maritime Christmas Stories
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$18.95“The morning was damp and we were feeling Christmas in the air, seeing and smelling it in the trees, as our feet crunched across new snow to where a wire fence stood between our fields and the railway tracks. It was there we saw a fir tree standing, more beautiful than any I can remember. Its limbs were full, well shaped and scented, and it stood proud and tall as though waiting for us.”
Sleigh Tracks in New Snow is a collection of Christmas stories set mostly in rural New Brunswick – principally the Miramichi Region – in a bygone day and age. The stories range from the early 1950s to the 21st century, as Curtis recounts the sweet old Christmases of his boyhood and more modern incarnations of the holiday. In this entertaining book, Curtis honours the deeply held traditions and rituals that made celebrating Christmas such a special time for his family and community.
During the author’s childhood, Christmas meant sleigh rides with horses and jingling harness bells, fresh cut forest Christmas trees and intense blizzards that blocked all roads for days. Winter in a rural community required hardiness, generosity, and sacrifice, qualities that were intensified during the Christmas season. Curtis tells how a grandmother sacrificed to ensure a happy celebration for her family, about the arrival of his sister while he and his father searched the woods for a beautiful fir tree to be trimmed in their farmhouse parlour, and the efforts of a prodigal son to get home for Christmas after years of absence. The holiday season also included the magic of skating on a frozen river with a bonfire of burning cattails, the excitement of the school concert, and the solemnity of a church service. These stories reflect an innocent time when truth, heart and honesty were always central to the celebration of Christmas.
Wayne Curtis was born in Keenan, New Brunswick, in 1943. He was educated in the local schoolhouse and at St Thomas University. He has won the Richards, the Woodcock and the CBC Drama awards and written for The National Post and The Globe and Mail. In 2005 Wayne received an honorary degree from St Thomas University. He divides his time between his cabin on the Miramichi and Fredericton. This is his sixteenth book.
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Sharing the Journey
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Sharing the Journey tells of the author’s life and adventures from the far reaches of Canada to Lesotho in Southern Africa and from Slovakia to Alaska. Always an independent and mindful thinker, prepared to take the road that best suited his skills and beliefs, Jim shares what he has learned during his years working at 25 different jobs from farmer to university professor.
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Paddy Boy
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$17.95Paddy Boy is Patrick O’Flaherty’s lively memoir of childhood in a small secluded Newfoundland community, covering the years 1939-54. This time is most unique because it is a bridge between the old Newfoundland with its curious links to England, Ireland, and Scotland, and its new status, after 1949, as a province of Canada. O’Flaherty reimagines just what that lost world was like, how children figured into it, how his family and other families functioned and what part religion played.
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Music In the Dark
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Music in The Dark is a compelling novel set in Prohibition-era Montreal when alcohol, drugs and jazz music ruled “Sin City.” Taylor Williams is a young black musician struggling to find fame in the Montreal Harlem District amid gangsters, racism and bootleggers. As a young boy, Taylor escaped a terrifying ordeal that haunts him as he pursues his dream of becoming a famous jazz musician.
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I Owe It All to Rock & Roll(and the CBC)
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95In this hilarious and insightful memoir, Frank Cameron takes readers from his childhood to his professional days at CHNS and then the CBC and on to his present life, hosting a show at Seaside FM. Frank just can’t get radio out of his blood. In between is a satisfying chronicle of a media personality who never takes himself too seriously. Frank is funny, but he also doesn’t shy away from stating his opinions and telling it like it is.
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Frontier Town: Bear River, Nova Scotia A Snapshot in Time
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$26.95Bear River photographer Ralph Nelson Harris captured the village’s waning days of sail and lumber through his camera lens in the early 1900s. Drawing upon hundreds of recently discovered Ralph Harris images, historian and author Mike Parker puts a newfound face to Bear River’s past while utilizing painstakingly researched excerpts from The Telephone, Bear River’s newspaper of the day, to add an informative and entertaining voice to the story. Includes 470 images.
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Travels With Farley
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$24.95After living in a remote Newfoundland outport and returning to Port Hope, Ontario, Claire and Farley Mowat abandoned the comforts of the mainland to live in the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. They moved into a small isolated community and eventually bought a home there.
Claire Mowat writes of the ups and downs of being outsiders on their island but also of their love affair with the Magdalens, with its windswept dunes, endless beaches and raw beauty. It was a rugged life by the sea for the Mowats and sometimes a life of isolation, but they attracted visitors from far and wide, including Pierre and Margaret Trudeau, who arrived by helicopter from Charlottetown. The Mowats eventually gave the Trudeaus one of the puppies they raised. The Trudeaus, fittingly, named the dog Farley. He lived at 24 Sussex with the prime minister’s family, enjoying the comforts of civilization his namesake often eschewed.
Travels With Farley picks up where Claire’s best-selling The Outport People left off. It gives insight into her own writing life as well as Farley’s during the time when he was crafting A Whale for the Killing and researching Sea of Slaughter.
This is a warm and haunting tale of two writers whose lives were woven together by love, adversity and adventure. The book will appeal to both those already familiar with Farley Mowat, one of Canada’s iconic literary figures, and to those who have yet to meet this legendary and often controversial environmentalist.
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The Price We Pay
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Decision-making happens throughout our lives. Some decisions we are proud of, others we regret, but they shape our lives. This book examines extraordinary events told to the author by more than 25 remarkable people. The men and women are police officers, firefighters, Canadian military personnel, Emergency Health Services (EHS) attendants, grief counsellors, social workers and ordinary citizens. All have faced adversity. Some have been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and that is an important part of their story.
These are stories of hope and healing in the face of regret, challenge, and, in some cases, life and death. One high-ranking Canadian police officer reveals to the author, for the first time publicly, that he has been diagnosed with PTSD. The diagnosis came after years of demanding first responder work both in Canada and abroad, including devastating earthquake and flood recovery and relief efforts.
In another case, a former Ontario paramedic describes how a decision he made at a murder scene left him reeling. He has since started a non-profit organization in the victim’s honour and travelled coast to coast in Canada raising awareness that “Heroes are Human.”
A mother of two describes her split-second decision to drive her car, at high speed, into a ditch alongside a Nova Scotia highway. When her car malfunctioned and a head-on collision was imminent, she acted selflessly to avoid killing or injuring anyone. Her near-death experience and dramatic roadside rescue by two members of the military will haunt readers of this true story.
Underpinning the work is Landry’s interview with the man who accidentally caused the horrific house fire which was the focus of her previous work, The Sixty Second Story. That book pays homage to her late father, Baz Landry, a Canadian Medal of Bravery recipient, and his Halifax firefighting peers. Together they rescued an eight-week-old infant from a burning home in 1978.
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Still Fighting for Change: Black Social Workers in Canada
Editor: Wanda BernardPublisher: Pottersfield Press$22.95In their own words, the twenty authors create a conversation with the reader about the Black social workers in Canada who have struggled to bring change not for themselves, but for their communities. This volume contains stories of social workers breaking barriers as they fight for changes to improve the system and enhance the lives of those they serve. There are also stories by members of the Association of Black Social Workers speaking frankly about the struggles they have encountered to become who they are.
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Limerence
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Can a man have it all?
The warmth of a solid family and the challenges of a fruitful career?
These questions lie at the heart of Limerence, a fun novel exploring the lives of two people seeking very different ways to be men. One’s a stay-at-home dad, the other a freewheeling libertine. Both struggle with addictions to limerence, that Leonard Cohen longing for something new that drives so many men to leave behind what’s good in pursuit of what seems better.
A car crash in southern Manitoba flings lives apart like planets ejected from the solar system. A man with no future staggers dazed from the wreckage and vanishes. A man with no past arrives in Halifax and creates a new life.
Cain Cohen denies he ever was Sam Stiller, but the past is catching up to his present. People who knew Sam insist he is the same person as Cain, but he rejects them, repeatedly insisting he’s not Stiller. Is he right? Or is he deliberately trying to shake off his old identity and assume a new one?
As the mystery unfolds, the novel probes deeper questions about manhood. Old ideas of how to be a man celebrate the stoic breadwinning father, but they’ve fallen out of our culture. Newer ideas, like taking time off to raise your children, barely make a dent. Men are left to explore the unmapped terrain alone, shaping the future without anyone noticing.
Drawing wisdom from the great Canadian poet Leonard Cohen, William Shakespeare and Steve Perry, Limerence dives deep into the new world of new men and asks: What does it mean to be a man?
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Angel Lady of the Maritimes
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95How does someone go from being a military nurse to a professional medium talking to angels and dead people? Read Karen’s enthralling autobiography portraying her spiritual journey and fascinating career change. Karen, The Angel Lady, didn’t talk to dead people as a child, nor is she a third-generation psychic. She didn’t grow up thinking, “I want to talk to angels for a living,” but looking back on her life, there were definitely clues she would.
Along the way, Karen had many frank chats with God while trying to stay on her life path, looking for divine guidance and help along the way. Discover the secrets of working as a professional medium and the realities of communicating with heavenly beings. It sometimes means persuading dead people to quiet down and allow her some private time.
As she recounts some hair-raising experiences in her life, Karen offers up helpful advice about knowing which angels are around you. With humour and a down-to-earth approach, Karen discusses her first ghostly encounter during a military tour of Gettysburg. She also writes of the startling first time a dead person spoke to her directly – a soldier killed in Afghanistan. And she tells of an angelic visitation at her military workplace informing her it was time to move on to the next phase in honouring her life path.
With warmth, Karen shares her angelic encounters: how Archangel Michael took over driving her car in a dangerous situation; how she sees the glowing presence of angels; how her deceased father grabs her attention from heaven; and what common messages your angels have for you.
Be inspired to fearlessly follow your life path. Know you are not alone in this world.
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Acting Up
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95This is a book about life and this is a book about acting.
Exploring Shakespeare’s dictum, “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players,” Bill Carr proves it isn’t just dramatic hyperbole but true. During his life, Bill has tried to live authentically while being very conscious he was acting. We are all acting, he claims, and some are better actors than others.
The same skills that work on the stage also work in life. Each requires the same attention to detail and a co-ordination of the inner life with the outer manifestation of that life. So Bill decided to improve his use of theatre techniques to better manage his own life. Now he shares those discoveries with readers.
Through exercises in the Play Journal and relating (often hilariously) his own life lessons, Bill will help you take the performance of your life to the next level – whatever you conceive that to be. Acting Up is about self-creation, taking control of the creative energies in and around you to be who you want to be in any given moment on your life’s stage. It asks you to follow Socrates’ advice, “Know thyself,” and challenges you to manifest that self in each moment. This is no easy task, but the alternative can be too costly.
The ideas here are gifts Bill received throughout his life from mystics, philosophers, seers, artists and seekers, who, like him, have experimented along the way, each offering bits and pieces that resulted in this book. Acting Up is part of an ongoing experiment in living. As you take part in the exercises, you join a company of artists dedicated to the adventure of self-discovery and, ultimately, self-expression. Perform your life as it was meant to be performed. It’s your show, so start acting up.
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What We’re Doing to Stay Afloat
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95We’re all at sea these days, no matter where we live. We make impossible pacts to guard against drowning, cobble together precarious rafts, patch our bailing buckets, and still the water pours in; we cannot hope to escape it. Job loss, heartbreak, accident, cruelty, impotence, climate change, madness, death: every sort of weather conspires to keep us lost and insomniac, struggling to reach some sort of shore. What We’re Doing To Stay Afloat chronicles such watery conditions and offers poetry as one sort of kit containing tools fitted to the task of staying alive: humour, rage, hammer, buoy, radar, chart. Here, melancholia and surrealism interleave, monologues become dialogues, want ads and Facebook posts are recycled into intimate domestic conversations, and ballads of human desperation alternate with accounts of the silliness, grace and violence of the natural world. Poetry alone won’t save us of course, but in flashes it here reveals where we are; it names, navigates, and gives us light to row by, perhaps long enough to sight an approach to the next harbour.
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After Swissair
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95On September 2, 1998, Swissair Flight 111 plunged into the sea near the mouth of St. Margaret’s Bay in Nova Scotia, killing all 229 on board. Thousands of people responded immediately: emergency personnel, fishermen, the military, divers, community searchers and RCMP officials. In the days, weeks and months after the crash, local residents and ordinary people supported the investigation in any way they could and, more critically, they also sought to comfort the families of the victims.
In the face of this almost unimaginable event, many experienced enormous suffering and world views were changed forever for the survivors – both the friends and relatives of the victims as well as support teams and the local communities of St. Margaret’s Bay, Halifax and beyond. What carried so many of them through this tragedy was the astonishing generosity and kindness each group gave to the other. As Wilson writes, “We all needed the families as much as they needed us.”
She wrote this collection of poems “in gratitude and in celebration of the thousands of men and women who suffered – and sometimes triumphed – during the months and years that followed the crash.” The poems reveal the depth of the impact the crash of Swissair 111 had on so many people.
Over the past 17 years, Wilson has been informed and inspired by the families of the victims, workers on land and sea, observers, professionals and by the local residents she has interviewed. She wove together these experiences to create a poetic vision of the sea change that occurred because of what Nova Scotians saw, heard or imagined about people they had never met, revealing the wonder of the sheer courage and generosity of the human spirit.
