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The Way We Hold On
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95The Way We Hold On is Abena Beloved Green’s debut book of poetry. Her poems address cultural, social, and environmental issues, relationships, and reflect on everyday life as a small-town raised, semi-nomadic, first-generation Canadian. Here are poems about holding on and letting go—of ideas, opinions, beliefs, people, places, and things.
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Toward the Country of Light New and Selected Poems 1978-2018
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95This collection brings together Allan Cooper’s best poems over the last forty years. He weaves visions of nature with insight into the workings of the human heart. Read them individually or read them as a single long, flowing and eloquent narrative. The meditative and compassionate observations will transport the reader from the chaos of everyday life into a healing realm of possibility.
In Toward the Country of Light, the author offers open sonnets, prose poems, ghazals, small poems inspired by the Chinese and Japanese, and poems influenced by Robert Bly and Francis Ponge. As Cooper observes, “Over the years I’ve come to understand that the poem itself usually demands the form it takes and that language uses us for its own secret purposes.”
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Where Duty Lies A New Brunswick Soldier in the Trenches of World War I
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Frank Grimmer did not set out to earn honours on the field of battle nor did he readily choose to go to war. World powers were shifting. The future of nations was deemed dependant on their armies. It was left to the young men to face the gunfire of other young men who could have been friends under the right circumstances and in times of peace. Where Duty Lies tells the story of how a 23-year-old St. Andrews, New Brunswick, man ended up in the quicksand-like mud of Passchendaele labouring under heavy artillery fire helping construct supply lines that supported the Canadian advance during the Third Battle of Ypres, often referred to as the most horrific in a war of horrific battles.
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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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Halifax A Literary Portrait
Editor: John BellPublisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Halifax: A Literary Portrait is a lively anthology of thirty-one selected writings about this colourful Nova Scotian port city dating from the early eighteenth century to the present. Included are works by such varied writers as Thomas Chandler Haliburton, Joseph Howe, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, L.M. Montgomery, Hugh MacLennan, Thomas Raddall, Will R. Bird, Irving Layton, Earle Birney, bill bissett and Spider Robinson.
Halifax is captured in its many moods, and the selections, while not always complimentary, are sure to entertain and illuminate.
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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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Salt Fires
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Salt Fires is a volume of poems that embrace and reflect our human consciousness: our awareness, our blindness, our Shadow, our mythologies. They invite us to look at ourselves in ways that often are disconcerting, sometimes startling. Love of land infuses Salt Fires. Intimately inhabited and passionately shared, Nova Scotia’s farms, woods, and shores reveal themselves to be our Earth in microcosm.
A suite of Sable Island poems closes the book and affirms this notion—Sable Island, a strip of sand in a vast ocean, impossible, yet somehow here, like our planet, rich in life and beauty. This is the work of a mature poet who examines moral blindness and human frailties by inhabiting the experiences of the poems’ speakers with vulnerability and honesty. Accessible, clear, and alive with music, the poems inform and incite.
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It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time Ten Years of Misadventures in Coffee
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Annabel’s coffee adventures took her from a wet, dreary market in northern England to the Canadian Prairies via a PhD in Central America. She gradually mastered the art of juggling a start-up business, her thesis, and a five-month-old baby at the same time, and negotiated emigration bureaucracy, a few disastrous business relationships, and the brutality of Canadian winters. This is the real story of coffee entrepreneurship, with all the grim, impossible, frustrating, and messy bits left in. Because they all seemed like a good idea at the time.
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Louisbourg or Bust A Surfer’s Wild Ride Down Nova Scotia’s Drowned Coast
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95A rickety surf rig on wheels. A guide named Don Quixote. No cellphone. Louisbourg or Bust is RC Shaw’s spandex-free pilgrimage up a haunted coastline. Fuelled by Hungry Man Stew and blind optimism, Shaw battles potholed hills and remote waves en route to the Fortress of Louisbourg.
With a Nova Scotia road map in one hand and a fat copy of Don Quixote in the other, Shaw hatches a plan. He builds The Rig, a Frankenstein-inspired bicycle-plus-trailer to haul his camping gear and surf stuff. Then he circles Louisbourg with a black Sharpie and vows to take the fortress back from its malevolent tourist occupiers. Finally, on a clear June morning, he kisses his family goodbye and creaks off down the road in search of adventure for adventure’s sake. No cellphone, no safety net. Just the restless pulse of the Atlantic Ocean as it rips and tears at the coastline of the Eastern Shore.
As the lark gets real, Shaw is forever changed by the gnarly soul of Nova Scotia’s fogbound, fading coastline.
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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 Tides of Time
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Set in northeastern Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons paints vivid portraits of contemporary labourers whose harvests mark the rhythms of the seasonal year. Each of the twelve monthly chapters tells the story of a labour unique to that month, including jobs like tuna fishing, cranberry farming, maple syrup production, sheep farming, beekeeping, lobster fishing, and foraging for wild mushrooms. Stewart revitalizes an older, contemplative view of the sacredness of time. In keeping with the genre of nature writing, her book offers a meticulous way of looking at the world as she blends first-hand observations of seasonal change with stories of the labourers. The Tides of Time offers a refuge from the rush of urban life. It turns to the seasons, rural life and literature for an alternative mode of time, which is fluid, rhythmic, and gentle. The symplicity is there—close at hand.
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One Strong Girl
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95One Strong Girl is a mother’s vivid account of what it is like to lose her daughter, India, to a rare debilitating disease. The story is a bold description of what it means to deal with deep sorrow and still find balance and beauty in an age steeped in the denial of death. At ten, India climbed the highest on the rope at gymnastics, yet by sixteen was so weak she was unable to even dress herself. The narrative follows the six-year fight for answers from the medical community. Finally, after the genetic testing of India’s DNA, it was discovered there were two mutations on her ASAH1 gene, a deadly combination. Today her cells are alive in a research lab at the University of Ottawa. This is a legacy that cuts both ways, a point of pride and pain. One Strong Girl is a story of what it’s like to outlive an only child. It describes the intensity of loving a dying child and most importantly, the joy to be found, even amidst the sorrow.
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Threads in the Acadian Fabric Nine Generations of an Acadian Family
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Threads in the Acadian Fabric tells the story of the author’s paternal family, her line of ancestors that stretches back nine generations to the first Poirier who arrived from France and settled in Port Royal in the 1640s.
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Around the Province in 88 Days One Woman, Two Pairs of Sneakers and 3000 Kilometers of Nova Scotia Coastline
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Early on a May morning, a young Nova Scotia woman straps on a small backpack and leaves the Halifax Common to start her journey along the coastal roads of Nova Scotia. Planning to cover almost a marathon a day, she will walk the perimeter of the entire province in just under three months to raise awareness for the Heart and Stroke Foundation and the Brigadoon Children’s Camp Society. She billets with locals each night and meets countless Nova Scotians who come out to walk with her, support her project, and tell their stories.
Along the way, fellow walkers share family folklore, tales of buried gold, lost fingers, and detailed instructions on how to catch a beaver by the tail. “We don’t wear make-up and we don’t dust,” explains one of the women Emily meets near Sable River, when asked how she found the time to rebuild the trails in her area and win the Community Spirit Award. Struggling with blisters, fatigue, and an encounter with a bear cub, Emily walks on, overwhelmed by the generosity of her hosts in each community and by the stunning coastal views at every turn. Around the Province in 88 Days details Emily’s beautiful and quirky experiences on the road as she develops an intimate connection with the province and its people, unsuspecting of the vast changes the trip will eventually set in motion in her own life.
Emily Taylor Smith has walked the perimeters of Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, the coastlines of New Brunswick and the Gaspé Peninsula, and also completed a 100-kilometre walk from Halifax to Truro in nineteen hours. Born in Salisbury, New Brunswick, she moved to Nova Scotia to study theatre at Acadia University, and perform with the Atlantic Theatre Festival. She is the founder Local Tasting Tours, a culinary walking tour in Halifax. She currently lives in Dartmouth with her husband, their poodle Woody and Wilson the cat.
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Elapultiek (We Are Looking Towards) A Play
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Set in contemporary times, a young Mi’kmaw drum singer and a Euro-Nova Scotian biologist meet at dusk each day to count a population of endangered Chimney Swifts (kaktukopnji’jk). They quickly struggle with their differing views of the world. Through humour and story, the characters must come to terms with their own gifts and challenges as they dedicate efforts to the birds. Each “count night” reveals a deeper complexity of connection to land and history on a personal level.
Inspired by real-life species at risk work, shalan joudry originally wrote this story for an outdoor performance.
Elapultiek calls on all of us to take a step back from our routine lives and question how we may get to understand our past and work better together. The ideal of weaving between Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds involves taking turns to speak and to listen, even through the most painful of stories, in order for us all to heal. We are in a time when sharing cultural, ecological, and personal stories is vital in working towards a peaceful shared territory, co-existing between peoples and nature.
“It’s a crucial time to have these conversations,” offers joudry. “The power of story can engage audience and readers in ways that moves them to ask more questions about the past and future.”
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End of the Line The Dominion Atlantic Railway – A Trip Back in Time
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$25.95There was a time when railways criss-crossed Nova Scotia, carrying passengers and delivering mail, moving freight and produce, hauling timber, coal, gypsum, and iron ore. But those days have passed thanks in large measure to the advent of the automobile, improved highways, long-haul trucking, and the vagaries of market demands and resource extraction. The number of railways operating today in the province can be tallied on one hand, with fingers left over.
Vestiges of Nova Scotia’s railway heritage are disappearing. Tracks are now Rails to Trails; trestle bridges have deteriorated to decrepitude; and train stations, once the arterial pulse for so many communities, have, for the most part, disappeared. Most poignant, perhaps, is the silencing of that magical, haunting train whistle.
Mike Parker’s latest book End of the Line follows a similar track as three of his earlier best-selling books about ghost towns and deserted island settlements. Presented in Mike’s popular storytelling style, and drawing upon more than 430 images, many of them in colour, End of the Line opens another window to the past, taking the reader for a nostalgic trip back in time on the abandoned Dominion Atlantic Railway along the once-famous Land of Evangeline route from Yarmouth to Halifax through the heart of the Annapolis Valley.
Twenty-five years have passed since the demise of the Dominion Atlantic Railway (1894-1994), which closed just one month and five days short of its one hundredth birthday. There have been many railways but none more storied than the D.A.R., considered to be “one of the more important pages out of Nova Scotia history.”
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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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Haven in the Heart of Halifax An Illustrated History of the Public Gardens
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$25.95The Public Gardens is one of the finest examples of a Victorian garden anywhere in the world. Nestled in the heart of the city, this important public space has a fascinating history. When you enter the Public Gardens, it feels for a moment as if you have stepped back in time. Everything seems to slow down when you push open one of the iron gates and set foot on the winding gravel paths that meander throughout plantings of astonishing variety. It is seemingly timeless but, of course, it has changed a great deal over almost one hundred years.
Nestled in the heart of the city, the Public Gardens’ origins date from the 1830s. Inside its gates are a staggering variety of beautiful flowers, shrubs, and trees and the most memorable historic structures. The aesthetic of the Public Gardens was the vision of Richard Power, the Gardens’ original superintendent.
Over time, the Gardens took its current form, through the addition of familiar features such as the bandstand, cast iron gates, fountain, and bridges. The structures and monuments in the garden themselves are filled with significance. Citizens and visitors alike have found a quiet oasis of calm in the middle of the downtown core. It is a place where memories have been made, as generation after generation have taken in the seven hectares of beauty. When you enter the Public Gardens, it feels as if you are stepping out of a hectic city and back in time. But the Public Gardens has survived through the careful stewardship of a cross section of the community.
This lavishly illustrated book is the first comprehensive history of this remarkable place.
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In Two Voices A Patient and a Neurosurgeon Tell their Story
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95For a decade, Linda Clarke and Dr. Michael Cusimano had offices across from one another at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. She worked in Clinical Ethics and he was a staff neurosurgeon. They knew one another to say hello, to nod as they passed one another on the stairs, to wish each other a Merry Christmas. Michael’s patients sat in the chairs along that shared hallway, waiting for their appointment with him. For ten years, Linda heard their talk outside her door, smiled at them as she passed by, tried to give them their privacy. She was always impressed by the things people endured.
Ten years into her work, Linda got sick; she left her job and, weeks later, she sat in one of those hallway chairs, waiting for her appointment with Dr. Cusimano. In the blink of an eye, she was a neurosurgery patient and he was her surgeon.
Linda and Michael wrote In Two Voices together: it is the intimate account of Linda’s surgery with Michael as her surgeon. The story builds a piece at a time as Linda and Michael tell each other their experience and then respond to one another’s writing. As the relationship shifts from one of patient and surgeon to one of Linda and Michael as colleagues and friends, they encounter surprises as their trust and mutual understanding develop. Here is an unprecedented view into the experiences of illness, care, and compassion, an intimate picture of the experiences, challenges, skills, and commitment of a surgeon. The worlds of both surgeon and patient are framed by a most critical and delicate surgical procedure.
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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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Awakening my Heart Essays, Articles and Interviews on the Buddhist Life
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95From Andrea Miller — an editor and staff writer at Lion’s Roar, the leading Buddhist magazine in the English-speaking world — comes a diverse and timeless collection of essays, articles, and interviews. Miller, whose writing is by turns earnest and irreverent, unadorned and lyrical, talks to Buddhist teachers, thinkers, writers, and celebrities about the things that matter most and she frames their wisdom with her own lived experience.
In Awakening My Heart, we hear Tina Turner on the power of song, Ram Dass on the importance of service, Jane Goodall on the compassion that exists in the natural world, and Robert Jay Lifton on the darkest deeds of humanity — and how to prevent such things from ever happening again. Moreover, Miller — with her gently probing questions — gets to the bottom of the friendship between Zen master Bernie Glassman and Hollywood’s Jeff Bridges and she takes a playful look at the difference between Michael Imperioli, the serious Buddhist practitioner, and the unhinged mobster character he played in The Sopranos.
Insight teacher Gina Sharpe coaches Miller on how to start facing the racism that exists even in the most liberal communities, while Robert Waldinger, a Zen priest and the leader of the world’s longest running study of human happiness, teaches her the key to being truly happy. Miller also brings the wisdom of a thirteenth-century Zen text into her very own galley kitchen and takes a look at animals through a quirky dharma lens. Finally, she goes on retreat with two of the world’s most beloved contemporary Buddhist teachers, Pema Chödrön and Thich Nhat Hanh, and travels to India to follow in the footsteps of the Buddha himself.
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Against the Grain A Biography of Dr. John Savage
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95John Savage was ready to leave Wales. Fed up with the National Health System, his frustrations grew daily. The back of a medical journal advertised that the town of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, was seeking medical professionals, and John was ready for a fresh start.
Many knew Dr. Savage as their physician. Others speak about his time as mayor of Dartmouth. Yet most remember him as Nova Scotia’s twenty-third premier. He entered politics because he didn’t like the way things were done. He had ideas, opinions, and a vision to transform a province drowning in debt and stuck in old ways. He was responsible for an amalgamation that is still of great debate, a controversial harmonized sales tax, a world-renowned emergency health system, two new casinos that met with petitions and scandal, and the list goes on. And while all of these historic reforms will forever be linked to John Savage, this is just a small fragment of a much larger legacy.
John Savage orchestrated the building of ball fields and medical clinics and pushed for sex education in the schools. Locally, he worked with addicts and alcoholics, but he also brought medical supplies and assistance to countries lacking basic necessities. He was never interested in doing what was popular. From tackling the health and education systems to making turn-the-province-on-its head decisions while premier, John was determined to change the way things were done. Against the Grain chronicles how he fought the status quo with unwavering conviction to leave a lasting legacy that would change the province of Nova Scotia forever.
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Sculpting Towards the Light
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95“Stone carving is a slow, meditative experience. The process can be transformative. Each of my projects has taken life’s rough moments and opens them up to the discovery of our shared humanity. The finished work may be the sculpture, but the creative process is never ending.”
Sculpting Towards the Light is an intimate and insightful story of a sculptor and his work. It follows the paths of imagination and activity which gave birth to a very unique work of art. The paths are diverse and unexpected, twisting into personal history, racing forward into the future, and then resting in the euphoric moments when the mind and its thoughts no longer exist and the carving occurs as if of its own accord.
The author writes, “There is a point in each sculpture where my energies collide. At first there is the initial inspirational emotion, full of conviction, demanding that I communicate its essence. The emotion has been concretely felt but the sculptural representation of that emotion remains vague. It is as if I am sleepwalking, unaware of where I am going. I can also feel playful in a place of excitement where there are no time pressures and few expectations. My mind becomes an elevator with predetermined automatic stops: journal writing, pencil sketches, listening to music, reading and meditative walking in nature. Eventually, a three-dimensional structure materializes from the midst of this contemplation.”
Here is a unique story about play and work, imagination and action. Costanzo looks at the past that has shaped him and his future as an artist working in an ancient medium, while the world races toward digital Armageddon.
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Fixing Broken Things
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95George Elliott Clarke writes of Gregory Cook’s poetry, “… a poignant, elegiac tone haunts these lyrics, whether Cook speaks of love or nature or family. Any risk of sentimentality is cut by his usage of hard particulars.”
Fixing Broken Things is Cook’s seventh book of poems. He has served as Chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada and as a member of the executive of The League of Canadian Poets. He was also a founder and first secretary the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (ACCESS).
In Fixing Broken Things, Cook offers contemplative glances and lingering views on everyday life, as if observed through a window on the weather, landscape, and appearance or disappearance of things that matter. These observations act as mirrors that reflect the self and allow the merging of inner and outer worlds. The poet’s rewards are discoveries of self and other in the magic visions and sounds that arise in combinations of words, like bits of winter ice reflecting prisms of light, life, and vision.
Moments from travel in Europe, Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand appear here, as much at home as his life in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Fixing Broken Things harvests nature, memory, love, astonishment, as well as a life of altered consciousness.
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Colours in Winter
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$14.95Colours in Winter is a whimsical children’s picture book. The child, with her two bird friends, initially wishes that the giant fantastic snowflakes were coloured. Everything is too white. She thinks of green frogs in the spring, enormous red strawberries in the summer, and heaps of yellow and brown leaves in the autumn. But her desire becomes true and the snowflakes are suddenly all different colours. “Too much colour!” she gasps.
When everything turns back to white, she makes a wonderful discovery: there is colour everywhere in the winter — blue sky and green conifers, red rose hips and yellow beech tree leaves. The child and her bird friends reunite in a joyous celebration.
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An Imperfect Healer The Gifts of a Medical Life
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95“She said she would pray for me. I asked her why. She said she prayed for many people. I asked her why. Stooped and frail, she wore the lassitude of ninety-seven years as transparently as she wore the pale blue wool sweater that seemed to grow from her shoulders. I had seen her before in the hurried and harried rounds I make here. My progress notes say repeatedly, ‘No problems reported.’ But today I took the time to listen.”
Every patient tells a story. Drawing on a forty-year medical career, Dr. Larry Kramer has written about some of the people he has met along the way. The stories chronicle love and loss, tragedy and comedy, and empathetically observe patients who live and die, some with courage and some with fear. These accounts frame the story of one physician’s life and how it was shaped, changed, and guided by those he encountered every day. The young, the old, the happy, the sad, and the suffering all bring gifts beyond measure.
Narratives of medicine are increasingly recognized as key components of the therapeutic experience. The Journal of the American Medical Association suggested in 2001, “Narrative medicine can examine and illuminate four of medicine’s central narrative situations: physician and patient, physician and self, physician and colleagues, and physician and society.” It enables patients, physicians, and others to be moved by stories of illness. Thus we share a common humanity. We all have stories. Our heroes are among us.
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Doing Time Writing Workshops in Prison
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Poetry can address our most intimate, frightened, hopeful selves. Langille found this to be true as she introduced poems to men and women in prison and gave writing assignments based on the discussions these poems inspired. Over and over participants shared private moments of self-awareness. The support they gave each other and the stories they told were profound. This book puts to rest many of the myths we have about inmates. It confirms both that people cannot be reduced to their worst deeds and that creative expression has a central place in the process of rehabilitation. Most pointedly, Langille’s work reveals how, by failing the men and women behind bars, the prison system harms us all.
Participants in these workshops were complicated people. As Bryan Stevenson, an attorney who fights for the wrongfully accused on death row, says, “People are more than the worst thing we’ve ever done … Even if you kill someone, you’re not just a killer.” Doing Time makes us rethink the myths we have about inmates and gives us insights into the force of trauma and the power of dignity. We get a glimpse of what goes on in a prison system and we learn, as Langille learned, from the men and women she worked with.
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Silver Linings Stories of Gratitude, Resiliency and Growth Through Adversity
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Silver Linings author Janice Landry asks the very tough question, “What are you the most grateful for?” to fifteen inspiring Canadians from five provinces and two esteemed guests from the United States. One of seventeen is Dr. Bob Emmons, considered to be the world’s pre-eminent expert in the study of gratitude.
Gratitude and resiliency are key cornerstones in the field of mental health. Science-based evidence, discussed by Dr. Emmons and others, underlines the importance of developing and practising gratitude. Research proves being grateful is good for us, both mentally and physically. Gratitude can improve our resiliency before challenges occur in our lives, which they inevitably do.
Let’s face it: it’s easy to be grateful when things are running smoothly. The people in Silver Linings have discovered that gifts may actually emerge from life’s toughest challenges. Landry’s own gratitude practice was shaken to its core when both her mother and a close friend, assisted-death advocate Audrey Parker, died within weeks of one another while she was writing Silver Linings.
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Halifax Nocturne A Novel
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95December 1954: the old city in winter wears its two hundred years of grime and vice without any shame. The paint peels from ramshackle homes, and the streets congeal with snow and mud. Weary pedestrians trudge through the bleakness with chins tucked below the collars of threadbare coats. Nothing comes easy to the old city, and nothing ever changes — too many tangled secrets and too many unspoken debts. And yet a new suspension bridge, being built out over the harbour to Dartmouth and set to open in the spring, promises a better tomorrow. Such promised are not easy to keep.
On the street, hard-drinking Halifax police detective Ray Vargas has an unfailing habit for finding trouble, and when a man is found shot to death in the back of a Chevy truck, Vargas finds more trouble than he can handle — the murdered man is his oldest friend and the husband of his lover.
Frank’s death reminds Ray of an unspoken debt left unpaid. He sets off to find a killer in a city that doesn’t much want a killer to be found. At every turn, he encounters lies and danger. With his partner Artie Brennan and friends Ezekiel Dixon and jazz great Louis Armstrong, Ray tries to make sense of the deepening mystery, but hope is hard to come by — at least until he meets Lee White, Frank’s one-time assistant, who might just be his own bridge to a better tomorrow.
Nothing in Halifax is what it seems. As the tension builds, and the stakes grow higher, Ray knows that his own future with Lee depends on his solving the mystery. But to do that, he must make a difficult choice: cross a bridge — or burn it.
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Green Ghost, Blue Ocean
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Green Ghost, Blue Ocean is a travel memoir about a 40,000 nautical mile adventure that spans seventeen years. Early in their careers, Jennifer and her husband Nik come to realize that the rewards in the corporate world will always be the same—more money to buy more things, but never time off for self-discovery. When they begin to imagine a life outside the norm, they seize on the idea of long-distance sailing as the perfect way to journey down a road less travelled.
Green Ghost, Blue Ocean is a story about taking time and taking a risk, about unwittingly losing your identity while simultaneously redefining yourself in ways never imagined. It is a story about the importance of starting and the acceptance of an imperfect plan. It is a tale of the triumph of conviction: if you believe that you?ll figure it out when you get there, it?s amazing how far you can go.
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Memoir Conversations and Craft
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Memoir opens doors we could never ordinarily walk through—into the lives of Olympians, queens, victims of war and other tragedies, teenage rock stars, former streetwalkers or geishas—along with the doors to the lives of extraordinary/ordinary people. The best memoirs are maps of the heart and mind, and Marjorie Simmins invites you to explore the map of your own life. Here are the probing questions and dynamic writing ideas, coupled with inspirational interviews with best-selling memoirists, to light your own imagination afire. How do you access the details of your earliest memories, make them immediate and dramatic? How do you drive the story forward? How do you make a stranger care about your life?
Memoir: Conversations and Craft is intended for any reader or writer who is fascinated by the renegade memoir form—personal life stories that demand to be read, refuse to be forgotten. Whether you wish to compile memories from childhood to share with grandchildren, or whether you burn with the makings of a literary memoir, this reflection on writing can galvanize you.
Donna Morrissey, Linden MacIntyre, Plum Johnson, Lawrence Hill, Edmund Metatawabin, Diane Schoemperlen, and Claire Mowat—some of Canada’s top fiction and non-fiction writers—speak with candour, humour, and compassion about their journeys to memoir. Often touching, always helpful and frank, the interviews cover a broad spectrum of the writing experience. The time to write a memoir is always now—and the benefits are transformative.
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Teaching at the Top of the World
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95This memoir is a love story of sorts that expresses great respect for Inuit people, their culture, and the magnificent Arctic landscape. It is told from the perspective of a non-Inuit woman, who has lived and worked within an isolated, cross-cultural environment. Odette and YoAnne learned quickly that to be successful northern teachers, you must enter into the lives of your students and their rich culture in meaningful and significant ways. Outside of their regular school day, they enthusiastically participated in community activities; they ate Northern foods; they snowmobiled out onto the land to take part in camping, fishing, and hunting activities; and they learned as much Inuktitut language as they could. In turn, the author and her partner were warmly welcomed and they were deeply touched by their complete acceptance as a lesbian couple in these remote places.
