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This Navy Doctor Came Ashore
Publisher: Acorn Press$17.95Dr. Read entered the Royal Canadian Navy in 1943 and worked for three years as a flight surgeon. When the war was winding down, he realized that his career as a flight surgeon was also over. But he remembered how much he had enjoyed the three weeks he spent in Charlottetown when he relieved the medical officer at HMCS Queen Charlotte. This city of 20,000, in which this landship was ‘moored’, was much to his liking partly because he had grown up in Amherst, Nova Scotia, just across the Northumberland Strait, where he thought the culture was very similar. He also knew that as the only medical officer there would be independence, significant responsibility and virtual freedom from naval protocol and politics. One couldn’t ask for more. But this was during prohibition on the Island and little did he know that a great deal of his time would be spent writing “prescriptions” for alcohol so that the officers could be allowed to drink. Nor did he know that because of the lack of family physicians on the Island, he would be asked to open a general practice in a rural area of the province. For a flight surgeon who had little experience in family medicine, this would be a whole new adventure. This book chronicles some of the noteworthy events of the time he spent spent as a country doctor.
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I am an Islander
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95No man is a Prince Edward Island. That’s a good thing, because the tiny province is eroding a metre per year. In the collection I am An Islander, Patrick Ledwell explores the hilarity of life viewed from the country’s crumbling Eastern edge. Raised in a big family, the Island comedian looks back at his rural roots and asks: I am an Islander is a funny and heartfelt stockpile of standup, sketches, and rants, banked up to defend your good humour against everything that might erode it.
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Right Place, Right Time
Publisher: Acorn Press$27.95With over 25 years of broadcasting experience, Bruce Rainnie has collected stories from every arena He has worked intimately with PEI’s legendary broadcaster “Boomer” Gallant as well as many other well known characters from across the country. Bruce did the first TV interview with Sidney Crosby back in 1996 and has remained in contact with him ever since. He also worked closely with Olympic Gold Medalist, Heather Moyse. The book will include these anecdotes and stories from his work as a news and sports broadcaster.
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Riptides New Island Fiction
Publisher: Acorn Press$21.95A call was sent out asking writers to submit unpublished short stories for a fiction anthology featuring newer writers with a significant P.E.I. connection. There were no boundaries for setting or genre, only a limit of 5,000 words. PEI is strong on tradition, which includes out-migration and immigration. Thus, its culture and demographics are changing, and these PEI writers both are Island-born and hail from away – Australia and Calgary, Newfoundland and Ukraine. The result is twenty-three stories, which take the reader from a ritual gathering of PEI widows to Chernobyl in the nuclear disaster’s aftermath, from a menacing marital game of hide-and-seek through the Maritime landscape to gender clashes on an outback sheep ranch, from a religious commune in Alberta to the Enlightenment Tour bus into Quebec. Whether the characters are struggling for dear life in breaking surf, gasping for emotional air at a ladies’ candle party or fearing the Tall Tailor’s scissors, the authors demonstrate a rich variety of fictional talent and imagination emerging from what Island poet Milton Acorn called the “red tongue…In the ranged jaws of the Gulf,” and revising our perception of “the land of Anne.”
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What If ? – Springvale
Publisher: Acorn Press$9.95Students of Valerie Dockendorff’s grade 5/6 at Springvale Elementary, Halifax, have written and illustrated a book to address a variety of world issues in a positive manner. We wish to raise awareness about problems faced by kids all over the world by imagining what it would be like if the problems didn’t exist! All messages and illustrations depict positive images that send a message of hope and provide concrete ways for readers to take action to celebrate and improve our world….word by word.
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What Really Happened is This A Poetry Memoir
Publisher: Acorn Press$18.95This collection of moving poetry puts into words the heartbreak and triumphs of looking after ailing parents.What Really Happened is This is a poetry memoir that focuses on the ten-year journey of an adult “only child” as her beloved parents face declining health and death. The wry, poignant, humorous, and sometimes heartbreaking, poems chronicle the poet’s struggle to find balance in her life, as she juggles the needs of her family with her own work and creative life. The poems touch on the universal in specific experiences, as the poet faces the death of each parent, and realizes she is now next in line.
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Sky Pony
Publisher: Acorn Press$12.95Elaine Breault Hammond, the author of the best-selling The Secret Under the Whirlpool, Under the Waterfall, and Explosion at Dawson Creek, has lived in six provinces as well as in the United States. She and her family lived on Prince Edward Island. Now she divides her time between PEI in the summertime and Kingston, Ontario, the rest of the year, where she is close to four of her seven grandchildren
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Great Day Fer Livin’
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95After living in Australia for 18 years, Juliet Wilson returned to Prince Edward Island for an extended stay. The Island’s allure hit her front on: not just the vibration of the gently rolling landscape, with its patchwork quilt of red soil and emerald fields, but the beauty of the people who make up the rich fabric of the Island, their sense of place, and their way of being.She spent the summer of 2009 driving the back roads of Prince Edward Island, introducing herself to people she met on the wharves and in the fields and in their shops, and getting to know them by listening to their stories and eventually photographing them. Like an informal anthropological study, this 48-page book gives a glimpse into the culture, belief, and practices of the primary producers who make up the backbone of Prince Edward Island.
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Beyond Silence
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Beyond Silence: Voices of Child Sexual Abuse is a collection of stories, poems, and images by twelve Island women. In these deeply personal accounts, the women tell about the abuse they suffered as children, the profound effect it has had on their lives, and the reasons why people need to join the fight to stop it. A prevention chapter, written by the group as a whole, focuses on five key areas that need to be addressed in order to end child sexual abuse. These include abusers taking responsibility for their actions and parents taking action to protect their children.Beyond Silence takes a fresh approach to the ongoing work of child sexual abuse prevention by focusing on the knowledge and wisdom of adult survivors. This book has the potential to dramatically change the ways communities respond to child sexual abuse. The stories are raw and real, honest and terrifying. The women dig into the darkness of the past so that others may see the light. They refuse to be silenced and they’re determined to make a difference.
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Mud, Sweat and Tears
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Mud, Sweat and Tears tells the story of Bud Ings’ adventures as a rural veterinarian in the 1950s. As one of Prince Edward Island’s first professionally trained veterinarians, Ings set up his practice in the eastern town of Souris before moving to Montague.
Farms were rarely close at hand, however, and the sight of Bud Ings behind the wheel of his Volkswagen Bug became a familiar one on the Island’s highways and muddy back roads. And whether he was helping to deliver a calf, giving shots of penicillin to a pig, or putting down a beloved horse, Ings treated each animal- and each farmer- with dignity and respect.
Ings’ memoir is a rich, often humorous account of his first decade as a vet, at time when there were few vacations, no modern tools of the trade, and no request too strange to attend to. It’s also the story of a past era, when PEI’s farms flourished and the animals were not only the backbone of the economy, but part of the family.
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Jean Pierre Roma (French)
Publisher: Acorn Press$9.95This is the French translation of Jean Pierre Roma and the Company of the East of Isle-Saint Jean.
In the 1700s, Jean Pierre Roma brought settlers to carve an international trading empire out of the virgin forests of Isle St. Jean — now known as Prince Edward Island. A successful entrepreneur in a thriving community, he saw all his accomplishments destroyed by privateers in 1745. Yet the story of Roma lives on as an inspiration and a cautionary tale to leaders and builders. This new edition of a monograph originally published in 1977 ensures that Roma is not forgotten.
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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.
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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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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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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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Landmarks: An Anthology
Editor: Brent MacLainePublisher: Acorn Press$16.95Poetry by 50 of the Atlantic region’s finest poets
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Hangman’s Beach
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95A skilful blend of romance and historical fact woven about Halifax, Nova Scotia, while the Napoleonic Wars were shaking the world. A few miles away on Melville Island, a French prisoner daily faces the agonizing question: What would be his fate if the British discovered that he had shot and killed Lord Nelson at Trafalgar?
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Foggy Cat
Artist: Robert LyonPublisher: Early Childhood Education Ctr - UNB$9.95Robert Lyon’s illustrative watercolors combine beautifully with Glenda Thornton’s rhythmic language. Together author and illustrator bring Foggy Cat’s daily and seasonal life to the page. Enjoy the meanderings of Foggy Cat through the neighbourhood, the house and seasons.
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Grandma Says (pb) Weather Lore From Meteorologist Cindy Day
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95On Cindy Day’s grandmother’s farm, the weather wasn’t predicted with a computer or official forecast, but by accumulated wisdom and careful observation. Cindy’s grandma was a constant prognosticator, making predictions about the weather that more often than not, proved correct!
Grandma Says is a collection of 80 weather-related sayings that Cindy recalls from her grandmother. Now CTV Atlantic’s meteorologist, Cindy explains the science behind this traditional weather lore, and over 40 accent illustrations complement the text.
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Tick-borne Diseases in Dogs A Canadian Perspective
Publisher: Island Studies Press$18.95Presenting the latest research on canine Lyme disease, anaplasmosis and ehrlichiosis, Tick-borne Disease in Dogs is an invaluable reference for veterinarians and dog owners. As geographic ranges of ticks and their associated vector-borne pathogens rapidly expand in Central, Eastern and Atlantic Canada, it is imperative to understand the complex relationships surrounding the incidence of disease in dogs to inform management and prevention.
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Poems and Lyrics by a Super-Centenarian I Needed the Quiet
Publisher: SSP Publications$9.95Garvie Samson’s 4th edition of poems penned in French and English by a Cape Breton teaching nun, who lived throughout 3 centuries (1891–2004).
