Our Books




Finding Creatures & Other Stories
by
C. June Wolf


Wolf uses different genres, different voices, different cultures—in short whatever she needs to make the story work. What ties it all together is her sure-handed prose and a depth she brings to her writing, that indefinable element that rises up from between the lines and gives a good story its resonance…
from the introduction by Charles De Lint, author of 
 The Onion Girl and Dingo.


Literary, science fictional, slipstream, and fantastic—this medley of stories is grounded in the present day, weaving backward to the life of Saint Francis, and forward to a time when Earth is a memory, and new humans are finding their place among the stars.
Wolf’s characters grapple with personal integrity and connection with others, with the imperatives to abandon fear and hate and to question cherished beliefs. A Haitian street kid with a mercurial coin, a skid-row waitress with a passion for palaeontology, and aliens inadvertently trapped in sculptures by Henry Moore, journey side by side with a northern Native man searching for a place to bury a dead spaceman, and two teenagers who build an old-style science-fiction machine with a very modern purpose.
Wolf’s unexpected approach to story telling interlaces humour, compassion, and a compelling affection for human and nonhuman with a fine-spun unorthodoxy in these understated tales of this world and beyond.

$15.95 plus postage and handling. 

ISBN 978-0-9810658-0-9
For reviews, excerpts, and more, click here
To order, click here.


Back in the Days
by Addena Sumter-Freitag
War, peace & getting by for one Black family in Winnipeg.
Poetry and creative non-fiction by the author of Stay Black & Die Commodore  Books, 2007.

Back in the Days brings to life the girls, boys, men and women of the Black community in Winnipeg and Nova Scotia, through Addena Sumter-Freitag’s anecdotes and provocations.
Advance Praise for Back in the Days
…bold-faced, broad-based and takes up space in a Canada that needs to be re-raced. *Back in the Days* is a book that will change your sense of here, and will eclectify your sense of self, wherever and whoever you are. You’ll love going back with Sumter-Freitag, whether or not you were there the first time around, because you’re here and now in her glorious storytelling.
Wayde Compton, author of Performance Bond and editor of Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature

$15.95 plus postage and handling.
ISBN 978-0-9810658-1-6
For reviews and excerpts, click here.
To order, click here.



Tales from the Holograph

Woods

by
Eileen Kernaghan


Author of eight books of fiction, two-time winner of the Canadian SF Aurora Award for her novels Songs from the Drowned Lands(1983) and The Snow Queen (2000), Eileen has been quietly publishing startling gems of poetry in magazines and anthologies throughout the years. 

With this collection, Kernaghan inhabits that strange netherworld, astraddle both yin and yang, one foot in the fierce daylight of knowledge and reason, the other in the dark mysteries of myth-ologies, the absyssal wood—whose “shadow is always there/dark subtext, dissonance…” Her sly words, fevered dream visions and lurking rhythms dance the reader a merry chase down peculiar paths, where there is sometimes only a “thin light/shining a long way off/like a summons.” Poetry should always, to some degree, be about the uses (and misuses) of enchantment, and Kernaghan has touched something deep and visceral with these verses. You will read them once, then, in the middle of the night, wake suddenly, shivering, and need to read them again. Eileen Kernaghan neither lights a single candle nor curses the darkness—she swallows it whole and then sets it on fire.
                                          —Sandra Kasturi, author of The Animal Bridegroom

ISBN 978-0-9810658-2-3
$12.95 plus postage and handling
For reviews and excerpts, click here.
To order, click here.




Water Window Mirror

by Gloria Barkley


Water Window Mirror by Gloria Barkley is the poetic rendering of a decades-long struggle with madness derived from allergies to food and food-additives. In a world where nothing could be counted on to be real, where even inanimate objects had minds of their own, Gloria raised three children, sought for and discovered her own creativity, and healed herself, with key helpers along the way.

METAMORPHOSIS


three ears become two
two bodiesone
for sure.
She handsprings
short way home.



These poems disturb and delight with their synesthetic surprise; quietly remind that the writing of a well-crafted little poem requires a long, arduous journey. Imagists’ poetry and Neruda’s Book of Questions come to mind. Thought provoking and invigorating, Barkley moves beyond arresting metaphor to visceral conflation. The sheer physicality, brutality, ironic beauty of Barkley’s language is her own.
                                      —Betsy Warland
                                       Breathing the Page – Reading the Act of Writing


 Water Window Mirror 
 Poems by Gloria Barkley
 $12.95
  ISBN 978-0-9810658-4-7