Karin Martel had never considered what happened to her in ninth grade shop class as sexual abuse. So when she is in a regularly scheduled, routine session with the department therapist to talk through the stress of her job as a 911 operator, she surprises herself by suddenly bringing up the memory of the groping she endured in high school.
John Bemrose draws readers in and won’t let them go until the last page of this astonishingly lyrical and deeply humane novel.
Scream Therapy: A Punk Journey through Mental Health follows the transformational journeys of Schreurs and the other punks he learns from, revealing the healing power of a misunderstood and underestimated music community.
Exploring the intergenerational consequences of trauma, including those of a Holocaust survivor and a woman imprisoned during the Iranian Revolution, Stella’s Carpet weaves together the overlapping lives of those stepping outside the shadows of their own harrowing histories to make conscious decisions about how they will choose to live while forging new understandings of family, forgiveness and reconciliation.
Post-World War I, the small town of Newcombe, Ontario, is in danger of dying. Remote and with fewer than 200 inhabitants, its future is spelled out: slow, drawn-out, painful death as a community. A chance meeting between Francis Barrett, an employee of the Canadian National Railway (CNR), and Cal Bannatyne, a major on his way home from the front, leads to an opportunity: getting a railway station to Newcombe, linking it to the rest of Canada, and perhaps keeping it from dying.
This book explains how a shy small town boy’s mental health changed as he progressed into his policing career. The author analyzes his career path of how he gradually changed during his career as a police officer confronting all of the types of calls mentioned above amongst others. That his changes to his mental health were so subtle that he didn’t notice of the damages done to his mental health until it was almost too late.
This year’s non-fiction finalists are a mix of a travelogue, a personal battle with PTSD and loss, and finding gratitude despite facing adversity. GOLD: Silver Linings by Janice Landry (Pottersfield Press) SILVER: Around The World In A Dugout Canoe by John M. MacFarlane and Lynn J. Salmon (Harbour Publishing) BRONZE: A Medic’s Mind by Matthew …
Every now and then a reader comes across a book that speaks to them. The words jump from the page and land squarely to the reader’s soul. For me, this was Save My Life School, by Natalie Harris. This book is so real, so raw and so honest that it is impossible not to fall …
Matthew Heneghan is the author of A Medic’s Mind, his memoirs of working as a medic with both the armed forces and in civilian services. His account of dealing with PTSD, his family, alcoholism and more are vividly and candidly explored in his debut publication. At the time of this writing, A Medic’s Mind is on “The Very Best!” Book Awards 2020 longlist for Best First Book (Non-Fiction).
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Nicholas Selig, Editor-in-Chief
