Reviews. News. Interviews.
Early 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.…
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.
Six years later, with my pet Steve-the-African-tree-frog, I headed off to grad school, a four-thousand-kilometre drive. Late on the third day, I was stopped for speeding. It was starless dark and the officer used a flashlight to approach our car. I had my license out. Steve was on the dash in his Mason jar. The officer didn’t seem to notice me, his flashlight trained on Steve.…
Fifteen years ago Wonderful Magical Words, my first book, was published, raising twenty grand for Make-A-Wish Foundation, for which I’m eternally grateful. Here’s a passage I hope you enjoy, The Story of Steve …
I was twelve. And I got a small African tree frog as a pet, one of a few to surface at our local pet shop, a novelty we assumed was part of an order gone wrong.…
When the Bartender Dims the Lights, storytelling after 80 by Ron Evans contains “bits and pieces of memory that managed to snag on the fence line and make a story because they sounded right.” A combination of memoir, parable, and wisdom gleaned throughout his life, Evans’ book reflects on the human condition and the complexities of aging.
The stories are brief, ranging from one to seven pages, easy to read in a short time, but each contains a nugget to ponder.…
Overland is the true story of a journey from Australia to Switzerland without flying. From vast deserts to an Indonesian fishing boat, a slow train through Burma to an armed confrontation in Laos, lullabies from middle-aged Chinese businessmen to a cold night on the Great Wall, wolves and reindeer herders, thieves and nomads: this is a vivid illustration of Asia and the people who live there, and of one ancient, stubborn motorcycle travelling through the world’s wild places.…
few of us were visiting over beers on an English seaside patio. One of the group seated at the picnic-style table was Renaissance man Gray Lightfoot – successful author and poet – a bus driver the rest of the week. I referenced Lightfoot being a bus driver-slash-poet. The others sniggered, thinking I just called him a piss-poet. “You don’t get the joke, do you?”…
The Miramichi Reader’s West Coast Editor, Bill Arnott is a published author and poet and a world traveller (although he’s isolating in Vancouver at the moment, he’s not going anywhere). Someplace he IS going, and you can join him is at Bill Arnott’s Gone Viking Online over at YouTube. You see, Bill was booked at libraries in and around Vancouver to promote his new book. …
The first independent account of the remarkable voyage of the Tilikum. Anticipating fame and wealth, Captain John Voss set out from Victoria, BC, in 1901, seeking to claim the world record for the smallest vessel ever to circumnavigate the globe. For the journey, he procured an authentic dugout cedar canoe from an Indigenous village on the east coast of Vancouver Island.…
travel. I’ve written about it. People have read it. Some even enjoyed it. Like music, travel’s one of those remarkable things where individuals in the same place at the same time can have wildly differing experiences. Individual tastes? Different perception? It doesn’t really matter. Fact is, that’s the way it is. And that’s the way it is with Hugues Corriveau’s Words for the Traveler.…
Mount Monadnock is a mountain in the state of New Hampshire, known for being featured in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. At 3,165 feet (965 m), Mount Monadnock is the most frequently climbed mountain in North America and the second most frequently climbed mountain in the world after Japan’s Mt. Fuji. Monadnock resides in the tradional lands of the Abenaki.…
Warning! Reading this book will leave you exhausted! I was only a few chapters in when I had to put down the book and wonder aloud: “How does a seventy-year-old manage to do all this in a day?” Let me back up and explain what Sandra Phinney’s Waking Up In My Own Backyard (2017, Pottersfield Press) is all about.
Basically “Waking Up” came about as an idea to do something different -each day- for 31 days straight.…
Canadian author David Cozac was born and raised in Toronto. He works for the United Nations. In the past, he worked for several human rights organizations, including PEN Canada and Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.
Finishing the Road (2017, Tightrope Books) is Mr Cozac’s debut novel and it certainly augurs well for any future books he may pen. Set in Guatemala in the closing years of its Civil War (1960-1999), it involves three principal characters: Marc, a young man from Toronto who is in the country to learn Spanish, Sixteen-year-old Magdalena and her younger brother Jacinto, Ixil people now living in Guatemala City whose father was taken away by the military, and whose mother died while they were hiding from government troops in the jungle, and Claire, a French journalist who has recently learned of her Guatemalan father and has traveled to the country to meet him for the first time.…
Wong is the author of five non-fiction bestsellers, including Out of the Blue and Red China Blues, named one of Time magazine’s top ten non-fiction books of 1996. She has won numerous journalism awards and is now a professor of journalism at St. Thomas University. A third-generation Canadian, Jan is the eldest daughter of a prominent Montreal restaurateur.
Apron Strings (2017 Goose Lane Editions) is a different kind of book.…
Listening for Jupiter (Les corps extraterrestres is the original French title) is the fourth book to be published by QC Fiction and their first of 2017 (release date is June). It joins such well-received titles as Brothers, The Unknown Huntsman and Life in the Court of Matane, all translated from the original French language writings. However, what is unique about Jupiter is that two translators have been employed, one for each of the two main characters, Xavier and Hollywood.…
