New ebooks From Canadian Indies
Description
Christmas a-glitter, Christmas on a shoestring. Christmas wrecked. Christmas salvaged. Christmas in city, village and country, in church and shopping mall and barn — they're all here, in stories by the best writers in the Maritimes and Newfoundland. Walter Learning's Christmas treat opens with "Matthew Insists on Puffed Sleeves," from Anne of Green Gables. Stars such as Alistair MacLeod and Antonine Maillet join their voices with regional favourites including Herb Curtis, Deirdre Kessler, and Helen Fogwill Porter. Goose Lane's own adaptation of David Adams Richards's screenplay Small Gifts is published here for the first time. Grahame Woods's adaptation of Gordon Pinsent's pilot for the CBC-TV series A Gift to Last ends this fulfilling celebration.
About the Authors
Walter Learning, a popular actor, director, and broadcaster, has served as artistic director at the Confederation Centre for the Arts and the Charlottetown Festival, and at the Vancouver Playhouse. He was founding artistic director of Theatre New Brunswick in Fredericton, and in 1995 he returned to TNB as executive producer.
Joseph Sherman is a Gemini award-winning children’s animation series director, with 30 years of experience in the design and production of animated series, motion graphics, and print illustrations.
Deirdre Kessler is the author of 28 books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including the recently published adult novel, Darwin's Hornpipe, and a one-volume edition of six novels in the Canadian Children's Book Centre Award-winning Brupp-the-cat series, as well as perennial favourite, Lobster in My Pocket. She is a former Poet Laureate of Prince Edward Island.
Born in Montana in 1910, Tessie Gillis in the 1950s came with her husband Joe to Rear Glencoe in Inverness County to live the hard, satisfying life of rural Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Illness finally gave her the opportunity to write, and her friend and editor Evelyn Garbary helped her bloom into one of Cape Breton's finest writers. Daring to write about the darker elements of rural life, Tessie Gillis has emerged as the Godmother of Cape Breton Fiction. She died in 1972.
Herb Curtis was raised near Blackville, on the Miramichi, and now lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick. His collection of short fiction, Luther Corhern's Salmon Camp Chronicles (1999), was nominated for the Stephen Leacock Award. The Last Tasmanian (1991, 2001), one of four novels, garnered the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and was a regional finalist for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
Deannie Sullivan-Fraser's is the author of a family musical, Time Shadows, where she wrote the play and the music. One of the songs, Making Tracks was recorded for Sesame Street. Two other songs, I Had a Place and You're my World have been recorded by the Ontario group, Arane. Deannie is taking her Masters in Atlantic Canada Studies at St. Mary's University in Halifax. She is currently writing her thesis, Home Medicine of Rose Blanche, Newfoundland. Deannie has also written articles for The Chronicle Herald and The Daily News and various other publications. She has worked as an associate producer, production assistant and researcher for CBC Radio's Mainstreet, a researcher for Vision's Reinventing Rituals, Marrying Well, Street Cents, Land & Sea and CBC special documentaries series, as well as historical feature film, Butterbox Babies. Johnny and the Gipsy Moth is based on an amazing event in her young father's life.
Readers of New Maritimes will be familiar with Ellison Robertson's evocative stories of industrial Cape Breton, his articles and his paintings. A native of Sydney, Nova Scotia, he now lives in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. His novel In Love with Then was published by Goose Lane Editions in 1992.
Jon Conway Dewar. A Saint John writer, Jon Conway Dewar won the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia Atlantic Canadian Literary Competition for drama in 1991. "One Turkey Extra" was first published in The New Brunswick Reader in 1994 and appears here by permission of the author. He dedicates this story to the memory of his father, Oliver Dewar.
Author of thirty-five books, David Adams Richards has won the Governor General's Award in both fiction and non-fiction as well as the Giller Prize. He is a member of the Order of New Brunswick, the Order of Canada, and was appointed to the Senate of Canada in 2017. He divides his time between Ottawa and Fredericton.
M.T. (Jean) Dohaney was born in the small village of Point Verde, Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. She moved to Fredericton in 1954, where she completed her BA in English at the University of New Brunswick. She holds both a MA and PhD in literature from the University of Maine and Boston University, respectively. In 1988, she released her first book, The Corrigan Women, which was followed by To Scatter Stones in 1992, A Marriage of Masks in 1996 and A Fit Month for Dying in 2000.
Ray Guy was a reporter and columnist at The Evening Telegram in St. John's from 1963 to 1974. He has been credited with helping turn Newfoundlanders against the authoritarian rule of former premier Joey Smallwood, whose policies Guy ridiculed and mocked with humour and satire. In the 1980s and '90s, Guy was a columnist for The Sunday Express, and then The Telegram. From 2003 to 2013, he wrote a column for The Northeast Avalon Times, a community newspaper based in Portugal Cove, which are collected in Ray Guy: The Final Columns, 2003-2013. He published several books, including "That Far Greater Bay," for which he won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 1977. Guy also wrote TV commentaries and plays, and acted in the CBC-TV series "Up at Ours." His play "Young Triffie's Been Made Away With" was made into a movie in 2006. Guy grew up in Arnold's Cove, and obtained a journalism degree from Ryerson Polytechnic Institute in Toronto in 1963. He died in St. John's on May 14, 2013 at age 74.
Brian Jones has been a columnist and desk editor at The Telegram in St. John's since September 2000. He has worked as a journalist and editor in St. John's, Calgary, Vancouver and Yellowknife, N.W.T. In 1997, he edited and published the humour magazine Caboto, and in 1999 he edited and published the humour magazine The Newfoundland Confederate. He obtained a BA in political science from the University of Calgary in 1981, and a BEd from Memorial University of Newfoundland in 1995. He moved to St. John's in 1989, and lives in Portugal Cove, Nfld., with his wife, Kathryn Welbourn, and their two sons.
Helen Fogwill Porter has published articles, stories, plays, and poems for six decades. Born and raised in St. John’s, as a writer, teacher, political activist, and feminist, she has received numerous awards, including an honorary doctorate and the Order of Canada. She now lives in Paradise, Newfoundland.
Helen Fogwill Porter has published articles, stories, plays, and poems for six decades. Born and raised in St. John’s, as a writer, teacher, political activist, and feminist, she has received numerous awards, including an honorary doctorate and the Order of Canada. She now lives in Paradise, Newfoundland.
Born in Hants Co., Nova Scotia, in 1933, Alden Nowlan moved to Hartland, New Brunswick, when he was nineteen, and worked on the Hartland Observer as reporter, editor, and general facilitator until he went to Saint John (and the Telegraph Journal) in 1963. In 1968 he was invited to take up the position of Writer-in-Residence at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. Alden Nowlan died on June 27th, 1983.
Born in Hants Co., Nova Scotia, in 1933, Alden Nowlan moved to Hartland, New Brunswick, when he was nineteen, and worked on the Hartland Observer as reporter, editor, and general facilitator until he went to Saint John (and the Telegraph Journal) in 1963. In 1968 he was invited to take up the position of Writer-in-Residence at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. Alden Nowlan died on June 27th, 1983.
Lawrence O'Toole. Originally from Renews, Newfoundland, Lawrence O'Toole became well known as a movie critic for Maclean's; he now lives in New York. A version of "Goodbye to the Wren and the Fools" appeared in Saturday Night in December 1990 and, in a different form, in Heart's Longing: Newfoundland, New York and the Distance Home (1994). This version of "Goodbye to the Wren and the Fools" appears by permission of the author.
Carol Bruneau is the award-winning author of nine books. Her reviews, essays, and articles have appeared across Canada, and she has previously taught courses on writing for the arts at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She lives in Halifax, NS.
An urban anthropologist by training, Clive Doucet is a graduate of the universities of Toronto and Montreal, and has worked for many years as a public servant at both the federal and provincial levels. He is currently the regional councillor for Capital Ward in Ottawa, Ontario. Doucet's literary credits include two novels, a memoir, novellas, and three books of poetry. Clive Doucet has also worked with the CBC, covering the first world reunion of the Acadians in New Brunswick for CBC Radio. Doucet is married with two children and lives in Ottawa.
An urban anthropologist by training, Clive Doucet is a graduate of the universities of Toronto and Montreal, and has worked for many years as a public servant at both the federal and provincial levels. He is currently the regional councillor for Capital Ward in Ottawa, Ontario. Doucet's literary credits include two novels, a memoir, novellas, and three books of poetry. Clive Doucet has also worked with the CBC, covering the first world reunion of the Acadians in New Brunswick for CBC Radio. Doucet is married with two children and lives in Ottawa.
Grahame Woods and Gordon Pinsent. As well as starring in the CBC-TV series A Gift to Last, Gordon Pinsent wrote the teleplays for the pilot and many of the subsequent episodes. Grahame Woods, a novelist and television playwright, novelized the series from Pinsent's teleplays. Woods also wrote the book for the musical stage version, with music and lyrics by Joey Miller; it has been performed at Christmas and in summer theatres since the late 1980s. Walter Learning and Alden Nowlan dramatized Gordon Pinsent's pilot for the stage, and this play, also titled A Gift to Last, has been performed throughout Canada to great acclaim. "A Gift to Last," the prose version of Gordon Pinsent's pilot and the first three chapters of Grahame Woods's book A Gift to Last (1978) © Grahame Woods, is reprinted by permission of Seal Books.
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