When poet and essayist Kenneth Sherman was diagnosed with cancer, he began keeping a notebook of observations that blossomed into this powerful memoir. With incisive and evocative language, Sherman presents a clear-eyed view of what the cancer patient feels and thinks. His narrative voice is personal but not confessional, practical but not cold, th …

As the South African War reached its grueling end in 1902, colonial interests at the highest levels of the British Empire hand-picked teachers from across the Commonwealth to teach the thousands of Boer children living in concentration camps. Highly educated, hard working, and often opinionated, E. Maud Graham joined the Canadian contingent of fort …

Joseph B. Martin traces his climb from a Mennonite farm in the village of Duchess, Alberta to Dean of Harvard Medical School in his memoir, Alfalfa to Ivy. Readers are rewarded with an intimate perspective on academic politics and health care in Canada and the U.S. that Martin is perfectly poised to critique. And it is the human story of Martin's j …

Conrad Kain is a titan amongst climbers in Canada and is well-known in mountaineering circles all over the world. His letters to Amelie Malek-a life-long friend-offer a candid view into the deepest thoughts of the Austrian mountain guide, and are a perfect complement to his autobiography, Where the Clouds Can Go. The 144 letters provide a unique an …

A peasant in peaked hat and blue shirt, with trousers rolled up high above his bare knees, crossed the road and silently examined the tricycle. “You have a good horse,” he then said; “it eats nothing.” —from An Italian Pilgrimage

The 1880s was an exhilarating time for cycling pioneers like Elizabeth and her husband Joseph. As boneshakers a …

"We gambled everything-our careers, our fortunes, the future of our nation-and every day brought new discoveries. It was like living on a frontier."-Arne Nielsen The memoir of Canadian petroleum industry leader Arne Nielsen is not a conventional business biography. During his six decades in the business, he witnessed critical events in the oil indu …

Poet Alice Major was given a book on relativity at the impressionable age of ten, so she never quite understood why science came to be dismissed as reductive or opposite to art. She surveys the sciences of the past half-century -- from physical to cognitive to evolutionary -- to shed light on why and how human beings create poems, challenging some …

From 1960 to 1982 Barry L. Strayer was instrumental in the design of The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the patriation of Canada's Constitution. Here Dr. Strayer shares his experiences as a key legal advisor with a clear, personal voice that yields an insightful contribution to Canadian history and political memoir. He discusses the pe …

In the 1950s, Anne Innis Dagg was a young zoologist with a lifelong love of giraffe and a dream to study them in Africa. Based on extensive journals and letters home, Pursuing Giraffe vividly chronicles the realization of that dream and the year that she spent studying and documenting giraffe behaviour. Dagg was one of the first zoologists to study …

Sick Joke is one quirky travelogue. Glenn Deir spent two years happily stumbling through the conundrums of Japanese culture. Then he got tonsil cancer and less happily stumbled through the conundrums of medical culture. Sick Joke is a tale of two journeys told simultaneously that will make you laugh out loud.

In 1960s Regina, when racial discrimination often went unchallenged, and the education system needed visionary reform, Gloria Mehlmann struggled to embrace her Cree/Saulteaux identity and sustain her passion for learning and teaching. Critical but not cynical, Mehlmann's touching stories reveal the experiences and students that taught her to become …

A stunning personal account of Janet Merlo's twenty years of service in the RCMP, with an introduction by Linden MacIntyre. In 2012, Janet Merlo was among the first female RCMP officers to publicly allege she had experienced sexual harassment and gender discrimination while serving in Canada's national police force. The women kept silent for so lon …

I Remember Laurier is the story—actually, thirty-seven stories—of the little university that could, told by some of those who devoted themselves to transforming the school from its modest beginnings into a superb small liberal arts college, and in turn to the university whose growth, diversification, research, and partnerships characterize it t …

The trouble with lions is that while you are conducting a pregnancy test, you need to be equally, if not more, aware of what you can learn from the lion's other end. That is one lesson that Jerry Haigh brings home in this fascinating collection of stories about working with wild animals in Africa. Conversational in tone, conservational in theme—y …

I always knew I’d be the perfect mother. So far, I’ve perfected the fetal position. When Vicki Murphy brought her new baby home from the hospital, she expected to be greeted by fluttering butterflies and harp-strumming cherubs. You know: the way it is in diaper commercials and the “Yay, You’re Preggers!” books. LIAR, LIAR, MATERNITY PANTS …

Dead Woman Pickney chronicles life stories of growing up in Jamaica from 1943 to 1965 and contains both personal experience and history, told with stridency and humour. The author’s coming of age parallels the political stages of Jamaica’s moving from the richest Crown colony of Great Britain to an independent nation within the British Commonwe …

This Holocaust memoir crosses generations. In I Have My Mother's Eyes, Barbara Ruth Bluman chronicles her mother's dramatic journey from Nazi-occupied Poland to western British Columbia, where her legacy lives on. Bluman sets an urgent and intimate tone as she follows Zosia Hoffenberg from her genteel upbringing in Warsaw through the shock of the b …

A pioneer in kidney transplantation in Canada in the late 1950s, Dr. John Dossetor was faced with making many ethical decisions in his ground-breaking research and practice in nephrology so it was with much personal experience that he embraced the study of medical ethics in his later years. His medical career spans decades of change as modern techn …

Growing up Jewish in the little town, or shtetl, of Eisiskes near the Polish-Lithuanian border, Leon Kahn experienced a peaceful childhood until September 1, 1939 when Hitler’s forces attacked Poland. Only sixteen years of age, Kahn watched as the women and children of his community were herded into a gravel pit and murdered.Realizing that to sta …

This collection of over thirty essays by both well-known and emerging writers explores what it means to “be at home” on Canada’s West Coast. Here the rainforest and the wild, stormy cost dominate one’s sense of identity, a humbling perspective shared in memoirs by individuals who come to see themselves as part of a larger ecological communi …

Magie Dominic’s first memoir, The Queen of Peace Room, was shortlisted for the Canadian Women’s Studies Award, ForeWord magazine’s Book of the Year Award, and the Judy Grahn Award. Told over an eight-day period, the book captured a lifetime of turbulent memories, documenting with skill Dominic’s experiences of violence, incest, and rape. Bu …

Long before she became the renowned author of the best-selling Schmecks cookbooks, an award-winning journalist for magazines such as Macleans, and a creative non-fiction mentor, Edna Staebler was a writer of a different sort. Staebler began serious diary writing at the age of sixteen and continued to write for over eighty years. Must Write: Edna St …

Graham McInnes was one of many talented young people recruited by the charismatic John Grierson to build the National Film Board of Canada during the heady days of WWII. McInnes’s memoir of these “days of high excitement” is an insider’s look at the NFB from 1939 to 1945, a vivid “origin” story of Canada’s emerging world-class film st …

“My name is Weetaltuk; Eddy Weetaltuk. My Eskimo tag name is E9-422.” So begins From the Tundra to the Trenches. Weetaltuk means “innocent eyes” in Inuktitut, but to the Canadian government, he was known as E9-422: E for Eskimo, 9 for his community, 422 to identify Eddy.

In 1951, Eddy decided to leave James Bay. Because Inuit weren’t allo …

My Parents: Memoirs of New World Icelanders is a collection of essays written by second-generation Icelandic immigrants in North America, describing the lives of their parents. Originally collected in 1956 by Dr. Finnbogi Gumundsson, the first Chair of Icelandic at the University of Manitoba, seven of the fourteen memoirs are translated here from I …

In his engaging memoirs, One Version of the Facts: My Life in the Ivory Tower, Dr. Henry Duckworth takes readers from his student days in Winnipeg and Chicago in the 1930s to his time as president of the University of Winnipeg (1971-1981) and chancellor of the University of Manitoba. An accomplished physicist, he wrote the first definitive text in …

In this powerful memoir, philosopher Karyn L. Freedman travels back to a Paris night in 1990 when she was twenty-two and, in one violent hour, her life was changed forever by a brutal rape. One Hour in Paris takes the reader on a harrowing yet inspirational journey through suffering and recovery both personal and global. We follow Freedman from an …

In 2005, Maurice Mierau and his wife, Betsy, travelled to Ukraine to adopt two small boys, age three and five. After weeks of delays while navigating a tangled bureaucracy, they returned to Canada as a proud new family of four. Now what? Does fatherhood begin the moment that the adoption papers are signed? Is family something that is created in an …

p>You wake up, and your sister is dead.

With an absent father and their mother constantly ill, sisters Darcy and Carly Nolan were forced to rely on each other growing up. While unpredictable Carly bounced around, her life’s direction uncertain, Darcy fell in love, went to University, and moved to another province. When nineteen-year-old Carly unex …

Active for over forty years with the Communist Party of Canada, Bert Whyte was a journalist, an underground party organizer and soldier during World War II, and a press correspondent in Beijing and Moscow. But any notion of him as a Communist party hack would be mistaken. Whyte never let leftist ideology get in the way of a great yarn. In Champagne …

In the early years of the Great Depression, thousands of unemployed homeless transients settled into Vancouver’s “hobo jungle.” The jungle operated as a distinct community, in which goods were exchanged and shared directly, without benefit of currency. The organization of life was immediate and consensual, conducted in the absence of capital …

Xwelíqwiya is the life story of Rena Point Bolton, a Stó:lō matriarch, artist, and craftswoman. Proceeding by way of conversational vignettes, the beginning chapters recount Point Bolton's early years on the banks of the Fraser River during the Depression. While at the time the Stó:lō, or Xwélmexw, as they call themselves today, kept secret t …

Part lyric, part memoir, Everything, now, Jessica Moore’s heart-rending debut, describes an untimely death and the journey of going on alone. The book stares down loss and struggles to transform that loss into language that can pass through boundaries of intricate sorrow; the act of translation here is not about two different languages—although …

Maurice Yacowar challenges genre and form in Roy & Me, a cross between memoir and fiction, truth and distortion. It is the exploration of Yacowar’s relationship with Roy Farran—soldier, politician, author, mentor—and his conflict with Farran’s anti-Semitic past. Best known for his service with the British Special Air Service during World Wa …

Alequiers is the story of a one–hundred–year–old log house on the banks of the Highwood River in Southern Alberta, with particular emphasis on the time that author Mike Schintz and his family spent there. The book details what little is known about Alexander McQueen Weir, the original settler on the site and goes on to describe the changes in …

In May of 1868, Elizabeth Bingham Young and her new husband, Egerton Ryerson Young, began a long journey from Hamilton, Ontario, to the Methodist mission of Rossville. For the next eight years, Elizabeth supported her husband’s work at two mission houses, Norway House and then Berens River. Unprepared for the difficult conditions and the “eight …

In 1910, young Pierre Maturié bid farewell to his comfortable bourgeois existence in rural France and travelled to northern Alberta in search of independence, adventure, and newfound prosperity. Some sixty years later, he wrote of the four years he spent in Canada before he returned to France in 1914 to fight in the First World War. Like that of s …

On 15 March 1939, Helen Waldstein’s father snatched his stamped exit visa from a distracted clerk to escape from Prague with his wife and child. As the Nazis closed in on a war-torn Czechoslovakia, only letters from their extended family could reach Canada through the barriers of conflict. The Waldstein family received these letters as they made …

In Whose Man in Havana? the author offers an unconventional, often dark, but more often hilarious view of diplomacy in settings as varied as Haiti, London, the Dominican Republic, the Balkans, Palestine, Paraguay, Guyana, and Kyrgyzstan, including covert monitoring of Soviet military operations in Cuba on behalf of the CIA with the blessing of Pres …

Between these covers, you will read about the life of an individual—Mark MacGuigan—who dedicated his life to bettering Canada. From his fascination with the law to his interest in politics and international affairs, Mark made a lasting impact on virtually every area to which he turned his efforts . . . from the forward by Paul Martin

Mark MacGu …

A social and economic history of one of the oldest Ukrainian settlements in Western Canada. Established in 1896, the Stuartburn colony was one of the earliest Ukrainian settlements in western Canada. Based on an analysis of government records, pioneer memoirs, and the Ukrainian and English language press, Community and Frontier is a detailed examin …

Jeffery Williams offers a vivid retelling of his childhood in Calgary during the depression, followed by the outbreak of war and his enthusiastic enrolment in the Canadian Army. First sent to England in 1939, eager and untrained, Williams went on to a thirty-three year career, experiencing wars in Europe and Korea, and serving inCanada, Germany, th …

At the start of the Second World War, Poland was invaded by both the German and the Soviet armies. The country was unable to withstand the assaults and thousands of Polish soldiers and civilians were shipped to labour camps and prisons, where starvation, disease, and mistreatment were their daily expectations. With the signing of an amnesty between …

Finalist for the Wildrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction at the 2017 Alberta Literary Awards!

The long rivalry between the Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company for control of the fur trade in Canada's northwest came to an explosive climax on June 19th, 1816, at the so-called Battle of Seven Oaks. Armed buffalo hunters – Indigenous allies …

Nonfiction author Myrna Kostash merges the past and the present in The Frog Lake Reader, which offers a multi-layered perspective on the tragic events surrounding the Frog Lake Massacre of 1885. By bringing together eyewitness accounts and journal excerpts, memoirs and contemporary fiction, and excerpts from interivews with historians, Kostash prov …

Life Among the Qallunaat is the story of Mini Aodla Freeman’s experiences growing up in the Inuit communities of James Bay and her journey in the 1950s from her home to the strange land and stranger customs of the Qallunaat, those living south of the Arctic. Her extraordinary story, sometimes humourous and sometimes heartbreaking, illustrates an …

Why does it seem as if everyone is writing memoirs, and particularly women?

The current popularity of memoir verifies the common belief that we each have a story to tell. And we do...especially women. Memoirs are not only representations of women’s personal lives but also of their desire to repossess important parts of our culture, in which women …

In 1949, Margaret Norquay moved with her new husband, a minister with the United Church of Canada, to Mayerthorpe, in northern Alberta, a village in the centre of what was in those days a pioneer hinterland. Broad Is the Way is a collection of stories from their seven years there. Told with affection and gentle humour, the stories cover the challen …

Mapping Canada’s Music is a selection of writings by the late Canadian music librarian and historian Helmut Kallmann (1922–2012). Most of the essays deal with aspects of Canadian music, but some are also autobiographical, including one written during retirement in which Kallmann recalls growing up in a middle-class Jewish family in 1930s Berlin …

Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives presents critical essays on contemporary Canadian cartoonists working in graphic life narrative, from confession to memoir to biography. The contributors draw on literary theory, visual studies, and cultural history to show how Canadian cartoonists have become so prominent in the international market for …