From a Speaking Place

Writings from the First Fifty Years of Canadian Literature

Edited by W.H. New, R. Beaudoin, S. Fisher, I. Higgins, E-M. Kröller, L. Ricou

$24.95

• September 2009
• ISBN: 978-1-55380-064-4
• 6 x 9
• 450 pp trade paper
• Literary Criticism
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From a Speaking Place brings together 63 essays, notes and interviews from 50 years of contributions to Canadian Literature, Canada’s foremost journal on the country’s writers and writing. Included are such stylish writers as Margaret Atwood, Gérard Bessette, George Bowering, George Elliott Clarke, Wayde Compton, Basil Johnston, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Thomas King, Margaret Laurence, George Ryga, Andreas Schroeder, Audrey Thomas, Tom Wayman, Rudy Wiebe and George Woodcock. The selections answer intriguing questions: Which famous Canadian poet is a “gunman”? When did Bangalore move to Saskatchewan? Why is poetry a painting? a crime? From a Speaking Place invites you into a conversation (in both English and French) about what it means to be a reader and a writer in Canada. This Canada speaks: of Inuit voices and Al Purdy’s “rock gothic,” of Bombay and Trinidad, of “great traditions,” urban findings, laughter, Acadia, nation, translation, theatre, exploration, life stories and more, from official languages and le monologue québécois to Marshall McLuhan and “Hollywood Not.” Illustrated by George Kuthan’s woodcuts, the book celebrates Canadian Literature’s 50th anniversary in 2009.

Tibetans in Exile

The Dalai Lama & the Woodcocks

by Alan Twigg

$21.95

• September 2009
• ISBN: 978-1-55380-079-8
• 6 x 9
• 272 pp 60 b&w photos
• trade paper
• History

Alan Twigg has here recovered the amazing story of how George and Ingeborg Woodcock, while travelling in northern India in 1961, encountered many of the Tibetan refugees who had recently fled over the mountain passes. Appalled by the condition of the children — huddled together with inadequate bedding, surviving on a diet of thin soup and steamed dumplings — the Woodcocks vowed to help. Hearing of this, one of the Tibetans said, “You must absolutely come and see uncle.” This was Khando Yapshi, the Dalai Lama’s niece. Among the first Westerners to meet with the Dalai Lama, the Woodcocks offered to campaign to provide humanitarian assistance. This was the genesis for the Tibetan Refugee Aid Society (TRAS), one of two remarkable non-profit charities spearheaded by the Woodcocks — the other being Canada India Village Aid (CIVA) — that have touched the lives of millions. Since 1962, TRAS has raised over $5 million and undertaken 300 projects. Both of the Woodcocks’ volunteer-based, low overhead organizations are still going strong today.

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REVIEWS

“A great book about great people.” — Joseph Planta, The Commentary

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Strange Bedfellows

The Private Lives of Words

by Howard Richler

$19.95

• APRIL 2010
• ISBN: 978-1-55380-100-9
• 6 x 9
• 164 pp trade paper

The bawdy English language has never been overly concerned with purity, and this promiscuous proclivity has contributed to many alluring word histories. Richler combines his etymological talents with those of the muck-raking journalist to expose the louche baggage that many words have accumulated throughout the centuries.

When reading Strange Bedfellows: The Private Lives of Words expect to learn the unexpected truth about the past lives of many words. You will discover why gossiping in church is etymologically proper and that words such as “avocado” and “porcelain” have past associations with some of the nether regions of the body that have been conveniently forgotten by the lovers of fruit and fine china.

As Richler reveals, the English language has slept around for centuries and in the process has been seduced by many foreign influences. Composed of short chapters with each containing ten words from specific fields, Strange Bedfellows will surprise and delight the reader.

Other Ronsdale books by Howard Richler:

• Can I Have a Word with You?
• Take My Words: A Wordaholic’s Guide to Language

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REVIEWS and MEDIA

“An etymological delight.”
— Concordia University Magazine

“One of the more delightful books to hit my desk this season. . . . It’s a fascinating, informative, and engrossing book on a great number of words, their origin, original meaning, and for some of them, where the English language has stolen them from. It’s also often amusing, and I find myself still—weeks after getting the book—dipping into it.”
— Joseph Planta, thecommentary.ca

“Word nerds rejoice! Howard Richler delivers another riotously funny and informative text. . . .Grade-A cocktail party conversation material.”
— Telegraph-Journal

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Women on Ice

The Early Years of Women’s Hockey in Western Canada

by Wayne Norton

$21.95

• October 2009
• ISBN: 978-1-55380-073-6
• 7-1/2 x 10
• 166 pp trade paper, index, 36 b&w photos
• History, Western Canada

Women on Ice is the first book to focus upon the vibrant world of women’s ice hockey in western Canada during the First World War and the 1920s. The Vancouver Amazons, with their championship laurels and their association with hockey’s famous Patrick brothers, were the most famous, but were only one of a number of women’s hockey teams that met during the annual Banff winter carnivals to compete for the women’s ice hockey championship of western Canada. With the support of more than three dozen photographs, many of which are published here for the first time, Women on Ice follows the fortunes of the Vancouver women as they encountered teams from Victoria and New Westminster and the powerful squads from Calgary and Edmonton — teams that deserve to be legendary, but are now largely forgotten. Also profiled are teams from what was the geographic heart of women’s hockey in British Columbia until the First World War, the Kootenays, as well as some of the dominant teams of the postwar years from Alberta. The curious decline of women’s hockey in the 1930s consigned to obscurity the history of these and of all women’s teams in western Canada. Women on Ice attempts to rescue some of that fascinating history.

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REVIEWS

“Norton offers a fascinating look at the early days of women’s hockey in the West, in a readable style that will appeal to the general reader as well as history buffs, sports fans and the growing number of girls and women who play hockey.”
— Times Colonist

“will doubtless become the book most referred to in all subsequent work on women’s hockey in Western Canada.”
— Suite101

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John Donne and the Line of Wit

From Metaphysical to Modernist

by Paul G. Stanwood

$9.95

• February 2009
• ISBN: 978-1-55380-065-1
• 5.75 x 9
• 44 pp
• 
  

John Donne and the Line of Wit: From Metaphysical to Modernist is a study of influence, adaptation, historical imitation and invention. In his own time, Donne was celebrated for his distinctive style, especially for what his contemporaries recognized as “strong lines,” that is, witty conceits or unusual, often unexpected and surprising comparisons. Donne’s “metaphysical wit” fell out of fashion in the later seventeenth century, not to be significantly explored and revived until the early twentieth century, and then notably by the modernist movement in the years that followed Eliot’s Waste Land (1922). Among the most important — and earliest — of poets and critics to respond to this movement are the self-styled Fugitives of the southern United States. As “fugitives” they stood against what seemed old and shop-worn language, and they gave their name and talent to the literary journal published at Vanderbilt University from 1922–25: The Fugitive provided an outlet for the work of John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and others, who discovered a “new” modernism that might be shaped out of the “old” metaphysical mode of Donne. Their poetry is characteristically concerned with verbal or “metaphysical” invention, usually composed with metrical formality, and from an objective, detached point of view. Stanwood concludes his study with close readings of several Fugitive poems, especially Ransom’s “The Equilibrists,” which consciously recollects Donne’s “Extasie.”

I Have My Mother’s Eyes

A Holocaust Memoir Across Generations

by Barbara Ruth Bluman

$21.95

• March 2009
• 978-1-55380-070-5
• 6 x 9
• 126 pp trade paper, 28 b&w photos, 2 maps
• 
  

In I Have My Mother’s Eyes, author 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 Blitzkrieg and on to her escape from Europe through the Soviet Union and Japan. That escape required the help of Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Lithuania, who defied his superiors and helped several thousand Jews to flee. Bluman also reveals how, even as she was recording her mother’s tale of survival, cancer was ravaging her own body. In this interwoven narrative, Bluman explains how she garnered strength from her mother’s account as a refugee, “staring death in the face.” These twin narratives blossom out of salvaged journal entries and letters, and from the photographs of family members who have reunited after years of displacement. A celebration of the universal struggle for survival, I Have My Mother’s Eyes offers a hopeful response to one of history’s darkest times.

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REVIEWS

“Zosia’s story, the main one, is well worth reading. . . . I would certainly recommend this book.”
— Prairie Fire

Utopic Impulses

Contemporary Ceramics Practice

Edited by Ruth Chambers, Amy Gogarty, and Mireille Perron

$26.95

• October 2007
• ISBN 1-55380-051-6
• 7.5 x 10
• 224 pp trade paper
  Includes 40 colour photos, bibliography, index
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Utopic Impulses: Contemporary Ceramics Practice brings together ten essays and twenty artist projects to explore ceramics as a socially responsible practice. By framing particular ceramics practices as “utopic impulses,” this anthology envisions new and stimulating conceptions of how studio ceramics contribute to the social and political fabric of their time. The ten essays by artists and theorists well-known in the field, including Paul Mathieu (2007 Saidye Bronfman Award winner) and Leopold Foulem, “make a case” for the importance and value of studio ceramics in the public sphere. The artist projects in Utopic Impulses reflect influences and contexts arising from both local and global concerns. Drawing from a full spectrum of examples, the projects include functional wares, design for industry, conceptual, community-based projects and large-scale installations by artists such as Greg Payce, Jeannie Mah, Sin-Ying Ho, Thérèse Chabot, Jamelie Hassan, Anne Ramsden, Diane Sullivan and Les Manning. Each artist project consists of generous visual documentation supported by an artist statement. While the majority of contributors are Canadian, several are from Australia, Ireland and the UK. Bringing together innovative and forward-thinking examples of theory, history and studio practice, this volume will appeal to students, practitioners and educators in the fields of contemporary visual arts, ceramics and craft culture in general.

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“Utopic Impulses presents examples of challenging work that involves social idealism, activism and critical theory. It is a work that has long been waited for, is definitely needed and will be much appreciated by a wide-ranging audience. It will challenge and inspire the current and next generation of artists, curators and critics.”
— Virginia Eichhorn, Curator, Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery, Waterloo

“Utopic Impulses is truly inspiring for ‘learning to inhabit the world in a better way.’ It draws together a fascinating and comprehensive collection of critical research and practices that are grounded in contemporary ceramics while soaring upward, towards the most uplifting creative and social possibilities of the human spirit.”
— Joanne Marion, Curator of Art, Esplanade Arts & Heritage Centre, Medicine Hat

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REVIEWS

“Utopic Impulses: Contemporary Ceramics Practice comprises a substantive addition to the growing body of theoretical writing on what has been for too long a marginalized and ignored field. We need more of this.”
— Fusion Magazine, Vol. 32 No. 2

To Touch a Dream

A Wilderness Adventure

by Sunny Wright

$21.95

• March 2006
• 1-55380-035-4
• 6 x 9
• 190 pp trade paper
• 
  

This warm-hearted memoir tells the story of the dream of many North Americans: to throw up a dull job and journey into the wilderness to live off the land. Sunny Wright does exactly that when she decides at age twenty-eight to quit working at a “man-sized job for a female wage” in a Vancouver sawmill. With her young daughter Lisa and friend Betty, they sell off everything from their urban existence and outfit themselves with two trucks full of goods for the journey in to northern B.C in search of a place to live. They have never even gone camping before, but they are determined to succeed, and they do. After much searching they find land near Vanderhoof and begin the hard but joy-filled labour of constructing their own house, their own barn and setting up as subsistence farmers. Eventually they will learn how to run a bootleg still for extra money and will become famous in the area for the dogs they raise and the winter trips they take by dogsled. This is a book that readers can enjoy as they live alongside Sunny, Betty and Lisa in the bush, watching them learn to build log houses, make friends with the fiercely individualistic people of the back country, survive the desperately cold winters and enjoy the independence of rural life. The volume includes many black-and-white photos of their life in the bush.

“Life-writing at its adventurous best.” — Dr. R.B. Hatch, Dept. of English, UBC

Thompson’s Highway:

British Columbia’s Fur Trade, 1800–1850
The Literary Origins of British Columbia

by Alan Twigg

$24.95

• October 2006
• ISBN 1-55380-039-7
• 6 x 9
• 250 pp
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For his third volume about BC literary history, Alan Twigg traces the writings of David Thompson, Alexander Mackenzie, Simon Fraser and thirty of their peers, mainly Scotsmen, who founded and managed more than fifty forts west of the Rockies prior to 1850. This lively and unprecedented panorama introduces remarkable but little-known characters such as the wandering artist Paul Kane; the spy Henry James Warre; the botanist David Douglas; the “white slave of the Nootka,” John Jewitt; the devout Christian Daniel Harmon; and John D’Wolf (Herman Melville’s uncle), the inspiration for Moby Dick. Thompson’s Highway anticipates a wide range of bicentennial events to mark David Thompson’s mapping of the Columbia River, near Golden, BC, in 1807. After the failure of Alexander Mackenzie and Simon Fraser to find a navigable route to the Pacific Ocean, it was the remarkable mapmaker, David Thompson, who was instrumental in creating the “highway” for commerce that connected both sides of the North American continent. Thompson’s exploration and mapping enabled George Simpson, the “Little Emperor” of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and James Douglas, the founding father of the province, finally to bring viability to the corporate fur trade on the so-called Western Slope.

“Since the deaths of W. Kaye Lamb, William Ireland, Margaret Ormsby, and Charles Lillard, Twigg has been the main voice for what I call the British Columbia narrative.” — Barry Gough, Papers of The Bibliographical Society of Canada

Take My Words

A Wordaholic’s Guide to the English Language

by Howard Richler

$14.95

• ISBN 921870-42-6
• 6 x 9
• 152 pp
• 
  

Drawing from his “Speaking of Language” columns written for The Montreal Gazette, Howard Richler invites readers to enjoy the pleasures of exploring the English language — which is rapidly becoming the world’s lingua franca. Among other things, Richler traces how foreign words invaded the English langauge over the centuries, and how people’s names came into existence. Richler completes his tour of English with a special section on Canadian English. Take My Words also contains many entertaining puzzles, quizzes and word games to challenge readers’ skills.
“Take My Words is a user-friendly pot-pourri of lexical tidbits that will prove especially enjoyable to anyone just discovering the joy of lex.” — Bill Casselman, Montreal Gazzette