The term still life did not come into being until 1650. The French adopted the term nature morte, dead nature, around 1750. The painter de Chirico was said to have preferred the Italian term vita silente. The Japanese, however, call still life, calm things. Calm Things is the title essay of this collection of meditations on what it is like to live with still life, and to live poetically. Both an insiders glimpse into the precarious world of artist and poet, and a long gaze at objects and the calm and silence they hold, these essays prize the ordinary, radiant gift of common things.

Calm Things: essays

Biographies & Memoirs

Lemay, Shawna

Community & Culture

Palimpsest Press

Hive is an experimental/poetic, allusive/elusive novel about the possibility of a woman art forger, about the belief in this possibility. Hive is interested in anonymity, hidden-ness, how we see, what remains invisible, in suspicion, confessions, lies, obfuscation. Hive is interested in belief. Not to mention fakery, forgery, mystification, shams, scams, hoaxes, greed, hunger. Hive is interested in what is real and honest. Hive moves back and forth between fiction and creative non-fiction. Hive wonders what it is, and how to be, real in this world, so often fake.

Hive: a forgery

Literature & Fiction

Literary

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Blue Feast, a beautiful collection of poems from eloquent Canadian wordsmith Shawna Lemay, examines motherhood, marriage, and the prosaic nature of everyday life. In these original, engrossing poems Lemay delves into universal feelings of isolation and the painfulness of writing. Her poetry strains between light and dark, exultation and sorrow.

Blue Feast

Poetry

NeWest Press

The Red Velvet Forest is a sequence of poems exploring themes of silence and solitude, dream and forest. The poems are organized into three sections, titled, The Circumference, Lost, and Red Velvet Forest. The sections reflect the stages of a personal spiritual quest.

The Red Velvet Forest

The Muses' Company

Fiction. Shortlisted for the Alberta Reader's Choice Award. "What is the soul?" asks Rumi, the poet. "If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks." RUMI AND THE RED HANDBAG follows the lives of Shaya and Ingrid-Simone, working together one winter at a second-hand clothing shop. Theodora's Fine Consignment Clothing shop becomes a small world where Shaya, an academic who abandoned studying the secrets of women writers, finds in Ingrid-Simone a reason to begin writing again, on scraps of paper and post-its. Fresh, unique and intelligent, RUMI AND THE RED HANDBAG is a journey to the Museum of Bags and Purses in Amsterdam, a journey to find Rumi, the soul, and the secret hidden in a red handbag.

Rumi and the Red Handbag

Literary Nonfiction. "A lamp and a flower pot in the center. The flower can always be changing."--Virginia WoolfFrom the bestselling author of RUMI AND THE RED HANDBAG comes a new collection of essays about the intersection of poetry, painting, photography and beauty. Inspired by the words of Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein and the art of Irving Penn and Georgia O'Keeffe, Lemay welcomes you into her home, her art and her life as a poet and photographer of the every day. Lemay shares visits to the museum with her daughter, the beauty in an average workday at the library, and encourages the budding writer. Take a long walk through the fragrance, the colours, the beauty and the simplicity Lemay brings to this pocket-sized collection of essays punctuated by moments of flowering. Make an appointment with flowers, and an appointment with life.

Flower can Always be Changing, The

Essays & Correspondence

Do you believe in angels? When Xaviere is tasked with transcribing taped interviews her deceased friend Daphne left to her in her will, she begins to piece together the story of the photographer Irene Guernsey, a moderately well known but elusive photographer Daphne was interviewing. Irene’s mysterious images captivate Xaviere as they had Daphne. Irene had never given interviews or talked about her work publicly, but near the end of her life, she reveals the magic hidden in plain sight in her mysterious and ethereal photographs and her attempt to capture angel wings on film. And once the angels appear, the reader is taken on a journey that spans decades and changes the lives of multiple women along the way. Everything Affects Everyone,/em> is a novel about listening, about how women speak to one another, and about the power of the question.\nFrom the Back Cover\nDo you believe in angels? When Xaviere is tasked with transcribing taped interviews her deceased friend Daphne left to her in her will, she begins to piece together the story of the photographer Irene Guernsey, a moderately well known but elusive photographer Daphne was interviewing. Irene’s mysterious images captivate Xaviere as they had Daphne. Irene had never given interviews or talked about her work publicly, but near the end of her life, she reveals the magic hidden in plain sight in her mysterious and ethereal photographs and her attempt to capture angel wings on film. And once the angels appear, the reader is taken on a journey that spans decades and changes the lives of multiple women along the way. Everything Affects Everyone,/em> is a novel about listening, about how women speak to one another, and about the power of the question. Shawna Lemay?s writing makes the miraculous accessible and the mundane seem magical. I now know that angels walk among us. Some of them write among us too. Bella Heathcote (Pieces of Her, Relic)

Everything Affects Everyone

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Books by Lemay, Shawna