Rue Des Rosiers

Literature & Fiction

TREGEBOV, RHEA

Literary

Wolsak & Wynn

With his 19-year-old daughter, a collection of maps, and the help of an opinionated GPS, Peter Midgley sets out across Namibia. Visiting small-town museums and gravesites, crossing border checkpoints, and changing tires, they travel the length and breadth of the country uncovering every facet of it. Stories about Portuguese explorers and the first genocide of the 20th century collect on the back seat of their car alongside the author’s earliest childhood memories of growing up in the country. By the end of the journey, the stories piece together into an understanding of present-day Namibia and make it possible for Midgley to share his love for this complicated, vibrant place with his daughter.

Counting Teeth: A Namibian Story

Biographies & Memoirs

Midgley, Peter

Historical

Finalist: High Plain Book Award, Creative Nonfiction “This is not the story of a ready-made farm, complete with generations of history, carefully tended tools and sturdy clapboard farmhouse.” In 2006 Jenna Butler and her partner, Thomas, purchased “160 acres more or less” of rough northern bush. They knew they weren’t purchasing anything more than hard work and hope but still they headed up every weekend to clear a spot in those woods where they could plant their first crops. In this collection Butler talks of the hardships, humor and grace notes of trying to build a northern farm. From being driven out by mosquitoes to thwarting grasshoppers to sublime moments under a night sky, Jenna tells the story of how the farm has grown and changed over the years. While it has never quite become viable, it has pulled her always deeper into her love of the land. Jenna also talks about her reasons for starting a farm, poking fun at her own dyed-in-the-wool idealism. She explains her desire to protect and preserve the land, touching on the impact of climate change and of the wear and tear of trying to make a go of it as a small farmer. This is a beautifully written book, one that will leave readers wanting to start their own farm.

A Profession of Hope: Farming on the Edge of the Grizzly Trail

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Butler, Jenna

Gardening & Landscape Design

D. D. Miller is fascinated by roller derby. As the Derby Nerd he has been covering roller derby since 2009, travelling to games across Canada and the United States, including two world championships, reporting back to an ever-growing audience the details of the sport. In this entertaining and thorough book he explains roller derby to newcomers and charts the sport’s rise from small groups of women looking for people to skate with over the Internet to the world presence it is today. Along the way he considers roller derby’s roots in Riot Grrrl and DIY culture, and the importance of the LGBTQ community both inside and outside of the sport. This is a warm, thoughtful look at a sport that Miller understands intimately, which takes us beyond the costumes and showmanship, into the heart of what he feels may be the first truly feminist sport.

Eight-Wheeled Freedom: The Derby Nerd's Short History of Flat Track Roller Derby

Sports & Outdoors

MILLER D.D

Individual Sports

Shortlisted: 2018 RBC Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction How can you truly belong to a place? What does being at home mean in a society that has always celebrated the search for greener pastures? And can a newcomer ever acquire the deep understanding of the land that comes from being part of a culture that has lived there for centuries? When Daniel Coleman came to Hamilton to take a position at McMaster University, he began to ask himself these kinds of questions, and Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place is his answer. In this exploration of his garden – which Coleman deftly situates in the complicated history of Cootes Paradise, off of Hamilton Harbour – the author pays close attention to his small plot of land sheltered by the Niagara Escarpment. Coleman chronicles enchanting omnivorous deer, the secret life of water and the ongoing tension between human needs and the environment. These, along with his careful attention to the perspectives and history of the Six Nations, create a beguiling portrait of a beloved space.

Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place

Coleman, Daniel

Reference

In this warm and honest memoir, celebrated academic Njoki Wane shares her journey from her parents' small coffee farm in Kenya, where she helped her mother in the fields as a child, to her current work as a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Moving smoothly between time and place, Wane uses her past to illuminate her present. The childhood confusion caused by nuns at her boarding school dismissing her proper name and demanding she give them a Christian first name she did not possess, which resulted in many unexpected consequences, leads deftly to her requirement as a professor that her students, and all her colleagues, learn to use and correctly pronounce her first name of Njoki. In similar ways, Wane uses other memories, painful and tender, to show how her early lessons and the support given by her family allowed her to succeed as a woman of colour in the academy and to later lift up her students facing their own difficult journeys. Yet Wane does not gloss over her own growing pains as a young woman, and as an established professor she still questions whether or not her attachment to Western conveniences is wise. For, in the end, Wane never forgets that her story started with the feeling of safety and the clear field of view she received as a child carried on her mother's back.

From My Mother's Back: A Journey from Kenya to Canada

Wane Ph.D., Njoki

Community & Culture

In this searing and seriously funny memoir Dorothy Ellen Palmer falls down, a lot, and spends a lifetime learning to appreciate it. Born with congenital anomalies in both feet, then called birth defects, she was adopted as a toddler by a wounded 1950s family who had no idea how to handle the tangled complexities of adoption and disability. From repeated childhood surgeries to an activist awakening at university to decades as a feminist teacher, mom, improv coach and unionist, she tried to hide being different. But now, in this book, she's standing proud with her walker and sharing her journey. With savvy comic timing that spares no one, not even herself, Palmer takes on Tiny Tim, shoe shopping, adult diapers, childhood sexual abuse, finding her birth parents, ableism and ageism. In Falling for Myself, she reckons with her past and with everyone's future, and allows herself to fall and get up and fall again, knees bloody, but determined to seek Disability Justice, to insist we all be seen, heard, included and valued for who we are.

Falling for Myself: A Memoir

Palmer, Dorothy Ellen

Arts & Literature

I hope you're okay in there, lovelies. I hope you're warm. After five years of working with bees on her farm in northern Alberta, Jenna Butler shares with the reader the rich experience of keeping hives. Starting with a rare bright day in late November as the bees are settling in for winter she takes us through a year in beekeeping on her small piece of the boreal forest. Weaving together her personal story with the practical aspects of running a farm she takes us into the worlds of honeybees and wild bees. She considers the twinned development of the canola and honey industries in Alberta and the impact of crop sprays, debates the impact of introduced flowers versus native flowers, the effect of colony collapse disorder and the protection of natural environments for wild bees. But this is also the story of women and bees and how beekeeping became Jenna Butler's personal survival story.

Revery: A Year of Bees

Professionals & Academics

Exploring the landscapes of death and grief, this collection takes the reader through a series of essays, drawn together from twenty-four Canadian writers that reach across different ages, ethnicities and gender identities as they share their thoughts, struggles and journeys relating to death. Be it the meditation on the loss of a beloved dog who once solaced a departed parent, the tragic suicide of a stranger or the deep pain of losing a brother, Locations of Grief is defined by its range of essays exploring all the facets of mourning, and how the places in our lives can be irreversibly changed by the lingering presence of death.

Locations of Grief: An Emotional Geography

Graham, Catherine

Parenting & Relationships

Award-winning author Armand Garnet Ruffo's compelling collection is being re-released with a new introduction by the author, which delves into his family's personal connection with Archie Belaney and into the questions of voice and appropriation that swirl around Grey Owlat a time when these discussions have never been more important. In a fascinating mixture of poetry, fiction, letter, and news report, Ruffo recreates the life of a man who recreated himself entirely and sold that story to the world. In the original back cover copy author Thomson Highway stated that "Armand Ruffo is definitely a writer with a future, a writer to be watched." Highway's observation has been borne out and now, twenty-five years after this collection was first released, a revised edition will return to bookstores.

Grey Owl: The Mystery of Archie Belaney

Ruffo, Armand Garnet

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Books by Wolsak & Wynn