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Making Room: Forty Years of Room Magazine celebrates the history and evolution of Canadian literature and feminism with some of the most exciting and thought-provoking fiction, poetry, and essays the magazine has published since it was founded in 1975 as Room of One's Own. This collection includes poems about men not to be fallen in love with, trans womanhood, the morning-after pill, the "mind fuck" of being raped by a romantic partner, and a tribute to the women who were murdered in the Montréal Massacre. In one story, a group of sexual assault survivors meet weekly and come up with a unique way to help police capture their assailant, while in another a dinner party turns to witty talk of racism, sexism, pornography, and time travel. One author recounts how she learned multiple languages in order to connect with her father, another reluctantly walks down the aisle in order to stay in Canada with the man she loves. For forty years, Room has created a space for diverse voices. As Amber Dawn says in her opening essay, "There is Room. We do fit." Contributors include Carol Shields, Audrey Thomas, Marian Engel, M. NourbeSe Philip, Carmen Aguirre, Eden Robinson, Daphne Marlatt, Dorothy Livesay, Ayelet Tsabari, Ivan Coyote, Tracey Lindberg, Sina Queyras, Evelyn Lau, Jen Sookfong Lee, Gail Anderson-Dargatz, and more. With forewords by Eleanor Wachtel and Amber Dawn, interviews with four former Room editors, and an afterword by Room's current publisher and managing editor. "As you read this anthology, you will undoubtedly regard it as a timely collection of seventy-eight exceptional literary works. Please, also take a moment to marvel at how scarcity and shame have not claimed a single page, not a single line or word of this anthology. You, dear readers, and I, and the seventy-five remarkable contributors are both teaching and learning a new message, right now. Say it with me. There is Room. We do fit. " -- Excerpt from Amber Dawn's Overturning Scarcity: Forty Years of Abundant Change

Curious about the previous inhabitants of the lake community where her family has vacationed for over one hundred years, author Shelley O'Callaghan starts researching and writing about the area. But what begins as a personal journey of one woman's relationship to the land and her desire to uncover the history of her family's remote cabin, soon turns into an exploration and questioning of our rights as settlers upon a land that was inhabited long before we came.O'Callaghan's research discovers a depth to the history of the Valley that runs as deep as the 1000 metre lake. She discovers her grandfather's intriguing connection with the First Nation's chief whose ancestry goes back to the earliest recorded history at the lake, and her grandmother's attendance at a school where First Nations girls were taught servitude instead of knowledge.Through the summer of her research, she shares her discoveries with her six grandchildren as they set off on expeditions that make the past come alive. Together they find the headstone of an American scout with the 1858 International Boundary Commission Survey, a 1916 silver mine set up by Chief Sepass, and remnants of the original Indian Trail. They learn about trapper and prospector Charlie Lindeman, who introduced her grandfather to the lake in the early 1920s, and rescued her mother and grandmother from a fire that engulfed the lake in the 1930s.Together with her grandchildren they consider the impact of the legacy of white settlement in the area-what is received from the past and what is given to the future. And as they reflect on the essence of a "summer cabin," a place that brings family together and that nourishes the soul with its solitude and beauty, they gain a new perspective on the inevitable nature of change and privilege."Only someone with O'Callaghan's intimate attachment to 'the lake' could have written such an appealing history-cum-memoir of this out of the way corner of the province. A charming portrait of family life set against the historical changes that threaten the tranquility and isolation of so many unique wilderness retreats. Highly recommended." -- Daniel Francis, editorial director, Encyclopedia of British Columbia

Edited by Miriam Matejova, Wherever I Find Myself is a diverse collection of stories about the joys and struggles of immigrant women living in Canada. Often bringing with them the shadow of war and the guilt of leaving, the women in this new anthology expose their emotional pain but also their gratitude for being able to call Canada home. Their stories paint touching and charming portraits of cultural and linguistic misunderstandings, bureaucratic hurdles, attempts to navigate unfamiliar landscapes, and a desire to be accepted despite differences in accent, skin colour, or taste in food. Together they form a mosaic of emotions and world-views that underline the immigrant condition for women. A yellow dress with ruffles, a kind Grade 1 teacher with a surname that's difficult to spell, cockroaches in the bathroom, the contempt of strangers, and Whitney Houston on the radio-a Filipino woman recalls her experience as a six-year-old immigrant in a ghetto in Mississauga in the 80s. Browsing through a Polish fashion magazine at a European deli, a woman sees herself in an alternative universe of what her life might have been had she never immigrated to Canada. A same-sex couple moves from Minnesota to Ontario to find refuge for their love, but first they must drive a seventeen-foot truck through a blizzard and make it through the frustrating net of Canadian bureaucracy. In search of her origins, a Jewish woman travels to her birthplace in Passau, Germany. There, among rows of European picturesque houses and foreign tombstones of a Jewish cemetery, she finds no memories, only the shadow of Hitler and the ghosts of her parents. Through these stories of courage, aloneness, and hope, new and established writers reach out to both immigrants and those whose families long ago ceased to identify with the immigrant label. Through their struggles and, at times, endearingly critical looks at Canada, they remind us that many of our perceived divisions are nothing but artificial creations of mind and that all of us are past, current, or potential immigrants.

In 1945, Alfred Adams, a respected Haida elder and founding president of the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia (NBBC), was dying of cancer. After decades of fighting to increase the rights and recognition of First Nations people, he implored Maisie Hurley to help his people by telling others about their struggle. Hurley took his request to both heart and mind, and with $150 of her own money, started a small newspaper that would become a powerful catalyst for change: The Native Voice. At that time, the Welsh-born Hurley had been an advocate for First Nations clients in court. She did not have a law degree, but was graced with the courage and confidence to challenge all who stood in her way. When defending a First Nations woman accused of stealing a hotel clerk''s wallet, she seared the hapless plaintiff with such a withering cross examination that his off-colour rejoinder earned him a night in jail for contempt after he refused to pay the fine. After Hurley launched The Native Voice, it became the official newspaper of the NBBC, one of the largest democratic First Nations organizations in the country, but she continued to serve on the editorial board as publisher and director for many years without remuneration. At a time when telecommunication was expensive and often inaccessible in Aboriginal communities, The Native Voicereported relevant news and stories of everyday life to First Nations throughout the province, including hard-won rights such as the right to vote provincially (1949) and federally (1960). As the official publication of the NBBC, the VOICE chronicled both the realities of Aboriginal life and a vision for the future, enabling and inspiring overdue change in Canada. Maisie Hurley''s dedication to improving the lives of those she referred to as "my people" was honoured through several First Nations naming ceremonies by people of the Skeena, Squamish/North Vancouver and Comox areas. The story of the NBBC, The Native Voice and Maisie Hurley offer an inspiring testament to the power of cooperation and vision to create powerful change.

At the age of sixteen, Ernest Lamarque travelled from England to North America, to begin a life as a Victorian adventurer. Born in 1879 and orphaned at age twelve, he would go on to become an artist, a writer and a surveyor, creating some of the earliest visual records of the people of remote regions of Canada. At seventeen, Lamarque started working as a clerk at Hudson''s Bay Company posts in Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia and the Northwest Territories. He recorded his adventures through paintings, sketches and photographs, which would later become invaluable historical resources -- the artwork and photography he created during his three years at the Ile-a-la-Crosse district, for example, are among the earliest visual records of the Metis of the area. As one of British Columbia''s best-known surveyors, he located a route across northern BC during the Bedaux Expedition. He also travelled along and photographed the historic First Nations Davie Trail as part of his work on the location of the initial Alaska Highway. In 1914, Lamarque participated in the important D A Thomas coal transportation survey in northern Alberta that was halted by the start of World War I. This book reveals remote regions of western Canada and its people and places through the eyes of a self-taught man. Utilising unpublished artwork, photographs and written accounts, author Jay Sherwood tells the story of Lamarque''s varied, unusual and interesting life.

In 2008, a small-scale flour miller from British Columbia's Sunshine Coast created a hand-made bike mill to attract a dedicated farmers' market following. Chris Hergesheimer wanted to challenge the belief that there is only one way -- the big way -- to grow, process and market grain and flour. For Chris and his family, it was not about profit, but connecting a community to its food producers for better health, lower impact on the environment, and the kind of flapjacks only fresh-milled flour can make. But Chris Hergesheimer and his brother Josh could not have predicted that this unique contraption would take them on the journey of their lives. Committed to their cause, and believing in its value despite the dismal economic outlook, the Hergesheimer brothers follow their passion for local on a transcontinental journey. From the rainforests of Roberts Creek, BC, to the bustling streets of Kampala, Uganda, and finally onwards to the village of Panlang in the north-western corner of South Sudan, this is the story of two community-minded entrepreneurs as they set out to build and deliver their bicycle-powered grain mill to a rural women's cooperative in a tiny village. Chris and Josh come face to face with the realities of life in South Sudan when war breaks out and their microcapitalism mission becomes a race to leave the country before violence makes escape impossible. Part grain-chain analysis, part bare-all exposé, this is a unique and gripping story that explores the trends and issues of local food systems as well as the challenges and power of alternative food movements. For the Hergesheimer brothers, it is also a journey of surprising adventure, from broken-down market vans, fraudulent bus tickets and hungry bears to a Russian helicopter, an attempted coup and a heart-wrenching homecoming.

Sometimes tragic, sometimes uproariously funny, THIS PLACE A STRANGER is a diverse collection of Canadian women writing about their experiences of travelling alone. From the deceptiveness of the everyday to the extremes of geography, weather and violence, these stories go beyond the usual tales of intrepid male explorers and reveal the varied and unique circumstances in which women travellers find themselves when "going solo." For one woman, the allure of a multiday hike on a "congenial trail" becomes as shrouded as the soggy temperate rainforest she was so unprepared for. After thirty-seven years of marriage, another woman prepares for her return trip to Africa: vaccination boosters, nausea pills and lots and lots of condoms. A seventeen-hour journey by car through the Great Lakes region of Ontario leads another to dreamlike reflections on the travels of her Anishinaabe grandmothers and the ever-present "fear, worry" she experiences today. In another story, a woman poignantly searches for what many seek on solo journeys - inspiration, renewal, discovery - by returning to Paris only a few years after the painful dissolution of her marriage. But the grey February, a body in pain and the funeral of Mavis Gallant offer a different insight. With new work from both emerging and award-winning authors including Yvonne Blomer, Jane Eaton Hamilton, Waaseyaa'sin Christine Sy, Catherine Owen, Karen Lee and more, these stories explore the unexpected blessings and soul-searching that aloneness offers: clarity, liberation, danger, misery, adventure, devastation and joy.

Ethie Coulter was born after her father Howard returned from the war in 1945. She never knew him as he was before, never knew that he had been an open, loving man and a devoted husband. When his wife dies in bizarre circumstances, Howard must take on the burden of looking after eleven-year-old Ethie and her two older brothers. Why, Ethie wonders, is he so silent and withdrawn? Howard Coulter was one of two thousand Canadian soldiers sent to the Far East a month before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. Surviving the fierce battle for Hong Kong, he became a POW, moving from camp to notorious camp, watching his friends die of disease, starvation and worse. Yet Howard carries more than the physical and mental scars inflicted by his captors. Something happened in Hong Kong, a secret that he has carried for nearly two decades. Ethie, inquisitive and fearless, will be the one to work her way towards the truth and help her father come to terms with the past.

Art, children, marriage, breaking, rejoicing. Love is a many-branched tree and in Hamilton's newest poetry collection, her third, it's autumn or winter, the winds are kicking up and branches are flying everywhere - bursting into a thousand shapes. Or maybe it's Hamilton's heart that explodes into many dimensions. Tender, furious, grief-stricken, witty, urbane, elegiac, political, personal, erotic - these poems are all those things. Hamilton can't stop loving big no matter how chancy it is. All these shapes lend raw material for a poem: Mothers lose their babies. A boy loses his leg to war. A girl hides from serial killer Richard Speck. A virgin gets pregnant. A partner mourns a death at Walkerton. Women tumble into love, celebratory and foolhardy. Frank and elemental, LOVE WILL BURST INTO A THOUSAND SHAPES reminds us that life is worth everything we can throw at it. "LOVE WILL BURST INTO A THOUSAND SHAPES is jazzy and engaging. Hamilton proves herself to be a real wordsmith, with a trickster's soul and a heart as big as New Mexico. The poems are enlightening, risky, rough, funny as hell, and ultimately very moving." -- Barry Dempster

Julia Hoop, a twenty-five-year-old counselling psych student, is working on her thesis, exploring an idea which makes her graduate supervisor squirm. She is conducting interview after interview with a group of women she affectionately calls the Molestas - women whose experience of childhood sexual abuse did not cause physical trauma. Julia is the expert, she claims, because she has the experience; her own father, Dirtbag, a furniture designer and failed poet, disappeared when she was eight leaving behind nothing but his Dylan Thomas book, and a legacy of addiction and violence. But the more Julia learns, the less certain she is of what she believes. When both her boyfriend and her graduate advisor break up with her on the same day, Julia leaves her city of Vancouver on a bicycle for a cross-Canada trip in search of her father, or so she tells people. Julia will visit the three cities from which he's contacted her over the years: Banff, Alberta; Redvers, Saskatchewan; and Kingston, Ontario. Her unexpected travel partner is Smirks, a handsome athlete who also has a complicated history, and with whom Julia is falling in love. Their travel days are marked by peaks of ecstatic physical exertion, and their nights by frustrated drinking and drugs. After an unsettling incident in rural Saskatchewan involving a trio of aggressive children, Julia wakes up in the morning to discover Smirks has disappeared. Everything, once again, falls apart. Sometimes shocking in its candour, yet charmed with enigmatic characters, PEDAL is an exploration of the potholes and pitfalls of identity. It is a close look at how we are shaped by accidents of timing: trauma and sex, brain chemistry and the landscape of our country. PEDAL challenges beliefs we hold dear about the nature of pedophilia, the essence of innocence and the idea that the past is something one runs from.

A collection of essays which follow Christine Lowther's journey from the unutterable loss of her mother to the discovery of her own poetic voice through reflection and her intimate connection to the coastal rainforest. Lowther looks back on her mother's poetry and activism. She recalls the day the police arrested her father, and the indifferent beauty surrounding that life-changing moment.

In 2007, at the age of sixty, Betsy Warland finds herself single and without a sense of family. On an impulse, she decides to travel to London to celebrate her birthday, where she experiences an odd compulsion to see an exhibit on the invention of military camouflage. Within the first five minutes of her visit, her lifelong feeling of being aberrant reveals its source: she had never learned the art of camouflage. This marked the beginning of OSCAR OF BETWEEN: A MEMOIR OF IDENTITY AND IDEAS. Taking the name Oscar, she embarks on an intimate, nine-year quest by telling her story as "a person of between." As Oscar, she is able to make sense of her self and the culture that shaped her. She traces this experience of in-betweenness from her childhood in the rural Midwest, through to her first queer kiss in 1978, divorce, coming out, writing life. In 1984, she and her lover wrote lesbian erotic love poetry collections in dialogue with one another, the first and only tandem collections on this subject in English Canada. After the two split, she experienced years of unacknowledged exclusion from a community in which she thought she belonged. In the process of writing Oscar's story, Warland considers our culture's rigid, even violent demarcations as she becomes at ease with never knowing what gender she will be addressed as: "In Oscar's daily life, when encountering someone, it goes like this: some address her as a male; some address her as a female; some begin with one and then switch (sometimes apologetically) to the other; some identify Oscar as lesbian and their faces harden, or open into a momentary glance of arousal; some know they don't know and openly scrutinize; some decide female but stare perplexedly at her now-sans-breast chest; some are bemused by or drawn to or relate to her androgyny; and for some none of this matters." A contemporary ORLANDO, OSCAR OF BETWEEN extends beyond the author's personal narrative, pushing the boundaries of form, and by doing so, invents new ways to see ourselves.

In her first full collection of poetry, Jane Byers explores her personal experience with resilience, beginning with her own difficult birth, which she describes as inoculation against despair. As a young adult, the writer moves from complicity and its illusion of power to building a pliant self. Byers turns an unflinching eye to parenthood, as the mother of adopted twins, and examines the workplace through the eyes of a female safety specialist working alongside firefighters, transportation crews and heavy equipment purchasers. The author draws on the steeling effects of being queer to imbue her children and injured workers with suppleness. Steeling Effects asks whether what doesnt kill you makes you stronger and lives its way into the pliant beauty that gratitude affords.

Each spring, over 800 climbers attempt to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. The conditions are challenging, and without warning can become life-threatening. Some make it to the top of what is considered the worlds most majestic mountain, but others are not so lucky, and in the attempt to reach the elusive summit, many more have lost their lives. Not all are recovered, their bodies left to the mountain. In 2010, documentary filmmaker Dianne Whelan immersed herself in the world of base camp on Mt. Everest. In this personal and eye-opening expos, Whelan shares gripping stories of Maoist rebels, avalanches and dead bodies surfacing out of a dying glacier. Whelan interviews climbers, doctors and Sherpas all living for months on end in the belly of the mountain as they wait for a weather window to summit the top of the world. Woven into the personal stories of these climbers is the devastating truth of the human impact on the mountain and the eerie and unforeseen effects of climate change.