Atlantic Books

Atlantic Books

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The act of writing can help one sooth anxieties and sort out problems. Often, the writer finds themself communicating in surprising ways.  

An Extra Dash of Love: Letters Celebrating Down Syndrome is a beautiful collection of letters, written by those who care for someone who has Down Syndrome. There is more real, raw emotion in these pages than most over-workshopped, MFA-doused poetry and fiction collections being published these days.  

The subtitle is on the mark: this is a celebration of human beings who share a similar way of life, but who are loved unconditionally. Here’s an example from a mother in Shediac Bridge, New Brunswick. 

What I love about my son Finn: 

♥ His openness and sweet, loving nature. 

♥ How he studies the wheels under his toy car as it moves. 

♥ How he brings me little pieces of paper/stickers that he finds to put in the garbage. 

♥ How he brings Lily her boots and coat when it’s time to go. He likes to keep her on task. 

♥ How he loves to help out with laundry by sorting the clothes or putting them into washer or dryer. 

♥ The positive impact he has on Lily; I like to think that she will grow up with more compassion and kindness towards others. 

♥ His easy, contagious laughter. 

♥ His coyness. 

♥ His smile. 

♥ The way he greets a loved one after a short absence: he comes running with arms outstretched, exclaiming loudly like you are the most important person in the world. 

♥ His determination. 

♥ The tenderness he has towards his sister. 

♥ How at 8 months old, he had open heart surgery and recovered like a champ. 

♥ The pride I feel at his successes. 

♥ Witnessing the joy he brings to others. 

♥ That he made me a mother. That I am his mother. I still worry about how the world will accept him when he gets older and he isn’t as cute (did I mention that he is adorable?), but he is surrounded by a family and community that loves and supports him. Finn has already made the world around him a little kinder, maybe that’s the most important step. 

Tammy, mother of Finn—Shediac Bridge, NB 

An Extra Dash of Love is a tender rendering of local folks’ emotional bravery and compassion for those in their lives who are deserving of each and every dash of this type of affection.  

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Doing Time explores the role of poetry and therapy in the most unlikely of places. After moving to a rural community near Hubbards, 45 minutes from the Central Nova Scotia Correctional Facility, Governor General’s Award nominated poet Carole Glasser Langille wrote to the John Howard Society, outlining a writing workshop she proposed to give. She explained the idea behind the workshop for prisoners, suggesting that “writing clarifies thoughts, and when thinking is clearer, actions become more comprehensible.”  

Inspired by Wallace Stevens, who said that the role of a poet is “to help people live their lives,” Langille wanted to bring a new form of rehabilitation to individuals who may not otherwise choose poetry as a therapeutic tool. The head of programming at the prison was looking for something fresh, and so, within a couple of weeks, Langille was volunteering on a weekly basis, encouraged by her vision, and inspired by the new relationships she made with the incarcerated.  

“Each week, when I walked down those windowless halls, the iron doors clanging behind me, I felt again and again that the pain and longing in that crowded building created a spiritual intensity that made this a holy place, a dwelling whose inhabitants must be appreciated and treated with care. I had the privilege of hearing many of their stories. I wanted to honour them for their trust.” 

What is unique about this book is how it’s set up: we go along with Langille each week, and as the poems develop, we see their progress almost in real time. There’s honesty here that is refreshing. We are privy to the workshop, the voices, the sharing, the intensity and unexpected lines as they were first written down in the workshop, and spoken in the workshop.  

Much like a public reading, where a new work is shared, we for the first time ever get to read the poem as it was first composed. 

Doing Time does not reflect the typical idea many have of prisoners, thanks to gruesome headlines and the ever-sensational depiction of prison in documentaries and Hollywood. Consider what state of mind the inmates were in before learning to ply their mental trade on something they perhaps never considered before—poetry.  

Sorting out line breaks and mixed metaphors isn’t going to rehabilitate every prisoner, workshops such as these can give those who accept it another mode of expression they would have otherwise never considered.  

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We live in a world of our own imaginations. At one time, fairytales warned of mean giants who lived in caves and valleys who would eat small children alive. While giants do not exist in the real world, large corporations that can devour our time and money in a matter of seconds do.  

In Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley, Rob Larson, professor of economics at Tacoma Community College, and the author of Bleakanomics, outlines the origin story of the Big Five of Silicon Valley: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon. He provides enough research material and condemning evidence that you’d think he was preparing for a Supreme Court showdown.  

The average reader may take for granted the domineering ways these giants lord over us as social consumers. Larson gives plenty of reason to open up one’s mind. He offers insight into our own willingness to mingle comfortably online, despite Big Tech’s global reputation for its hoarding of its users’ personal data.  

Google is the biggest villain in the plotline. This ubiquitous search engine is a monster who has “vacuumed up user data from the start.” In 2004, when Gmail was released, consumers were shocked to learn their emails were being scanned so Google could custom brand advertising based on keywords and search history.  

Larson notes that Google created only one product beyond its search engine: an email platform. Everything else, like YouTube, they acquired.  

Bit Tyrant reads like a binge-worthy docu-series on Netflix or Prime, moving through our tech history from our 8bit days, in Reagan’s bleak America of the early 1980s, to our oversharing present, with web-monster ghouls like Donald Trump demonstrating how not to use social media. Larson sets the stage for Apple Computer’s plan for world dominance in its Super Bowl 1984 ad campaign, which “became famous, both for its then-innovative art design and its tagline ‘You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984’ referencing of course, George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.” 

Larson pulls no punches in revisiting the embryonic dark days at Apple, including the February 28th, 1981 firing of 41 of the company’s 1,500 employees, when Steve Jobs told his staff, “You guys really fucked up,” after sales of the Lisa fell well below expectations. “Much as with Bill Gates, Jobs became notorious for preserving the very worst of hierarchical capitalist tyranny into the information age.”  

This is one long water cooler chat about the history of everything that damns and inspires us about the high-tech, mass-culture world we all share, use, buy into and drown in. 

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“Nothing is so boundless as the sea, nothing so patient. It is not true that the sea is faithless, for it has never promised anything; without claim, without obligation, free, pure, and genuine beats the mighty heart, the last sound one in an ailing world. Many understand it scarce at all, but never two understand it in the same manner, for the sea has a distinct word for each one that sets himself face to face with it.” (Alexander Kielland, 1880. Garman and Worse) 

With these sentences, one of the great writers to emerge from Norway in the nineteenth century captured an essence of the ocean in a way that few have done since. No two individuals understand or experience the sea in the same manner because the sea speaks to each of us differently. No wave, no individual, is the same. 

But to better appreciate Kielland’s perspective, perhaps one needs to slip beneath the surface of the common veneers of oceanic experience (sailors sail, fishers fish, divers dive) and explore its depths. In The Imperilled Ocean, Laura Trethewey’s seven vignettes invite us to do just that. 

The topics vary. Some readers will be attracted to the opening story about an aquatic cinematographer, the machinations required to film a model for a music video, and informed thoughts on the future of underwater filming. Others might be engrossed by the trials and tribulations (and the omnipresent unpredictability of marine weather) experienced by a Canadian couple hoping to sail the South Pacific.  

Those interested in species at risk can follow a fishery biologist on the Fraser River in his attempts to learn more about the endangered, seaward-migrating white sturgeon, the largest fish in Canada. The story about an admirably determined effort to clear plastics from ocean beaches includes a truly ingenious initiative to recycle this debris into oil. 

Trethewey’s book is entitled The Imperilled Ocean. Yet, one is struck by the realization that many of the stories deal not with ocean imperilment, but the imperilment of humans. 

Harrowing, life-threatening migrant crossings of the Mediterranean. The tragedy of a young life cut short, against a background of wealth inequality, corporate indifference, and a cruise ship. Day-to-day uncertainties for individuals threatened with eviction from a patch of ocean they call home in British Columbia. 

The Imperilled Ocean serves to inform, engage, and enrich our knowledge of human experiences with the ocean. In doing so, it lends credence to Kielland’s assertion that “it is not true that the sea is faithless, for it has never promised anything”. Rather, the faithlessness would appear to lie in us. 

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“What are you grateful for?” 

That’s the question Nova Scotia author Janice Landry poses to 17 different people—herself included—in Silver Linings: Stories of Gratitude, Resiliency and Growth Through Adversity. 

This unique project marks the award-winning writer’s fifth book. Like her past works, it is deeply personal, for the author and her subjects. 

Landry’s journalistic talent for putting people at ease is evident. Every chapter is laid out in a captivating combination of interviewee biography, her own perspective of the interview, and transcript of those candid conversations. She spoke with fifteen Canadians and two Americans, many whom have overcome hard-to-fathom adversity with grace and the very gratitude that is Landry’s focus.  

Take, for instance, fellow Nova Scotians Paula Simon and Robert Chisolm, who lost their son at eight months old, but speak of the gift of loss. Or the book’s prologue writer, Saskatchewan native Alvin Law, a professional speaker who is most grateful for “being born without arms, because it sent my life on the course I have taken with pride and honour.”  

There’s also paramedic Stefanie Davis Miller of Paris, Ontario, who was diagnosed with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—she prefers the stigma-reducing term PTSI, or Post-Traumatic Stress Injury. She suffered multiple unrelated traumas. Her wrenching stories of emotional survival accompany many others from first responders, who are near and dear to the author’s heart.  

Opening up about your personal traumas and darkest times is no easy task, especially knowing they will be printed for public consumption. One of Landry’s gifts is sharing these often-troubling yet relatable stories with a real sense of compassion and empathy. 

Landry herself lost her firefighter father Baz Landry in 2006. She shares his story in The Sixty Second Story: When Lives are on the Line. She also lost her dear friend Audrey Parker, who chose to leave on her own terms November 1, 2018, through Canada’s MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) program, after her breast cancer spread aggressively. Most recently, Landry suddenly lost her mother, Theresa, while working on Silver Linings.  

“It took me more than a year, and until after my mother died, to figure out my answer to this question,” Landry writes. “I am most grateful that my father, Capt. Basil (Baz) Landry, M.B., of the Halifax Fire Department did not die in the 1978 house fire from which he and his colleagues recued an eight-week-old infant. Our collective ability to cope, as a family, would have been severely diminished.” 

Like her interview subjects, and like us, Landry has her own stories of resiliency through hardship. She doesn’t hesitate to follow the openness of the people she profiles by pouring her own heart out on the page. 

Dr. Robert Emmons, a California-based gratitude expert, perhaps answers her question most succinctly, in a way that seems to sum up the overall sentiment of Silver Linings. His source of gratitude?  

“I’d have to say it’s the ability to love and be loved,” he says. “I think that would take precedence.” 

For Landry, who dedicates this book to her friend Audrey and mother Theresa, Silver Linings is clearly a labour of love. 

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The case of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks is a defining issue of the age. It is a nexus of several topics currently dominating the discourse. The Iraq War, post-9/11 US foreign policy, the Arab Spring, the election of Donald Trump, freedom of speech and the #MeToo movement all coalesce into this globe-spanning affair.  

The persecution of the Australian publisher and activist, and the events surrounding it, are explored in the new book In Defense of Julian Assange. Edited by political activist Tariq Ali and civil rights attorney Margaret Kunstler, this collection of essays, articles and excerpts aims to expose the vilification of Assange as character assassination, perpetrated by the United States Government and fuelled by mass media. Defense also strives to dismantle the charges against him and raise awareness as to how these attacks pose serious threats to press freedoms everywhere.  

Those new to the trials of Assange and those familiar only with the popular damning narrative can both take something from this collection. The book’s introduction expertly establishes the story so far, from the birth of WikiLeaks, its mass releases of classified war logs and cables, through to Assange’s asylum claim in the Ecuadorian embassy, his 2019 arrest by British authorities and his current incarceration in Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh. 

In Defense of Julian Assange is painstakingly curated. Each contribution adds a new facet defending Assange as an unjustly persecuted journalist, while further dispelling the narrative propagated by world leaders and media figures painting him as a lecherous, narcissistic cyber-terrorist.  

The list of contributors is an all-star roster of anti-authoritarian iconoclasts, such as Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges and Slavoj Žiֲžek. Assange’s own writings and interviews are transcribed, and journalists like Stefania Maurizi, who published WikiLeaks revelations with the Italian magazine L’espresso, are also featured.   

One piece that stands out is a Guardian op-ed by Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of the UK organization Women Against Rape (WAR). The article, “We are Women Against Rape but we do not want Julian Assange extradited,” highlights the organization’s belief that the Swedish authorities’ fervent pursuit of Assange for sexual assault allegations in 2010 had little to do with the state seeking justice for Assange’s accusers, and far more to do with the goal of eventually extraditing him from Sweden to the US.  

The book also functions as a field manual on how to counter accusations commonly directed at Assange. This is accomplished through a series of chapters by Caitlin Johnstone entitled “Responding to Assange’s Critics.” 

Apart from serving as an antidote to what the editors say is a smear campaign against Assange, this collection also illustrates the broader danger the Assange case poses to journalistic freedoms. In Matt Taibbi’s piece “Julian Assange Must Never Be Extradited,” the American journalist lays bare the United States Government’s exploitation of the Espionage Act of 1917, and how it could apply to any journalist who dares expose state-perpetrated abuses of power.  

Perhaps the most powerful assertion from In Defense of Julian Assange is in its introduction: 

“There is no evidence that WikiLeaks’ releases have caused the death or persecution of a single individual—globally.” 

If true, then there is more blood on the hands of those exposed by WikiLeaks than on those of Assange, and readers must ask if the vilification of Assange is merited, or if its perpetrators are engaging in a witch hunt, attempting to stamp out dissent. In Defense of Julian Assange boldly argues the latter.  

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On writing More Ghost Stories of Nova Scotia…

“It is possible that all of us have the gift of intuition, but only a few are able to tap into it.

There’s a lot of ground to cover when with the supernatural, but I would say that stories of forerunners, or premonitions, are my absolute favourite. Forerunners leave such an emotional mark on one’s heart and mind that the experience stays with you for a long time. The thing about a forerunner, too, is that they can appear to anyone at any time and in any place.

Living in Nova Scotia you’ve probably heard tales of haunted houses, ghost stories, reports of forerunners, and legends of ghost ships that appear and then disappear as quickly as they came. Tales of the unexplained and the unexplainable are common among the residents of this province and such stories have become the stuff of local legend. 

Call it a gut feeling. Call it a sixth sense. Or call it intuition, but there is that knowing of something with a certainty, even though you can’t explain how you know it.”

– Vernon Oickle 

Excerpt:

Shortly after Jimmy’s 26th birthday, he was preparing for a fishing trip that his captain estimated would last four or five days. Including the captain, there were four crewmembers on board and Jimmy was looking forward to this trip because he was saving money for a down payment on a house that he had been eyeing and he estimated that these earnings would give him enough to finally make the purchase. But while he was looking forward to the trip, his mother was dreading it.

In the days leading up to her son’s departure, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was terribly wrong. She couldn’t quite explain it, but she felt there was a dark cloud hanging over her family and she feared something terrible was about to happen. Because her husband had retired and neither of her older sons was scheduled to go out in the near future, she couldn’t shake the feeling that whatever was about to happen must involve Jimmy.

Fearing the worst, she tried for days to convince Jimmy to skip this trip, telling him that he didn’t need the money and offering to pay whatever difference he needed for his down payment on the house. But Jimmy wasn’t having any of that and as he packed his gear, he dismissed his mother’s fears as nothing more than the ramblings of a superstitious old woman.

On the morning of his departure, he kissed his mother goodbye as he always did, and told her he would see her in four or maybe five days. As he left through the kitchen, he paused at the back door and turned back to tell her not to worry. He insisted he would be okay.

But Helen was not so sure, and as she watched her youngest son walk down the back steps and disappear down the back walkway on his way to the wharf, she felt a deep gnawing in the pit of her stomach.

As the next two days crept by, the dark cloud followed Helen wherever she went. She could not shake the oppressive feeling that tragedy was near. She prayed that her son and his fellow crewmembers were okay and that they would make it safely back to port.

On the night of the second day of Jimmy’s trip, Helen was having an especially difficult time sleeping. Tossing and turning, she remembers glancing at the digital clock on the night table next to her bed. In glowing red numbers, the clock said it was 12:15 a.m.

Just then, she felt a strong urge to turn around and when she did, she was surprised to see Jimmy standing in the doorway. He said to her, “Don’t worry, Mom. Everything is okay. You can go to sleep now.”

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When reading Beyond the Trees, one gets the impression of author Adam Shoalts as a kind of Jack Kerouac meets Jack Reacher: an obsessive wanderer at his calmest in the midst of catastrophe.

Beginning in Eagle Plains, Yukon, on May 28, 2017, Shoalts, now Explorer-in Residence with the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, spent nearly four months paddling and portaging through some of the most remote and challenging conditions imaginable, enduring run-ins with grizzly bears, chest-deep traverses in swollen Arctic rivers, and clouds of blackflies thick enough to draw blood from a stone.

I suppose it was a mad idea,” the Fenwick, Ontario-raised Shoalts writes of his near 4,000-kilometre solo trek across Canada’s Arctic, the inspiration for Beyond the Trees. Shoalts had set his sights on Baker Lake, Nunavut, a hamlet of 2,000 some three-hundred-twenty kilometres inland from the Hudson Bay. To get there, he would need to travel for miles against the current, beginning with the longest river in Canada: the mighty Mackenzie.

“At the time, I really wasn’t sure if I could pull it off,” he admitted to Atlantic Books Today. There were August snowstorms, ice floes and winds that bent tent poles like drinking straws.

It’s mesmerizing to be guided through Canada’s wilderness through Shoalts’ eyes. Behold, a mind that can identify spruce trees and sandpipers, muskox and mergansers. From Shoalts, one learns that sphagnum moss, with its naturally-occurring iodine, can be used for treating cuts; that caribou lichen can be boiled and eaten as emergency rations.

Shoalts also wields a wicked wit—important for any guide. Of a run-in with an overly-aggressive muskox, he jokes his first instinct was to shield his body with a life jacket: “Of course, the rational side of my brain was immediately dismissing this as nonsense.” In choosing to drink straight from lakes and rivers, he mentions that if he were to fall sick with giardia, his journey might end quite badly, “though perhaps well for medical science.”

But for all of Shoalts’ good humour and incredible wealth of knowledge, the question still remains: why do this trek alone? Why do it at all?

“I wanted to see the wilderness while it still exists,” he explained Atlantic Books Today. Still, one wishes he would offer more introspection.

At times throughout the book, Shoalts admits to feeling lonely, though he seldom lingers on the thought for longer than a paddle stroke. Even when he confesses to feeling demoralized—rare though the occasions may be—he tends to skate over the emotion, as if it were an inconvenience to the story and not part of the story itself. (Here, the Jack Reacher comparison returns.)

Beyond the Treesis a remarkable tale—and a staggering feat, no doubt. But it is largely a tale about adventure, and not the adventurer himself. Instead, it seems Shoalts counts upon his exploits to carry the book, where another author might dig within for meaning. (What is Wild without Cheryl Strayed’s confessions?)

Perhaps that is to be expected of a geographer and historian: stories about others come more easily. But one wishes for Shoalts’ full story—blemishes and all.

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Johnny Reid was a PEI legend. At the age of twelve, Johnny bought a deep fryer, 200 pounds of potatoes, and installed a telephone in the shed in his parents’ backyard. His best customers telephoned in their orders for hot French fries from the numerous bootleggers in Charlottetown’s east end. A boy on a bicycle delivered the hot fries. Johnny eventually parlayed that enterprise into Johnny’s Fish and Chips restaurant next to the train station, which morphed into Davy Jones Locker and the Prince Edward Lounge, later renamed JR’s Bar, where he showcased PEI and Canadian talent such as Anne Murray, Gene MacLellan, John Allan Cameron, and his new pal, Stompin’ Tom Connors.

He was one of the best draws I ever had. The place would be packed. They were lined up for a block every night of the week. That was his first show on the Island, and that’s when he met his wife Lena, at my place. She was working for me. He said to me, ”Who’s that girl?” I said, “She works here and her name is Lena, and don’t you try and steal her.” So they became friends and started going out, and on his next trip, she said, “I want to give you my notice. I’m going away.” Tom said, “We’re getting married. I want you to stand for me?” I said, “Jeez, Tom, I can’t stand for you. I’ll be at the wedding, but you can get anybody to stand for you.” I knew it was going to be on TV. Tom said, “If you don’t stand for me, I’ll never set foot inside your place again.” “Well since you put it that way,” I said, “I’ve not got much choice, do I?”

So, I stood for him, and, Pauline, who worked for me, was matron of honour and my wife Judy was bridesmaid at the Four Seasons Hotel up there in Toronto on the TV. So, here it was, Mutt and Jeff, great big tall Stompin’ Tom and short fat Johnny Reid.

1973: Johnny Reid with wedding Stomping Tom and Lena.

Elwood Glover’s Luncheon Date ran on CBC television in the 1960s and ’70s, and, in 1973, hosted Stompin’ Tom and Lena’s memorable wedding, with best man Johnny Reid. Tom’s and Johnny’s friendship began years earlier when they shared a cell in the 1911 Queens County jail, and both immediately recognized a fellow rebel and soulmate.

Ironically years later, Johnny bid and won the contract to feed the jail’s inmates. One of the prisoners wrote a letter to the paper criticizing the menu: he was tired of getting lobster three times a week. When I asked Johnny, he insisted it was steak, but his wife Judy confirmed the prisoner’s story. Either way it was a bizarre protest.

During the Second World War, Johnny worked in an aircraft factory in Amherst, NS. Back on PEI, the Royal Air Force (RAF) landed on PEI in 1940, and set up a training base where the present Charlottetown airport is. Islanders fell in love with these rather exotic airmen with their English and Scottish and Welsh accents.

Helen Cudmore’s family ran a large general store in Oyster Bed Bridge and Helen kept a diary of events both mundane and unusual.

In 1942, my sister Verna had a boyfriend named Ted Farrell from England, and he used to walk from the Charlottetown airport out here to Oyster Bed to visit her [twenty-one kilometres/thirteen miles]. Dad would drive him back as far down as the Milton Road, and he’d walk the rest of the way back to the airbase [thirteen kilometres/eight miles].

Would you see many RAF airmen out this way?

Quite a few, yes.

What brought them out here?

Girls. Nice-looking girls in this area. Here’s another entry: June 21st, 1955. Two neighbours married, Moses and Marjorie. And the groom passed away that same day. Died the same day he was married. They lived just up the hill here. Certainly, was a shock to everyone.

Helen, her mother, and her sisters all kept diaries. Thanks to Helen’s diary, I learned that in 1930 it cost $2 a day to stay in the hospital—the old Infirmary on Kensington Road—$5 for an operation, and a dollar a day for your hospital meals. The first two were deals, but $1 for hospital food? Better food at the 1911 jail.

On 25 July 1958, arguably the most influential American musician ever—not that he’d ever blow his own horn—jazz great Louis Armstrong played a show in Charlottetown. Twenty years earlier, he was paid $5,000 to appear opposite Ronald Regan in the movie Going Places singing the song “Jeepers Creepers” to a race horse with the same name. Even singing to a horse, Satchmo stole the show.

I can’t say for a fact, but I’d bet MacKenzie Dixon played the fiddle to his horses at one time or another. Mac was born in 1926 in South Melville where his family ran a flour and grist mill. Mac loved horses, and raised champion Clydesdales, but he bought an unusual used car to court what turned out to be the number one love in his life: his future wife Erma Ings.

The first car that I bought was a 1937 Terraplane. They were built by the Hudson Motor Company. The day we were married, a neighbour of ours was going to stand for me, my best man, and we were heading for the church in Millview—that’s where Erma came from—and down in Churchill Hollow, the front axle broke. We went right over the bank, and it was steep enough. Of course, we had no seatbelts in those days, and my head went down and I struck my nose and started bleeding all over my white shirt and tie. And believe it or not, the first car that came along was the RCMP, and I got in with them. That was a good start wasn’t it?

What happened to the car?

That was the end of that one. It served its purpose, it got me that far and that was it.

The Churchill and Strathgartney hills have claimed many cars over the decades. Model-Ts often had to back up the hill because of their gravity-fed carburetor. Johnny MacGillivray and his father before him had a blacksmith shop across from the church, and every spring, he and his team of horses would pull countless cars out of the mud. He said there was a bit of irony there.

One day, a car from Ontario coming off the Borden ferry ran into the back of Johnny’s car. The Ontario driver complained to the RCMP that Johnny hadn’t signalled a left turn, and this the Trans Canada Highway. Johnny protested, “Why would I signal? Everyone knows I live here.”

Mac Dixon, holding a photo of his mum, Edna Smith Dixon, in front of her piano.

Mac Dixon’s mother was Edna Smith Dixon, one of the multitalented Smith sisters, who grew up playing music and helping her parents run the Pleasant View Hotel in Hampton. The Pleasant View was a rambling, three-storey hotel where Upper Canadians and New Englanders came by rail, steamboat, and finally horse and coach to spend the summer months, basking on the beaches, enjoying the salt air, cool nights, and three meals a day—plus snacks—of the celebrated Smith home cooking.

When Edna was two years old, she fell from a third-storey window and landed on her back in front of the horrified guests. Not a scratch. As well as doing the high-diving act for people who had paid their two bits, Edna was a great cook. After she married Johnny Dixon, who was by that time running the mills, she’d probably fed half the countryside. She sometimes cooked for fourteen different people a day: farmers waiting for Johnny to mill their wheat and oats. As Mac said:

We’d feed their horses, and them, too. That was all free gratis. When my grandfather John Dixon was running the mill, this day, Matthew Smith, who ran the Pleasant View Hotel, [came] with a grist of wheat to get ground. His little daughter was with him, just came for the trip to the mill, you see. And John Dixon’s son Johnny Dixon was there, and he was two or three [years] older than this little girl, Edna Smith, and he came in to the mill and he thought she was going to be bored, sitting there, so he asked if she’d like him to show her around the farm. So, this was great.

And after she went home to the Pleasant View, her mother asked her how was her trip to the mill. “Oh,” she said, “it was a great trip, and this nice little boy Johnny Dixon took me by the hand and showed me all around the farm, the sheep, the lambs, everything.” Fifteen or sixteen years later, they were married. And became my parents. So that’s got to be my favourite story, wouldn’t you think, Dutch?

Edna and Johnny played concerts at the Hampton Hall, piano and violin. Mac was also a fiddle player, and once I managed to get Mac and two other millers together. Turned out, all three were fiddle players, and spent three hours talking about old fiddle tunes instead of grinding wheat. So instead of Red Fife it was “Red Wing.”

Muriel Boulter MacKay

From Dixon’s Mills to Saskatchewan, the land of wheat, via Albany, PEI, where Muriel Boulter MacKay was born in 1895. In 1918, after surviving the Halifax Explosion a year earlier, Muriel went west on the harvest excursion train to teach school in Saskatchewan. That’s where she met and married George MacKay, a farmer originally from PEI.

January 1918 in Saskatoon, Knox Presbyterian Church, and the Reverend Wylie Clark. I remember it all quite well. It was thirty below. There was no wind but the air was full of frost. He was from this area, right up opposite the school. I knew him for six years before I married him.

[He courted me with] horse and wagon. He had a lovely horse, a prize horse, it would beat any horse on the road.

Was that one of the reasons you were attracted to him?

Oh, I don’t know. I know my parents weren’t attracted to him because he was a farmer and Mother said, “Don’t marry a farmer. Marry somebody else, don’t marry a farmer. Too much work and too little money.”

It turned out to be a very successful marriage. When George was PEI’s Lieutenant-Governor, they hosted Queen Elizabeth at Fanningbank, and Prince Philip was very curious about Island farming methods and crops. And who better to ask…

Gladys Bryan

 

I was at my grandmother’s and Heber’s father had bought a house in Alberton, and they were shingling and Heber came up to help his father. I was over looking up at the men shingling the roof someone said, “Which one of those Bryan boys do you like?” “Oh,” I said, “I think I’d like the little one.” So anyway, he must have heard me. He came down the ladder and when he was leaving, he came over to say hello. He said, “Could I come back and take you for a drive tonight?” Sure enough, he showed up. I was only sixteen then.

They courted and sparked for two years, and when Gladys turned eighteen, Heber popped the big question in a typically male roundabout way.

Guess where he proposed to me? Underneath an apple tree. We were visiting friends in Elmsdale, they invited us for supper, and while they were washing the dishes, we went out into the orchard, and were sitting under the apple trees, and Heber said, “Gladys,” he said, “would you like a job for the rest of your life?” I said, “What do you mean?” “Well, we could get married.”

What was your job going to be? Looking after him for the rest of your life?

Yeah. So anyway, I said yes, and so we were married about a month after. My gosh, what a time that was.

This is where Muriel MacKay’s mother’s advice about not marrying a farmer might make sense.

We never got a honeymoon. They were picking potatoes at the Bryan farm when we got married. They had the great big party there that night. Oh, we danced all night. Then in the morning, they had the potato pickers coming. I spent my first married day cooking for potato pickers, at eighteen years old. Now, just imagine, eh?

14 October 1936. And the future didn’t look much brighter for Gladys and Heber when they took possession of their own fifty-acre farm down the road.

Honest to heaven, a grasshopper would starve to death jumping across that farm.

The other side of marrying a farmer is, of course, the farmer’s extraordinary optimism. Every time they plant a seed, a farmer takes a chance, hoping for rain and sun—and very few grasshoppers—to harvest a crop four or five months down the road. Gladys was as optimistic as Heber, a perfect match. For years, to make ends meet, they took turns delivering the mail, first by horse and wagon, then in an old Model-A car Gladys hand-painted. They contributed to the school and their church, and became valued neighbours. Over the years, the Bryans added hundreds of acres to the original fifty and built their farm up into a hugely successful operation. That and their good name is their legacy.

Bygone Days Folklore, Traditions & Fingernails
Reginald “Dutch” Thompson
Nimbus Publishing

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When you have a bestselling book (2013’s You Might Be From Nova Scotia If …), there is a temptation to write a sequel right away. I didn’t. I thought I said everything in the first book.

But as I travelled the province for the next few years, I kept seeing things I missed. The stuff that makes us unique surrounds us every day.

Whether I was in Bridgewater or Lunenburg in the summer, or taking my kids to soccer or ringette in Berwick or Cape Breton, visiting family in New Glasgow or Kentville, I kept getting inspired by things I saw or people I met. I slowly started accumulating another book.

Like the first book, this book is less about places and more about people, the people of Nova Scotia.

I didn’t want to fall back on stereotypes. Writing a book of stereotypes is easy. Capturing the common experiences of a diverse population is hard. We are not a province just of fishermen and longshoremen anymore, despite what our tourism advertisements might portray. We are a modern society with modern problems that still has a close connection to the sea. And, more importantly, we have close connections to each other.

 

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Siegebreakers – A Novel
Justin Podur
Roseway Publishing

Academic, author and activist Justin Podur’s latest novel, Siegebreakers, is an international tale of war and espionage centred in the Gaza Strip.

The novel is a fictional account of Palestinian resistance fighters Nasser and Leila, whose paths become intertwined with a conscientious Israeli spy named Ari and a group of skilled American security contractors. Together, they attempt to carry out a plan to unite feuding Palestinian factions and expose Israel’s siege on Gaza to the world.

Through his meticulously researched descriptive writing, Podur evokes a vision of Gaza where inhabitants lead desperate lives among bombed-out buildings and the lurking threat of sniper fire. Stylistically, Siegebreakers moves at the relentless pace of an action-packed thriller. To punctuate the onslaught of information, Podur interlaces the narrative with one resistance fighter’s spontaneous recitations from revered Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

Much of the novel alludes to true events in the history of the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, but Podur takes care to alter names of certain organizations and figures, which gives the work an air of speculative fiction. In an afterword, Podur lists his sources to justify some of the more outrageous events depicted, as well as highlight and explain his artistic embellishments. 

A controversial aspect of Siegebreakers is Podur’s sympathetic depiction of the Palestinian resistance movement. As shown in the afterword, “The Resistance,” as it’s called, is inspired in part by Hamas. However, Podur is no apologist for extremism. His freedom fighters are presented as a sanitized, secular version of the group regarded by many countries to be a terrorist organization. The Resistance could be seen as representing an idealized version of a pro-Palestinian force, who, unlike Hamas, do not espouse anti-Semitism, religious extremism or the targeting of civilians. Readers may find the framing of these militants as morally righteous to be irresponsible, but it’s clear that Podur intends to generate discussion. 

As a work of fiction, Siegebreakers is a riveting Middle East-centred thriller that expertly dodges the predictable clichés of the genre, giving nuance and depth to its protagonists. This audacious account of the Israel-Palestine conflict is sure to provoke and entertain.

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The Wake – The Deadly Legacy of a Tsunami
Linden MacIntyre
HarperCollins

Somewhere back around 1990, I first watched Linden MacIntyre do his impressive investigative reporter routine on CBC’s Fifth Estate. I was impressed by a man willing to dig deep and to get to the truth of a difficult story. The digging part might be because mining is in his family: his father was a miner. His latest book, The Wake, reaches back into the fluorspar mining history of a small remote town on Newfoundland’s Burin Peninsula—St. Lawrence. And it’s a disturbingly gruesome tale of poverty, political neglect, brutal working conditions and death.

For any book I read, I try hard to find some kind of personal connection to the story. So, okay, this is a book about mining. Connection one: When I was in grade seven, I took some kind of aptitude test and the guidance counsellor told me that I should one day become a miner. This had something to do with the fact I collected rocks. (Thank God, I didn’t go that route.) Connection two: The baddest of the bad guys in Linden’s book of woe, Walter Siebert, is from New Jersey. And so am I, but I hope no one will hold that against me. Connection three: The book begins with the story of the 1929 Atlantic tsunami, and I love anything to do with waves—even big destructive ones.

Surely, the way to read any book is to allow the author to put the reader in the middle of the action. So there I was, watching the townsfolk being swept out to sea in a Newfoundland outport on November 18, 1929, finding myself grieving for my family and friends lost in that tragedy. What followed was loss of a livelihood—the fish just disappeared after the disaster. Before long, the promise of full-time work was offered and I was, as my guidance counsellor suggested, down in the mines trying to make a scant income to keep my family alive.

Fluorspar mining was rotten work. And no one was around to protect the miners or insure their health. The work was dirty and physically devastating, and it eventually killed you and your colleagues. The man from New Jersey, the entrepreneur Siebert, was to blame and so was the weak Newfoundland government of the time.

Linden MacIntyre takes it all personally—partly because of his father’s connection to the place. Yet he also does his darndest to explain exactly how it all happened and how all the pieces fit together. Most of us know little about the history of the Burin Peninsula but now, this dark chapter is out there by one of Canada’s finest investigative reporters.