memoir

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World Rights Available

Reviews

Journey Without A Map: Growing Up Italian
Donna Caruso

ISBN: 978-1-897235-36-2 / trade paper
$19.95 CAD / 225 pages / March 2008

Even as generations pass, cultural pride persists in the very DNA of those who were raised in Italian immigrant families. Donna Caruso’s Journey Without A Map appropriately begins with pasta cooking instructions, and from there the aromas of tomatoes, olives and red wine weave through her sensuous, often humorous stories.

"Journey Without a Map is a journey directly to the heart of family. And that’s one trip Donna Caruso needs no map for — she is a master navigator who intuitively knows the way, and how to tell some great rollicking stories along the way. Her tales of family and being Italian are hilarious, moving, and rich as her homemade marinara sauce." — Dave Margoshes

• Winner of the 2008 Saskatchewan Book Award for Non Fiction

essays

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Reviews

Phantom Limb
Theresa Kishkan

ISBN: 978-1-897235-23-2 / trade paper
$17.95 CAD / 221 pages / May 2007

In Phantom Limb, Kishkan invites her readers to explore culture and nature by looking at landscape and place through a series of historical lenses, ranging from natural history to family history to the broader notions of regional and human history. In her popular essay “month of wild berries picking” she reveals the extent to which native stories articulate the complexity and importance of rules that govern relationships between species, a profoundly symbiotic world where one respected not just the territory of another species but its dung, its bones, its very spirit as well.
Resonating throughout this collection, especially when describing the natural world or in her travel essays, is a rich lyricism and a distinctive visceral imagery. Kishkan is among those literary naturalists whose words transcend the flora and fauna to engage human relationships, social concerns, historical milieus, and political boundaries. For these reasons Phantom Limb stands elegantly in its own energy and light.

• Winner of the first annual CNFC Readers’ Choice Award

essays

Available in the US
World Rights Available

ISBN: 978-1-897235-35-5 / trade paper
$15.95 CAD / 176 pages / September 2007

Interwoven Wildbegins with an intimate look at Don Gayton in his BC garden with his dog Spud. Striking a series of premises — the first one being that gardening is essentially an irrational act — he logically and humorously begins to unravel the work and rituals of gardening. Engaging the reader with real gardening experiences, Gayton takes us on the microscopic steps of a gardening season and his interest in ecological succession. While commenting on the inter-reliance of species, types of soil, why weeds invade, how foreign planets appear, insects, disease and frost, he also speculates on gardeners — their needs to landscape, to purchase specialized tools, to use chemicals, to emotionally bond with trees, shrubs, flowers and vegetables.

By interlocking artists such as Monet and Caravaggio; writers such as Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Emily Dickenson, and Ann Dowden; park designer Frederick Law Olmstead, and landscape architect Christopher Alexander, Gayton reminds us that the garden has long held sway in the creative consciousness. His brief excursions into history, whether tracing the apple back to Kazakhstan, explaining how the tulip made its way from Turkey to Holland, or how the industrialist Baylock’s introduction of a smuggled Asian cherry tree destroyed the BC cherry orchids fascinate as well as instruct. For Gayton, the garden is a primordial human urge — a gift, celebration, and revelation buried in human psyche, marked in our collective mythologies — a kind of magical glue binding world culture, science and economics.

history/photography

Available in the US
World Rights Available

ISBN: 978-1-897235-27-0 / trade paper
$29.95 CAD / 96 pages / 160 B&W Photographs / May 2007

It was both providence and necessity that created Canada’s and the Commonwealth’s first degree-granting drama department at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. Born out of the University’s Dramatic Society that flourished in the first three decades of the Twentieth Century, the Greystone Theatre emerged to become a force in theatre development and a prominent shaper in the family tree of Canadian theatre. Known for its program range — from classic repertory to cutting-edge new plays — it continues to this day to teach and inspire theatre production, management, artistic direction, and acting. Its history is a fascinating amalgam of anecdote, commentary, and biography that show its contribution to the cultural evolution of Canadian theatre in the last century.
Emrys’ Dream captures the energy that has driven and sustained the Greystone Theatre. Drawing on the well-preserved and substantial visual and written archives at the University of Saskatchewan, and selectively reconstructing interviews of directors, actors, and alumni whose Greystone experience animates the book’s text, actor, writer and present Greystone director, Dwayne Brenna, has forged a lively testament: that Emrys’ Dream is alive and the Greystone Theatre lives on revealing the quiet, steady influence it has had on Canadian theatre.