A Bountiful Harvest
Editor: Alice Anna ReesePublisher: Acorn Press$22.95Little did organizers know when they planted the seed 15 years ago that the Literary Awards would reap such a bountiful harvest. This collection of over 35 first-prize short stories, poetry, and writing for children represents the best new writing in Prince Edward Island. Readers will recognize several of the names – people who have gone on to be published or produced – including Rai Berzins, Lesley-Anne Bourne, Judy Gaudet, Elaine Hammond, Hugh MacDonald, Brent MacLaine, Steve McOrmond, Dianne Hicks Morrow, Melissa Mullen, Libby Oughton, and Nancy Russell.
A Long Way From the Road
Publisher: Acorn Press$13.95A collection of 77 anecdotes, this book is humorous and sardonic, insightful and witty, with the warmth and charm for which Atlantic Canada has become famous. Subjects that come under the microscope include politics, religion, sex, human foibles, and insularity that can come from living on a small island.
A Photographer’s Guide to Prince Edward Island
Photographer: John Sylvester, Stephen DesRochesPublisher: Acorn Press$24.95New by award-winning photographer team.
There are very few places as photogenic as Prince Edward Island. With its sweeping landscapes, scenic vistas and miles upon miles of beaches, the Island is a haven for photographers. Taking advantage of potential stunning images of the Island in all seasons, these two award-winning photographers know the best places to set up, when and how best to photograph each corner of the Island and how to get there. The thousands of visitors from all over the world who travel to the Island learn the secrets of these two seasoned experts.
Acadian Women of Prince Edward Island Three Centuries of Action
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95From the time of their arrival on Isle Saint-Jean in the early 1700s,Acadian women played a major role in the survival of the colony.Over the generations, they have been active in the home and in the community. They have nursed, taught, worked, sung, prayed, and served. Integrated into a well-documented text with numerous photographs, their testimonies provide a history of the Acadie of Prince Edward Island. This book relates how that history was lived by Acadian women and influenced by their action and determination.
Afternoon Horses
Publisher: Acorn Press$16.95Deirdre Kessler teaches creative writing and children’s literature at the University of Prince Edward Island. Her poetry has appeared in a number of collections, including The New Poets of Prince Edward Island and Landmarks: An Anthology of New Atlantic Canadian Poetry of the Land, and in chapbook form: Subtracting by Seventeen. She is the author of five children’s novels, including the Canadian Children’s Book Centre Award-winning Brupp Rides Again, and six picture books, including perennial favourites Lobster in My Pocket, and Lena and the Whale.
All is Clam A Shores Mystery
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95It’s Christmas at The Shores. There’s no snow yet, but there are so many outdoor lights that the tiny coastal village can be seen from space. Apart from Ian Simmons’ place, and he’s considered odd, there’s only one house in the village that isn’t lit up. It’s been dark for years. That’s about to change. Wild Rose Cottage is about to come to life, and death, once again. Meanwhile, the villagers wish for snow to complete the Christmas portrait. When it comes, it’s with the body of newcomer, Fitz Fitsimmons, a former acrobat turned bully and drunk. Mountie Jane Jamieson has seen murder here before, but none where she’d rather not catch the killer.
Along Lot Seven Shore
Publisher: Acorn Press$14.95Often, folksongs are left to stand alone, with no record as to the events, visions and principles that inspired them. Rarely do we get a glimpse of the poet’s view of the community and people he or she writes about. However, Donnie Doyle, in wanting to give something back to his community, has done just that. Along Lot Seven Shore is a fascinating combination of memoir, anecdote, narrative song and poetry, created by someone who has experienced that which he has written. In so doing, he shares glimpses of a way of life that makes and defines “community”; this particular community happens to be along Lot Seven Shore of Prince Edward Island (named so when the Island was divided into 67 lots and given in a Land Lottery to the English King’s patrons in 1767), but it could be anywhere in rural Canada.
An Island Christmas Reader (Updated edition)
Artist: Dale McNevinPublisher: Acorn Press$17.95An Island Christmas Reader is a book about Christmas past and present on Prince Edward Island. In 22 stories and essays, David Weale combines reminiscences of Islanders with his own musings to rekindle the memory of Christmas, where imagination and magic work hand in hand to create the “unsullied wonder of childhood vision.”
And My Name Is Stories from the Quilt
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95In this, Margie Carmichael’s first collection of short stories, ordinary women have extraordinary skills, gifts and strengths; they are women who live next door or in the distance, shadowed by fear or absence of recognition. Age, race, and culture connect in the timeless fabric of the quilt, with craft, patience, and faith connecting the women through the threads of their diversity.Anna tells of life after residential school; Irini reflects on her life in war-torn Afghanistan. In Tansie, two adults survive childhood abandonment. Freelance cosmetician to the dead Flora Hill offers insight into the lighter side of love, marriage, and death.Featuring illustrations by Dale McNevin, the book is a collaboration that began with an original painting and companion poem first published in the Maritime Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health 2000 Calendar.
Beautiful Veins
Publisher: Acorn Press$15.95A Canadian poet’s last wordsA sense of ego-urgency has seemingly sucked hard on any high octane left in my system, and what used to take me a decade and more to accomplish as a writer has suddenly fruited within a 12-month time frame.- Joe Sherman, December 2005The result is Beautiful Veins, Joe Sherman’s final book of poems. Joseph Sherman, author of seven books of poetry, editor, and supporter of the arts, died on January 9, 2006, in Charlottetown. He was 60.Beautiful Veins begins with the picture of a child, of “one life with all the promise of its beautiful veins.” Some of the poems catch details of domestic life and its indwelling spirit and glancing irony; they explore the cache of memory. Others evoke history and landscape, opening them up to careful consideration. Always there is a love of language and its quirks, oddities, split-levels, riches. Out of the intricate and elliptical syntax, moments of joy are discovered, named against the threat of time and illness.
Bridging Islands
Editor: Godfrey BaldacchinoPublisher: Acorn Press$29.95An island is a piece of land surrounded by water. But: what happens when bridges, causeways, tunnels- “fixed links”- irrevocably connect islands to mainlands? Is insularity, and its way of life, threatened? Or is it saved by virtue of a stronger integration with the world at large?Bridging Islands is a critical, interdisciplinary scoreboard of the pros and cons of bridging islands to mainlands. Internationally recognized scholars review the assorted socio-cultural, economic and political impacts of fixed links on small island communities. Included are chapters on Prince Edward Island’s Confederation Bridge (celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2007), Cape Breton’s Canso Causeway, islands in Quebec and Newfoundland, the Florida Keys, Ireland, France, Scotland, Sweden, and Singapore.
Charlottetown: Then and Now
Photographer: W.Blair MacDonaldPublisher: Acorn Press$19.95D. Scott MacDonald’s father, W. Blair MacDonald had a keen interest in the changing landscape of Charlottetown, and documented a number of these changes with his slide camera. Instilled with a keen sense of history at an early age, Scott and his family have always treasured the work that their father did to preserve Charlottetown’s history. So, over 50 years later, Scott has nowretraced his father’s steps to record how the city has changed over that time. Standing in the exact spot where his father stood, Scott has captured how the streets and buildings of Charlotttown have changed and remained the same. Scott has also researched the history of the buildings he protrays, both back to his father’s time and much earlier. The result is a fascinating glimpse into why and how even a small city can change so much.
Dip & Veer Reflections on the Art of Alex Colville
Publisher: Acorn Press$14.95Frank Ledwell has previously published one volume of prose and poetry, The North Shore of Home (Acorn Press, 2002) and two collections of poetry, Crowbush and Other Poems (Ragweed, 1990) and Dip & Veer: Reflections on the Art of Alex Colville (Acorn Press, 1996). He has performed as a popular storyteller in venues across Prince Edward Island. Frank Ledwell is a Professor Emeritus of the English Department of the University of Prince Edward Island, where he taught creative writing for many years. He was the first recipient of the PEI Council of the Arts’ Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Literary Arts, and for many years was known as the Island’s unofficial poet laureate.
Door to the Past Abandoned Properties of Prince Edward Island
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95If you have ever gone for a drive around rural Prince Edward Island, you would have noticed that the rural landscape is littered with abandoned buildings. Tony Gallant began to get curious about these properties and started investigate them, looking for signs of thier past. He began to not only photograph the homes, buildings or barns that have been abandoned on P.E.I, but post what he found on his Facebook page. The result is a curious collection of images of the homes and what is left of the former inhabitants, leaving the reader to only imagine the stories they hold.
Elaine Harrison: I am an Island that Dreams I am an Island that Dreams
Publisher: Acorn Press$24.95Elaine Harrison was born in Petite-Rivere in Nova Scotia, but moved to Prince Edward Island to teach in 1938. There, she and her companion spent their summers at “Windswept,” the 200 year-old farmhouse on the cliffs near Seacow Head, where they lived a simple life, and for over fifty years were involved in the intellectual life of the Island and beyond, playing host to numerous summer visitors and corresponding with some of Canada’s top writers. In 1968, retirement gave Elaine the freedom to turn to her interests: her poetry, the campaigning for favoured causes, but above all her painting. Inspired by the Group of Seven, she found her subject matter in the cliffs and waves at Windswept, the sunflowers in her garden, the trees of the local hardwoods, and latterly her own cats and kitchen. In the early days she frequently gave her paintings away to anyone who appreciated them, but from the 1970s she began to get the recognition and financial returns they merited. She died in 2003, but her work is still much-loved by Islanders.
Fixer-Upper
Publisher: Acorn Press$16.95Funnyman Lorne Elliott’s take on Island life. When Bruno MacIntyre decides to rent his ramshackle cottage to summer tourists, the wacky merriment begins. Lorne Elliott, comic master of mirth and mayhem, takes us to Savage Bay on the south shore of Prince Edward Island, where the hapless Bruno turns to his clever and caustic Aunt Tillie for help in securing tenants. First, the cottage, inherited with a bad reputation from Bruno’s ne’r-do-well father, must be renovated. Then, Bruno must duel with his aunt’s wry insults and sly plans, a sardonic would-be author, and two torrid tenants. Elliott’s celebrated gifts for sharp-witted repartee and vivid characterizations are in full force. So, too, are Elliott’s keen eye and ear for our fumbling aspirations, bittersweet banterings, self-deceptions, hard-won wisdom, surprising tenderness, and zany outcomes. The Fixer-Upper–the novella adaptation of his play, Tourist Trap–is classic Lorne Elliott, with a brash and cheeky Maritime flavour.
Great Day Fer Livin’
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95After living in Australia for 18 years, Juliet Wilson returned to Prince Edward Island for an extended stay. The Island’s allure hit her front on: not just the vibration of the gently rolling landscape, with its patchwork quilt of red soil and emerald fields, but the beauty of the people who make up the rich fabric of the Island, their sense of place, and their way of being.She spent the summer of 2009 driving the back roads of Prince Edward Island, introducing herself to people she met on the wharves and in the fields and in their shops, and getting to know them by listening to their stories and eventually photographing them. Like an informal anthropological study, this 48-page book gives a glimpse into the culture, belief, and practices of the primary producers who make up the backbone of Prince Edward Island.
Growing Up With Julie
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Growing Up With Julie is the story of Gerry Steele’s childhood with a French-speaking mother in an English-speaking community. Set in Miscouche, near Summerside, Prince Edward Island, in the early part of the 20th century, the story is an historical snapshot of a life heavily influenced by the Catholic church, poverty and the Depression, alcoholism, and cultural tensions between the Acadians and the Scots. At the head of the family is Steele’s grandmother, a woman unwavering in her beliefs—regardless of their merit, validity, or tendency to offend. It is also a story of one woman’s determination to educate her children in a hard-living rural society coming to terms with modernity.
Gifted with an excellent memory for detail, Gerry Steele delivers a story that is rich in integrity and precision, with a good dose of humour to brighten up the dark corners.
Historic PEI : Vintage Postcards of Prince Edward Island
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Throughout Canada’s early days, Prince Edward Island was a thriving province with a strong tourist industry. Historic Prince Edward Island portrays the quaint lifestyle and the busy industry that Canada’s smallest province had to offer. With unique messages to friends and family, these early postcards paint a picture of history not available in history books.
