"A hilarious how-to on creative writing that makes the writing process fun for aspiring middle-school authors."-- Provided by publisher.
Creative nonfiction
- Author:Scrimger, RichardSummary:
- Author:Summary:
This is a book about women and ageism. There are twenty-nine contributing writers, ranging in age from their forties to their nineties. Through essays, short stories, and poetry, they share their distinct opinions, impressions, and speculations on aging and ageism and their own growth as people. In these thoughtful, fierce, and funny works, the writers show their belief in women and the aging process. Contributors: Rona Altrows, Debbie Bateman, Moni Brar, Maureen Bush, Sharon Butala, Jane Cawthorne, Joan Crate, Dora Dueck, Cecelia Frey, Ariel Gordon, Elizabeth Greene, Vivian Hansen, Joyce Harries, Elizabeth Haynes, Paula E. Kirman, Joy Kogawa, Laurie MacFayden, JoAnn McCaig, Wendy McGrath, E.D. Morin, Lisa Murphy Lamb, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Olyn Ozbick, Roberta Rees, Julie Sedivy, Madelaine Shaw-Wong, Anne Sorbie, Aritha van Herk, Laura Wershler.
- Author:Summary:
You Look Good for Your Age is a collection of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry about ageism by 29 women writers ranging in age from forties to nineties. The anthology responds to a culture that values youth and that positions aging in women as a failure. Questions arise. What effects do negative social assumptions have on women as they age? What messages about aging do we pass on to our daughters? Through essays, short stories, and poetry, the contributing writers explore these questions with thoughtfulness, satire, and fury. Contributors: Rona Altrows, Debbie Bateman, Moni Brar, Maureen Bush, Sharon Butala, Jane Cawthorne, Joan Crate, Dora Dueck, Cecelia Frey, Ariel Gordon, Elizabeth Greene, Vivian Hansen, Joyce Harries, Elizabeth Haynes, Paula Kirman, Joy Kogawa, Laurie MacFayden, JoAnn McCaig, Wendy McGrath, E.D. Morin, Lisa Murphy Lamb, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Olyn Ozbick, Roberta Rees, Julie Sedivy, Madelaine Shaw-Wong, Anne Sorbie, Aritha van Herk, Laura Wershler.
- Author:Heighton, StevenSummary:
Since selections first appeared in the New Quarterly and the National Post as part of “The Afterword,” Steven Heighton’s memos and dispatches to himself — a writer’s pointed, cutting take on his own work and the work of writing — have been tweeted and retweeted, discussed and tacked to bulletin boards everywhere. Coalesced, completed, and collected here for the first time, a wholly new kind of book has emerged, one that’s as much about creative process as it is about created product, at once about living life and the writing life.
"I stick to a form that bluntly admits its own limitation and partiality and makes a virtue of both things,” Heighton writes in his foreword, “a form that lodges no claim to encyclopedic completeness, balance, or conclusive truth. At times, this form (I’m going to call it the memo) is a hybrid of the epigram and the précis, or of the aphorism and the abstract, the maxim and the debater’s initial be-it-resolved. At other times it’s a meditation in the Aurelian sense, a dispatch-to-self that aspires to address other selves — readers — as well.”
It’s in these very aspirations, reaching both back into and forward in time — and, ultimately, outside of the pages of the book itself — that Heighton offers perhaps the freshest, most provocative picture of what it means to create the literature of the modern world.
- Author:Summary:
Wisdom River: Meditations on Fly Fishing and Life Midstream is a collection of stories, poetry, photos, art, recipes, and jokes that celebrate the wonders of fly fishing and the wisdom that can be gained from spending time on the river. Writers from Montana and Alberta each bring a unique perspective and voice as they share adventures and memories from times they have spent riverside and midstream. Story authors are Larry Kapustka, Chad Okrusch, Jim McLennan, Kaitlyn Okrusch, Pat Munday, Kayla Lappin, Jerry Kustich, Paul Vang, Greg Allard, David McCumber, Chris Pibus, Rayelynn Brandl, and John McKee. Poets are Doris Daley, Al (Doc) Mehl, Larry Kapustka, and Chad Okrusch. Photographers and artists are Tim Foster, Mike Forbister, Rich Thřoux, & Tyler Rock.
- Author:Alexander, KwameSummary:
This powerful memoir from a #1 New York Times bestselling author and Newbery Medalist features poetry, letters, recipes, and other personal artifacts that provide an intimate look into his life and the loved ones he shares it with. In a powerfully intimate and non-traditional (or "new-fashioned") memoir, Kwame Alexander shares snapshots of a man learning how to love. He takes us through stories of his parents: from being awkward newlyweds in the sticky Chicago summer of 1967, to the sometimes-confusing ways they showed their love to each other, and for him. He explores his own relationships-his difficulties as a newly wedded, 22-year-old father, and the precariousness of his early marriage working in a jazz club with his second wife. Alexander attempts to deal with the unravelling of his marriage and the grief of his mother's recent passing while sharing the solace he found in learning how to perfect her famous fried chicken dish. With an open heart, Alexander weaves together memories of his past to try and understand his greatest love: his daughters. Full of heartfelt reminisces, family recipes, love poems, and personal letters, Why Fathers Cry at Night inspires bravery and vulnerability in every reader who has experienced the reckless passion, heartbreak, failure, and joy that define the whirlwind woes and wonders of love.
- Author:Powe, B.W.Summary:
This powerful, beautiful book blends parables, aphorisms, dreams, fantasies, anecdotes, witticisms, puns, vignettes, and prose poems in a meditative and often passionate way. It takes the risk of being free in its style and form, to affirm the possibilities of thought, spirit, heart, humour, and imagination. Here B.W. Powe gives us his boldest, most soul-revealing work to date.
- Author:Sarah, de LeeuwSummary:
Finalist for the 2017 Governor General's Literary Awards--Non-Fiction!
Finalist for the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize at the 2018 BC Book Prizes!
Where It Hurts is a highly charged collection of personal essays, haunted by loss, evoking turbulent physical and emotional Canadian landscapes. Sarah de Leeuw's creative non-fiction captures strange inconsistencies and aberrations of human behaviour, urging us to be observant and aware. The essays are wide in scope and expose what--and who--goes missing.
With staggering insight, Sarah de Leeuw reflects on missing geographies and people, including missing women, both those she has known and those whom she will never get to know. The writing is courageously focused, juxtaposing places and things that can be touched and known--emotionally, physically, psychologically--with what has become intangible, unnoticed, or actively ignored. Throughout these essays, de Leeuw's imagistic memories are layered with meaning, providing a survival guide for the present, including a survival that comes with the profound responsibility to bear witness. - Author:Kacer, KathySummary:
Do young people today find meaning in the Holocaust? That’s the question that prompted a writing project across North America, Italy, and Australia asking young people to share their ideas about this time in history. Some students wrote short stories. Some discussed the impact of books they had read and wrote about the messages that they understood from these books. Several interviewed survivors and recorded their impressions. Many talked about how they have tried to make sense of this history in the world in which they now live. Others created works of art. Children wrote from their hearts with sensitivity, thoughtfulness, and great insight. Their teachers saw this opportunity as a gift, and it proves to all that young people can make a meaningful connection to the Holocaust. Their contributions give hope for a more peaceful and tolerant future.
- Author:Lane, CassandraSummary:
When Cassandra Lane becomes pregnant at thirty-five, she turns to creative nonfiction to recreate her great-grandparents' history, which was never officially documented by the state, in order to impart a familial legacy to her son.
- Author:Bauer, GabrielleSummary:
Short-listed for the 2002 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction So you grow up as a member of the baby boom. You’re well-brought up, well-educated, and your parents have great expectations. And, yet, somehow, you just don’t feel you belong. Along the way, you find the right wrong boyfriends: the poet-husband, and bane of your mother’s existence, the married Japanese doctor. When love at last arrives, and the realization that it’s just not in your nature to hold down a nine-to-five, stick-with-the-program corporate job, you discover that the one thing you thought would be very easy - conception - doesn’t happen. Square peg in a round hole? Absolutely. But now it’s called Waltzing the Tango - the humorous memoir of Gabrielle Bauer. It’s a tale most women will not only identify with, but will also laugh along with - occasionally with the painful pangs of self-recognition.
- Author:Gevisser, Mark, Allfrey, Ellah WakatamaSummary:
Illuminating African narratives for readers both inside and outside the continent. Representing the very best of African creative nonfiction, Safe House brings together works from Africa's contemporary literary greats. In a collection that ranges from travel writing and memoir to reportage and meditative essays, editor Ellah Wakatama Allfrey has brought together some of the most talented writers of creative nonfiction from across Africa. This creative nonfiction single from Safe House anthology by Mark Gevisser chronicles the travails of a young gay Ugandan man living as a refugee in Kenya.
- Author:Apostolides, MarianneSummary:
Voluptuous Pleasure: The Truth about the Writing Life is a collection of non-fiction whose title states that non-fiction does not exist. These stories, by acclaimed author Marianne Apostolides, are sensuous and smart, ambiguous but incisive in their truths. Voluptuous Pleasure will take you inside brothels and bedrooms, kitchens and consciousness; it will seduce you along the limits of non-fiction, making you question the veracity of anything you’ve ever read – or even experienced.
- Author:Hargreaves, AllisonSummary:
Indigenous communities have been organizing against violence since newcomers first arrived, but the cases of missing and murdered women have only recently garnered broad public attention. Violence Against Indigenous Women joins the conversation by analyzing the socially interventionist work of Indigenous women poets, playwrights, filmmakers, and fiction-writers. Organized as a series of case studies that pair literary interventions with recent sites of activism and policy-critique, the book puts literature in dialogue with anti-violence debate to illuminate new pathways toward action.
- Author:Moore, SylviaSummary:
Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has sparked new discussions about reforming education to move beyond colonialist representations of history and to better reflect Indigenous worldviews in the classroom. Trickster Chases the Tale of Education considers the work of educators and Mi’kmaw community members, whose collaborative projects address the learning needs of Aboriginal people. Writing in the form of a trickster tale, Sylvia Moore contrasts Western logic and Indigenous wisdom by presenting dialogues between her own self-reflective voice and the voice of Crow, a central trickster character, in order to highlight the convergence of these two worldviews in teaching and learning. Exploring the challenges of incorporating Indigenous ways of knowing, doing, and being into education, this volume weaves together the voices of co-researchers, community members, and traditional Mi’kmaw story characters to creatively bring readers into the realm of Indigenous values. Through a detailed study of a community project to highlight the important connection between the Mi’kmaw and salmon, Moore reveals teachings of respect, reciprocity, and responsibility, and emphasizes the need for repairing and strengthening relationships with people and all other life. These dialogues demonstrate the need for educators to critically examine their assumptions about the world, decolonize their thinking, and embrace Indigenous knowledge as an essential part of curriculum. Using the power of storytelling, dreams, trickster figures and their teachings, humour, and contemplative silences, Trickster Chases the Tale of Education will resonate while providing insights into Indigenous learning and teaching.
- Author:Cohen, SheldonSummary:
A rare glimpse into an artist’s mind, his toolbox, and the world of film animation
The Sweater is one of the most beloved animated films of all time. Based on Roch Carrier’s short story, also known as “The Hockey Sweater,” the film recounts the most horrifying moment of the author’s childhood. Sheldon Cohen adapted the story into animation and created a film that is as much about childhood emotions and the desire to fit in, as it is about hockey, the clash of cultures, and a harkening to bygone times.
Now 30 years later, Sheldon delves into his notebooks, photographs, and memories to recreate the process he undertook to make The Sweater. He takes the reader on a journey back to Ste.–Justine, showing all of the places and people that inspired him. He also delves into his other films, book illustrations, and paintings over his 40–year career, and along the way he gives us rich insights into the creative process.
- Author:Haysom, Simone, Lamwaka, Beatrice, Komba, Neema, Edozien, Chike Frankie, Allfrey, Ellah WakatamaSummary:
Illuminating African narratives for readers both inside and outside the continent. Representing the very best of African creative nonfiction, Safe House brings together works from Africa's contemporary literary greats. In a collection that ranges from travel writing and memoir to reportage and meditative essays, editor Ellah Wakatama Allfrey has brought together some of the most talented writers of creative nonfiction from across Africa. This collection of the first five singles from the Safe House anthology gathers work from the very best of contemporary African writers. Includes: The Life and Death of Rowan Du Preez by Simone Haysom The Mission at Verona by Beatrice Lamwaka The Search for Magical Mbuji by Neema Komba Forgetting Lamido by Chike Frankie Edozien
- Author:Pearl, MatthewSummary:
In his first work of narrative nonfiction, Matthew Pearl, bestselling author of acclaimed novel The Dante Club, explores the little-known true story of the kidnapping of legendary pioneer Daniel Boone's daughter and the dramatic aftermath that rippled across the nation. On a quiet midsummer day in 1776, weeks after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, thirteen-year-old Jemima Boone and her friends Betsy and Fanny Callaway disappear near the Kentucky settlement of Boonesboro, the echoes of their faraway screams lingering on the air. A Cherokee-Shawnee raiding party has taken the girls as the latest salvo in the blood feud between American Indians and the colonial settlers who have decimated native lands and resources. Hanging Maw, the raiders' leader, recognizes one of the captives as Jemima Boone, daughter of Kentucky's most influential pioneers, and realizes she could be a valuable pawn in the battle to drive the colonists out of the contested Kentucky territory for good. With Daniel Boone and his posse in pursuit, Hanging Maw devises a plan that could ultimately bring greater peace both to the tribes and the colonists. But after the girls find clever ways to create a trail of clues, the raiding party is ambushed by Boone and the rescuers in a battle with reverberations that nobody could predict. As Matthew Pearl reveals, the exciting story of Jemima Boone's kidnapping vividly illuminates the early days of America's westward expansion, and the violent and tragic clashes across cultural lines that ensue. In this enthralling narrative in the tradition of Candice Millard and David Grann, Matthew Pearl unearths a forgotten and dramatic series of events from early in the Revolutionary War that opens a window into America's transition from colony to nation, with the heavy moral costs incurred amid shocking new alliances and betrayals.
- Author:Greenblatt, StephenSummary:
Greenblatt transports listeners to the dawn of the Renaissance and chronicles the life of an intrepid book lover who rescued the Roman philosophical text On the Nature of Things from certain oblivion.
- Author:Seeger, PeteSummary:
This audio collection presents Pete Seeger's spoken words as he recounts his most engaging stories, narratives, and poems through musical traditions as diverse as African music, the blues, bluegrass, Celtic music, classical guitar, folk, Israeli music, jazz, Native American music, and Tuvan throat singing--taking Pete's wisdom and stories out to new audiences and into a new technological age.