Böcker utgivna av Caitlin Press

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.

In this debut collection, Andrea Routley muddies the line between the physical and emotional worlds: reality becomes not simply what is in front of us, but a mutable, fragile place in the imagination. On the verge of divorce, and in a pot-induced haze, Tom Douglas prepares to roast a pork shank in his new--and contentious--Authentic Italian Brick Oven, but some surprise visitors threaten to spoil the dinner. In a story set in 1997, the last earthbound member of a Hale-Bopp suicide cult reconsiders her final act. After being accused of sexual harassment, a sharp-witted but naive teenager discovers a surprising truth about her teacher. In the title story, "Jane and the Whales," Jane is on a quest to discover the meaning of her uncontrollable astral projections, which always lead her back to the same diminishing gay bar. Many of Routley's characters suffer loss, shame and guilt. But the promise of clarity comes only with doubt and that frightening unravelling of certainty.