Mother Tongue Publishing Limited

West Coast Literary Publishing | Creating a Legacy of Art & Literature


Al Rempel

Undiscovered Country, new poems

4 poets

Rocksalt


Rempel's books of poetry include This Isn't the Apocalypse We Hoped For, Understories and two chapbooks: Four Neat Holes and The Picket Fence Diaries. His poems have also appeared in various journals including The Malahat Review, GRAIN, CV2, Event, and Prairie Fire as well as in anthologies such as The Best Canadian Poetry in English, Rocksalt, 4Poets, and Half in the Sun. He was awarded Prince George's Arts & Culture Award for Poetry in 2012 and Shortlisted for the Fred Cogswell Excellence in Poetry Award in 2013. One of his poems was shortlisted for Arc's Poem of the Year Award in 2015 and his poems have been included twice in the Poetry in Transit project in Vancouver. Rempel has also had some of his poems translated into Italian by the poet Sandro Pecchiari. Rempel has also created a number of videopoems in collaboration with local artists. “Sky Canoe” was screened at the Visible Verse Festival in Vancouver, 2012, and at the Filmpoem Festival in Dunbar, Scotland, 2013, as well as Liberated Words in Bristol, UK, 2013. Three of the poems in Undiscovered Country have also been made into videopoems. Al Rempel currently lives in Prince George, where he teaches math and science at a high school.
Linda Rogers

Crow Jazz, short stories

111 West Coast Literary Portraits

Force Field, 77 Women Poets of BC

The Summer Book


Rogers is a novelist, essayist, editor and songwriter, past Victoria Poet Laureate and Canadian People’s Poet, and President of the League of Canadian poets and the BC Federation of Writers. She has published twenty-nine books, appeared in a number of anthologies and been awarded national and international literary prizes, including the Leacock Prize, the National Poetry Prize, the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, the Gwendolyn MacEwen Prize and the Milton Acorn Award in Canada; the Cardiff Prize, the Bridport Prize and the Petra Kenney Award in Britain; the Prix Anglais in France, the Rukeyeser Award in the United States and the Voices Israel Award for Poetry.
 
Rogers has written songs for children with her husband, mandolinist Rick van Krugel (whom Muddy Waters called “the best white blues mandolin player in the world”), who also accompanies readings, and lyrics for various songwriters. Her song for Terry Fox marked the thirtieth anniversary of his run. She wrote the screenplay for the award-winning film Legend of the Dolphins and the play Warhol for the Ontario Gallery of Art. She is currently writing a children's book, Hello. Wiksas? with Kwakwaka'wakw artist Chief Rande Cook, whose primary interest is also in the rights and rites of children.
  
Sheryl Salloum 

The Life and Art of Mildred Valley Thornton


Finalist for the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize

Salloum was born and raised in British Columbia. She has lived and worked in various regions of the province. Sheryl graduated from Simon Fraser University with an English Major and Early Childhood Minor. She has taught in the public school and college systems. A freelance writer for over twenty years, Sheryl has published articles in numerous Canadian magazines
and newspapers. Her areas of interest include Canadian art, culture, and history and children’s issues. In 1995, Sheryl published Underlying Vibrations: The Photography and Life of John Vanderpant (Horsdal & Schubart). That book was a finalist for the Hubert Evans Non-fiction BC Book Prize. In 1987, Sheryl published Malcolm Lowry: Vancouver Days (Harbour Publishing. She lives in Vancouver.
Linda K. Thompson

Black Bears in the Carrot Field
debut book of poetry
July 2021
$19.95 Order Now

"Whoever is talking in these poems is someone I want to sit down with at the kitchen table, potatoes boiling on the stove, “cherries on the oil cloth gleaming in the electric light.” The story-teller’s voice is refreshingly rural, heart-driven and tough. Every character Thompson brings so brilliantly to life will stay with you forever.”–Lorna Crozier, author of Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats).

"Thompson's gorgeous writing is a soul balm. Drawing inspiration from a cast of engaging characters and inviting spaces, this collection renders wise reflections on growing up along the BC coast. With an ebullient ear for language and a clear-sighted celebration of spirit, she offers readers a saucy, sensuous smorgasbord of captivating, tender-hearted poems.”–Eufemia Fantetti, author of A Recipe for Disaster & Other Unlikely Tales of Love.

“Here are poems of pinto ponies, swampy pastures, bowie-knives and ball-peen hammers, ginger beer and thimble babies. This collection is a hillbilly chin-wag in a jacked-up shack with a big bottle of whiskey. It’s an off-kilter kitchen party, a Lillooet River valley hootenanny. It’s the sweet chord harmonica music drifting out through the window of a dusty pick-up as it jaunts down a washboard road. Salt of the earth and tough as jerky, Thompson is a gifted storyteller, chronicling small talk, gossip, and intimate secrets whispered over a Formica table. Deftly crafted, raucous, rhythmic and filled with heart. Discover the charm and twang of Linda Thompson. There is no other writer like her.”–Sandra Ridley, author of Silvija.

"Like the people she writes about, Linda Thompson’s poems are plainspoken and unsentimental. Her characters show up fully formed from her blunt yet tender scrutiny—she’ll convince you there is a man named Boober who pumps gas down at the Texaco. Thompson’s poems are like secrets overheard through an open kitchen window—you won’t be able to keep them to yourself."—Rhonda Ganz, author of Frequent, small loads of laundry.

Thompson’s debut book of poetry, is loaded with personalities from small towns and long ago days. Growing up in the isolated Pemberton Valley in BC her characters are full of imperfection and humour. Verna, who sneaks back from the dead, Gloria, who whacks down walls, Kirk, who buys a house on Visa, and old Pete, who never loved the moon. Thompson deftly combines the twang of a hurting song with something dark, lyrical and very witty. Peppered with farm life, cows, horses and old cars, the reader enters each poem and doesn’t want to leave. There’s Eddie who rolled his skidder in ’68. Dominion Day on the verandah. Juicy Fruit and Sen Sens. Dreaming about black bears in the carrot field. Ethyl Peach hammering out tunes on a mildewed piano. And then there is Jesus, come to town, driving a Chevy Chevelle or was it a Dodge Dart, mid-blue, hardtop with a 273, spotted later at the Stawamus Chief looking way up. Finally a Canadian poet that writes characters better than many novelists.

Linda K. Thompson was raised on a potato and cattle farm in the Pemberton Valley and has lived for many years now on Vancouver Island. Her work has been published across Canada and in the U.S. and Great Britain. She has won awards for her writing and been shortlisted at the Malahat Review and the Troubadour International Poetry Prize contest. Linda has a chapbook Four Small People in Sturdy Shoes and her work recently appeared in Prairie Fire and Release Any Words Stuck Inside of You: Canadian Flash Fiction and Prose Poetry. She lives in Port Alberni.


978-1-896949-84-0
includes photographs
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Bill Stenson 

Ordinary Strangers

Half Brothers and Other Stories
a novella and four fictions
Illustrated by David Lester

September 2021
$19.95 Order Now

Winner of the Great BC Novel Contest

"Reading these stories is much like showing up at a party and discovering that, though everyone there is a stranger, every stranger makes you glad you'd come. Once I'd read them all, I wanted to read them again ––especially the novella that gives the collection its title.”–Jack Hodgins, author of Spit Delaney's Island and A Passion for Narrative.

"These Cowichan Valley stories from Bill Stenson share a timeless quality, and a classic feel. They tease with sly humour and, like all great stories, never fail to surprise. When they sometimes widen in bleakness, it’s only to make room for their main strength, an abundance of heart.”–Bill Gaston, author of Just Let Me Look at You and The World.

“Stenson's observations of the ordinariness of people are keen and revelatory.”–Prairie Fire

"The characters in Bill Stenson’s quirky story (Ordinary Strangers) are used to catching life’s curve balls, and dealing with luck, whether good or bad, as they find it.”– The Star

Half Brothers and Other Stories
These stories shimmer in summer heat under the gaze of a two-humped mountain and belong to the Cowichan Valley. Children born to ex-cons, lawyers, longshoremen, wood carvers, boxers, investors and gamblers write their own new-generation stories, at times melodic, often discordant, always determined to carry a tune.

Half Brothers is a masterly and unsentimental novella of the lives of two brothers left unchanneled by parental review. One brother is tough and likes to fight, the other does not. One is the father’s favourite and the other hides when he can. But in an extraordinary reversal of roles, and as the years pass, readers ultimately learn which one has the true grit. In the four short stories; Ball and Chain, Bon, Dick and Jane and Super Reader, Stenson uses wry wit to capture the voices of the young and old of small-town Duncan and area, in edgy juxtapositions. This is Canadian Literature at its best — calling forth a country that already exists. Flying beneath the radar, Stenson is one of our best fictionists.

Bill Stenson won the Great BC Novel contest with his compelling novel, Ordinary Strangers (Mother Tongue). His books of fiction include Translating Women, Svoboda and Hanne and Her Brother (Thistledown). He was also a finalist for the Prism International Fiction Contest and the Prairie Fire Short Fiction Contest. Stenson was born in Nelson, B.C., went to a one-room schoolhouse on Thetis Island and grew up on a small farm in Duncan. He became a teacher because he loved literature and taught English and Creative Writing at various high schools, the Victoria School of Writing and the University of Victoria. Many of his stories have been published in Canada and the US in Grain, The Malahat Review, Event, The Antigonish Review, filling Station, Blood and Aphorisms, Wascana Review, Prairie Fire, Toronto Star, The New Quarterly, Prism International, Scarlet Leaf Review, Darkhouse Books and the Nashwaak Review. Stenson and Terence Young founded the Claremont Review, an international literary magazine for young adult writers. Bill Stenson lives with his wife poet Susan Stenson in the Cowichan Valley and writes every day.

978-1-896949-85-7 | 180 pages
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