Search results for ""harbour publishing""

A masterful new collection from award-winning poet Russell Thornton.With intense lyricism, Thornton records his imaginative movement between the element of water, waking to “the aloneness of water,” and the phenomenon of light, comprehending “light” as “fate” and “love” as “memory of light.” In the process, Thornton highlights how hard lives can manifest beauty and affirmation. A mother transcends degrading circumstances through laughter. A long-lost father’s drafting set case is a “coffin,” its tools a “skeleton;” his “ashes are buried” in the poet’s “arm.”Revelations of nature abound. Thornton’s rainy locale lifts onto the mythical level, water “wrapping around” him, “holding” him “complete / as within womb water about to break.” Herons’ wings “span the countless characters”

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Acclaimed author Tom Wayman’s account of his shift from urban to rural.The recent pandemic accelerated an existing trend among urbanites to move to the country. Yet to quote from a 2022 Globe and Mail article, “People from cities don’t always realize what they’re getting into.”For anyone setting out in that direction, or dreaming of doing so, Tom Wayman’s The Road to Appledore: Or How How I Went Back to the Land Without Ever Having Lived There in the First Place is rewarding reading. The book follows Wayman from Vancouver to southeastern BC’s Slocan Valley, deep in the Selkirk Mountains, and presents with his characteristic humor and philosophical insight his ensuing major shifts of perspective and knowledge. Mishaps, misadventures and moments of delight and wonder abound in Wayman’s prose reflections on his decades of living immersed in nature and the contemporary rural—from havin

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Longtime fisherman and Sointula resident Jon Taylor dishes up hilarious yarns from his life off northern Vancouver Island.Capturing the “rough but reasonable” freedom of Malcolm Island, situated off the northeast shore of Vancouver Island, Jon Taylor recounts the bizarre but enticing lifestyle of a fisherman and his remote community—“haywire tightwads” for skippers, rotten fish in the hold that become “three thousand humpies in a warm, pink soup,” and the kind of integrity you don’t often see.Jon Taylor’s family history on Malcolm Island extends back to 1917, when Taylor’s Finnish grandparents planned to move to the community of Sointula, to live among fellow expats who shared a language and a dream. However, Taylor recounts, upon seeing the island they promptly changed their minds and moved to Cuba. Taylor himself moved to Malcolm Island in 1976 and became a steadfast resident, embracing the

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Growing your own medicine is empowering—learn how with plant activists Dan Jason and Rupert Adams.Many common, easy-to-grow plants can energize or soothe, stimulate the immune system, aid in sleep or digestion, help to heal injuries, change blood pressure, reverse inflammation, soothe a sore throat—and more. But how do you find or grow them, and how do you use them?This compact book describes nearly fifty of the best-known medicinal plants and provides expert information on their care and use. Accompanied by the beautiful watercolor illustrations of Lyn Alice, Dan Jason and Rupert Adams explain the nature of each plant, how to grow them, their medicinal properties and other potential perks, such as their ability to produce dyes or attract pollinators.Dan Jason has owned and operated the mail-order seed company Salt Spring Seeds since 1986 and Rupert Adams has worked for over two decades with Dan Jason, currently growing a wide variet

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This is the spellbinding story of six young dreamers who set out from Vancouver in the seventies to haphazardly establish a back-to-the-land commune on a small island in the Salish Sea.Against all odds, the dream endures for half a century through fierce internecine squabbling, occasional community uproar, births and deaths, disasters in animal husbandry, the War in the Woods, police raids and the blandishments of oily developers. But throughout it all what abides is the land itself, its gifts and spirits and seasonal graces. A story within a story, the tale is told by the commune’s sole remaining occupant to an enigmatic stranger. Herself a recent urban exile exploring the ways of rural living, she succeeds in coaxing him through his rememberings away from grief into renewed life.Des Kennedy brings his signature humor and intimate knowledge of gardens and woodlands to this engaging novel. Throughout Commune, Kennedy poses the big questio

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