National Network for Equitable Library Service

Knitting is a booming pastime, enjoying a resurgence of interest, spawning books, movies, a brisk online trade in wool and knitted goods — even trade fairs. In Canada, Cottage Craft has long held a strong reputation for its fine wool, dyed to the palette of the local landscape, and the fine craftsmanship of the women who weave and knit its quality materials. Behind Cottage Craft is the story of a woman of vision and remarkable resolve.

In this compelling collection of first-person stories, adults who have made outstanding achievements in adult literacy were paired with writers to tell of their transition to reading. These are people who have had the courage to overcome the barrier of words to break into a broader sense of themselves, to feel more empowered in the world. Courageous, too, is the very sharing of these stories, in which private moments are opened wide with the hope that others will take the same steps.

Shortlisted, Hubert Evans Non-Fiction AwardWarm, imaginative, and thoroughly original, this memoir intertwines the mysteries of trees with the defining moments in the life of novelist and essayist Theresa Kishkan. For Kishkan, trees are memory markers of life, and in this book she explores the presence of trees in nature, in culture and in her personal history.

When Kate Barlow was a little girl, she moved with her mother and her older sisters to a ramshackle English mansion. They were not alone on the once-grand estate, surrounded as they were by twenty eccentric, elderly women, one of whom was her grandmother . . . or was she? This remarkable memoir is the true story of life inside “The A,” the infamous Agapemone,* named for the Greek word meaning Abode of Love. It was a religious cult founded in mid-19th century England by a defrocked clergyman who claimed to be guided personally by the Holy Ghost.

Was Barbie was the first feminist doll? She always worked in interesting positions, never married, never had a child, and never did house work. Yet today, many women who played with Barbie when they were children consider her to be an inappropriate role model, although these same women often have interesting Barbie stories to tell. In Forever Barbie, cultural critic, investigative journalist, and first generation Barbie owner M.G. Lord tells Barbie’s own story with clarity and intelligence, brilliantly shaking up many preconceptions.

On the ghastly battlefields of the First World War, Jimmie Johnston drove teams or pack horses carrying ammunition and hauling guns to the front lines. One night, Johnston was hauling guns back from the front line. Suddenly, in the darkness and pouring rain, he, his team, the wagon, and the guns pitched into an old trench. After disentangling the horses from their harness, Johnston found a trenching tool, dug away the side of the trench, and led the horses out of what had become a sea of mud.

One Friday, Walter Dohaney, novelist M.T. (Jean) Dohaney's husband, went out as usual to play hockey with his friends. She never saw him alive again. Without warning, Jean was plunged into the most painful and disorienting experience of her life. Faced with a tumult of emotions and sudden responsibilities, she turned to her writing for solace and began a journal. In her journal, Dohaney's sharp sense of humour and her impatience with conventional pieties lay bare the depth of her bereavement, yet at the same time they express the life force within her.

When Victor Hugo died in 1885, the world was shocked to discover that he had a lone survivor: his daughter Adèle, incarcerated in an asylum for insane gentlewomen. Adèle Hugo was an accomplished, intelligent, and ambitious young woman whose potential shrank with every year she spent under her tyrannical father’s roof. At thirty-three, she fell desperately in love with an English soldier who quickly lost interest in everything about her except her money. Her obsession with him proved her undoing.

Born in 1889, Gertrude Harding spent a boistrous childhood on a Welsford, New Brunswick, farm. She travelled to Hawaii to live with her sister, and, when her sister moved to London in 1912, Harding went with her. One day, from the top of a London bus, she saw a parade of women carrying large white posters. Attended by a policeman, they walked in single file on the street close to the curb as passersby stared and shouted rude remarks. It was a poster-parade of Militant Suffragettes demanding votes for women; after more than two decades of mild action, the Suffragettes were on the warpath.

At his death in 1985, Alden Nowlan stood in the first rank of Canadian writers. Today, his poetry is beloved by Maritimers and popular across Canada and in the US as well. If I Could Turn and Meet Myself tells his life story, from his birth to a 14-year-old mother in 1933 through his impoverished childhood, his disturbed adolescence, his newspaper career, his struggle with cancer, and his tenure as writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick. Nowlan founded his success and peace of mind on his belief that he was a composite of many selves.