Author: Lynne Melcombe

The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Cod Fishery

/ Lynne Melcombe / 1 Comment

I can barely remember a time when I wasn’t intrigued by Canada’s easternmost province, Newfoundland and Labrador. I’ve never been there, but it calls to me in much the same way many distant parts of Canada, like Haida Gwaii and the far north, call to me. I hope someday I’ll be fortunate enough to visit more of our country’s far corners. 

Book cover of 'Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboys' by Jenn Thornhill Verma, featuring an illustration of colorful fishing buildings and boats in a vibrant marine setting with a Canadian flag emblem.

In Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboys (Nimbus Publishing, 2019), Jenn Thornhill Verma (class of 2019) paints an intimate portrait of the island portion of her home province—not only how physically beautiful it is, but where it’s come from, what its people have endured, and where it’s going. 

In the early chapters of this moving memoir, Verma depicts in vivid detail what life was like for her grandparents, Pop and Nan, and great grandparents. They raised their family in a one-room wooden house. Wood was the only fuel used for cooking and heating, in a home that lacked indoor plumbing and was lit by a kerosene lamp. Wood was also used to build the boats that kept the island’s bountiful cod fishery alive.

Fishing was a hard life, one most parents didn’t wish for their children. And indeed, Verma’s parents did not grow up to be fishers but became skilled professionals in a hospital in Corner Brook. Yet the fishing way of life is also one that many remember fondly, in spite of both hardships and risks that most of us can barely imagine. Verma writes:

When it comes to a career at sea, practice brings some degree of perfection, but luck comes into play a lot of the time too. That’s what comes to mind as I recall what Gene told me about navigating tricky weather in his fishing days. “People used to say to me, ‘It’s thick with fog. You’re not going out today.’ I said, ‘Honey, I got a compass, I knows where I’m to.’ But I said, ‘The other fellers can’t find me.’ On a fine day, yes no trouble. Anyone could go to fish on a fine day, but I often went forty days out here and never saw land. Forty days in the fog day after day after day, nothing, only fog. I could only see to the end of the boat. But I was happy. I would sooner be out there than in here.” And yet, Gene is well aware of the risks of being “out there.” He told me of one dicey situation when he went overboard.

“I went in with an anchor. One Saturday evening, it was thick with fog and mad rough. We were setting a net from here to there somewhere. I was … hauling up the anchor and I don’t know what happened. It happened so fast. Rope come off … and I went down. It got dark. I could see a rope, so I grabbed the rope. The anchor was hauling me down. When the anchor got on the bottom, I got the rope off me and I started to come up. And next thing, I could see the propeller on the boat spin because I had only just slowed the gear. Anyway, I come up and I grabbed the rail of the boat and I got a bit of air.”

The cod fishery supported Newfoundland fishers for hundreds of years. But after World War II, as fishing methods improved, drawing fleets from as far away as Portugal to the Grand Banks and taking far more fish than could be sustained, the government of Canada finally admitted that without dramatic changes, the once-teaming cod population was in danger of extinction. 

The cod moratorium, announced July 2, 1992, immediately put 30,000 fishers out of work—the largest layoff in Canada’s history. It was supposed to last two years; it lasted three decades. Within ten years, Newfoundland’s population dropped by a record ten percent. The moratorium was finally lifted in 2024, but whereas total allowable catch (TAC) at the fishery’s peak was around 240,000 tonnes, it’s now 18,000 tonnes.

Cod Collapse is a story of hardship and loss, but it’s also a story of survival and recovery. It’s a story about a young woman moving away and distancing herself from the place she grew up, not least because “Newfies,” as I remember myself (with shame, now) referring to Newfoundlanders as a kid, who were for many years the butt of Canadian jokes. It’s a story about reconnecting with a past and feeling deep pride in it. And it’s a story about finding other ways to make a sea-faring life work—other fisheries, such as lobster; other ways to use the ocean, such as the offshore oil industry; and other ways to make a living off the land, such as tourism in one of the most ruggedly beautiful corners of our country. 

I’m immensely proud to be a Canadian, proud of every corner of this country, the many I haven’t seen as much as the relatively few I have. Books like this only make me prouder. It’s an amazing land we live in, from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic. And in an era when our sovereignty is threatened by outside forces, writers like Verma help us all to build that pride by telling the stories of those who make this country what it is. 

Here’s another book about fish, with a very different perspective:

Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis, by Andrew Reeves.

And here are some books about Canada that inspire pride:

Peace by Chocolate: The Hadhad Family’s Remarkable Journey from Syria to Canada, by Jon Tattrie.

Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness, by Virginia Heffernan.

The Ring of Fire: Balancing Resource Extraction and Indigenous Rights

/ Lynne Melcombe / 3 Comments

One of the things I’m enjoying about this project I’ve undertaken to read and review all the books published out of the University of King’s College Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Nonfiction Writing on is that I’m reading a lot of books I wouldn’t otherwise pick up. (Like Overrun and The Minister’s Wife, both great reads!)

Book cover of 'Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness' by Virginia Heffernan featuring a map of Ontario with geological lines and text in orange and yellow.

Because of that I’m learning a lot of things I wouldn’t otherwise learn. And I love learning. I’m a bit of a learning junkie. 

Virginia Heffernan’s (class of 2021) book Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness (ECW, 2023) is not one I would have picked up. And I have to admit that I struggled through Part 1: Prospectors and Promoters.

But I didn’t struggle because it’s not well researched and written; Heffernan is top-notch at both. Rather, my ADHD brain made it difficult for me to keep track of the enormous cast of corporations, characters, and deals that have been attempting to shepherd the Ring of Fire from its discovery through to the extraction of an abundance of critical minerals that will be crucial to Canada’s continued development as a sovereign nation. 

I honestly don’t think I could do what Heffernan did in these opening chapters, and she tacitly acknowledges the complexity in Part 1: Prospectors and Promoters by including, at the back of the book, a complete list of key players along with a timeline of crucial developments from 1987 to 2022. But as difficult as it must have been to untangle all that information and keep it straight, it was essential that she did it. This complex history laid the foundation for Part 2: People and the Planet, which looks at the critical importance of appropriate development of the Ring of Fire to the well-being of northern Ontario’s Indigenous communities; and Part 3: Power and Protest, which examines how protest movements have influenced related developments in Ontario’s halls of power. 

What is the Ring of Fire? In the opening pages of the book, Heffernan writes:

The Ring of Fire is a 5,000-square-kilometre crescent of ancient volcanic rock rich in nickel, copper, and other metals considered critical to the global transition to renewable energy. The metal deposits lie hidden beneath the remote swamps of the Hudson Bay and James Bay Lowlands of northern Canada, the second-largest temperate wetland in the world. The area is home to several thousand Indigenous people in communities accessible only by plane or winter road. The deposits, too, are stranded by a lack of infrastructure. In 2022, Canada and the province of Ontario pledged billions of dollars towards a critical-minerals strategy, including building an all-weather road to the Ring of Fire.

Resource extraction has a long and dubious history that’s included significant steps in the advancement of civilizations along with unchecked environmental degradation, impoverishment of local Indigenous populations, and enrichment of the few on the backs of the many. But, as Heffernan argues throughout Parts 2 and 3, it doesn’t have to be that way. Her hope for Ring of Fire mines, based on social and political changes that have been slow in coming, is considerably more optimistic. In her conclusion, she writes:

In my vision, the federal government has scrapped the Indian Act and stopped clawing back resource revenue from First Nations. The majority of government funds required to administer the Indian Act has been redirected towards delivering much-needed capacity to northern communities.

The First Nations of Ontario’s James Bay Lowlands have seized the opportunity to become self-governing and self-sufficient … [with] the power to write their own laws on a variety of local governance issues affecting their communities, including environmental protection, public order, and land and resource use and planning. 

Marten Falls … has become a hub for education and small business. Acrid wafts of burned diesel no longer permeate the air because diesel generators have been replaced by wind turbines supplemented by hydro power humming its way along transmission lines ….

Heffernan goes on to envision mine funds being invested in schools, hospitals, and community centres staffed by Indigenous locals, some of whom are working hard to bring back Indigenous language and culture. She sees sustainable housing, suited to the cold-but-warming climate, that has become available for all, supplied by clean water and connected to sewers, electricity, and high-speed internet access. 

In other words, with the approach to development that Indigenous People have been fighting for, Ontario’s northern and Indigenous communities could thrive and prosper, as so many southern communities have been doing for so long. 

I never would have pictured myself reading a book about mining, but Heffernan’s book has opened my eyes to the possibilities. I don’t think I’ll ever look at mining through such stubbornly jaded eyes again. 

July 1 was Canada Day. Here are some other books about Canada’s history, geography, and culture, for better and for worse:

Louisburg or Bust: A Surfer’s Wild Ride Down Nova Scotia’s Drowned Coast, by RC Shaw.

Murder on the Inside: The True Story of the Deadly Riot at Kingston Penitentiary, by Catherine Fogarty.

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, by Jessica McDiarmid.

Peace by Chocolate: The Hadhad Family’s Remarkable Journey from Syria to Canada, by Jon Tattrie.

Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir, by Aaron Williams.

Understanding Disability: A Journey Through Parenthood (and other essays)

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments

The closest I can come to understanding what it’s like to have a child with a disability is that all three of my kids, when they were very young, were in and out of hospital with asthma, and felt like they stuck out at school because they were the only ones with food allergies, some of them life-threatening. 

Cover of the book 'I Don’t Do Disability And Other Lies I’ve Told Myself' by Adelle Purdham featuring a blue background with artistic illustrations of leaves, a bird, and a horse.

It doesn’t begin to compare to learning the child you’re carrying has Down Syndrome, or to waiting many extra months for your child to figure out a pincer grip. Where it does compare is the understanding that your child is your child and they are absolutely perfect the way they are (even though it doesn’t always feel like it when they’re in the middle of a raging tantrum).

In the series of essays that comprise I Don’t Do Disability and Other Lies I’ve Told Myself (Dundurn Press, 2024), author Adelle Purdham (class of 2022) walks us through the emotional wreckage of finding out that your unborn child has a disability, the prejudices we are likely to uncover within ourselves when that happens, and the fierce protective instincts that then compel that parent to become a disability activist, advocate, ally. 

But that’s not all she walks us through because these essays also cover the terrain of love and marriage, of being a mother/writer who feels guilty when she’s mothering about not writing and when she’s writing instead of mothering (boy, do I know that one well), and who tries in every moment of her life—okay, as many moments as possible—to be a good person. In a deeply touching and achingly honest essay called “A Thin Line,” she writes about an encounter with a homeless woman. 

I see her as I drive past, stumbling down the street, decrepit. Please, I think, I don’t want us to run into her. She is a mess. I’m Ronald from The Paper Bag Princess …

We are on our way to the cottage. The SUV is packed full. The girls have their cupholders folded down in anticipation the bottles of iced tea I will be buying them to go with their dinner. …

I park the car and notice the Freshii on the corner. “What about Freshii? You girls can get bowls.’

While these girls have not yet been exposed to the ways of the world, the underworld, they are well versed in the vernacular of a privileged life. They speak the dialect of healthy takeout well. As do I. … the girls and I can afford to cruise around until we find an open takeout place that suits our tastes. This idea of accessibility to food as an immense privilege will sit with me and my uneaten burrito, afterward, when I find I no longer have an appetite.

As we cross Hunter Street, directly in front of us is the woman, doubled over …

“Please, can you help me?”

She asks for money, and I immediately reach for my wallet and pull out a loonie, the only coin I have. Why have I not pulled out a bill? Is it because I believe she will use it on drugs or alcohol instead of food? Yes….

“I need help,” she repeats. “I’m scared.”

With the enunciation of her fear, that is it. The thin sheath between us slips away and the world stops for her and me. Our lines cross, her path and mine, like asteroids colliding, and intergalactic even. I feel the presence of the girls over my left shoulder, standing stone still, watching. If I turn my back on this woman and hurry the girls away, it will be like turning a shoulder on myself, on my daughter, on my daughter’s friend, on the very stardust I am made of.

“Do you need to go to a shelter?” I ask her. Clearly, I think she needs to go to a shelter. She can’t stay here … 

On my iPhone, I quickly google the number for the shelter. …

“It’s so good to see kids,” she says, squeezing her eyes shut, then opening them. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen any kids.” …

Springing into action is what privileged women like me know how to do. We ascertain the problem and create a plan. My plan is to call the shelter. Make sure this woman is safe. Show my kids that I care, that we should all care, that a person in need is a person in need. That we don’t turn our backs on a person in need, no matter how destitute, forgotten, and discarded they seem. Especially when that is the case. Why is that the case? And why do I need to remind myself of this?

I won’t spoil the outcome for you. I will just say that this is some of the best literary writing I’ve read in a while—clear, compelling, compassionate. Purdham’s voice pulls me in; I could be standing next to her, watching the scene in each essay unfold, whether it’s at the lake listening to the loons, in a rocking chair nursing an infant, or on a street trying to help an unhoused woman through a state of extreme distress.

July is Disability Pride Month. Add to your pride in knowing a bit more about disability tomorrow than you did yesterday by reading this book.

Here are some other books about disability:

Just Jen: Thriving Through Multiple Sclerosis, by Jen Powley.

One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable—A Mother’s Memoir, by S. Lesley Buxton.

Scream Therapy: A Punk Journey through Mental Health, by Jason Schreurs.

Surfing in Nova Scotia: ‘Louisbourg or Bust’

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments

When I was a little girl in the 1960s, and it would come to bedtime, I would have my radio playing quietly in my bedroom—lights off, door open. I was supposed to be going to sleep, but most evenings I’d stay up for at least an hour past my bedtime listening to the Beach Boys and dancing in the dark in my baby doll pyjamas, mastering the Jerk and the Monkey and the Twist and the Swim and the Pony. 

Book cover of 'Louisbourg or Bust' by RC Shaw featuring a bicycle with a trailer that includes a surfboard and camping gear, set against a backdrop of green trees.

I was pretty wild when I was eight years old. And of course, I wanted to be a surfer girl, just like Gidget. 

I still wish I’d learned to surf at some point, but I doubt I will now. I tried windsurfing a couple years ago and I couldn’t get my balance. So much for Gidget. 

But it sure was fun reading RC Shaw’s (class of 2017) Louisburg or Bust: A Surfer’s Wild Ride Down Nova Scotia’s Drowned Coast (Pottersfield Press, 2018) and imagining myself out there on the waves. I didn’t even know you could surf in Nova Scotia. My mental images of surfing are in places like California and Hawaii and Australia, where the waves get big, man. 

But apparently there’s some great surfing in Canada’s Atlantic provinces. Shaw tells us all about it in his memoir/travelogue of a trip he took for no explicable reason from his comfortable home in Cow Bay (where he lives with his wife and two little girls) up the Nova Scotia’s Eastern Shore to Fort Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. He does the trip on a rickety bike towing a trailer—he calls it The Rig—carrying his camping supplies, many cans of Hungry Man Stew, a copy of Don Quixote, and his surfboard, Old Yeller. 

And it is an adventure. An adventure during which he rides up way too many hills, meets an awful lot of the type of people who make Nova Scotia what it is, camps in some out-of-the-way and perpetually damp places, has many encounters with the Fog Monster, and does it with the kind of humour that leaves me imagining him standing by a campfire on a beach, in his trunks and hoodie (the uniform of the Nova Scotia surfer), sucking back a beer while telling stories and laughing. 

Back at Camp Sog, I perked up with a fresh coffee and another can of beans. The sandpiper who attacked me earlier had gathered his crew and they were going ballistic in a stand of sea grass across from the tent. They paced on stilted legs, hitting me with sharp and insistent peeps. I must have camped near their nest. The Nova Scotia Bird Society would hate me. 

“Sorry, guys,” I said. “Really, I am. I’m not here to bother you. I’ll be gone in a bit.”

More aggressive peeps — they sensed my submissiveness.

Or how about this for a picturesque description:

By the time I reached St. Peter’s, a bustling town on a bay with the same name, I was in code red bathroom mode. I scanned the storefronts for eating establishments and nearly crashed when I spotted the word CAFÉ painted on glass. Through gritted teeth and clenched muscles, I unceremoniously tipped The Rig against a brick wall and dashed for the door. It took every last ounce of strength to politely request a table — it was a sit-down, lacy tablecloth kind of café — and not sprint for the bathroom. I just made it. When I emerged into the rosy light of the warm dining room, the world had taken back its beauty.

This is a really fun book—yet another one I probably wouldn’t have picked up but for this project I’ve taken on, but I’m so glad I did. It’s quite likely I never will learn to surf—or maybe I will. Who knows? I might make it out to the West Coast of Vancouver Island for a women-only surfing school. But even if I don’t, it was fun remembering my days of dancing to the Beach Boys in my room—lights off, door open—and pretending I was Gidget. 

Here’s another travelogue:

How to Clean a Fish: And Other Adventures in Portugal, by Esmeralda Cabral.

Here’s a book about making the world come to you:

The Heart of Homestay: Creating Meaningful Connections When Hosting International Students, by Jennifer Robin Wilson.

And here’s a completely different way to look at the world:

The Worst Songs in the World: The Terrible Truth about National Anthems, by David Pate.

Changing Our Tunes: A Critical (but Amusing) Look at National Anthems

/ Lynne Melcombe / 1 Comment

We all know them, but how often do we think about them: the lyrics to our national anthem? In The Worst Songs in the World: The Terrible Truth about National Anthems (Dundurn Press, 2024), author David Pate (class of 2023) looks at anthems around the world from every imaginable angle and comes up with a terrible truth: they’re violent, racist, sexist, war-mongering tunes that do far more to divide people than unite them. 

Cover of the book 'The Worst Songs in the World: The Terrible Truth About National Anthems' by David Pate, featuring a blue background with a trumpet and a flag graphic.

But do we think about that as we stand at attention and spew forth words we learned as children and have sung for years without question? In some cases, maybe; in others, not at all.

Think about the Canadian national anthem: “O Canada, our home and native land/True patriot love, in all thy sons’ command …” Or, as some have suggested: “O Canada, our home on native land/True patriot love, in all of us command …” Then there’s the most recent controversy, brought about by US President Donald Trump’s threats to Canadian sovereignty, which prompted chanteuse Chantal Kreviazuk at a recent hockey game to tweak the same words to “True patriot love that only us command.“

And what about “God save our land”? I’m an atheist, as are a growing number of Canadians; why would I beseech god to save our land? Besides, as one of the most multi-ethnic, multi-faith countries in the world, even for those who believe in one or more gods, which of those many gods should we, as a collective, appeal to?

Of course, I’d had some of these thoughts long before I read Pate’s thoroughly researched and often humorously written tome, but he’s covered the topic in far more detail than I imagined possible, reporting things like: 

  • Most anthems have many more verses than are typically sung at public events because if they were, the anthem could go on for too long—in the case of Greece’s anthem, at 158 stanzas, nearly an hour. 
  • The lyrics to some anthems were abandoned after a significant change in power or politics, such as the death of Franco in Spain; other nations with wordless anthems are Kosovo and Bosnia, both due to divisive civil wars, and the tiny nation of San Marino—who knows why? 
  • That copyright on national anthems has become a serious legal issue in countries as diverse and widespread as Kenya, Uganda, Barbados, and South Korea; 
  • That some national anthems, such as the Republic of Ireland’s, started as songs for outlawed rebel movements but now demand that people stand at attention for them, even though they refer to violently defeating a head of state who may be alive and present when the song is being performed.

Yet for all the contradictions and concerns with national anthems, the question of how to address the issues anthems raise is fraught with challenges. As Pate explains in a chapter called “A Kinder, Gentler Way”: 

When you remove all the anthems that feature religion or violence or both, you’re left with fewer than forty songs. Take out the ones that are sexist (by honouring only sons and fathers) or describe their country as a Fatherland or Motherland, and you are down to a handful of anthems that are non-violent, non-sectarian, and non-sexist. Out of the 193 full UN members, just thirteen have anthems that meet that criteria. And three of them have no lyrics. 

Think about that. Only ten countries in the world have national anthems that meet the kind of basic criteria that we’d expect from an elementary school play. And even some of those are problematic.

But is anyone doing anything about the issues? Apparently, the Swiss tried to by staging a national competition beginning in 2013. By 2015, they came up with a winner that satisfied all the parameters—a song the Swiss government promptly put in a drawer, where it has remained ever since. 

Do we need national anthems? Such things didn’t even exist until relatively recently—Saturday September 28, 1745 to be precise, as one of many interesting stories in the book explains—although something like the Maori Haka could be seen as akin to a national anthem. 

For a subject I’d never given much thought to over the years, the question of national anthems is full of issues. And David Pate, who unfortunately and unexpectedly passed away before Worst Songs was published, has raised them in ways that are far more entertaining than any national anthem I’ve ever heard—except for Jimi Hendrix’s version of Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock.

Now that was an entertaining version of a national anthem!

Other interesting perspectives on global history and culture:

The Heart of Homestay: Creating Meaningful Connections When Hosting International Students, by Jennifer Robin Wilson.

Press Enter to Continue: Scribes from Babylon to Silicon, by Joan Francuz.

Finding Success with YA Fiction After the MFA in Creative Nonfiction

/ Lynne Melcombe / 1 Comment

I don’t usually review fiction in this space, but this week I’m making an exception. 

Cover of the book 'Secrets of the Hotel Maisonneuve' by Richard Levangie, featuring stylized flowers and an ornate staircase.

The University of King’s College Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Nonfiction has, to date, produced more than 50 published authors of creative nonfiction, most of which are listed here. Assuming each cohort comprises about 20 talented and experienced writers, as did the inaugural class of which I was a very lucky member, that means about a quarter of us have had the good fortune to hold a copy of our published work in our hands—an amazing success rate. 

Sadly, that means three-quarters of us are either still searching for a publisher (read excerpts of my as-yet-unpublished manuscript here) or, alas, have moved on. But moving on often leads to other successes. Starlit Simon, a member of the inaugural class, is working on her PhD as well as perfecting the traditional Indigenous craft of porcupine quill art. Moira Dann (class of 2016), whose MFA project about the mothers of confederation sounded fascinating to me, went on the publish Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures (which I’ll write about for BC Day in August) and more recently Fat Camp Summer: Advice I Would Have Given My Parents. And Richard Levangie, another member of the inaugural cohort (class of 2015), went on to write the excellent middle-grade YA novel, Secrets of the Hotel Maisonneuve (Nevermore Press, 2020). 

Hotel Maisonneuve focuses on 13-year-old Jacob Jollimore, who is having the worst summer of his life. Then he finds a 100-year-old letter hidden in a bureau in the Edwardian hotel his parents are renovating, which sends him on a treasure hunt that would challenge even the great Sherlock Holmes. It’s a great plot, and I have no idea how Richard thought up the incredible puzzle clues.

But that’s not all that makes it a worthwhile read. Richard’s writing, replete with references to books like Lord of the Rings, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and The King of Attolia, is also full of clever imagery, like “the minutes dripped by like a leaky faucet,” “paint stripper oozing from his pores,” and “[her] bruises were as purple as pansies.” The book even includes a haiku:

Jacob was so intent that he forgot where he was. An ancient woman crashed into his cart with almost-lethal force, but she didn’t apologize. No wonder everything was so heavily dented. Jacob decided to pay closer attention before someone sent him flying into the. Mangoes where he’d die a quick but horrible death, buried under hundreds of pounds of hard green fruit. 

Maybe that would be his epitaph. He composed a haiku.

Here rests the fool who

Could not solve hard puzzles

Crushed by rock-like fruit.

Not bad, but it needed work. 

One of the things I admire most about Richard is his ability to move on, not just from the creative nonfiction project he worked on for his MFA, but in life. As he writes about himself:

If I couldn’t be a hockey player in the NHL, I wanted to be a doctor. But when I was studying to be a doctor, I realized that what I really wanted to do was tell stories. As a journalist, it started with artists and artisans, and with food and wine, but then real life intervened in the form of a rare brain tumour that knocked me flat. For nearly two decades, I wrote nothing worthy.

When an unexpected respite from the pain took hold in 2012, two novels sprang into my head, waiting for me to write them. I cherished this rare gift, for it felt like Divine Intervention into a life that had forgotten what it was like be alive. I believe that the stories we tell offer us a chance to truly understand ourselves, and come to understand each other. It is a sacred gift, and I feel blessed. 

Not surprisingly, Richard recently inked a deal for his second novel, this time an adult fantasy called Red Tiger. Read an excerpt on his website. I have no doubt it will do well.

Other books to come from grads of the class of 2015:

Run, Hide, Repeat: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood, by Pauline Dakin.  

Just Jen: Thriving Through Multiple Sclerosis, by Jen Powley.

Fifteen Thousand Pieces: A Medical Examiner’s Journey Through Disaster, by Gina Leola Woolsey.

The Girl in the Woods, by Stacey May Fowles.*

(*This book was published, but it appears to have been pulled from sale.)

And coming soon:

No Such Thing: A True Story of “mild” Traumatic Brain Injury and My Twenty-Year (so far) Recovery, by Lynne Melcombe.

Highway of Tears: A Story of Indigenous Women’s Tragedy

/ Lynne Melcombe / 5 Comments

Saturday June 21 is National Indigenous Peoples Day in Canada. Although there are other days dedicated to Truth and Reconciliation and Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, I can’t let June 21 go by without reflecting on the tragedy of our lost women. I live in Port Coquitlam, BC, where notorious serial killer Robert Pickton was born, raised, and spent several years murdering at least 49 women. Many or most were Indigenous sex workers, their murders undetected by RCMP until they stumbled on a grisly scene when executing a search warrant for illegal firearms on the Pickton family’s pig farm. 

Book cover of 'Highway of Tears' by Jessica McDiarmid, featuring Indigenous art elements and detailing the pursuit of justice for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.

All women are subject to violence, largely at the hands of men. While feminism has been bringing attention to the scourge for decades, few inroads have been made into the reality that Indigenous women are three times as likely to be subject to gender-based violence and six times more likely to be murdered than their non-Indigenous sisters. So when I saw that Canadian journalist Jessica McDiarmid (class of 2016) had published Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (Penguin Random House, 2019), I bought and read it almost immediately.

“The Highway of Tears is a 725-kilometre stretch of highway in British Columbia,” McDiarmid writes, running approximately from Prince George to Prince Rupert. “And it is a microcosm of a national tragedy—and travesty.” 

She continues: 

I was ten years old the first time I saw Ramona Wilson. A photo of her, smiling, black hair cloaking her left shoulder, was printed on sheets of eight-by-eleven paper and hung up around Smithers, the B.C. town where we both grew up. Over the picture was a banner that read: MISSING. Under it was a description: 16 years old, native, 5 foot 1, 120 pounds, last seen June 11, 1994. The posters plastered telephone poles and gas station doors and grocery story bulletin boards throughout town and the surrounding areas for months. But in April the following year, the posters were taken down. She was gone. 

I would learn later that Ramona wasn’t the only First Nations girl or young woman to vanish from the area … There wasn’t a great fuss about these missing and murdered girls. “Just another native” is how mothers and sisters and aunties describe the pervasive attitude. Police officers gave terrified, grieving families the distinct impression that they didn’t care and didn’t try very hard. Nor did the public rally to the cause in large numbers …

I left northwestern British Columbia in my late teens and never planned to return, aside from the odd week or two to visit family. I reported from across the country and overseas, focusing when I could on human rights abuses and social injustice … Over those years, I watched as women and girls in northwestern B.C. continued to disappear —Nicole Hoar, Tamara Chipman, Aielah Saric-Auger, Bonnie Joseph, Mackie Basil—and long felt that I needed to come home to this story. The first time I spoke with local family members … was in 2009. But it wasn’t for another seven years that circumstances aligned and I returned home to research and write this book. 

In June of 2016, not long after I arrived back in Smithers, I had the honour of walking the Highway of Tears with Brenda Wilson, Ramona’s sister; Angeline Chalifoux, the auntie of fourteen-year-old Aielah Saric-Auger; and Val Bolton, Brenda’s dear friend, along with dozens of family members and supporters who joined them for part of the way. … [We arrived in Prince George on] June 21, National Aboriginal Day, and hundreds of people had turned out … Angeline told Aielah’s story, and then she read to the crowd her favourite quote, from Martin Luther King Jr. “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it,” she read out. “He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” 

This is a thoroughly researched, beautifully written, and compassionate book. It was a finalist for the RBC Taylor Prize and the Hubert Evans Prize and a national bestseller. I encourage you to read it.

Post Script: There is also a Highway of Tears documentary (2015), a documentary called The Pig Farm (2011) about the Pickton murders, and a true crime documentary series called Sasha Reid and The Midnight Order (2024), which focuses in part on the so-called Butcher of Port Coquitlam. 

Other not-so-great moments in Canadian history:

Murder on the Inside: The True Story of the Deadly Riot at Kingston Penitentiary, by Catherine Fogarty.

Acadian Driftwood: One Family and the Great Expulsion, by Tyler LeBlanc.

Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboys, by Jenn Thornhill Verma.

Fifteen Thousand Pieces: A Medical Examiner’s Journey Through Disaster, by Gina Leola Woolsey.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31240893

Resilience and Chocolate: A Refugee Family’s Remarkable Journey

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments

I’m finding it hard to live in the world at this moment in history. Over and above the daily headlines about Gaza and Ukraine, there is a major violent humanitarian crisis in Sudan, which has been largely overshadowed by the focus on the former two. In fact, the website for the Geneva Academy tells us that there are currently over 100 armed conflicts raging across the globe. None of these affect me personally, and yet in a way all of them do. Edited to add: And now, Israel has started a war with Iran.

Cover of 'Peace by Chocolate' book featuring the Hadhad family on a beach, with text highlighting their journey from Syria to Canada.

So, you can imagine how I felt reading Jon Tattrie’s Peace by Chocolate: The Hadhad Family’s Remarkable Journey from Syria to Canada (Goose Lane Editions, 2020), perhaps the most uplifting book I’ve read in—well, maybe ever.

Okay, Anne of Green Gables, but that’s fiction. 

Peace by Chocolate is the story of a large family that had a successful, internationally renowned chocolate business in Damascus, a business the father had created from scratch as a young man. This business was the reason he met his beloved wife, which led to the births of seven children. It was the reason his family home, a single-story building when his own father was young, grew into a 10-storey home for much of his extended family. It’s a story of success and love and plenty …

… until the Assad regime responded to the arrival of the Arab Spring in Syria by turning on its own people, killing hundreds of thousands and turning hundreds of thousands more into refugees. The Hadhad family survived, but their beloved family home and their chocolate business did not. 

After three years of languishing as refugees in Lebanon, the Canadian government finally chooses the eldest son, Tareq, to come to Canada. Meanwhile, a group of people in Nova Scotia have come together to welcome at least one family, to save at least one person, from this horrible conflict by bringing them to Canada and helping them settle in the small town of Antigonish. 

When Tareq arrives at Halifax airport on a snowy night just before Christmas, to his surprise, he is greeted by dozens of people who have been making calls and filling out paperwork and fundraising for a couple of years. Tareq’s arrival is the first of the fruits of their labour. 

What follows—the way things come together, the barriers that fall away, the pieces that fall into place—is nothing short of remarkable. Within months, he is joined by most of his family. His father begins making chocolate in the kitchen of their new home and selling it at a winter fair. The chocolate business outgrows the kitchen, and then the basement, and then a shed. Within less than a year, the Hadhads open a factory in the small town that’s welcomed them—and several other Syrian families—and Peace by Chocolate, the company, becomes a major local employer. 

The farther their remarkable story spreads, the more remarkable it becomes, leading to international speaking engagements, meetings with heads of state—and a request by CBC journalist and author Jon Tattrie to write a book about them. As Tattrie writes of his first meeting with Tareq in the Author’s Note:

I’d been watching Tareq Hadhad for almost two years. I knew the names of his mother, father, sisters, and brother. I knew of his dreams to be a doctor. I knew of his family’s passion for chocolate. I knew they’d lost everything in the Syrian war and rebuilt it in Canada. But I didn’t know how. How had they turned from refugees into pillars of the community so quickly?

And I didn’t know how small-town Canada had truly reacted to a Middle Eastern Muslim family dropping out of the clear sky to take up residence. My previous books had documented the intense and often violent racism minorities face in Nova Scotia. Eddie Carvery was a young black man in the 1960s when Halifax bulldozed Africville, his family home for generations. He moved into the ruins in 1970 to plant his body as a living protest for justice. He was still there forty years later when I asked him if I could tell his story. And I’d written about the notorious Edward Cornwallis, the British soldier who founded Halifax and tried to exterminate the Mi’kmaq First Nation. I’d written about Daniel Paul, the Mi’kmaw elder who campaigned for decades to get the city to take down its Cornwallis statue.

Would I find the same grime under the shiny story I’d been reading about the Hadhad family and Peace by Chocolate?

The answer is no. But to find out more you’ll have to read Peace by Chocolate, which quickly became a national bestseller and was later made into a multi-award winning motion picture. Whichever way you choose to find out more about this story, I caution you to do so with a box of tissues at hand. I’m getting misty again just writing this.

Other books about food:

How to Clean a Fish: And Other Adventures in Portugal, by Esmeralda Cabral.

The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Forest, by Helena Moncrieff.

How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty, by Bonny Reichert.

Connecting Communities Through Urban Fruit Gathering

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments

One of the sweetest memories I have from my childhood is my mom making preserves and canning or freezing fruit. My favourite was her strawberry jam. One June day my dad would take us all out to a pick-your-own place. Our parents paid us by the basket we picked. We always ended up eating almost as much as we put in the basket. 

Cover of 'The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest' by Helena Moncrieff featuring colorful leaf illustrations and a floral design.

Then we’d go home and help my mom sort through the berries: the firmest went into the freezer and the mushy ones into the jam pot, often with rhubarb picked fresh from our garden. She’d always make bread the same day so we could feast on warm strawberry jam on oven-fresh bread. 

I remembered those days fondly while reading Helena Moncrieff’s The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest (ECW Press, 2018). At its heart, it’s a book about making good use of the thousands of fruit trees in any city that bear fruit, only to rot on the ground while people are going hungry. It’s about connecting property owners willing to share the fruit, volunteers willing to pick it, and neighbours in need. It’s about reducing food waste, connecting people to their environment, and rebuilding the food literacy we’ve lost over the last few generations.

The Fruitful City explores the concept of fruit gathering and sharing in many more dimensions than I imagined were connected, in the process sharing a wide range of fascinating facts. Here are some of the interesting things I learned from this book:

  • “Tree Climbers International [who knew?] touts the benefits of being up a tree, including exercise, accessibility and a full sensory experience with hands on bark and the sound of the wind whistling through leaves. Japan is home to a tree-climbing school and has led the way in using trees for therapy.”
  • Neuroscientists have used functional MRI to show how acts of giving, such as volunteering for an organization that picks fruit and donates it to those in need, activate the brain’s mesolimbic reward system—the same system engaged in feeling good from monetary gain.
  • The Canada Food Guide was developed during WWII to combat nutritional deficiency during rationing. But since that war ended, food illiteracy has grown steadily with the advent of convenience foods that mean we no longer need to know how to grow anything, or how to tell what’s poisonous from what’s safe. 

Like Andrew Reeves’ Overrun, Laura Pratt’s Heartbroken, Lezlie Lowe’s No Place to Go, and Sue Harper’s Winter in the City of Light, among many others, The Fruitful City is thoroughly researched; I learned a lot and for me that’s one of the biggest pleasures of reading. And Moncrieff’s writing is always high quality and, well, clever. Consider this:

Bohemian waxwings are said to get drunk on winter berries. Whitehorse residents have rescued the wobbly birds from wonky flight paths and window crashes, incarcerating them in hamster-cage drunk tanks until they sober up. … In a freeze-and-thaw cycle through the fall, the fruit ferments. The little creatures either can’t tell the difference or they like the experience.

Who wouldn’t love that image? Not to mention the recipes at the end of every chapter.

Full disclosure: Helena Moncrieff is the partner of one of my dearest friends from the class of 2015, Havard Gould. But that in no way influenced how much I enjoyed this book, not least because of the memories it evoked of my mother’s many varieties of jam or the canned peaches that came from the tree in our backyard or the strawberry-rhubarb crisp that she served up warm with ice cream after a summertime dinner.  

My mouth is watering with the memories. 

Read my reviews of other books from the prolific class of 2016:

One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable—a Mother’s Memoir, by S. Lesley Buxton.

Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures, by Moira Dann.

Press Enter to Continue: Scribes from Babylon to Silicon, by Joan Francuz.

A Cure for Heartache: Life’s Simple Pleasures, One Moment at a Time, by Mary Jane Grant. Review coming soon. 

Sit Still and Prosper: How a Former Money Manager Discovered the Path to Investing with Greater Clarity, Calmness, and Confidence by Stephanie Griffiths. Review coming soon. 

Winter in the City of Light: A Search for Self in Retirement, by Sue Harper.

Nowhere to Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs, by Lezlie Lowe.

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, by Jessica McDiarmid.

F-Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism, by Lauren McKeon.

A Distorted Revolution: How Eric’s Trip Changed Music, Moncton and Me, by Jason Murray. Review coming soon. 

Conspiracy of Hope: The Truth about Breast Cancer Screening, by Renee Pellerin. 

Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis, by Andrew Reeves.

The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons, by Suzanne Stewart.

Chasing Smoke: A Memoir of Firefighting in British Columbia’s Interior

/ Lynne Melcombe / 3 Comments

Long ago, in a previous life, I worked in archaeology. One summer in Hat Creek Valley, 26 kilometres beyond Cache Creek, BC, our 26-person crew was dawdling over breakfast when local ranchers drove by to notify us that a few small fires had broken out at the north end of the valley. Would we help put them out?

Book cover of 'Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir' by Aaron Williams, featuring a forest scene with smoke and an orange sky.

We put down our breakfast dishes, piled into our trucks, and sped off (like the heroes we thought we were) to spend the morning digging small fireguards and throwing dirt on flames that kept cropping up here and there. It was hot, hard work for a bunch of university students who spent most of our time sitting on stools in one-metre-square holes in the ground excavating millimetres at a time with trowels and paint brushes. 

I was thinking about that as I was reading Aaron Williams’s Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir (Harbour Publishing, 2017), which tells of his firefighting experience during the summer of 2014 (he’d been firefighting since 2006). Of course, there’s no comparing my miniscule experience with his, yet I can’t help thinking that the memory of how easily a single spark can jump 20 metres, or a small flame can travel underground along a tree root and pop up 10 metres away gives me a tiny bit of perspective on what real forest-firefighters are up against. 

Chasing Smoke provides insight into how firefighting works, why forest fires have been getting worse with climate change, and what the whole experience of firefighting is like, from a brutal training camp in May to sheer exhaustion in August. The author’s descriptions of fire are intensely visual:

A thunderstorm approaches. Little pockets of fire, previously resting in the moss, are brought to life by the strong winds preceding the downpour. The flames look tenacious under the dark clouds. I stand and watch a pocket of heat thrash around as it starts spitting rain. The flames, billowing and wide on the forest floor, find a spruce tree. One more kill before they lose the battle to the rain. 

The fire grabs on to the spruce and its lower limbs being to sizzle. Flames climb the tree and when they reach the top they balloon out, feasting on the fat clump of recent growth crowding the tree’s peak. The fire burns slow up there and the rest of the tree cools down and fades to a less intense orange. But the top still burns bright, the colour of a street light against the storm.

Many moments in this memoir are reminders that this work is decidedly dangerous:

Trees start coming down like I’ve never seen before. They’re limbless save for their very tops, where wind catches the foliage and pushes the tree over. … 

At first I’m calm as the trees fall. But suddenly a mess of wood, bent horizontal and cribbed into the trees above us, comes down in a rush of a hundred machine-gun snaps. Trees caught in the nest flail around before hitting the ground. Our eyes dart everywhere, trying to keep track of every moment. Trees break free and swing themselves like catapults. Splintered chunks of wood slash through the air like propellers. Tabes and I look in opposite directions, standing guard for each other. We don’t dare move, as that would take our complete focus from the storm of debris. 

As soon as it’s over I turn to Tabes. “Fuck this, let’s get out of here.” 

For all its intensity, though, Chasing Smoke is also an entertaining read. Williams has a sardonic sense of humour and laughs at himself and his crew at least once every few pages:

Dan holds the after-work meeting while we grill the steaks. The crew is paying more attention to us than to Dan’s end-of-day spiel. The pressure of getting the meat right is immense. Is it too rare? Or the ultimate shame—is it too cooked? It turns out fine, and Tabe and I share a moment when it’s all done. A stern nod to each other acknowledges that our integrity as men has never been stronger.

This was one of the first books I read when I decided to pursue this project of working my way through and reviewing all the books published by alumni of University of King’s College’s MFA program in Creative Nonfiction Writing. And it’s a great example of why I keep coming back for more. 

Books on different types of disasters:

On Borrowed Time: North America’s Next Big Quake, by Gregor Craigie.

Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis, by Andrew Reeves.

Fifteen Thousand Pieces: A Medical Examiner’s Journey Through Disaster, by Gina Leola Woolsey.