Food

MFA Alumni Book Highlights: From 50 to 80 Publications

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

It’s been a while since I posted a rundown of books published by grads of the MFA in CNF program, and in that time the number has jumped from 50 to about 70—or 71, because I just added my own book to the list below.

I actually think the number is higher than that, maybe as high as 80, but I’m not sure everyone’s books are listed here. (I took this list from the UKing’s website.)

If your book(s)—either the one you started for your master’s degree or any you’ve published since then—aren’t listed here, please let me know and I will update the list.

(It’s great to see how many of us have gone on to write more books after that first one.)

Tamara Baluja (class of 2024) Nav Bhatia: The Heart of a Superfan, Penguin Random House Canada, 2024. Review to come. 

Niko Bell (class of 2023) Risk, Freedom, and the Future of Safe Sex, ECW Press, TBA.

Sheima Benembarek (class of 2020) Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Women in North America, Penguin Random House Canada, 2023.

Gloria Blizzard (class of 2021) Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas, Dundurn Press, 2024.

Alec Bruce (class of 2022) The Cooperators: The People Behind the Rebirth of a Nova Scotia Movement, Pottersfield Press, 2024.

S. Lesley Buxton (class of 2016) One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable—A Mother’s Memoir, Pottersfield Press, 2018.

Esmeralda Cabral (class of 2019) How to Clean a Fish and Other Adventures in Portugal, University of Alberta Press, 2023.

Michaela Cavanaugh (class of 2024) Present Tense: How We Reckon with the End of the World, McClelland & Stewart (Canada) and The New Press (US), 2027.

Marilyn Carr (class of 2020) Nowhere Like This Place: Tales from a Nuclear Childhood, Iguana Books, 2020. Review to come. 
How I Invented the Internet, Iguana Books, 2022.

Gregor Craigie (class of 2019) On Borrowed Time: Shaking Complacency in North America’s Seismic Zones, Goose Lane Editions, 2021.
Why Humans Build Up: The Rise of Towers, Temples, and Skyscrapers, Orca Publishing, 2022.
Radio Jet Lag, Cormorant Books, 2023.
Our Crumbling Foundation: How We Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis, Penguin Random House, 2024.

Pauline Dakin (class of 2015) Run, Hide, Repeat: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood, Penguin Random House, 2017.

Moira Dann (class of 2016) Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures, Touchstone Editions, 2021.
Fat Camp Summer: Advice I Would Have Given My Parents, Sutherland House Books, 2025.

Deborah Dundas (class of 2023) On Class, Biblioasis, 2022.

Marsha Faubert (class of 2018) Wanda’s War: An Untold Story of Nazi Europe, Forced Labour, and a Canadian Immigration Scandal, Goose Lane Editions, 2023.

Amy Fish (class of 2023), One in Six Million: The Baby by the Roadside and the Man Who Retraced a Holocaust Survivor’s Lost Identity, Goose Lane Editions, 2025.

Catherine Fogarty (class of 2018) Murder on the Inside: The True Story of the Deadly Riot at Kingston Penitentiary, Biblioasis, 2021.
Someone You Know: An Unforgettable Collection of Canadian True Crime, HarperCollins, 2023.

Stacey May Fowles (class of 2015) The Girl in the Woods, McLelland and Stewart, 2018.
Baseball Life Advice: Loving the Game that Saved Me, Penguin Random House, 2017. 
Whatever Gets You Through: Twelve Survivors on Life After Sexual Assault, Greystone Books, 2019.
Good Mom on Paper: Writers on Creativity and Motherhood, Book*hug Press, 2022.

Joan Francuz (class of 2016) Press Enter to Continue: Scribes from Babylon to Silicon, 1920 House Press, 2018.

Kim Fraser (class of 2021) The Accidental Caregiver: Challenges and Triumphs of Intimate Family Caregivers, Sutherland House, 2022. Review to come. 

Maryanna Gabriel (class of 2022), On Earth as It Is: Walking the Camino, Pottersfield Press, 2023.

MJ Grant (class of 2016) A Cure for Heartache: Life’s Simple Pleasures, One Moment at a Time, Hodder, 2019.

Stephanie Griffiths (class of 2016) Sit Still and Prosper: How a Former Money Manager Discovered the Path to Investing with Greater Clarity, Calmness, and Confidence, Bird in the Sky Press, 2018. Review to come. 

Sue Harper (class of 2016), Winter in the City of Light: A Search for Self in Retirement, Amazon, 2019.

Suzanne Elki Yoko Hartmann (class of 2021) The Nail That Sticks Out: Reflections on the Postwar Japanese Canadian Community, Dundurn, 2024.

Virginia Heffernan (class of 2021) Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness, ECW Press, 2023.

Taslim Jaffer (class of 2022) with Omar Mouallem, Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity, and Home, Book*hug Press, 2024. Review to come. 

Kirk Angus Johnson (class of 2019) Some Kind of Hero: Love, Death, and Trauma in a Nova Scotia Town, Penguin Random House, TBA.

Kevin Kelloway (class of 2019) The Performance Equation, University of Toronto Press, TBA.

Kim Kierans (class of 2025) Journalism for the Public Good: The Michener Awards at Fifty, Bighorn Books, 2024. Review to come. 

Gwen Lamont (class of 2019) The View from Coffin Ridge: A Childhood Exhumed, Ginger Press, 2024.

Nellwyn Lampert (class of 2017) Every Boy I Ever Kissed: A Memoir, Dundurn Press, 2019.

Nellwyn Lampert with Pamela Oakley, Christian Smith, and Gillian Turnbull, eds., Bad Artist: Creating in a Productivity-Obsessed World, Touchwood, 2024.

Tyler LeBlanc (class of 2018) Acadian Driftwood: One Family and the Great Expulsion, Goose Lane Editions, 2020.

An artist's rendering of a river, mountains and trees in shades of grey, brown , and red, with the book title and author's name.

Lezlie Lowe (class of 2016) Nowhere to Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs, Coach House Books, 2018.
The Volunteers: How Halifax Women Won the Second World War, Nimbus Publishing, 2022.

James MacDuff (class of 2024) with Mirriam Mweemba, The Illogical Adventure: A Memoir of Love and Fate, Pottersfield, 2025. Review to come.

Susan MacLeod (class of 2018) Dying for Attention: A Graphic Memoir about Nursing Home Care, Conundrum Press, 2021.

Leslie Marion (class of 2018) Easy Money: A Bankspeak Primer for Small Business, 4th Floor Press, 2020. Review to come. 

Jessica McDiarmid (class of 2016) 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, 2020.

Lori McKay (class of 2020) Searching for Mayflowers: The True Story of Canada’s First Quintuplets, Nimbus Publishing, 2024. Review to come. 

Lauren McKeon (class of 2016) F-Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism, Goose Lane Editions, 2017.
No More Nice Girls: Gender, Power, and Why It’s Time to Stop Playing by the Rules, House of Anansi, 2020.
Women of the Pandemic: Stories from the Frontlines of COVID-19, Penguin Random House, 2021.

Lynne Melcombe (class of 2015) No Such Thing: A True Story of “Mild” Traumatic Brain Injury and My Twenty-Year (so far) Recovery, Iguana Books, 2026. 

Helena Moncrieff (class of 2016) The Fruitful City: Building Communities Around Nature’s Bounty, ECW Press, 2018.

Chris Moore (class of 2024) The Power of Guilt: Why We Feel It and Its Surprising Ability to Heal, HarperCollins (Canada), BenBella (US), August Books (UK), 2025.

Philip Moscovitch (class of 2019) Adventures in Bubbles and Brine: What I Learned from Nova Scotia’s Masters of Fermented Foods—Craft Beer, Cider, Cheese, Sauerkraut and More, Formac Publishing, 2019. Review to come. 

Jason Murray (class of 2016) A Distorted Revolution: How Eric’s Trip Changed Music, Moncton and Me, Nimbus Publishing, 2017. Review to come. 

Jesse O’Reilly-Conlin (class of 2019) Visiting Africa: A Memoir, Demeter Press, 2021. Go: A Memoir of Movement, Iguana Books, 2023. 

Robin Pacific (class of 2021) Skater Girl: An Archaeology of the Self, Guernica Editions, 2024. Review to come. 

A microphone and cords on a white tabletop.

David Pate (class of 2023) The Worst Songs in the World: The Terrible Truth about National Anthems, Dundurn Press, 2024.

Renée Pellerin (class of 2016) Conspiracy of Hope: The Truth About Breast Cancer Screening, Goose Lane Editions, 2018.

Jen Powley (class of 2015) Just Jen: Thriving Through Multiple Sclerosis, Fernwood Publishing, 2017.
Making a Home: Assisted Living in the Community for Young Disabled People, Fernwood Publishing, 2023.

Laura Pratt (class of 2020) Heartbroken: Field Notes on a Constant Condition, Random House Canada, 2023.

Adelle Purdham (class of 2022) I Don’t Do Disability and Other Lies I’ve Told Myself, Dundurn Press, 2024.

Andrew Reeves (class of 2016) Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis, ECW Press, 2019.

Bonny Reichert (class of 2022) How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love and Plenty, Appetite/Penguin Random House (Canada), and Ballantine/Random House (US), 2024.

Dylan Reid (class of 2021) Messy Cities: Why We Can’t Plan Everything, Coach House Books, 2025. Review to come. 

Jo-Ann Roberts (class of 2023) Storm the Ballot Box: An Insider’s Guide to a Voting Revolution, Nimbus Publishing, 2025.

Jason Schreurs (class of 2022) Scream Therapy: A Punk Journey through Mental Health, Flex Your Head Press, 2023.

RC Shaw (class of 2017) Louisbourg or Bust: A Surfer’s Wild Ride Down Nova Scotia’s Drowned Coast, Pottersfield Press, 2018.
Captain Solitude: One Surfer’s Search for the World’s Greatest Sailor, Goose Lane Editions, 2024.

Sharron J. Simpson (class of 2021) The Kelowna Story: An Okanagan History, 2nd Edition, Harbour Publishing, 2025.

Christian Smith (class of 2017) The Scientist and the Psychic: A Son’s Exploration of His Mother’s Gift, Random House, 2021.

Suzanne Stewart (class of 2016) The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons, Pottersfield Press, 2018.

Karen Stiller (class of 2018) The Minister’s Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Doubt, Loneliness, Forgiveness and More, Tynedale House, 2019.
Holiness Here: Searching for God in the Ordinary Events of Everyday Life, NavPress, 2024.

William Sullivan (class of 2017) The City and the Smelter: How Against All Odds Did It Happen, First Choice Books, 2023. Review to come. 

Jon Tattrie (class of 2020) Peace by Chocolate: The Hadhad Family’s Remarkable Journey from Syria to Canada, Goose Lane Editions, 2020.

Gillian Turnbull (class of 2017) Sonic Booms: Making Music in an Oil Town, Eternal Cavalier Press, 2019. Review to come.

Jennifer Thornhill Verma (class of 2019) Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboy, Nimbus Publishing, 2019.

Aaron Williams (class of 2017) Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir, Harbour Publishing, 2017.
The Last Logging Show: A Forestry Family at the End of an Era, Harbour Publishing, 2024.

Jennifer Robin Wilson (class of 2025) The Heart of Homestay: Creating Meaningful Connections When Hosting International Students, Page Two Books, 2025.

Gina Leola Woolsey (class of 2015) Fifteen Thousand Pieces: A Medical Examiner’s Journey through Disaster, Guernica Editions, 2023.

Remember, if you’re an MFA in CNF grad and you have a CNF book that’s not shown here, let me know and I’ll update this list in a future post.

Must-Read Nonfiction Books for Labour Day

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

It’s Labour Day, a stat holiday for most of us, but one that few of us ever ponder the meaning of. As its name suggests, Labour Day originated as a day to honour the hard work and rights of society’s ordinary workers. This Labour Day, I thought I’d take a thematic look at books produced through the labour MFA CNF grads that pertain to labour. That said, I’ve taken a broad lens on labour that touches on diverse aspects of the way work, or the lack of it, impacts the lives of ordinary workers and their families.

A close-up of the grey-blue waves of The Atlantic Ocean on the cover of The Cooperators by Alec Bruce.

First up, Alec Bruce’s (class of 2022) The Cooperators: The Rebirth of a Nova Scotia Movement 1949-2024 (Pottersfield Press, 2024). Over the years, I’ve been involved in many cooperatives. I bank at a credit union; driven cooperatively owned cars; bought outdoor sporting goods at Mountain Equipment Co-op; and shopped for natural and organic foods for my family at a cooperatively owned grocery store.

This book honours the role of cooperatives in improving quality of life for everyday people. This is a meticulously researched book that covers the storied history of the cooperative movement in Nova Scotia beginning with its founding father, Father Moses Michael Cody. After a lull during the war years, new advocates emerged to carry the flag of the cooperative movement in Nova Scotia through a period of rebuilding to the success it’s enjoying today. Moreover, this history is interesting for anyone who’s ever used a co-op, even if they don’t live in Nova Scotia. 

In contrast, Deborah Dundas’s (class of 2023) slim volume On Class (Biblioasis 2023) looks less closely at labour than the lack of it. From a deeply personal perspective, she examines impacts of chronic un/der-employment that too many of us are quick to blame on those who are suffering. In most cases, it’s not the fault of individuals but an integral aspect of the free-market theory of capitalism. While many of us decry the injustice that has people living on the street, struggling for food, many fewer of us realize that this actually requires the existence of an economic underclass. In starkly poignant prose, Dundas describes how this theory works out in reality. Her book makes it easy for readers to see that the affluence of a few in our society rides on the backs of a much larger group of people with significantly less wealth. While most of those people are middle class and doing okay, some of them are inevitably doing much less than okay, living in tents, begging for coins at traffic lights, and scrounging food from garbage bins. As I write in my review:

The words Deborah Dundas On Class alongside a photo of worn work boots.

[T]he kind of poverty Dundas describes [is] the kind where you own only two sets of clothes and one of them is always dirty, where you can’t afford shampoo so you wash your hair with dish soap, where it’s not that you hope dinner won’t be hamburger again but that you’ll have dinner. That kind of poverty leaves its imprint well into adult life, when it reminds you over and over that you’re not worthy and you shouldn’t expect much out of life. Only a few, like Dundas, climb out of that deeply entrenched poverty, a climb that’s as much psychological as financial in that it has much less to do with pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps than believing one is just as deserving of boots as anyone else.

The Nordic countries constantly show the rest of the world that there is something better than a system that depends on the misery of a considerable percentage to sustain the financial hoarding disorders of a select few. Dundas captures the unquantifiable impacts of this economic injustice and backs it up with hard, deeply disturbing facts. 

A vividly coloured painting of a red house on the shore of a blue sea teeming with fish, with a fishing boat off shore.

Unemployment is also a theme in Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboys (Nimbus Publishing, 2019) by Jenn Thornhill Verma (class of 2019). Verma braids memoir with history in describing what life was like on “The Rock” for centuries before 1992. That was when the tragic overfishing of cod off Newfoundland’s Grand Banks resulted in a moratorium that put 30,000 cod fishers out of work overnight. Cod fishing had sustained thousands of families for a few centuries before the province’s labourers were plunged into an unprecedented level of poverty. And that’s saying something about a place where the grinding life of work at sea sustained whole families in one-room cabins without plumbing or central heating for many decades.

Yet many people loved that life as much as they love the rugged beauty of their island home, a place where jagged cliffs drop straight down to water so cold it can kill a human in minutes, a place where spring and summer are enlivened by whales spouting, puffins nesting, and icebergs floating by. Grounded in historical research brought to life by vivid, personal memories, Cod Collapse is a powerful read about what happens when the population of an entire island is forced change the way it works and lives overnight.  

A photograph of individual flowers and leaves arrayed against a white background with the title The Times of Time A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons and the author's name, Suzanne Stewart, in a font with a quaint, old-timey feel.

The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons (Pottersfield Press, 2018) by Suzanne Stewart (class of 2016) allows us to finish our review on a more optimistic note. Stewart take an imaginative look at the labour that sustains us—the work of food production. Dividing her book into four parts, one for each season, she focuses each month on the characteristics of that season, like fall colours in October and the heat of summer in July. Then, for each month, she visits and interviews one of the people whose work produces wholesome, natural, delicious food that reaches peak production at that time of year.

A professor of Romantic literature at St. FX, Stewart punctuates her lyric essays with quotes from Keats, Wordsworth (both William and Dorothy), and Thoreau. The result, to me, is a soothing read, a story to take in while curled up in a rocking chair by a fire on a fall evening or sipping an espresso on a patio on a Sunday morning. There is no labour in getting through these chapters, no rush to meet a deadline. The Tides of Time is just a leisurely stroll through the seasons while celebrating the unsung heroes of all our lives, the labourers who literally “give us our daily bread.” And that, after all, is what Labour Day is about.

These books look at labour from many dimensions, helping us understand and appreciate the ordinary people who make our lives possible, and often delightful. Take some time this Labour Day to consider which of these books, or many others, you might read to gain a better appreciation of the labourers we celebrate today, including those authors who have laboured so hard to produce these wonderful and informative examples of creative nonfiction writing.

Best Canadian Reads for Earth Day 2023

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

April 22 is Earth Day. Here are some great books about the environment by Canadian authors to commit to reading.

Cover of 'Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir' by Aaron Williams featuring a wildfire scene with smoke and flames among tall trees against an orange sky.

I live in the Pacific Northwest, where two things are ever-present on people’s minds: how bad the wildfires will be this summer and when the next big earthquake will hit. Although Aaron Williams (class of 2017) wrote Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir (Harbour Publishing, 2017) as a memoir of one summer (of many) on a firefighting crew in the dense forests of British Columbia, it wouldn’t be possible to write such a memoir without touching on the impacts of a warming planet on creating the conditions that are making wildfires worse every year (2023 was Canada’s worst season on record). From hectares of dry brush where forests were clearcut to fire seasons that begin earlier and end later each year, Chasing Smoke not only describes a wildfire fighter’s lifestyle but a problem that must be addressed if we don’t wish to see our planet go up in flames.  

Book cover of 'On Borrowed Time' by Gregor Craigie featuring an urban skyline with yellow seismic wave graphics, emphasizing themes of earthquake preparedness.

One might not think climate change influences earthquakes, and that’s not where Gregor Craigie (class of 2019) focuses his attention in On Borrowed Time: North America’s Next Big Quake (Goose Lane Editions, 2021). But science acknowledges that as hurricanes, floods, and wildfires increase in frequency and severity, so too does global warming contribute to the frequency and severity of earthquakes. “As a result of the man-made global warming, the melting of land ice, mainly in Antarctica and Greenland, occurs in an accelerating process and sea levels are rising worldwide” as are increasing emissions of greenhouse gases. “Both phenomena also have an impact on earthquake risk since they lead to a small but notable increase in pressure on tectonic faults in the subsurface due to hydrostatic load….” And “sea-level fluctuations of just a few decimetres are enough to trigger earthquakes.” (https://www.gfz.de/en/press/news/details/mehr-erdbeben-durch-menschengemachten-klimawandel) Reading Craigie’s deeply researched book provides frightening insight into what can happen when the next Big One hits. 

Cover of the book 'Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis' by Andrew Reeves, featuring illustrations of various fish on a light blue background.

In Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis (ECW, 2019) Andrew Reeves (class of 2016), an award-winning environmental journalist, tackles the eponymous environmental crisis head on. When I began reading Overrun, I’d never heard of Asian crap, much less the crisis they’ve caused. But as I read Reeves’ entertaining account of how, with all good intentions, this voracious and prolific fish was introduced to control invasive water weeds in aquaculture farms in the southern US, I became increasingly aware of just how dangerous it can be to import any species of life to any part of the world where it lacks natural predators. From a few fish in the 1950s, several species of Asian carp have taken over river systems from the mouth of the Mississippi River watershed north to where they’re a handful of miles now threatening the ecology of the entire Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River system. This is what happens when humans, with all the best intentions, believe they can improve on billions of years of evolution and try to take nature into their own hands. 

Of the books I’ve reviewed to date, these three are the ones I’d recommend most highly as Earth Day reading. But they’re not the only ones to touch on environmental themes, even though the environment is not the main thrust of the book. I also highly recommend Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness (ECW, 2023) by Virginia Heffernan, which advocates for a different approach to resource extraction, one that is more environmentally safe and concerned with the welfare of Indigenous Peoples. The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest (ECW, 2018) by Helena Moncrieff (class of 2016) focuses predominantly on community sharing of the harvest of fruit trees within any city, but in so doing it also speaks to feed the human population by stopping our environmentally stupid wasting of nature’s bounty just because it sits on privately owned land.

Cover of the book 'The Fruitful City' by Helena Moncrieff, featuring colorful leaf illustrations and a subtitle about the urban food forest.

While Jenn Thornhill Verma’s (class of 2019) Cod Collapse: The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Saltwater Cowboys (Nimbus Publishing, 2019) is a memoir of a family’s lost way of life, one that had endured for generations in many families, it’s also a tale of the consequences of overfishing, not only to the environment but to those who depend on the sea for their living. And for those of us currently living in the Pacific Northwest, it’s a cautionary tale about the way deal with dwindling salmon populations. And finally, The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons (Pottersfield Press, 2019) by Suzanne Stewart (class of 2016) is more directly about the link between different people’s food-producing labour with a particular month, it’s also a compelling series of essays about how people can and do choose to live in harmony with the seasons. And it’s hard to imagine anything more environmentally advantageous than that. 

The Beauty of the Seasons: A Review of The Tides of Time

/ Lynne Melcombe / 1 Comment

In university, I took a fourth-year course on the Romantic Period in English literature. I love the prose and poems of that period; Blake is my favourite, where my professor at the time was pretty much obsessed with Coleridge’s “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.” 

Book cover of 'The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons' by Suzanne Stewart, featuring a pastel background adorned with various leaves and flowers.

Suzanne Stewart (class of 2016) is a professor of Romantic literature who teaches at St. Francis Xavier University. Sadly, she now reports that she hasn’t taught literature of that period for several years. I guess there’s not enough demand for it, which baffles me. That hasn’t stopped Stewart from bringing the words and mood of the Romantic writers to life in her book of lyric essays, The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons (Pottersfield Press, 2018).

In Tides of Time, Stewart goes through the year, month by month, looking at the labour of the people who produce the food we eat—real food, food from the earth, not from a factory. Starting in September (which is why I’m posting this on the first day of fall), she gets on her bike (or sometimes in her car) and cycles out to interview fishers, farmers, bakers, beekeepers, and cheesemakers, to name a few, around her home community of Antigonish about the work they do and why they love doing it. 

In keeping with the form of the lyric essay, she regularly quotes from writers of the Romantic Period, such as John Keats and William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau, and she occasionally throws in something from Aristotle or the Bible. But what’s most impressive about her writing is the vivid word pictures she paints of places and people and feelings. Here’s how she opens the chapter she calls Spring’s Overture:

Dawn comes suddenly now, with a beautiful blush. On March 1, the sky fills with muted amber and soft pink, as if wine had been poured into the air, tinging it with sweet fruitfulness. A burst of darker purple-pink appears like a cherry tree in blossom. Then the sky turns orange as the softest pink dissolves, which lightens to yellow as it spreads, like liquid from a lemon squeezed. 

A few thin grey clouds smudge the light. 

Feeling tired and distracted by the length of winter, I haven’t noticed beauty or looked this hard, for days, but this morning is different. Colour pours and blends and moves with the light. I’d like to slip into its heat. 

Now the colour is gone. Morning evolves. The day becomes dull: the sky plain and covered in clouds. 

In March, light stretches and retreats, still finding its comfort in the whiteness of winter. The days are longer but they haven’t lengthened all the way to spring. March’s fingers are still curled in the cold, unable to unfold, to reach that far.

But March is a month of music, probably more than of light. 

As I lie in bed, waiting for the first cracks of morning, I hear the birds. At this early hour, they sing more fully now. In spring, song precedes the light: invites it.

“The air is a velvet cushion against which I press my ear,” Henry David Thoreau said, as he listened for the sounds of the first robins and bluebirds and insects. 

“May my melody not be wanting to the season,” he added … “I go forth to make new demands on life.”

This month, Stewart will visit a sheep farm. She will go there in lambing season, when the ewes are birthing and then feeding their new babies. 

This is a beautiful book, evocatively, poetically, romantically written. It was also the second-place winner of the 2018 Pottersfield Prize for Creative Nonfiction. 

If you’re ever feeling down and you need something beautiful to lift you up, try this book. 

Other books with a lyrical quality:

Heartbroken: Field Notes on a Constant Condition, by Laura Pratt

I Don’t Do Disability: And Other Lies I’ve Told Myself, by Adelle Purdham

Other books about real food:

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

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

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

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

Must-Read Books from Recent Canadian Graduates: Part 2 of The List So Far

/ Lynne Melcombe / 1 Comment

So many new authors on this list! (For comparison, see the first list here.) Congratulations to all the newly published authors (at least since the first list), to all the authors who were published long before I reviewed your books, I’m reading as fast as I can, and to all the authors who’ve been published that I still haven’t got to … I’m reading as fast as I can! And to anyone reading this, if I’ve missed anything, gotten any details wrong, or in some cases don’t know the year you graduated, please let me know. And the winners are:

(Edited to add: Apparently I missed quite a few books that should go on this list. I’ve added them at the top of the list so you won’t miss them. There have been several more deals but the books aren’t out yet and I’m unable to find complete information about them.)

Barone, Rina (class of 20??) Art Always Wins: The Chaotic World of Avant-garde Pioneer Al Hansen, (press and year?)

Jaffer, Taslim (class of 2022) with Omar Mouallem, Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity, and Home. Book*hug Press, 2024.

Kierans, Kim (class of 2025), Journalism for the Public Good: The Michener Awards at Fifty. Bighorn Books, 2024.

Kuzmyk, Emma (class of 2025) with Addy Strickland, This Wasn’t On the Syllabus: Stories from the Front Lines. Simon & Schuster, 2024.

McKay, Lori (class of 2020) Searching for Mayflowers: The True Story of Canada’s First Quintuplets. Nimbus Publishing, 2024.

Moore, Chris (2024) The Power of Guilt: Why We Feel It and Its Surprising Ability to Heal. HarperCollins (Canada), BenBella (US), August Books (UK), 2025.

Moscovitch, Philip (2019) Adventures in Bubbles and Brine: What I Learned from Nova Scotia’s Masters of Fermented Foods—Craft Beer, Cider, Cheese, Sauerkraut and More. Formac Publishing, 2019.

Simpson, Sharon J. (class of 2021) The Kelowna Story: An Okanagan History, 2nd Edition. Harbour Publishing, 2025.

John Larsen’s (Class of 2023 I think) book is not out yet–due in 2026 I think. 

Book cover of 'Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas' by Gloria Blizzard, featuring a colorful abstract background with wavy lines.
Book cover for 'Press Enter to Continue: Scribes from Babylon to Silicon' by Joan Francuz, featuring an image of ancient scribes on a laptop screen.
Book cover for 'The View from Coffin Ridge: A Childhood Exhumed' by Gwen Lamont featuring a black and white photograph of a corridor with scattered leaves.

Book cover design for 'The Fruitful City' by Helena Moncrieff, featuring colorful illustrations of leaves and flowers, with the subtitle 'The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest'.
Book cover for 'Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis' by Andrew Reeves, featuring various species of fish against a light blue background.
Book cover of 'Peace by Chocolate' by Jon Tattrie, depicting the Hadhad family by the sea, highlighting their journey from Syria to Canada.

Resilience and Chocolate: A Refugee Family’s Remarkable Journey

/ Lynne Melcombe / 4 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 / 3 Comments
Cover of 'The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest' by Helena Moncrieff featuring colorful leaf illustrations and a floral design.

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. 

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.

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 Reneé Pellerin. 

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

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

University of King’s College MFA Program in Creative Nonfiction: Books Published So Far

/ Lynne Melcombe / 3 Comments

If you’re already on this list, congratulations! You’re in terrific company. If you’re not on this list, keep putting yourself (and more importantly your book) out there. Meanwhile, in case you’re curious, here’s what (I think) the list is so far. If I’ve missed anything, gotten any details wrong, or in some cases don’t know the year you graduated, please let me know.

Book cover of 'The Heart of a Superfan' by Nav Bhatia, featuring a smiling man in a Raptors jersey and a black and red jacket, with a white turban, against a purple background.
Book cover for 'Run, Hide, Repeat: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood' by Pauline Dakin featuring a vintage roadside scene.

Cover of the book 'Murder on the Inside: The True Story of the Deadly Riot at Kingston Penitentiary' by Catherine Fogarty, featuring an image of the penitentiary.

the Eiffel Tower with the book title overlaying it

cover of book No Place to Go with image of empty toilet paper roll.

Book cover of 'Heartbroken: Field Notes on a Constant Condition' by Laura Pratt, featuring a stylized image of a rose with a smoky effect and the word 'Canadian' in the top right corner.

Book cover for 'How to Share an Egg' by Bonny Reichert, featuring an illustration of an egg on a blue background with the title and author's name displayed.

Book cover of 'Still, I Cannot Save You' by Kelly S. Thompson, featuring a person in red walking on a sandy shore with a vast landscape in the background.

From Starvation to Abundance: A Memoir of Family and Resilience

/ Lynne Melcombe / 6 Comments

I can’t imagine it. I’ve tried, but it’s beyond my ability. The closest I can come to imagining what it must have been like to survive the Holocaust and, against all odds, marry, have children, and live a happy life is knowing what it was like to be the child of an RCAF pilot who spent three months injured in a POW hospital in occupied France. 

I suppose it’s understandable that people can’t imagine living through such trauma themselves. It protects us. But when you’re the child of people who survived that horror, when the knowledge of what one or both of your parents experienced forms the backdrop for your entire life, lived in comfort and safety in one of the richest countries in the world—that’s a different story.

Marsha Lederman, author of the bestselling Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed (McLelland &Stewart, 2022), which I devoured last year, was one of those children. Bonny Reichert (class of 2022, Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction, University of King’s College) was another.

For most of her life, Reichert coped with the knowledge of what had happened to her father by not thinking about it. I don’t blame her. She and her father talked about one day writing a book together about it, but for one reason and another that day never came. Until one day, after a trip to her father’s native Poland and an encounter with the perfect bowl of borscht, Reichert realized the time had come. 

The result of that realization is How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty (Appetite by Random House, 2025). A memoir with strong culinary overtones, How to Share an Egg shares with the reader that good food has played an important role in the author’s life, not only because, as the daughter of a successful restaurateur, she grew up with excellent cooking but because her father had very nearly starved to death. 

The preface to the book opens like this:

Imagine two boys—a couple of skeletons, really—roaming the German countryside. One is fourteen, the other, a little older. It’s the spring of 1945, and they haven’t eaten much besides potato peels and coffee grounds for three years. They knock on door after door until they find a farmer who goes into his kitchen and brings something back: a single brown egg. One egg for two starving boys. … 

The book you’re about to read is a tale of hunger and sorrow and love. It’s a mishmash of what happened to my dad and what’s happened to me; a portrait of a parent and a child, a father and a daughter. It’s both a small story and an enormous one, a study of contrasts. And because it’s my family, it’s a story about food—sumptuous meals and meals of almost nothing at all; food that is simple and complicated, basic and bountiful. Food that is rife with meaning.

How does a daughter reconcile her privilege when her father had nothing? How does she set her table, heavy with plenty, when her ancestors were lucky to share a single egg? As much about survival as sustenance, the story you’re about to read is about a family that lost everything and built itself up again, one meal at a time. 

I sometimes worry that recent generations simply don’t know enough about the Holocaust. I worry about the way this lack of knowledge has been fuelling a global resurgence in antisemitism. I’m heartened by the appearance of books by the children of survivors, like Reichert. If there was ever a book to teach about that shameful period in human history while making you go from laughing to crying and back again, this is surely it. 

Books about the Holocaust:

Wanda’s War: An Untold Story of Nazi Europe, Forced Labour, and a Canadian Immigration Scandal, by Marsha Faubert. Review coming soon.

One in Six Million: The Baby by the Roadside and the Man Who Retraced a Holocaust Survivor’s Lost Identity, by Amy Fish. Review coming soon.

Journey To Portugal: A Family’s Culinary Trip Through Their Heritage

/ Lynne Melcombe / 7 Comments

When my two older children were small, I had a dream. We would, as a family, put our belongings in storage, take two years off work and school, and travel the world. As time passed, I reduced it to a year travelling Europe. Then it was a six-month road trip around North America. 

None of that ever happened. We did, after I’d had significant windfalls, have six weeks in Cabo San Lucas when our older kids were four and six, and a month in Costa Rica when our older two were leaving home and our youngest was 12. And since my divorce, I’ve had a month in Ireland and three weeks in Scotland. I love to travel.  

So, when I heard that Esmeralda Cabral’s (class of 2019) book, How to Clean a Fish and Other Adventures in Portugal (U of Alberta Press, 2023) was all about a five-month sabbatical she and her husband took with their family to Portugal, I was intrigued. 

Cabral, a Portuguese Canadian, spent most of her childhood in the Azores, which I can only imagine as idyllic, so the opportunity to return to the land of her birth was too good not to take advantage of. And everything she writes about it makes me jealous. As one can imagine from the title, a lot of the book focuses on food, a delicious and important part of Portuguese culture. Here’s an excerpt from a tale early in the book: 

One of my favourite things to do in Costa was to browse in the market. I often went alone in the morning, while Eric [husband] and Georgia [daughter] did their work at home. I would stop and have a coffee at the counter of one of the coffee shops on the way, and sometimes I’d have a pastel [an egg custard tart] too. I’d go to the bakery to buy a loaf of bread or a few buns [mmm, Portuguese buns], and then head to the market, where I would talk to the vendors and fulfill my need for conversation. …

At a small stand right inside the north entrance, a woman sold mostly verduras, or greens. She didn’t seem to have much to sell on any given day and what she had looked a little wilted, but I usually bought something from her—lettuce, if nothing else. She would smile and greet me as I entered the market, and I found it difficult to get past her without buying anything. I would stop to talk to her, and then the woman from the next stall (who had much better-looking produce) would join in our conversation. From her, I’d buy potatoes, kale, carrots, and whatever else looked good. ….

Farther down in the fruit stall area, there was the man who sold what I deemed to be the sweetest oranges. … The crisp, peppery smell of citrus in this part of the market often permeated my nostrils and filled my head with memories of my childhood in the Azores. … I remember looking forward to Saturday morning walks to the orchard with my father because it felt like I was going to work with him. We’d come home laden with bags of oranges and lemons and sometimes bananas too, and my mother would promptly make fruit salad. …

Past the fruit stalls was a large, partly closed-off area full of tables with fish and seafood displayed on mounds of ice. Women in oil-cloth aprons called out their catch of the day and competed for customers. I didn’t go in there very often because I felt conspicuous in my ignorance … and I was intimidated by these women, all of whom were loud and looked strong and confident. … I wasn’t yet brave enough to buy fish as I had no idea how to clean or cook most of it. … One day I’ll buy fish there, I’d think to myself. 

And of course, one day, she finally did, and the woman in the market cleaned it for her and told her how to cook it. And it turned out just right. 

The whole book is a series of memories, with picturesque descriptions of the scenery and the food and the people, many of them including food images so precise that reading made me hungry, and all of it interlaced with memories of Cabral’s childhood. It’s a gently written book that left me wanting to revisit that long-ago idea of putting my life in storage and heading out to see the world again.

Maybe one day I’ll do that. 

Other books about travel:

Winter in the City of Light: Finding Yourself in Retirement, by Sue Harper.

Walking the Camino: On Earth as It Is, by Maryanna Gabriel.

The Illogical Adventure: A Memoir of Love and Fate, by James MacDuff and Mirriam Mweemba.

Visiting Africa: A Memoir, by Jesse O’Reilly-Conlin.

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.