historical nonfiction

Exploring Japanese Canadian Identity and History

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

As a little girl, I had a pink and turquoise satin kimono. I can’t remember why I had it or where it came from; it likely had something to do with the dance classes I took for several years, and it was likely a gross misrepresentation of what it was meant to be. But until I was much older, it was all I knew of Japanese culture. 

Cover of the book 'The Nail That Sticks Out' featuring the title in bold letters, authors' names, and an image of a girl in traditional attire.

I was likely not alone in that. Yet the Japanese Canadian community has a rich history in Canada, a history that includes far more than the tragic and shameful chapter in Canadian history of the internment of all Japanese Canadian citizens during World War II and the confiscation of their property, for which they only received redress in 1988. 

In The Nail That Sticks Out: Reflections on the Postwar Japanese Canadian Community (Dundurn Press, 2024), Suzanne Elki Yoko Hartmann (class of ??) combines family history and details of traditional Japanese culture with personal memoir. The result is a compelling account of a community that has endured through racism and hardship but must, Hartmann argues, be defined as far more than that.

There is a touching account of her grandfather, who painted beautiful watercolours but never considered his art good enough for more than scraps of newsprint and saved none of paintings. There is the story of the cousin who, fearing academic disappointment, gave up all her dance classes—except traditional odori dance because she’d seen it give her grandmother so much joy. 

There are also the notes of persistent and systemic racism: the lack of Asian representation in theatre and film paired with underpayment of Asian actors when they do appear. The thoughtless souls who pop up everywhere with the ridiculous question every biracial person hears far too often: “What are you?” (To which Hartmann flippantly replies, “I’m still human, the last time I checked.”)

But even that history is slowly being erased, Hartmann writes:

From Camille’s [her daughter’s] perspective, most Torontonians “don’t know JCs exist, let alone the historical context” of the relocation after the war and how JCs became resettled … “Our trauma is only amplified. Only internment is ever talked about … “

In many ways this reality is reflected in the larger community. Despite Japanese planting roots in Canada more than a hundred years ago, JC history is slowly being erased. Each generation adds their own perspective on identity and culture. Camille’s generation—the gosei, or fifth generation—are almost entirely biracial. To the untrained eye, kids like Camille or their cousin Samantha easily pass for white. Just as my sister and I loosely resemble our parents, there are glimpses of us within our kids too. Our ethnicity may appear ambiguous, yet we share a rich cultural inheritance. 

Canada’s only Japantown in Vancouver is long gone. But here, in places like Markham’s J-Town and the downtown Toronto strip called Little Tokyo a string of savvy entrepreneurs have stepped in to serve up Japanese-infused shopping experiences Do consumers ever ponder the roots of our community as they stand in line with their matcha lattes and mochi ice cream, hoping to get their pork belly ramen or stamped cheesecake before they sell out? Unlike these stores, which offer the latest trends and tastes of modern-day Japan, other long-established cultural and religious institutions scattered throughout the Greater Toronto Area reflect the perseverance of JCs who were determined to rebuild their lives after the war.

Will anyone remember their struggles or history decades from now? With so few Japanese in Canada, will anyone care? When searching for information, I discovered a dark void, a dearth of evidence, and little mention of our Japanese congregation or the people who dedicated their lives to it. A lost legacy in a disappearing community. 

I sincerely hope not. 

Essential Feminist Reads for International Women’s Month

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

March 8 was International Women’s Day, and the month of March is International Women’s Month. With a nod to both, with this post I acknowledge several books from the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction program that further the cause of justice and equality for women. 

Cover of the book 'Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Women in North America' by Sheima Benembarek, featuring ripe figs and a 'Staff Pick' label.

It’s hard to pick just a few books. The program is dominated by women, all of whom I’d describe as feminist, and many of their stories are about women’s lives, whether their own or others. But if I’m going to stick strictly to books with a decidedly feminist theme, I’d choose these five:

Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Women in North America by Sheima Benembarek. This book was eye-opening for me. It honestly never occurred to me that a blue-haired, niqab-wearing, orthodox Muslim woman might be polyamorous. It doesn’t surprise me that a child from a Muslim family might be just as likely as a child from any other family to be transgender. But I have to admit some surprise—the good kind—in reading about a same-sex couple, both comedians, one a Palestinian-born Muslim the other a Jew from Montreal who perform individually and as a pair who starred in a Crave comedy special called Marriage of Convenience. The title of the book, Halal Sex, comes from a term for sex practiced within a heterosexual Muslim marriage. But Benembarek put a decidedly feminist twist on it by redefining it as “all consensual sex between adults.” 

Book cover featuring the title 'Every Boy I Ever Kissed' by Nellwyn Lampert, with a graphic design showing a woman in a red dress and hands embracing her.

Every Boy I Ever Kissed: A Memoir by Nellwyn Lampert. I started calling myself a feminist at the age of 13. I was in way too much of a hurry to lose my virginity, which I did at 14. I had no idea of the connection between the two. But there is a connection, a pretty important one. And that connection is a major part of what Lampert wrestles with in this coming-of-age memoir. As the cover blurb says, “for Nellwyn Lampert, losing her virginity would turn out to be anything but simple. Her chosen partners struggled with porn-induced erectile dysfunction and other crises of masculinity. And in the bedroom, nothing went according to plan.” So, in that regard, our experiences were entirely different. But in terms of “the realities of sexual liberation, female empowerment, and masculinity,” the issues are not that different at all than the ones I was too young to realize I was doing with more than 50 years ago that sexual freedom and gender freedom are two very different concepts. 

Cover of the book 'Highway of Tears' by Jessica McDiarmid, featuring an illustrated mask and a striking orange background. The subtitle highlights themes of racism and justice for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.

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. It’s a grim fact that Indigenous women make up only about 4% of the female population in Canada but accounted for 16% of all female homicides between 1980 and 2012. And a disturbing number of those women are abducted, raped, and murdered along a strip of highway in northern BC called the Highway of Tears. From the back cover: “Journalist Jessica McDiarmid investigates the devastating effect these tragedies have had on the families of the victims and their communities, and how systemic racism and indifference have created a climate where Indigenous women and girls are over-policed, yet under-protected.” As difficult as this book was to read, it was just as difficult to put down. I can’t imagine a better lens through which to examine the intersection of racism and misogyny than through the horrific impacts of colonization by patriarchal white, European culture on Indigenous women and girls. 

Book cover of 'F Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism' by Lauren McKeon featuring bold black text and a pink graffiti-style accent.

F Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism by Lauren McKeon. It’s always surprised me that when I say I’ve been calling myself a feminist since I was 13 but I haven’t always felt that feminism welcomed me, what many people seem to hear is that I don’t think feminism is necessary or relevant. In fact, I’m saying exactly the opposite—that feminism remains as relevant today as ever and that’s why it’s so important to ensure that ALL sorts of women feel a sense of belonging within the movement. That was my read on McKeon’s book. She recognizes that too many women have moved in the wrong direction instead of understanding that feminism is for every woman—that, indeed, until we are all free, none of us are free. Why has this happened? That, as McKeon points out, is a question for feminists to answer. And as women’s rights are being eroded daily, it’s becoming increasingly urgent that we answer it and ensure that all women feel that the arms of feminism welcome them. 

Book cover for 'Conspiracy of Hope' by Renée Pellerin, featuring stylized illustrations of a woman's chest with highlighted areas, and subtitle 'The Truth About Breast Cancer Screening'.

Conspiracy of Hope: The Truth About Breast Cancer Screening by Renée Pellerin. No woman in the western world isn’t familiar with the unique joy (she said sarcastically) of having her breasts pulled and twisted and squished between cold metal plates for their regular mammogram. In this book, Pellerin, an award-winning producer with the CBC, does a deep dive into the evidence supporting and opposing regular mammography screening. And her conclusion is that the evidence weighs strongly in favour of less screening. It’s supported by vested interests, false positives can lead to invasive overtreatment, false negatives can give women a false sense of security, its effectiveness differs significantly for different age groups, and regular exposure to radiation can, in a small number of cases, increase risk of cancer. It’s an eye-opening book that every woman should read and consider carefully before assuming that doctor’s orders should never be questioned. 

Happy International Women’s Month and enjoy the reading!

Visiting Africa: A Personal Memoir and Reflection

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments

I can’t remember a time when I haven’t wanted to visit Africa. I love African music, traditional and modern. I love the colourful fabrics. I would love to see the animals I’ve admired on TV and in photos as up close and personal as safely possible. I’d like to witness the power of Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe and walk the desert sands of Namibia, and I’d be honoured and humbled to visit Robben Island, the brutal prison where Nelson Mandela spent 18 years of his life. 

A person walking along a sandy beach with a fishing spear, against a backdrop of blue sky and ocean, with the title 'Visiting Africa: A Memoir' prominently displayed.

So, when I saw that an alum of the UKing’s MFA program in creative nonfiction writing had published a book called Visiting Africa: A Memoir (Demeter Press, 2021), I jumped at the chance to read it. And I wasn’t disappointed. As a former PhD student with an interest in the slave trade, historic and modern, Jesse O’Reilly-Conlin (class of 2019) is well acquainted with his subject matter. Told in the first person and with raw honesty about his feelings as a privileged middle-class white man, this memoir is thoroughly engaging, and I’d recommend it to anyone. 

After an introduction that takes the reader from the author’s early life and the start of his interest in Africa through his public-school years, the book is written in two parts. In the first part, he describes his journey as a graduate student studying the forced migration of Africans while wrestling with personal feelings of inauthenticity and inadequacy. In the second part, he has set aside his efforts to learn about Africa from books and has embarked on a two-month journey as much into himself as through several countries in the south of the continent. His goal: to see and hear and feel the place he has worked so hard at learning about without ever really being there or immersing himself in the cultures. 

Part 2 opens with these words:

It’s May 2018, I am thirty-three years old, and I am on my way to Africa. Four years have passed since I left WITS [University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg]. Four years have passed since I left South Africa, and the African continent, without doing so many of the things I had wanted. When people asked me whether I have been to Africa, I would always pause before answering “Yes, I have.” I had walked the streets of Johannesburg and Cape Town, of course, and my passport still contained my South African study visa. I had proof of a visit. Yet I wavered in responding in the affirmative because I knew the libraries and classrooms of Johannesburg and Cape Town better than those cities’ actual sites and sounds. Despite my living in Johannesburg, I spent so much time safely ensconced in my dorm room or in a library or in a classroom that Johannesburg, the real and dynamic city, seemed a thousand kilometres away. I had spent so much time reading and studying about migration in Southern Africa that I associated the word “Africa” with only words on the page, with a problem that needed fixing. I had come to experience South Africa, yet I remained as divorced from it as I had been in Toronto, Montreal, and Busan.

This trip would be different though. I have two months to explore Southern Africa—to put faces and sounds and smells to the worlds I had spent years reading and analyzing. Finally, I can step outside the book, the classroom, and the school. I can walk amid the people and their histories. I can visit their worlds. 

Through his eyes, O’Reilly-Conlin invites his readers to visit, too—to see the old slave forts and understand the suicides of captured Africans less as acts of despair than of defiance; to wander down the wrong street of a city and feel one’s own body go limp when the author is mugged; to enter a busy marketplace and hear dozens of languages representing as many proud and rich cultures; to look at sunlight streaming through bullet holes in the roof of a Rwandan church where a genocide deeply rooted in colonialism claimed forty thousand lives in minutes; to viscerally comprehend the persistent consequences of the transatlantic slave trade centuries after it ended. 

If you wish to understand racism better, confront your own privilege more deeply, or simply explore the history and current reality of life on the African continent, add this book to your reading list. 

If you enjoy travel memoirs, read the following books by MFA grads:

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

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

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

For more on race and racism:

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

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

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

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

The Baby by the Roadside: A Remarkable Holocaust Story

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

Having had three children of my own, I cannot imagine deciding that that only way to give at least one of them a chance to survive would be to abandon her at the side of a road and hope someone would save her. But that was exactly what Esther Silber did with her eight-month-old daughter, Rivka, right before she, her husband, and her older children were herded into train cars to join the ranks of the six million Jews whose lives and memories the Nazis attempted to erase from history in World War II. 

Cover of the book 'One in Six Million' by Amy Fish, featuring a light blue background with black and yellow text, highlighting themes related to the Holocaust and identity.

Miraculously, Esther’s baby girl survived. A Polish couple happened to be walking along the road where the baby had been abandoned. Following the sound of her cries, they found her, tightly swaddled, a note pinned to her blanket: Maria, November 25, 1941 (Esther had changed her name to something less Jewish-sounding). Approaching their forties, they’d always wanted but never conceived a child. So, despite the deadly risks to themselves for rescuing for what they knew was a Jewish infant, they took her home to raise as their own. 

From there, the story of Rivka’s/Maria’s life and her search, as an adult, to find clues to her origins or biological family only becomes more incredible. Yet it’s not only a true story; it’s also not entirely unique. Even seventy-five years after the war, Holocaust survivors continue to search for family members they believe to have been murdered but hope, on the slimmest of chances, might have lived. It’s amazing how many of them continue to find each other. 

Amy Fish’s (class of 2023) book, One in Six Million: The Baby by the Roadside and the Man Who Retraced a Holocaust Survivor’s Lost Identity (Goose Lane Editions, 2025) boasts a large cast of characters but just one real hero; a multitude of surprising plot twists and reversals of fortune; and tantalizing leads that compel the reader to keep turning pages but end up going nowhere. In her telling of a tale that could easily have been bogged down by extensive details, Fish endows this remarkable true story with all the hallmarks of a great British mystery.

It had been three years and two months since Maria first posted her question on JewishGen. It had been a year and eight months since Sarah told Stanley about the case. And it had been one year, eighteen weeks, and five days since Rabbi Kirchevsky packed Maria’s DNA packed Maria’s DNA in his suitcase and flew with it to New York. And finally, finally, after thousands of names of spreadsheets, hundreds of phone calls to complete strangers, and dozens of potential matches that turned out to be dead ends, they knew where to look.

Well, sort of. Sarah knew she could look at the Freund family in Krosno. But Sarah also logged onto Geni, a worldwide genealogical database, and ran a search for Freunds. She found a gaggle of them in Jaslo, a neighbouring town less than thirty kilometres from Krasno. Sarah promptly emailed Stanley, and Stanley immediately got to work. “With the kindness and cooperation of the Jaslo Urzad Stanu Cywilnego (Civil Registry Offices),” Stanley explained, “in combination with Ora’s input, it was possible to flesh out the entire family.”

Fish gives the bulk of the credit for the incredible research on this story to Stanley Diamond. A successful businessman, Diamond started a genealogical database when he retired twenty-some years earlier. His goal, at the time, was to warn Jewish relatives, close and distant, that the recessive gene for a serious genetic illness called beta thalassemia runs in the families of many Ashkenazi Jews, including theirs; they should have themselves tested before conceiving a child. But over the years, the work that became Stanley’s second career evolved. When Maria’s nearly impossible search came to his attention, he dug into it with fervour. 

But not all the credit goes to Diamond. As amazing as Maria’s story is, the details of a years-long genealogical investigation could become tedious in the wrong hands. (This is a challenge of creative nonfiction writing that the UKing’s MFA program in CNF teaches students to manage.) Fish seamlessly weaves in personal background of the key players in the search, the history of the Jewish people from millennia past to horrific details of the Holocaust, and facts about her own faith and culture as a Jew. 

An oft-related quote from the Talmud tells the faithful that: “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.” In an act of courage and faith that I cannot fathom, Esther Zilber saved Maria’s life by leaving her on a roadside. Vasili and Antonina Markovitch saved Maria’s life by picking up the abandoned infant and, at no small risk to themselves, raising her as their own. Stanley Diamond and the anonymous “Sarah” may not save lives, per se, but they enrich them by reuniting severed families in ways that make them feel whole again.

Finally, we can never know how many lives Amy Fish might be enriching, or even saving, by showing them that, even in a world apparently gone mad, there is still light. There is still hope. 

World War II: Dimensions of the Holocaust You Didn’t Learn in School

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

Like many Baby Boomers, I grew up in the shadow of World War II. My father was a bomber pilot whose plane was shot down days after D-Day; he was MIA (missing in action) and a POW (prisoner of war) in a hospital in German-occupied France for three months, where the doctors did such a terrible job of setting his leg that they left him with a permanent disability. My mother was a nurse who, despite numerous traumatizing experiences, survived The Great Depression, graduated from nursing school, and worked in Vancouver’s Shaughnessy Hospital when it was a veterans’ hospital. That’s where they met, he in a hospital bed after surgeons rebroke and reset his leg, she a nurse on his ward over the months while his leg healed. I know this because my mother occasionally spoke of it; my father never did. 

Silence was the case for Marsha Faubert’s mother- and father-in-law, Wanda and Casey. It was as if their lives only began when they set foot in Canada—and maybe, in a way, they did. After they’d both died, while clearing out their house to sell it, Faubert (class of 2018) came across a tin of old photos and bits of memorabilia. She’d always been curious but never felt she should push them to talk, but now she began using those bits and pieces as starting points to explore and understand what happened to them.

The result is Wanda’s War: An Untold Story of Nazi Europe, Forced Labour, and a Canadian Immigration Scandal (Goose Lane Editions, 2023). This well-researched and compassionately written story describes aspects of World War II that I never learned about in school, including the cruelties inflicted by the Nazis against Polish people—and presumably other Slavs, a large ethnic and linguistic group that encompasses much of Eastern Europe, whom the Nazis considered subhuman. (Although their primary target was Jews, the Nazis persecuted and imprisoned millions more people: Roma, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people—anyone who didn’t fit their idea of a “master race.”) Like many other Poles, Wanda was taken from her home and deported to Germany, where she was forced into slave labour in factories. Others, like Casey, who lived in a part of Poland that was under Soviet control, were shipped off to gulags in Siberia, from which they were “liberated” two years later, only to be conscripted by the Soviets to fight the Nazis. 

Adding insult to injury, their introduction to Canada involved recruitment into two years of indentured servitude, living in restrictive conditions and working for minimum wage in factories (Wanda) and on farms (Casey). No doubt, conditions in Canada were better than under the Nazis or the Soviets, but as one Canadian official said (to deaf ears), these people, who had somehow survived six years of hell, went “From slave labour to slave labour” on government-sanctioned programs, as a condition of immigrating to Canada. By comparison, British men and women arriving in Canada at the same time with the intent of citizenship were not subjected to any such requirements. 

In a book this well researched and written, it’s nearly impossible to pick out a single passage to quote, and certainly not a short one. The paragraphs below describe a time long after the war when Wanda’s son George, the author’s husband, learned about a compensation fund for people who had been forced labourers in Nazi Germany:

George called Wanda to tell her about her right to make a claim for compensation. She was unenthusiastic. “What’s the point?” she said. “It was so long ago.” George prodded her. … To him, a busy arbitrator, accustomed to hearing labour grievances, it was simple: fill out the form, send it in, wait for the decision. It seems insensitive, in retrospect, that we didn’t consider that it might not have been simple to Wanda, digging up a memory that she preferred to leave undisturbed. …

The form asked for a description of what happened during her period of forced labour, including the conditions in which she was held. For the first and last time, she told George what had happened to her in Germany. He wrote it down for her:

We lived in a barracks behind barbed wire. Every morning the guards took us to work. We worked from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., I think. There were armed guards in the factory watching us while we worked. In the morning before we worked, they gave us one slice of bread and black coffee. For lunch we had kohlrabi soup and a slice of bread. For dinner, we had a slice of bread and black coffee. There was one Italian, two Russian, and four Polish barracks. There were 21 of us in a 25-foot by 12-foot room in three-high bunks. We were not ever allowed to go outside for any reason except to go to work. There were armed guards outside the barracks. We worked seven days a week. The guards would beat at us [sic] for no reason. The barracks were filthy and full of lice and bedbugs. When the Allies were bombing the area we were not allowed to leave the barracks and go to a bunker.

Wanda gave as little detail as possible. She didn’t tell George about the day she was taken and deported to Germany. They didn’t have a conversation about life during the Russian and German occupations or during her time in the camp. She didn’t talk about being hungry or afraid or how she felt about losing her home. She didn’t offer any of the details we later heard from Joe [George’s uncle]. The form didn’t require this information and she didn’t volunteer it.

I’ve wondered sometimes about my father’s silence about the war. I know he, like other military men, were told to forget their experiences and just live happy lives. I also know he suffered from PTSD, not clearly defined at the time, and went to therapy. But I wonder too, if, as Faubert concludes, “Silence was Wanda’s answer to the past and her protection in the present. Silence was her right. Who is to say that the burial of her memories, the simple life in a safe space, wasn’t justice for her?”

I’d never thought about it that way, but who indeed? 

Reviews of MFA alumni books on war and subsequent immigration:

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

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

Remembering Sacrifice: A Personal Ode to My Father

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

On Remembrance Day, November 11, 2025, reposting this ode to my father.

The Space Between

A picture hangs in my living room, a sort of collage, but more organized, befitting its contents. It includes my father’s Royal Canadian Air Force wings and stripes from World War II, a green-and-gold RCAF emblem he embroidered while in traction for months in a veterans’ hospital, and two black-and-white photos, rimmed in gold. The pieces are carefully arranged against dark-blue cloth, framed in gun-metal grey with dignified flecks of gold. The photo on the left, taken before my father shipped out to England in 1942, depicts a handsome, athletic, optimistic, young man in his NCO uniform. To the right are his wings and stripes, a few threads out of place. From the photo on the right, the face I remember smiles out at me in his Pilot Officer uniform at the time of his medical discharge in 1945, still a handsome man.

In the first, he’s twenty-one. In the second, he looks much more than three years older. … (Read more here.)

A young man in an air force uniform with RCAF insignia, wearing a cap, posed for a black-and-white photograph.
Black-and-white portrait of a young man in a Royal Canadian Air Force uniform, wearing a cap with insignia, smiling confidently.

Books on war and peace by UKing’s MFA in CNF alumni:

Book cover of 'Wanda's War' by Marsha Faubert featuring a photograph of a young woman in historical clothing against a dark background, with the title in bold yellow text.

Faubert, Marsha (class ’18) Wanda’s War: An Untold Story of Nazi Europe, Forced Labour, and a Canadian Immigration Scandal, Goose Lane Editions, 2023. Review coming soon.

Book cover for 'One in Six Million' by Amy Fish featuring a blue background with images of a family and handwritten annotations.

Fish, Amy (class of ’23) One in Six Million: The Baby by the Roadside and the Man Who Retraced a Holocaust Survivor’s Lost Identity, Goose Lane Editions, 2025. Review coming soon.

Book cover of 'The Nail That Sticks Out' by Suzanne Elki Yoko Hartmann, featuring a child in traditional Japanese clothing with floral patterns against a golden background.

Hartmann, Suzanne (class of ’21) The Nail That Sticks Out: Reflections on the Postwar Japanese Canadian Community, Dundurn Press, 2024. Review coming soon.

Cover of 'How to Share an Egg' by Bonny Reichert, featuring a simple illustration of an egg against a blue background, with the title and author's name prominently displayed.

Reichert, Bonny (class of ’22) How to Share an Egg, A True Story of Hunger, Love and Plenty, Penguin Random House, 2025. Read my review here.

Tattrie, Jon (class of ’20) Peace by Chocolate: The Hadhad Family’s Remarkable Journey From Syria to Canada, Goose Lane Editions, 2020. Read my review here.

Cover of the book 'Peace by Chocolate: The Hadhad Family’s Remarkable Journey from Syria to Canada' by Jon Tattrie, featuring a family posing on a beach with the ocean in the background.

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.

Press Enter to Continue: A Journey Through 6000 Years of Writing

/ Lynne Melcombe / 1 Comment

I didn’t quite know what to expect when I opened Joan Francuz’s (class of 2016) book, Press Enter to Continue: Scribes from Babylon to Silicon (1920 House Press, 2018). It seemed like it might be a good choice to review for International Literacy Day, which is today, with this year’s theme being “promoting literacy in the digital era.” When I ordered it, I wondered if it might be a history of writers or maybe a history of writing tools. 

Book cover of 'Press Enter to Continue: Scribes from Babylon to Silicon' by Joan Francuz, featuring an image of ancient scribes on a laptop screen.

I was right and wrong on both counts. As the blurb on the back of the book says, “Trace the history of our digital age through the words of the people who described things—the scribes and technical writers of their time,” an appropriate description for what turns out to be “a work memoir of someone who survived the gig economy by working as a scribe.” 

Neither the title nor the blurb really do the book justice. It’s actually a short history of the world, at least since the first writing on stone tablets, through the lens of a person who spent most of her career as a technical writer—a career I considered 30 years ago when I was casting about for a writing gig that would be steadier and pay better than freelance journalism. (Because I’m technologically challenged, I turned to editing as a better option for me—still not great pay, but better.)

During the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Nonfiction Writing, one thing we learned is that what you exclude from a book is just as important as what you include. This is important for me because I love research, and I try to include every bit of information I find. It doesn’t make for a great narrative arc. 

If I found it challenging to limit the amount of information I included in my book about concussion, a field in which research has exploded over the last two to three decades, I can’t imagine what it must have been like for Francuz to pick the pertinent bits out of 6,000 years of history to shape an arc in 155 pages. It’s mind boggling.

Not only has she succeeded, but she’s done so with dry wit:

In the hierarchy that runs up from data to information to knowledge and wisdom, data is something simple like “8”; information is the number of people invited to dinner; knowledge is making the dessert the day before the party; and wisdom is not discussing a spouse’s online shopping habits just before the guests arrive. 

While the ancients seemed to spend their time on the higher order questions of wisdom and knowledge, and sought answers to questions like what made for a good life, the scientists of the Enlightenment discovered knowledge and information about our physical world. In our modern age, we seem to have moved further down to the data and information end of the hierarchy. 

Think of a selfie that arrives on your device. Why is your friend standing in front of that building? Is this a reminder that you had plans for dinner—and you’re late? Is it a holiday photo? Are you meant to comment on their new hair or clothing? Was the photo sent to you by mistake? Is that really your friend in the photo? 

This is a modern example of data without information. 

This is an unexpected little gem of a book, full of fascinating facts gleaned from the books in a seven-page bibliography—enough to spawn a whole new version of Trivial Pursuit—with a 16-page chapter of Notes on Sources that reads like a mini-book of its own. Francuz’s story told with intelligence and humour by a woman of roughly my own age—born in the fifties, molded in the seventies, and seasoned by 40 years of working in the “gig economy” long before that term was coined.  

Even more importantly, the back-of-the-book blurb closes on a note I can truly relate to: “if you have a garden and a library, you have everything that you need.

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.

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.

The Fruitful City: Building Communities Around Nature’s Bounty, by Helena Moncrieff.

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.

SwissAir Flight 111: A Tragic Tale Told with Skill and Compassion

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

Full disclosure: Gina Leola Woolsey, author of Fifteen Thousand Pieces: A Medical Examiner’s Journey Through Disaster (Guernica, 2023) was a member of my cohort (class of 2015). That’s how I know that, before signing up for the MFA program in Creative Nonfiction Writing, she had already completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in creative writing at UBC. 

Gina’s extensive skill and training show in every word. From page 1, I’m hooked. It’s a rainy Wednesday evening—September 2, 1998—when the phone on Dr. John Butt’s bedside table rings. Swissair Flight 111 has gone down, killing all 229 souls aboard. Butt, Nova Scotia’s Chief Medical Examiner, takes a moment to absorb the news.

“The information doesn’t go straight to the action center in his brain,” Gina writes. “His plausibility muscle bats away the news so his mind has a minute to rev the mental engines.” In a classic example of writing so well the reader forgets they’re reading, her use of metaphor is so smooth that, after forty years as a writer and editor, I barely notice it. And when I do, I’m impressed.

Within the first chapter, she’s laid down an immense amount of exposition without ever slipping into information dumping. In a scant seven pages, she introduces nine characters, including just enough about each to make them memorable. Throughout the book, she most often refers to the multitude of people she interviewed by their first names, no doubt a deliberate choice to create intimacy in a story that might more easily be kept at arm’s length. 

She uses verb tense to set mood: present tense when she writes about the disaster, conveying anguished immediacy, switching to past tense to for her present-day relationship with Butt. When done without thought, tense-switching can be jarring; I’ve critiqued dozens of editing clients for doing it unconsciously. In Gina’s hands, it’s as smooth as glass. 

Focusing on Gina’s facility with the small choices a writer makes is not intended to minimize the skill with which she tackles larger issues. I remember her talking in class about a unique problem this story presented. Invited by the central character to write this book, he requested that it tell not only about the disaster that ended the lives of 229 people, forever changing life for countless bereaved friends and family and leaving an indelible imprint on everyone involved in recovering and identifying 15,000 bits of bodies instantly torn apart on impact with the cold, dark Atlantic. He also wanted to share his own story, that of a sensitive but difficult man, raised in an oppressive environment, who repeatedly alienated friends, family, and colleagues until coming to terms, late in life, with his homosexuality. 

I recall wondering how she’d reconciled these two stories as I began reading. But I quickly forgot about it as I devoured the book, barely noticing the two disparate stories unfolding.

To say Gina’s writing is seamless, visually rich, alive with detail doesn’t do it justice. I wish I could find one passage, short enough to include in a blog post, that would show everything that impresses me about it. The following is just a taste:

A Sea King helicopter transports John from the morgue-in-construction at Shearwater to the Preserver. Above the scene of destruction, he gets the first glimpse of debris. Small boats dot the surface with larger boats stationed at the edges of the scene. The entire area, a portion of the sea that many fishermen call their workplace, is closed to all but those working on the recovery operation. 

The ship’s doctor shows John to the bridge where Commander Town is waiting. During the night, it was Commander Town who managed the fishermen, military personnel, and other helpers on the water. Rick Town was the beacon in the dark. After a night receiving one horror after another from the small vessels on the scene, Town might need a guiding light of his own. From the Preserver’s bridge, John gets a closer look at the water. To the untrained eye, it’s a largely unidentifiable mass of scattered debris, but John sees the human remains for what they are. Floating viscera mingles with hunks of caramel-coloured foam from the seat cushions, clothing, teddy bears, and luggage. Now he understands why they don’t know how to deal with the situation. It’s not as easy as putting bodies in bags and counting them off in whole numbers. 

In lesser hands, this could have been an impossible story to tell. Instead, it’s a deeply personal, profoundly compassionate, extensively researched, and intimately told tale of one of the worst air disasters in Canadian history, and the enigmatic man who had the grizzly task of sifting through the eponymous 15,000 pieces of humanity. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

For more on disaster, read my reviews of: 

Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir, by Aaron Williams.

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

For more Canadian history, read my reviews of:

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.

Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures, by Moira Dann.

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

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

Exploring Craigdarroch Castle: Victoria’s History Told Through 21 Objects

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments

I’m pretty obsessive when I go into museums. I like to take my time, consider each object, read every placard, watch every video, listen to every audiotape. I don’t feel most museums are meant to be gone through in a single trip. There’s too much to take in and the brain tends to tire of all that information with no place created to file it yet. So, I’m quite happy to go back to museums time and again to see whatever I didn’t get to the last time. 

Book cover of 'Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures' by Moira Dann, featuring a tag with the castle's name and a pencil, dated September 21st, 1897.

I know I’ve been to Craigdarroch Castle in Victoria, BC, which now houses a museum of the way wealthy white settlers lived in Victoria (and elsewhere) in the nineteenth century. I can’t recall exactly when I was there, but there’s no way I could have taken it all in in just one trip. Which is why it’s such a delight reading through Moira Dann’s (class of 2016) Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures (Touchwood Editions, 2021). 

Like Richard Levangie’s Secrets of the Hotel Maisonneuve, this was not Dann’s project for the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction at University of King’s College in Halifax. (I’ll never understand why that book didn’t get picked up: it was about The Mothers of Confederation, the wives of all the men who are touted as The Fathers of Confederation, who most assuredly played a role.) And therein lies a hint about the author, who was in the class immediately after mine and became a friend: she loves history. And Craigdarroch Castle is nothing if not a walk through history. 

Built by coal baron and shipping entrepreneur Robert Dunsmuir, who’d immigrated from Scotland in 1851 with his wife and newborn daughter, theirs is a genuine rags-to-riches story. Dunsmuir started out as an independent coal miner, found a rich coal seam near Nanaimo, and “turned that into wealth, influence, and power.” So much so that by 1887, less than four decades later, he started construction on the castle he had (according to rumour) promised his wife, Joan, when they left Scotland. 

In an introductory chapter called “Why I Wrote This Book,” Dann explains why she chose to tell the castle’s story through a series of objects: a clock, some chairs, keyboards, stained glass, photographs, drawings, paintings, radiator brushes (to show what a servant’s life was like), dance cards (with pencils provided), and more.

Many of the stories in this book and elsewhere start with objects of the time, placed in a restored context. Objects are also the jumping-off point of the post-Dunsmuir stories this castle holds. 

Some might say it’s preposterous to think an overview of a massive story repository such as Craigdarroch Castle can be reduced to not even two dozen objects. 

“In the particular is contained the universal,” said James Joyce … and I agree. We can view the wide expanse of meaning just as well, if not better, through the lens of a microscope as we can through that of a telescope. …

But Craigdarroch Castle houses more than just the stories of the “fractious, fractured” Dunsmuir family, Dann writes. In 1909, after Joan Dunsmuir’s death (Robert had died before it was completed), it was sold and went through several incarnations. From 1919 to 1921, it was Craigdarroch Military Hospital, for veterans returning from the Great War. Later, it housed Victoria College (predecessor to the University of Victoria), the Victoria Conservatory of Music, and the offices of the Victoria school board. It was sold to the Craigdarroch Castle Historical Museum Society in 1979 and turned into the museum it is today.

The collection described in loving and impeccably researched detail in this book “allows us a peek into the lives of different people in a different time and provides us a bit of context for our lives in the twenty-first century …” Dann writes. “These objects can set our imaginations alight. Imagining an earlier time helps us create a better now and imagine a better future.”

And a better future is something we can all strive to imagine. 

August 4 is BC Day. Here are some other books about BC:

Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir, by Aaron Williams.

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.