Lyric Nonfiction

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.

Finding Joy in Simple Pleasures: A Path to Healing

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments

On May 29, 2016, I tried to end my life. It wasn’t the first time I’d tried, but it was the closest I came to succeeding. My reasons are not the point here. The point is that, during my long, slow climb back to mental health, I learned that I needed to stop living my life in the past and the future. If I was going to stay alive, I needed to live my life one moment at a time. 

Cover of the book 'A Cure for Heartache' by Mary Jane Grant, featuring an open window view of a cityscape with greenery, an open notebook and a cup of tea on a table, accompanied by cookies.

That is the key message of Mary Jane Grant’s (class of 2016) A Cure for Heartache: Life’s Simple Pleasures, One Moment at a Time (hard cover, Hodder, 2019, sold in paperback as Happier Here and Now: The Restorative Power of Life’s Simple Pleasures). Struggling with grief after a sudden divorce, Grant moved to England where she slowly learned to live her life moment by moment, soaking in the joys of each minute, and learning that life can’t be lived in the past or the future. It can only be lived here and now. 

The therapist I found to help me through that period of my life is trained in a well-researched and fully secular practice of meditation called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). One of the techniques she taught me for pulling myself out of depression and anxiety, though not meditation, is a simple practice, of going through the five senses, one at a time, and noticing five things I see, five things I feel, five things I hear, taste, and smell. It’s meant to break the cycle of rumination over past experiences one finds depressing and anxiety over future experiences.

It’s meant to bring the person back to the physical world around them in each moment. 

This is what I thought about as I read Grant’s book, as she explained her process of minding her senses, learning to wander, learning to let go, loving what you do, and learning to appreciate and to connect. Here’s how Grant describes her experience of getting reacquainted with her five senses:

I entered the reading room. Morning light streamed through tall windows. The walls were filled from floor to ceiling with books, and a dozen or more freestanding shelves took up the remaining space. To the left of the entrance door were counters with computer stations. Above, a bulletin board was covered in notices, local advertisements and sign-up sheets for local classes and lectures. A couple of round wooden tables filled the rest of the space. People sat here and there, reading books and newspapers. I went to an empty table, quietly unpacked my things, sat down and closed my eyes.   

Book cover of 'Happier Here & Now' by Mary Jane Grant, featuring a hand holding a colorful bouquet of flowers, with the title and subtitle prominently displayed.

I could hear the occasional rustling of a newspaper and the soft hum of the heating system. 

I took a deep breath through my nose. I detected a faint floral hint from the hand lotion I’d applied before leaving my room. Lately, I’d switched my allegiance from lavender to rose. Maybe it was the influence of England. After all, what was more English than a rose? 

I settled into place, connected my laptop, opened the internet and started my search. My first question was simple: why, when I immersed myself in the present, did I feel so much better? By pulling my attention to the five senses, I gave myself no choice but to focus on what was happening in the moment. I was not stuck in the past or worried about the future. Yesterday, I had learned first-hand that the senses held the key that opened the gate to my present experience. They admitted me to the garden of earthly delights—sights, sounds, smells, tastes and physical feelings—right here, right now. By being in the body, I could calm the mind and soothe the spirit. It felt neither self-indulgent nor hedonistic. It felt beautifully, blissfully ordinary. 

When I was recovering after my suicide attempt, I read Full Catastrophe Living, a 650-page volume by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, a world-renowned mindfulness researcher and originator/teacher of MBSR. I took the MBSR course twice, and underwent a one-year program called Dialectical Behavioural Therapy. 

If I ever encounter someone going through a rough time, I might tell them, instead, to buy Grant’s 200-page A Cure for Heartache and read it slowly, mindfully, savouring each syllable, and then maybe go back and read it again. Because everything I learned in that difficult time is what I learned all over again from this meaningful little book. 

For more on heartbreak and healing, read:

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

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

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

For more lyric essays, read:

Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and other dilemmas, by Gloria Blizzard

I Don’t Do Disability and other lies I’ve told myself, by Adelle Purdham

The Minister’s Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Doubt, Friendship, Loneliness, Forgiveness, and More, by Karen Stiller

Black Cake, Turtle Soup: A Journey Through Racism for Any Month of the Year

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

Years ago, I attended a one-day workshop on racism. At one point, the workshop leader asked one person in the group to sit on the hotseat to learn about the experience of racism from a first-person perspective by talking about a time they’d experienced an “ism.” I volunteered.

Book cover for 'Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and other dilemmas' by Gloria Blizzard with a colorful wave pattern background.

I sat in the chair, closed my eyes, and—guided by his questions—recounted my experience with a long-ago boyfriend and his abiding misogyny. As the workshop leader led me slowly through a specific memory, I dove deeper and deeper into an incident that I needed thirty-five years to understand was rape. 

Before I opened my eyes, after I had dissolved into heaving sobs, the leader brought me gently back to the present and translated my pain into a new level of awareness of the parallels—NOT the sameness, but the similarities—between all kinds of “isms” and “phobias,” in this case racism and sexism. 

Not a day has gone by in the thirty-some years since then that I haven’t reflected on what I learned that day. I can’t ever know the pain of the constant “othering” that must constantly wear down the resolve of the strongest of individuals. I can only try to learn more, to understand more about racism when life presents me with an opportunity. 

Gloria Blizzard’s (class of 2021) book of lyric essays, Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas (Dundurn Press, 2024) presents such an opportunity. I’d like to say that once I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down, but that’s not true. Rather, after I’d read almost every essay, I needed to put the book down and take some time to process and integrate what I’d just read. Like this passage, from an essay called “The Mathematics of Rage.”

Sitting at Northwood on Bloor Street West over a mocktail and beer, Gillian asks, “Did you notice suddenly becoming invisible to men around age forty?” 

Me: “Nope.”

“Yeah, but you are beautiful.”

“So are you.”

“But I noted it and it was sudden.” Gillian is smart, gorgeous, accomplished, white, a writer, and one of my mentors during my MFA. 

Good for her, I thought, as mostly I found myself far too visible. Still. A constant imposition or a weight lay upon me. Except, that is, when I wanted medical or legal care or psychological or academic care for me or my child—then I became eminently less visible, categorically unseen, a giant perplexity for someone who looked at me blankly, or with sexually laced assumptions or suspicion. 

This is not unlike my trip to a walk-in medical clinic for extreme rib pain that had me hobbled. After an hour wait, I was sent to an examining room. The doctor entered. I sat twisted in pain and pointing at my chest. His face turned to scorn, the absence of concern. “Get out,” he said. “Just, just go,” he said, waving me and my pain away. 

It happens to women of all ages and races, this shifting state of value and visibility. Gillian noted herself as suddenly unseen at a certain age. My Blackness, however, ensures that eyes remain on me. This disappears, however, when I am due for a promotion or in need of care. Then I am fucking invisible.

I did not respond in real time at the clinic. My thoughts were blunted by pain, shock, and confusion. This medical assault surprised and shocked me, and yet it did not surprise me at all. The doctor assumed I was there for opiates. …

The doctor got paid by our state for that visit. For my pain-infused walk to and presence in that clinic, I got nothing. The next day, after another pain-filled night, I took more time off from my job and visited a naturopath who was also a chiropractor. I paid for this visit myself. Upon a physical examination that took approximately two minutes, he determined I had a dislocated rib. “What have you done to yourself?” he asked. “This is a body response. Have you been under extreme stress?” 

“You have no idea,” I responded. 

That was exactly the lesson I learned at that workshop all those years ago: I can try my best to understand every day. And I do try. Every day. It’s literally the least I can do. But no matter what I do or how hard I try, I will never really have any idea. 

That’s the reality that all of us need to integrate into our lives and reflect on every day for the rest of our lives. Adding this excellent book to the library of books and movies I continue to accumulate—not just in the years since that workshop, not just in the months after George Floyd’s murder, not just during Black History Month, but every month of every year I continue to be alive—is one small way to continue trying. 

It’s not enough, of course. I doubt anything will be enough in my lifetime. But to paraphrase a very wise woman I once knew: How do you start fighting racism? You just start.

Other books that deal with racism:

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

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

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

One in Six Million: The Baby by the Roadside and the Man Who Recovered a Holocaust Survivor’s Lost Identity, by Amy Fish

Walking the Camino: A Healing Journey

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments

Several years ago, I coached a client through a few drafts of a memoir. About twenty years earlier, he and his wife, always up for travel and adventure, had tried long-distance hiking. It had been disastrous: they’d done no training, they were wearing new ill-fitting boots, and their six-year-old son was with them. They abandoned their hike about halfway through. 

Book cover of 'Walking the Camino: On Earth as It Is' by Maryanna Gabriel, featuring a path leading into the horizon with silhouettes of hikers.

A few years later, both approaching milestone birthdays, they were mulling over how to celebrate and decided to give hiking another try, this time doing lots of research and physical training, and leaving their children with family. It went so well and was so fulfilling that they made it an annual tradition. 

At first, they did a few hikes in England, a hiking-friendly country. Then they decided to tackle something bigger: El Camino de Santiago, a trail for religious pilgrims that starts in the French Pyrenees and makes its way across northern Spain and Portugal to its terminus in Galicia, on the Atlantic Coast. Around 800 kilometres long, it takes thirty to forty days to complete; they broke it into three segments, which they completed over three years.

I’ve been intrigued with the idea of hiking the Camino ever since. So, Maryanna Gabriel’s (class of 2022) book, Walking the Camino: On Earth as It Is (Pottersfield Press, 2023) immediately leapt out at me. A bit adrift after the unexpected death of her mother, Gabriel was seeking a way to deal with her grief and reconnect with her inner self. She attended a talk about walking the Camino, where a stranger with whom she exchanged a few brief words leaned in and said, “Walk the Camino. You’ll know why.” 

Her travel memoir, Walking the Camino, is exactly what the title promises: a chronicle of Gabriel’s experience, from that moment at the talk, through months of preparation, and from the beginning of the famed spiritual route in the Pyrenees Mountains to its end at the Atlantic Ocean. Just a few days into the hike, she writes about a moment when she’s resting with some fellow travellers, talking about the ineffable quality of the Camino.

I lifted my head at a pause. Something unusual was happening. I was trying to understand a rushing sensation from a great depth. I examined Bjørn intently.

“May I have your permission to pray,” he asked. His blue eyes twinkled.

It was getting late, customers had departed, and the owner had disappeared. We were alone. Kris and I glanced at each other and nodded.

Intonations of sound emerged. Rumbles that seemed ancient and long forgotten. Vowels tumbled, then halted, and gathered momentum. Bjørn tossed back his head and boomed in a crescendo of resounding benediction, a cascading river that encircled us then rolled upwards into the starlight. The sound was unlike any language I had ever heard, Latin but not Latin, Hebrew but not Hebrew, Spanish but not Spanish, but seemed to contain elements of these languages. The effect was musical and the intent benevolent. It uplifted the heart and I was filled with the wonder of it. Of babies, and cinnamon toast, dragonflies on mountain lakes, of angels blowing their horns, of kisses and custard and roses, a flower dappled in sunlight and pollen and dewdrops, the laughter of children, a first candy cane, of cookies and fire crackle, the crunch of snow, the crinkle of presents, of soft knitted socks, and the snuggle of Sunday mornings. A profound peace coursed through me, as though I had been enormously blessed. Was it from this world or beyond?

The reverberations slowly died away. Had Bjørn been speaking in tongues? I roused myself. I had to ask.

“Does this happen often?”

He mumbled and looked at me shyly from beneath shaggy brows. “Sometimes.”

Beautiful, visual, lyrical writing.

Anyone I’ve spoken to who’s done the Camino comes back with similar stories of wonder and awe and peace. The writer I spoke of earlier was at a complete loss to express his feelings as he and his wife drew close to and finally reached the end point, the finish line they’d been striving toward for three years. 

I don’t know if I’ll ever walk the Camino. It seems huge, daunting. But if the kind of experience Gabriel and my writing client describe awaits along the route or at the end, maybe, just maybe, I should do it. 

Walking the Camino: On Earth As It Is was the 2022 winner of the Pottersfield Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Other winners of this award from among the graduates of the MFA program include:

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

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

The Illogical Adventure: A Memoir of Love and Fate, by Andrew MacDuff and Mirriam Mweemba. Review coming soon.

Other books of inner exploration through travel:

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

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

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