Reviews

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.

The Truth Behind Breast Cancer Screening: A Review

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month

I’ve never met a woman who doesn’t hate having her biennial mammogram. And why would any woman not hate it? It feels like the technician is trying to pull your breast right out of your chest and squash it as flat as a pancake between two very cold metal slabs. 

Regardless, every two years, I receive a reminder letter that I’m due for my mammogram and I dutifully make my next appointment and get it done. It’s become such a regular part of women’s health care regimes once they’re past 40 that almost no one questions it. 

Enter Reneé Pellerin (class of 2016), who questions it deeply in Conspiracy of Hope: The Truth about Breast Cancer Screening (Goose Lane Editions, 2018). Pellerin points out that, at best, research doesn’t clearly support screening programs, and at worst, it suggests they may cause harm. 

In a cover blurb written by Dr. Brain Goldman, host of CBC’s White Coat, Black Art, the veteran ER physician writes, “Pellerin knows the science better than many of the doctors in whose hands women have placed their trust.” On that note, I’ll let Pellerin speak for herself. The following passages are taken from the beginning and the end of the introduction:

Based on the knowledge of the day and her own decade of experience, [Maureen] Roberts [the clinical director of the Edinburgh Breast Screening Project] expressed serious misgivings about the nationwide breast screening program launched in the United Kingdom the year before she died. She acknowledged … research that showed mammography screening reduced deaths from breast cancer by 30 percent. But she urged her readers to also consider other research that did not find benefit….

Then she asked, “If screening does little or no good could it possibly be doing any harm? We are all reluctant to face this…. There is also an air of evangelism, few people questioning what is actually being done,” she wrote. “Are we brainwashing ourselves into thinking that we are making a dramatic impact on a serious disease before we brainwash the public?” …

Toward the end of the introduction, Pellerin concludes:

The story of mammography screening is a story about science and medicine. It’s a story about hundreds of thousands of women who were participants in screening studies around the world. It’s a story about honest differences and sincere efforts to do good. It is also a story about vested interests, money, and greed….mammography is a multi-billion dollar industry that provides employment to radiologists, creates markets for the latest in imaging equipment built by multinational companies, and perpetuates the bureaucracy and infrastructure of government-run screening programs. Pink ribbon charities that benefit financially from our fear of breast cancer take advantage of paternalistic messaging around early detection. The desire to believe in early detection is intuitive and compelling with the result that women and their doctors become complicit in the conspiracy, if unwittingly.

It’s not unusual for scientists to disagree, and controversy in medicine is not surprising…. But nothing in medicine has ever generated as much controversy or conflict as mammography screening. The mammogram story is about much more than argument. Sadly, it is often about backstabbing, bullying, and deliberate suppression of information. These are the by-products of fear and hope.

If you’re a woman, or if you’ve ever loved a woman—partner, mother, daughter, sister—read this book. You may still go for your regular mammograms—I do—but with just a little more doubt in my mind than I ever used to have. And that’s not a bad thing. 

Other books for women: 

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

Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Women in North America, by Sheima Benembarek.

Every Boy I Ever Kissed: A Memoir, by Nellwyn Lampert.

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.

How Punk Music Saves Lives

/ Lynne Melcombe / 1 Comment

I live with depression and anxiety. I do All The Things to reduce the extent to which they affect my daily life but, regardless, they are my companions. So, I know, on a personal level, what it is to look for a community where I feel accepted and understood as I am.

Cover of the book 'Scream Therapy: A Punk Journey Through Mental Health' by Jason Schreurs, featuring a microphone with a tangled cord and the book's title prominently displayed.

Jason Schreurs (class of 2022) wrote Scream Therapy: A Punk Journey Through Mental Health (Flex Your Head Press, 2023) to reach out to his community. Schreurs lives with bipolar disorder. Depression and anxiety are not fun, but the roller coaster ride of bipolar disorder? As my mother used to say, “Thank the lord for small mercies.”

Scream Therapy is what Schreurs promises to be: a message to people who, at some point in their lives stumbled into punk music, often by way of skateboarding, and found their community. Punk concerts are always screaming loud, the mosh pits are nothing I could ever trust, and sometimes the live performances are improv’d by musicians who assembled just that evening, for that evening only.

I’m the first to admit I don’t like hard core music. The heaviest metal bands I’ve ever enjoyed are the likes of Steppenwolf, Rush, and the Doors—easy listening compared with punk. But the thesis of Scream Therapy is not that everyone should like punk. The thesis is that an inordinate number of punk rockers feel strongly, as Schreurs does, that punk music saved their lives. Without the community they found in punk—a community that gave them a sense of belonging for the first time … well, ever—they would have ended their own lives. 

Consider this passage about a man named Brian, now a middle-aged husband and dad with a day job that wouldn’t suggest anything about him as a person, much less how deeply he relies on punk music and the punk community for his mental health:

For Brian, leaving his parents’ house for a more stable environment allowed him to focus on turning his pain into positivity. Brian poured all he had into screaming in bands and organizing shows. At age 16, he booked a West Coast tour for Ashes, his first serious band. At 17, he went to Europe with Battery, the straight edge hardcore band his name became synonymous with for the next eight years. Between tours, Brian moved to Boston when he was 18 and set up one of the most popular recording studios of the ‘90s and ‘00s….

But depression creeped back into his life after opening the studio. He buried his internal turmoil and poured everything into the music, surrounding himself with a support network of bands like Gainesville, Florida’s Hot Water Music—unwavering rays of positivity with members that would do anything for him. It was the most amazing time of his life, but he kept his struggles hidden, stifling his inner doubt and emotional pain. “I was one of the most sought-after record producers for bands all over the world, and I felt like a failure.” Brian digs deep for the right words to make sense of that time. “The thing about depression is it’s not fucking reasonable. It doesn’t make sense.” 

(Boy, do I understand that sentiment.)

Years later, Brian’s nervous system refused to hold back his depression any longer.… “I remember my wife saying to me, ‘You need to be doing music. You need to be writing.’ I had to force myself to think about my issues and acknowledge them and not let them grow and become corrosive.” One evening, Brian picked up a guitar in his basement. Less than 10 minutes later, he had the first song he’d written in 20 years. I picture his song as a battering ram, bashing the pain trapped inside. “I can’t express to you the weight that came off my shoulders.” Brian sighs and tells me singing and songwriting for his new melodic hardcore band Be Well is his daily therapy….

“I don’t know that I’ve ever felt such gratitude as I feel toward punk and hardcore,” he says. “It gave me a family and an avenue to find myself at multiple times in my life when I needed a community to hear me, and see me, and appreciate not only my strengths but my weaknesses.” Brian chokes up and pretends to clear his throat. I do the same. His words could be mine. 

Not every type of music, or any art form, is for everyone. (I look at Jackson Pollock’s paintings and think What?) But there is a body of research on the importance of community to mental health, some of which Schreurs cites in Scream Therapy. It doesn’t matter what bring people together around as long as the community they create provides its members with a feeling of belonging, a feeling they have people to turn to as much to celebrate their victories as to seek support and reassurance when life sucks. 

I don’t imagine I’ll ever care for punk music. But if Schreurs and his peers find in the punk community what they need to get through life, more power to them. And more power to Jason Schreurs for reaching out to whomever he can reach through his book as well as his podcast, also called Scream Therapy, and letting them know there are people out there that they, too, can turn to for support, laughter, joy, reassurance—or maybe just to have a really satisfying scream. 

October 10 is World Mental Health Day. Here are some other books by MFA grads relating to mental health and the role of community in maintaining it: 

About mental health and its impact on one family:

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

About the importance of building community around almost anything:

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

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

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

About the power of community, as well as the challenges it can present:

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

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

/ Lynne Melcombe / 5 Comments

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

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

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

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

She continues: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other not-so-great moments in Canadian history:

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

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

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

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

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

Resilience and Chocolate: A Refugee Family’s Remarkable Journey

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other books about food:

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

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

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

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.

A Memoir of Faith: Insights from a Minister’s Wife

/ Lynne Melcombe / 5 Comments

I’m not religious. Which doesn’t mean I don’t have faith. My faith is atheism. I believe what we see is what we get, we have one chance to leave a positive impact on the people around us, and our afterlife is what we leave behind in those people’s hearts and minds. 

It also doesn’t mean I don’t respect other people’s faiths. I do, very much. Even when I don’t understand their religious choices, as I don’t understand all the choices the Muslim women Sheima Benembarek wrote about in Halal Sex, I respect their right to make those choices, free of judgment. Which is probably why a diehard atheist like me got so much out of a book of essays written by a devoted Christian. 

Karen Stiller (class of 2018), author of The Minister’s Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Doubt, Friendship, Loneliness, Forgiveness, and More (Tyndale, 2020), has written a book filled with stories about what it’s like to be married to a member of the clergy—the burden of other people’s (and her own) unrealistic expectations, the wish that sometimes people would just stop talking to her and leave her alone, the loneliness of being unable to find a friend in one’s own community, the disappointment when her husband’s career takes the family places they’d rather not go instead of where they’d love to go. 

Stiller not only offers insight into what that life is really like, but she does so in an I-bet-you’re-more-fun-at-a-party-than-anyone-might-guess authorial voice, which she combines with a self-deprecating sense of humour that makes you wish that party was happening tonight. In a chapter on family, Stiller weighs in on what it’s like raising three human beings who are blessed and burdened with being minister’s children: 

The messes and misses are what Brent and I remember the most, what touch us so deeply—our clumsy selves just trying to do our best. There are so many real things that we did wrong, especially me with all my yelling. 

I wish I had never once shouted. I also wish they had not stretched plastic wrap around the living room lamps as I watched, helpless, while interviewing someone on the phone for a magazine article I was writing about whether or not spanking was a good thing. I wished they had not dumped a can of beans in their brother’s bed, or put all my bras in the freezer on April Fools’ Day. I wished that a frog had not been dropped in a sink full of dishes because, as it turns out, frogs die in hot, soapy water. …

I also wish I had done those things I had planned to do, like cooking a meal from a different country every week, learning about the culture together (sitting quietly, taking turns reading out loud), and praying for the people who lived there (sitting quietly, taking turns praying out loud). I did not do that, not even on one single Wednesday evening. That was an idea I had before we had kids, something nice to do with your puppy maybe.

This is a deeply human book, a book I chuckled along with as I recognized, against all odds, how much Stiller’s life reminded me of mine, a book I feared I wouldn’t enjoy (and then wouldn’t know what to write about) but instead ended up reading in one sitting. It’s the kind of book I like to read when I’m awake at 3 AM, much as I like reading Richard Wagamese’s gentle memoirs-in-essays, so that its kind and soothing message can take my mind off the troubles racing like squirrels around my brain—and allow me to find my way back to an untroubled rest.  

Books about faith:

Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Women in North America, by Sheima Benembarek.

The Scientist and the Psychic: A Son’s Exploration of His Mother’s Gift, by Christian Smith.

Inside the Deadly Kingston Pen Riot: Have Any Lessons Been Learned?

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments

There are those who firmly believe that if you do the crime, you do the time, and it doesn’t matter if the prison time you serve is cruel and inhumane; in fact, the worse it is, the happier they are. If you’ve broken the law, they believe, you deserve whatever you get. The worse the punishment, the less likely you’ll be to reoffend. 

Book cover of 'Murder on the Inside' by Catherine Fogarty, featuring the title, subtitle about the Kingston Penitentiary riot, and an image of the prison.

Never mind research that’s shown not only that prison time doesn’t work as a deterrent but that people tend to come out more likely to offend than when they went in; or that racial and cultural minorities are significantly over represented in prison systems; or that disproportionate numbers of prisoners (compared with the general population) suffered child abuse or neglect, including sexual abuse, undiagnosed and untreated concussions, learning disabilities, and ADHD than in the general population. Many people still believe prisoners get what they asked for by committing crimes and that should be the end of that. 

Except it’s not, because it’s one thing to deprive people of civil rights and something entirely different to deprive them of human rights. And when you deprive them of basic human rights for long enough, eventually they will fight back—and the consequences could be dire. 

Catherine Fogarty’s (class of 2018) Murder on the Inside: The True Story of the Deadly Riot at Kingston Penitentiary (Biblioasis, 2021) details exactly how dire the consequences were on April 14, 1971, when prisoners at Kingston Pen decided they’d had enough and started a riot to protest their living conditions. Fogarty writes in the Introduction:

The early 1970s was a time of great political and social upheaval, and what was happening in our prisons reflected that change. Deteriorating prison conditions and the increasing awareness of basic human rights were creating a combustible penal environment … Prisoners wanted to be treated like humans instead of numbers and they were demanding to be heard.

But what began as a rallying cry to the outside world for prison reform and justice quickly dissolved into a tense hostage taking, savage beatings and ultimately murder. For four terrifying days, prisoners held six guards hostage as they negotiated with ill-prepared prison officials and anxious politicians, while heavily armed soldiers surrounded the prison and prepared for an attack.

The deadly ingredients had been brewing long before that fateful night in April. The warden … had alerted his superiors in Ottawa that the prison was dangerously overcrowded and understaffed. … But the danger signs were not heeded, and the years of mistreatment, bitterness and distrust ultimately created a human volcano … 

“When the rebellion finally erupted,” Fogarty continues, “it made headlines around the world” ultimately costing the lives of two men and changing the lives of many more. 

Canadians often think of our history as “boring,” but Fogarty’s telling of this pivotal event is anything but. Researching and writing the book took five years, numerous trips to Kingston, hours in Ontario’s provincial archives and Queen’s University archives, interviews with dozens of retired correctional officers and family members of those who had died, and even interviews with some of the surviving prisoners. 

The year 2021, when the book was published, marked the fiftieth anniversary of the riot, yet fifty years after prisoners demanded to be heard and treated humanely, she asks, “what have we learned? Our country still struggles with fundamental questions related to incarceration and basic human rights. Cruel injustices continue to happen in our prisons every day.” 

Fogarty’s book offers “a peak behind the curtain of a correctional system that is still deeply flawed in its philosophy and practices. The Russian writer Dostoyevsky once said: ‘The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.’ But how are we to judge” she asks, “if we are still not even allowed to see inside?” 

In the tradition of University of King’s College Professor Emeritus and award-winning historical true crime writer Dean Jobb, Murder on the Inside is a page-turning historical account that is unflinching in its honesty, compassionate in its motives, and yet another beautifully written book to emerge out of the Master of Fine Arts program at University of King’s College. Whether you are an afficionado of historical true-crime nonfiction or have never read a word of it, this is a truly worthwhile read. 

Other not-so-great moments in Canadian history:

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.

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

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

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

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

/ Lynne Melcombe / 5 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, Maryanna Gabriel. Review coming soon.

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

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

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.

Exploring Muslim Women’s Sexuality in “Halal Sex”

/ Lynne Melcombe / 8 Comments

This post is the latest in an ongoing project to read and review the books written as the major project of graduates of the University of King’s College Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction Writing.

With Ramadan starting February 28, I thought this week’s blog post would give a nod to the Muslim faith. I’m not sure what I expected when I started reading Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Women in North America (Viking, 2023) by Sheima Benembarek (class of 2020), but what I found was so much better than anything I imagined. 

As a baby boomer who grew up in the seventies, I always thought of myself as a person who didn’t have too many sexual hangups. As a middle-class white woman who grew up in a secular Christian household, I had many preconceived notions (largely wrong) about Muslim women. So, it was a surprise to me to read the stories of a half-dozen Muslim women who are forging their own paths sexually. 

Hind is a self-described niqabi—she wears the full body-covering niqab, with only her hands and eyes showing, which she chose because she tired of being subject to the male gaze. I’m guessing many if not most Western women think of the niqab as a sign of women’s oppression. I let go of a friendship years ago because the person in question said outright that she had no respect for women who wore even a headscarf for religious reasons because they were submitting to male oppression. But the male gaze can be oppressing too and I understand the perspective that covering up might have a freeing effect.

Regardless, underneath her niqab, you never know what colour HInd’s hair might be—turquoise, maybe—as she practices a form of self-expression that’s meaningful to her. She’s also in an unusual marital situation—divorced from her first husband, now sharing her second husband with another woman (her idea), but living separately and independently because she doesn’t get along with his first wife. Her husband spends two days a week with her and the rest of the time with his other wife and children. (I could deal with such a relationship.) She has an abundant sexual appetite but her first husband didn’t, which was one of the reasons they went their separate ways. And despite the conservatism of her faith, she’s very open in talking about sexuality and educating young people in her community about it. 

Benembarek writes skillfully about a half-dozen women who are expressing their sexual identity in their own ways. Like Azar, a nonbinary transgender Sufi, which Benembarek describes as the hippy group of Islam. And Bunmi, a black bisexual Texan Muslim of Nigerian heritage who gave up the headscarf and can now be found roller skating and smoking a joint.  And Eman, who’s “one half of a popular Jewish-Palestinian lesbian comedy duo who, after marrying, combined their last names and professionally call themselves the El-Salomons.” 

And then there’s Khadijah who,

sashays back and forth in her cherry red pleather thigh-high boots, watching herself in the floor-length mirrors in front of and behind her. It takes practice to stay up on those eight-inch heels and even more practice to confidently swing around on a pole in them. The boots are made of polyvinyl chloride, a durable type of plastic; she wears stockings to avoid sweating profusely and to ease the labour of peeling them off. Her brown curls are conveniently out of the way and up in a messy bun, and she adjusts a sheer black cape that’s not long enough to conceal her frilly black high-rise panties. …

Khadijah worries her pole dancing isn’t as sophisticated as the other women’s; she has more experience in burlesque. She’s the only woman of colour dancing in the studio that afternoon, and the combination of leather and black and red fabrics suits her. The stern yet sultry look she’s putting on does too.

None of these women are what would come to my mind if you had asked me to describe a Muslim woman before reading Halal Sex. But then, if there’s anything I love in any book, it’s the opportunity to learn. For me, Halal Sex was all about learning. 

Books with a feminist leaning:

Every Boy I Ever Kissed: A Memoir, by Nellwyn Lampert.

No Place 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.

Conspiracy of Hope: The Truth About Breast Cancer Screening, by Reneé Pellerin.