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Understanding How Concussion Affects Women’s Lives

/ Lynne Melcombe / 1 Comment

This week’s post is not about a book—well it is, sort of; and it’s not about a UKing’s grad, although it is about someone who attended the MFA in Creative Nonfiction program. 

Julia Nunes, who has cowritten two books on mental health with Scott Simmie, was in the class of 2016. We hit it off while we were in New York for the publishing residency. My book (which will be released in the spring) is about a concussion I suffered over twenty years ago now. She, too, was writing about concussion, focusing on her son, who was at that time lying in bed with, if memory serves, his second hockey concussion—crushing headaches, severe photophobia, disorienting dizziness, ongoing vomiting, the whole nine yards. 

The first night we were in New York, I was out to dinner with Deirdre Macdonald (a peer in the class of 2015 who’s just released her MFA book project, Her Hat in the Ring: Toronto Milliner El Jamon and Her Circle). As we got up to leave, I slipped on a piece of tomato on the floor and fell backward, striking the back of my head on the corner of a table in almost exactly the same spot I had struck in 2003, when I sustained the concussion I was writing about. 

I went by ambulance to the hospital (with Deirdre, bless her) and yes, I had another concussion. It nearly ruined my time in New York—headaches, dizziness, thankfully not vomiting—so I only attended a few of the lectures (couldn’t focus for long) and none of the social events (way too loud). By the last day, I was feeling a bit better, so Julia and I explored The Highline and walked around Strand Books.

I finished my degree that year; Julia didn’t get to finish the year because a short while later she fell and had a severe concussion. It took her months to recover. I think she’d hoped to return the following year, but then she suffered another concussion, and another (having one concussion increases the risk of having another). 

So, she never finished her degree (or, as far as I know, the book about the inadequate way children’s sports teams were dealing with concussion in players). However,  I recently read an excellent book called Impact: Women Writing After Concussion, edited by ED Morin and Jane Cawthorne (University of Alberta Press, 2021). Toward the end of this wonderful and vindicating anthology of essays is an essay by Julia Nunes called “The Next Hit.”

This excerpt hit home for me:

I attended a speech recently by a woman who lived first with post-concussion syndrome (PCS) and then with breast cancer. She shared a PowerPoint graph called “Sympathy by Casserole.” The comparison was stark: friends and family delivered more than sixty meals as she underwent chemotherapy versus zero meals post-concussion. Yet breast cancer, she said, was a breeze compared to PCS. The pain was less intense and the brain fog of chemotherapy had nothing on the confused, muddy state of the concussed mind.

I had something like this happen to me not long after my concussion. A friend who no longer lives on the Pacific Coast came into town with her husband for three months. In all that time, she found forty-five minutes for me but visited a friend who was dealing with breast cancer numerous times. When I expressed my hurt, she responded with something like, “Lynne, she has cancer. You bumped your head.” 

No one really understands concussion until and unless they live through it; no one understands that while seventy to eighty-five percent of concussions heal within days, weeks, or months, the other fifteen to thirty percent can continue causing symptoms for years, even lifetimes. 

Sadly, I know Julia understands—sadly because as much I’d like people to understand better, I wouldn’t wish a single concussion on anyone, much less multiple concussions. 

If you’ve never had a concussion and would like to understand it better, read Impact, starting with Julia Nunes’ excellent essay, “The Next Hit.”

And if you’ve had a concussion and would like to see your experiences reflected accurately on a page, read Impact, starting with Julia Nunes’ excellent essay, “The Next Hit.”

Here are other books from the prolific graduating class of 2016:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures, by Moira Dann

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

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.

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

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, by Jessica McDiarmid

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

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

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

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

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

A few thin grey clouds smudge the light. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other books with a lyrical quality:

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

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

Other books about real food:

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

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

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

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

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

/ Lynne Melcombe / 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Heart of Homestay: Lessons from Hosting International Students

/ Lynne Melcombe / 3 Comments

As fall and the start of the school year approach, I’m reminded of what these days meant for my family for many years: the arrival of homestay students, some new, some returning. So, when I read Jennifer Robin Wilson’s (class of 2025) book, The Heart of Homestay: Creating Meaningful Connections When Hosting International Students (Page Two; 2025), almost every page brought back memories. (Full disclosure: Some of our students may have come to us through Wilson’s business, the Canadian Homestay Network.)

Cover of the book 'The Heart of Homestay: Creating Meaningful Connections When Hosting International Students' by Jennifer Robin Wilson, featuring colorful geometric patterns.

In chapter 1, when a student stays out long past her curfew leaving her host mother in a state of panic, I remembered the time a Japanese girl fell asleep on the bus, missed her stop, and got off the bus disoriented and confused. With very little English, she approached a random house, knocked on the door, and explained her predicament. Shortly after, we got a phone call from the people in the house grilling us to make sure we were decent enough people for them to drive this sweet and innocent young traveller to our home.

Chapter 2 includes a section on homesickness, which we encountered often. What I remember most clearly is bonding with a lovely young Chinese girl over her homesickness. All of fifteen years old when she arrived, dressed like a little sk8tr girl and kicking her legs like a small child in the passenger seat of my car, she stayed with us two-and-a-half years until she went off to McGill University in Montreal. We still see her sometimes when she’s passing through Vancouver on her way to or from China. 

Wilson goes on in other chapters to talk about creating emotionally safe spaces for children, such that one Russian boy was able to come out as bisexual, which he hadn’t been able to do at home. While reader a whole chapter on food, I remembered the time our Thai “daughter” and her mother, who stayed with us for her daughter’s first nine days with us, spent a whole day cooking the most delicious meal for us. In one chapter, Wilson touches on household chores. As parents, we expected everyone in the family to do chores and never had a problem with our students—except the time a Chinese student (who’d clearly never cleaned a bathroom) used the handheld shower nozzle to spray down the WHOLE room and then tried to clean up the water with a Swiffer mop WITHOUT the absorbent mop head. 

It’s clear from the subjects Wilson covers and the anecdotes she shares that she writes from extensive personal experience. And not only as a homestay coordinator and parent: she also experienced homestay personally when her mother, who started the company, took students in, and later as a mother when her own daughter went to France as an international student.

Over and above writing from a deep well of experience, Wilson researched The Heart of Homestay broadly, citing books ranging from Amy Edmondson’s Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well to Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, and a dozen-ish more that this anthropology undergrad would be happy to read. Not to mention dozens of articles from peer-reviewed journals like the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (on the ubiquity of noise in Brazilian culture, the journal of Adaptive Human Behavioral Physiology (on the human need for touch), and the Journal of Personality (on shame).

Wilson’s thorough research combines with her warm, friendly authorial tone to make her book a positive and helpful introduction to homestay—even when she’s describing the aftermath of a terrible incident when a student’s stray cigarette ignited a fire that gutted the homestay family’s home. Astonishingly, the homestay parents curbed their anger and not only allowed the boy to stay in their home, but worked hard at ensuring he wouldn’t carry guilt about it through his life. How could they do that? Because they’d formed a bond of familial love with him, Wilson says:

The family bond that Liz described came up again and again in my interviews, the host survey comments, and student testimonials. While some hosts are quick to identify this as love, others use related words like “bond,” “connection,” or “friendship,” but they share the characteristic of familial love. Psychology professor Barbara Fredrickson, who is known for her work in positive psychology, defines love as “the preoccupying and strong desire for further connection, the powerful bonds people hold with a select few and the intimacy that grows between them, the commitments to loyalty and faithfulness.”

In a nutshell, love is large. It is an emotion, but it’s also a verb. All loving actions, gestures, words, and commitments produce meaningful connections between hosts and students, but some of the most profound examples come at moments when we are most vulnerable. In the anguish of a devastating loss, or the depths of grief, or the intense pain of heartbreak, love persists. 

Over the years, my husband and me must have hosted fifty-ish students, for as little as a week and as long as three years; it’s been nearly thirty years since we hosted our first student and over a decade since our last one left, but several are still in touch with us. For us to have had Wilson’s book when we started out would no doubt have helped us a lot. Which is why I know what a boon it will be to all the new homestay parents who are setting out, as we once did, to welcome the world to their doors. 

If you’re interested in other cultures, whether by travelling yourself or getting to know people from other cultures here at home, check out my posts on these other books:

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

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

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

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

And for something a little different:

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

Surviving the Big One: Life in North America’s Earthquake Zones

/ Lynne Melcombe / 5 Comments

I live in Port Coquitlam, a small city just outside Vancouver. Among the many amazing things Vancouver is known for—mountains, ocean, a temperate climate, and unreal real estate prices—is something no city wants to be known for: we’re in an earthquake zone. 

So, I read Gregor Craigie’s (class of 2019) book On Borrowed Time: North America’s Next Big Quake (Gooselane Editions, 2021) with interest, generously laced with a sense of foreboding. And Craigie’s book is, indeed, frightening. His descriptions of people surviving (and not surviving) earthquakes are spine chilling. Of the 2011 earthquake that hit Christchurch, New Zealand, he writes: 

People outside watched in horror as the [Canterbury Television) building twisted and lurched in multiple directions. The windows exploded in unison as the concrete columns on the fifth floor collapsed and floor after floor plummeted to the ground. … Many of the more than two hundred people who were inside the building were crushed almost instantly, but some survived the collapse. When Kendyll Mitchell regained consciousness, she saw [her preschooler and her infant] were very much alive [but] covered in blood, which Mitchell quickly realized was coming from a wound in her head. She’d also suffered a large gash to her leg and a triple fracture to her pelvis. … The three were protected inside a small hole roughly one metre high by one metre wide. A steel beam directly above them protected them from a fatal blow. They were now entombed in a tangle of shattered glass, broken concrete, and bats of pink insulation. Mitchelle wiggled her foot out of the rubble but soon realized the broken bits of building above her were just too heavy to move. The elation she felt at surviving the building’s collapse was soon eclipsed by the smell of smoke. Would she survive an earthquake only to die in the fire that followed?

But On Borrowed Time is not only frightening: it’s also encouraging. In addition to vivid detail about what can happen in the wake of a quake (tsunamis, nuclear meltdowns, economic collapse, homelessness), he also offers solutions. Not that any of them will prevent the next big one, but that there are things we can do to prepare on a personal level (preparedness kits that can be pooled with neighbours’ supplies to bring communities together in the face of calamity); inviting a seismic expert into our homes to advise on improvements that might help these structures withstand a temblor; and a community level (lobbying municipal and other governments to tackle expensive retrofits as possible and having clear disaster response plans in place). 

There was a reason I chose to write about Craigie’s book as September approaches. When my kids were small, at the start of each school year, parents were reminded that the next big quake could happen anytime in the next century. Of course, that was 40 years ago, so now they’re rounding it down to 50 years. 

So, every year at this time I’d pull my earthquake backpacks off the shelf by the door and check whether the clothes would still fit my kids, whether any of the food or medication (Tylenol, Epi-pens) had passed its expiry date, whether I could afford to add anything this year. (One year I added solar-charged flashlights; the next year, solar-powered radios.) 

My kids are grown now, and I live alone, but I still have an emergency backpack in my front closet. I haven’t updated it in a decade but after reading Craigie’s book, I might get on that. And that’s really Craigie’s main point: we can’t predict when the next big one will come. And no matter what we do, we might not survive. Some folks use that as their fatalistic approach to not preparing. To me, though, preparing as much as I can is about a different kind of survival: if I do nothing, my anxiety will keep me awake all night. If I know I’ve taken control of what I can, I sleep. 

Right. Next weekend, I’m hauling down my own disaster preparedness kit and making sure it’s up to date.

On Borrowed Time won the Writer’s Trust of Canada’s Balsillie Prize for Public Policy

Want to read about some very different types of disasters?

Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir, by Aaron Williams.

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

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.

The Rise and Fall of Newfoundland’s Cod Fishery

/ Lynne Melcombe / 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here are some books about Canada that inspire pride:

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

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

The Ring of Fire: Balancing Resource Extraction and Indigenous Rights

/ Lynne Melcombe / 3 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir, by Aaron Williams.