Writing

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.

Connecting Communities Through Urban Fruit Gathering

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments

One of the sweetest memories I have from my childhood is my mom making preserves and canning or freezing fruit. My favourite was her strawberry jam. One June day my dad would take us all out to a pick-your-own place. Our parents paid us by the basket we picked. We always ended up eating almost as much as we put in the basket. 

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

Then we’d go home and help my mom sort through the berries: the firmest went into the freezer and the mushy ones into the jam pot, often with rhubarb picked fresh from our garden. She’d always make bread the same day so we could feast on warm strawberry jam on oven-fresh bread. 

I remembered those days fondly while reading Helena Moncrieff’s The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest (ECW Press, 2018). At its heart, it’s a book about making good use of the thousands of fruit trees in any city that bear fruit, only to rot on the ground while people are going hungry. It’s about connecting property owners willing to share the fruit, volunteers willing to pick it, and neighbours in need. It’s about reducing food waste, connecting people to their environment, and rebuilding the food literacy we’ve lost over the last few generations.

The Fruitful City explores the concept of fruit gathering and sharing in many more dimensions than I imagined were connected, in the process sharing a wide range of fascinating facts. Here are some of the interesting things I learned from this book:

  • “Tree Climbers International [who knew?] touts the benefits of being up a tree, including exercise, accessibility and a full sensory experience with hands on bark and the sound of the wind whistling through leaves. Japan is home to a tree-climbing school and has led the way in using trees for therapy.”
  • Neuroscientists have used functional MRI to show how acts of giving, such as volunteering for an organization that picks fruit and donates it to those in need, activate the brain’s mesolimbic reward system—the same system engaged in feeling good from monetary gain.
  • The Canada Food Guide was developed during WWII to combat nutritional deficiency during rationing. But since that war ended, food illiteracy has grown steadily with the advent of convenience foods that mean we no longer need to know how to grow anything, or how to tell what’s poisonous from what’s safe. 

Like Andrew Reeves’ Overrun, Laura Pratt’s Heartbroken, Lezlie Lowe’s No Place to Go, and Sue Harper’s Winter in the City of Light, among many others, The Fruitful City is thoroughly researched; I learned a lot and for me that’s one of the biggest pleasures of reading. And Moncrieff’s writing is always high quality and, well, clever. Consider this:

Bohemian waxwings are said to get drunk on winter berries. Whitehorse residents have rescued the wobbly birds from wonky flight paths and window crashes, incarcerating them in hamster-cage drunk tanks until they sober up. … In a freeze-and-thaw cycle through the fall, the fruit ferments. The little creatures either can’t tell the difference or they like the experience.

Who wouldn’t love that image? Not to mention the recipes at the end of every chapter.

Full disclosure: Helena Moncrieff is the partner of one of my dearest friends from the class of 2015, Havard Gould. But that in no way influenced how much I enjoyed this book, not least because of the memories it evoked of my mother’s many varieties of jam or the canned peaches that came from the tree in our backyard or the strawberry-rhubarb crisp that she served up warm with ice cream after a summertime dinner.  

My mouth is watering with the memories. 

Read my reviews of other books from the prolific class of 2016:

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

Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures, by Moira Dann.

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

A Cure for Heartache: Life’s Simple Pleasures, One Moment at a Time, by Mary Jane Grant. 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.

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.

Chasing Smoke: A Memoir of Firefighting in British Columbia’s Interior

/ Lynne Melcombe / 3 Comments

Long ago, in a previous life, I worked in archaeology. One summer in Hat Creek Valley, 26 kilometres beyond Cache Creek, BC, our 26-person crew was dawdling over breakfast when local ranchers drove by to notify us that a few small fires had broken out at the north end of the valley. Would we help put them out?

Book cover of 'Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir' by Aaron Williams, featuring a forest scene with smoke and an orange sky.

We put down our breakfast dishes, piled into our trucks, and sped off (like the heroes we thought we were) to spend the morning digging small fireguards and throwing dirt on flames that kept cropping up here and there. It was hot, hard work for a bunch of university students who spent most of our time sitting on stools in one-metre-square holes in the ground excavating millimetres at a time with trowels and paint brushes. 

I was thinking about that as I was reading Aaron Williams’s Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir (Harbour Publishing, 2017), which tells of his firefighting experience during the summer of 2014 (he’d been firefighting since 2006). Of course, there’s no comparing my miniscule experience with his, yet I can’t help thinking that the memory of how easily a single spark can jump 20 metres, or a small flame can travel underground along a tree root and pop up 10 metres away gives me a tiny bit of perspective on what real forest-firefighters are up against. 

Chasing Smoke provides insight into how firefighting works, why forest fires have been getting worse with climate change, and what the whole experience of firefighting is like, from a brutal training camp in May to sheer exhaustion in August. The author’s descriptions of fire are intensely visual:

A thunderstorm approaches. Little pockets of fire, previously resting in the moss, are brought to life by the strong winds preceding the downpour. The flames look tenacious under the dark clouds. I stand and watch a pocket of heat thrash around as it starts spitting rain. The flames, billowing and wide on the forest floor, find a spruce tree. One more kill before they lose the battle to the rain. 

The fire grabs on to the spruce and its lower limbs being to sizzle. Flames climb the tree and when they reach the top they balloon out, feasting on the fat clump of recent growth crowding the tree’s peak. The fire burns slow up there and the rest of the tree cools down and fades to a less intense orange. But the top still burns bright, the colour of a street light against the storm.

Many moments in this memoir are reminders that this work is decidedly dangerous:

Trees start coming down like I’ve never seen before. They’re limbless save for their very tops, where wind catches the foliage and pushes the tree over. … 

At first I’m calm as the trees fall. But suddenly a mess of wood, bent horizontal and cribbed into the trees above us, comes down in a rush of a hundred machine-gun snaps. Trees caught in the nest flail around before hitting the ground. Our eyes dart everywhere, trying to keep track of every moment. Trees break free and swing themselves like catapults. Splintered chunks of wood slash through the air like propellers. Tabes and I look in opposite directions, standing guard for each other. We don’t dare move, as that would take our complete focus from the storm of debris. 

As soon as it’s over I turn to Tabes. “Fuck this, let’s get out of here.” 

For all its intensity, though, Chasing Smoke is also an entertaining read. Williams has a sardonic sense of humour and laughs at himself and his crew at least once every few pages:

Dan holds the after-work meeting while we grill the steaks. The crew is paying more attention to us than to Dan’s end-of-day spiel. The pressure of getting the meat right is immense. Is it too rare? Or the ultimate shame—is it too cooked? It turns out fine, and Tabe and I share a moment when it’s all done. A stern nod to each other acknowledges that our integrity as men has never been stronger.

This was one of the first books I read when I decided to pursue this project of working my way through and reviewing all the books published by alumni of University of King’s College’s MFA program in Creative Nonfiction Writing. And it’s a great example of why I keep coming back for more. 

Books on different types of disasters:

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

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

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

Exploring the Asian Carp Crisis: A Riveting Read

/ Lynne Melcombe / 3 Comments

I like to eat fish. That’s about the extent of my relationship with them. Before I married, I had a boyfriend who loved fishing and took me with him once; I couldn’t understand what he thought was so great about it. Before our children came along, my ex-husband had several large fish tanks where he bred African cichlids, which he sold to a pet store to support his aquarium habit. 

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

But I’ve never been much interested in fish beyond what they taste like. So, when I first saw Andrew Reeves’s book, Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis (ECW, 2019) I wasn’t immediately drawn to it. I received it as a gift one Christmas after deciding to pursue this project to read and review all the books to come out of the University of King’s College Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Nonfiction Writing.

Overrun sat on my shelf for a year or three before I cracked the spine. And then, as happened with Karen Stiller’s The Minister’s Wife—another book I would not have chosen but thoroughly enjoyed—I found myself utterly absorbed. As author Maude Barlow reflects in her advance praise for the book, “A riveting, ‘can’t put it down’ book about fish? You bet!”

Reeves opens the story where the crisis began, close to the mouth of the Mississippi where, in the 1950s, an enterprising judge bought some land, created a lake, and stocked it with fish to be caught for a fee. When aquatic grass threatened to choke out the fish, the judge’s son, now in charge of the business, looked for a way to deal with it. 

With the publication of books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the 1960s, environmental awareness was growing. Importing Asian carp, which eat aquatic grasses like nobody’s business, seemed a better choice than trying to control it with chemicals.

That was before the environmental community began to appreciate the threat posed by invasive species—species deliberately or accidentally imported, many of which have caused untold damage to ecosystems because they didn’t evolve there, have no natural predators to keep them in check, and therefore threaten to choke out species native to an area. (As an avid gardener, plant species like dandelions, morning glory, and English ivy spring to my mind.)

Reeves follows the carp as it moves north, taking over lakes and rivers, leaving devastation in its wake. Incorporating research that must have seen him crawling through archives for weeks and conducting interviews that took him on land and water journeys south along the Mississippi and north to Illinois, he builds tension, eases off, builds more tension, and eases off again as he moves toward the climax like the author of a great mystery novel. 

Reeves’s skill as a writer goes well beyond finding a compelling way to shape a CNF story and deep into descriptions of people and landscapes that hold readers’ attention between peaks in the narrative. Here’s a sample: 

I had one last stop before leaving Arkansas. Ninety-two of the White River’s 720 miles flow through the White River National Wildlife Refuge, a 160,000-acre boomerang of land eight miles north of where the White River meets the Mississippi. Three hundred oxbow lakes are the dominant feature in the refuge. Here, the Mississippi shows signs of its constant movement: as the river erodes its banks, u-shaped meanders form that grow deeper with time. As the horseshoe becomes more pronounced, the neck of land between bends in the river grows narrower until it finally caves. Cut off from the river, the once-vibrant meanders sit dormant waiting, like lost children, for the river to come collect them.

I generally start my day by drinking coffee and reading for about an hour. While devouring Overrun, I had a hard time cutting myself off after two or three hours. At 330 pages, it’s a hefty book chock full of deep and thorough research crafted into a compelling narrative by a masterful storyteller. 

As I work my way through this project I’ve created, I’m learning not to judge a book by its cover (which in this case is quite creative) or its subject matter, but to keep my mind open to whatever comes my way. What came my way this time was a completely unexpected but very welcome treasure that I can’t recommend too highly. 

Books on environmental issues:

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

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

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

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

Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir, by Aaron Williams.

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

/ Lynne Melcombe / 3 Comments

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

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

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

the Eiffel Tower with the book title overlaying it

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

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

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

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

From Starvation to Abundance: A Memoir of Family and Resilience

/ Lynne Melcombe / 5 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

The preface to the book opens like this:

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

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

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

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

Books about the Holocaust:

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

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

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.

Remembering Alma Lee: A Literary Legacy

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

I’m saddened to hear of the passing of Alma Lee who founded the Vancouver Writer’s Festival after helping to create both the Writer’s Union of Canada and the Writer’s Trust of Canada.

I knew her briefly in the late 1980s when I was interim executive director of the Federation of BC Writers. She was a force of nature and was ultimately recognized for her efforts by being appointed to the Order of BC and the Order of Canada, and receiving an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Simon Fraser University, and the Commemorative Medal for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee.

Read more about Alma Lee in this obituary published in BC Bookworld.

R.I.P. Alma Lee (1940 – 2025)

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.

For Daffodil Month, a Journey Through Cancer in ‘Still, I Cannot Save You’

/ Lynne Melcombe / 3 Comments

As the daffodils come into bloom this year, I am reminded that April is Daffodil Month, the Canadian Cancer Society’s awareness and fundraising month for cancer. And then I can’t help thinking of the heart-wrenching memoir I recently finished reading, Still, I Cannot Save You: A Memoir of Sisterhood, Love, and Letting Go (McLelland and Stewart, 2023) by Kelly S. Thompson.

The book opens as Thompson, an officer in the Canadian military, waits to meet her sister in a shopping mall. Christmas music plays in the background as Thompson wonders if, this time, her older sister Meghan will show up. Meghan, we learn, is an addict and as such unpredictable and unreliable. And she also survived cancer as a very young child. She’s also thin, and three inches shorter than her younger sister. Genetics or the impact of cancer and chemotherapy on the development of a three-year-old? Impossible to know. 

As the years move forward, Meghan sobers up, finds a man, has a child, and marries the baby’s father, an abusive alcoholic. Thompson is medically discharged from the military due to her own bout with cancer. She too marries, learns she can’t have children, lives with depression. 

Through it all, the sisterly closeness that eluded them through Meghan’s addiction slowly returns. Just when they are closer than they’ve ever been, and as Meghan welcomes another child, she’s diagnosed with cancer again, this time a large sarcoma that had been hidden behind the growing fetus.  

With all the tragedy and hardship this family faces – both parents have survived cancer and the girls’ mother is coping with MS – it’s amazing that Thompson is able to write with humour about what must have been one of the darkest chapters of her life. At one point, Thompson sets about dying her sister’s hair in an effort to help her feel attractive. After letting the dye do its work, they head into the bathroom to rinse it out. 

“Alright, let’s hose you down,” I said, gesturing to the bathroom. 

“How am I going to keep my pyjamas clean?” …

“Just go in there naked. I’m your sister, what do I care? I’ll be in my bra and underwear anyways. Don’t want to get soaked.” …

She gingerly stripped down to reveal a padded Depend, convenient after having a child. Her breasts were pendulous, filled with milk, nipples white with colostrum. I could not take my eyes off them. “Well at least your boobs look great.” 

She gave her chest a gentle shimmy. “Yeah, I’m a regular porn star.” We giggled at this as I helped her shuffle into the bathroom, shocked at how she was rail thin yet simultaneously puffy. She sat on the supportive bathing chair and then leaned forward as I set to work with the extendable shower head, releasing a stream of inky brown from the tendrils that dangled over her face. That is, until I dropped the shower handle, cracking off the cover and sending water everywhere in a zealous spray, cascading blotches of dye across the walls, Meghan, and the bathroom. The incontinence brief hung limp with liquid and mascara ran down my face, pooling within the brown sludge at our feet. 

“There’s a porn movie in this somewhere,” Meghan said, laughing so hard she was gasping and clutching at her misshapen stomach. 

“What’s with you and porn today? Besides, I don’t think anyone in porn is wearing a diaper.” I was laughing too hard to control the shower handle … 

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” she said. And then we laughed even harder. 

I devoured this book in a couple of days. You should too, but make sure you have a box of tissues at hand.

Edited to add: I belatedly learned that Kelly S. Thompson is not an alumnus of the MFA program but a mentor! Oh well, I’d always figured once I was running out of books by grads I’d start reviewing books my mentors and directors—there are plenty of those too. Now if the grads would just take a pause from being so prolific …

Other books about family, for better and worse:

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

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

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

The View from Coffin Ridge: A Childhood Exhumed, by Gwen Lamont.

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

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

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

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