Winter Nature: Common Mammals, Birds, Trees & Shrubs of The Maritimes

by Merritt Gibson and Soren Bondrup-Nielsen.  Illustrated by Twila Robar-DeCoste.
Gaspereau Press)

~ Halifax Herald, December 2008 

When temperatures plummet, trees stand bare, and fields and forests are blanketed in white, it often appears that birds and animals have either flown south or burrowed underground to wait it out. Not so!

Winter Nature is a naturalist’s guide to the mammals, birds, trees and shrubs found in the Maritime provinces in winter. These pages are littered with little known facts and survival methods of birds and wildlife and the winter landscape they inhabit.  Have you ever heard of a ‘yard of deer’?  Do you know where to find ‘subnivean space’? Would you recognize coyote tracks in the snow?  The answers are all here.

Winter Nature: Common Mammals, Birds, Trees & Shrubs of The Maritimes is a guide for naturalists, hikers and cross country skiers, indeed, for anyone who enjoys the outdoors in winter.  A clear, descriptive narrative and detailed black and white sketches by Twila Robar-DeCoste make Winter Nature an interesting and informative guide.

Wildlife activity in winter takes on different rhythms, and birds such as the Snowy Owl and the Rough Legged Hawk, whose summer home is the Arctic, actually make the Maritimes their winter destination.  Birds and animals on the prowl for food such as leaves, bark, berries or smaller mammals leave their footprints crisscrossed on the snow’s surface.  For the naturalist, these prints mark clearly the pathways of wildlife whose habits and habitants are much less visible than  when temperatures are warmer.

Robar-DeCoste’s careful sketches make it easy to identify birds, mammals, berries, twigs and trees, and the chapter on mammal tracks alone will encourage every winter walker to slip this guide into a pocket before setting out.  Scattered throughout are suggestions for winter activities, such as how to measure the snow profile, and what to consider when setting up bird feeders.

The guide is well laid out and easy to use, even for a novice or a ‘wannabee’ naturalist.  It is separated into three sections: mammals, birds and trees/shrubs. Sub-sectional groupings break down categories even further, and each species entry is accompanied by a detailed sketch.  At the back, an index and a list of reference guides make navigation simple and provide resources for further investigation.  Robar-DeCoste’s original black and white sketches are a perfect complement to this well written, thoughtfully designed book.

           

Good to a Fault

by Marina Endicott
Published by Freehand Books
  ~ Review in Halifax Herald, December 2008

Clara Purdy understands liability. She works in insurance. Her life is ordinary, defined by her job, her neat bungalow and her mother, whose voice reaches from the grave to direct her disappointed, middle aged life. But one day, in dreamy unfocussed moment, she causes an accident and a family of six spills from their wrecked car into her life. This is a family on the move, and without a car they are abruptly homeless. Injuries are minor, but in hospital the mother, Lorraine, is diagnosed with advanced cancer.

Understanding somewhere in her consciousness there is no one else to help, Clara takes them in. “She was surprised at herself and again thought that she was doing the right thing ....” When Lorraine’s husband takes off for places unknown, Clara becomes custodian of three children and a vitriolic mother in law. Her neat bungalow hovers on the edge of chaos as she scrambles to establish a routine of meals, baths, bedtimes and hospital visits.

Days turn into weeks. Then months. The children thrive, she thrives and Lorraine watches uneasily from her hospital bed. Her children reach Clara’s disappointed heart and she begins to take ownership of the small, needy family. The older children go to school. Clara comforts the baby, “his neck warm against [her face]. Mine, she thought.” The slippery slope to appropriation gets easier as Lorraine’s health declines.

It is Lorraine, desperately ill, uneducated and homeless who understands the implications of this every burgeoning, unpayable debt. Endicott is masterful as we watch this burden and the balance of repayment shift back and forth between the two women. She writes about guilt and love and pain with such quiet movement forward that we are drawn completely into her characters lives. We see the untidy imperfections of people just trying their best.

True to her theatrical roots, Endicott allows her characters to live and breath, building a slow tension as they pull us in. And she doesn’t let us off the hook either. She writes with unshrinking clarity about things we would sooner run away from, and of the joy it brings to our souls when we do not. Behind the easy succinctness of her prose is an intelligent awareness of the big questions which linger long after the last page is turned. Easy to understand why Good to a Fault was shortlisted for this year’s Giller Prize.

Marina Endicott was born in British Colombia and worked as an actor and director before writing fiction. She lives in Alberta.

The Paper Garden: Mrs Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72

by Molly Peacock
McClelland & Stewart
~ Review: Halifax Herald, Feb 18, 2001

Mary Granville Pendarves Delany was born into a minor branch of an important British family at the turn of the eighteenth century.  At the tender age of 17, this vivacious young woman was married off to a boorish drunkard old enough to be her grandfather, to improve the family fortunes.  She was widowed after seven difficult years.  She married again twenty years later, a union which afforded her much contentment and happiness, but it wasn’t until after the death of her second husband that Mrs Delany picked up scissors and paints and invented a medium now known as mixed-media collage.  She was 72.


Over the next ten years, Mrs Delany worked tirelessly at her art, creating botanically correct cut-paper flowers, precisely accurate in both detail and colour. These exquisite reproductions are often hard to recognize as paper and paint. In all, she produced 985 flowers, and it was her failing eyesight that finally stopped her.  The collection, known as Flora Delanica, is housed in the British Museum.


In The Paper Garden, Molly Peacock focuses on eleven of these extraordinary pieces of art, weaving through the narrative snippets of her own life as it parallels that of Mrs Delany’s. Her language is both visual and poetic, with an attention to detail that takes her readers into the heart of court life in eighteenth century England.


In the continuing debate about the future of print publications, McClelland & Stewart have triumphed. An electronic version of The Paper Garden would be a mere shadow, only hinting at the pleasure readers will get from this miniature art book.  The silken pages, the writing, the careful stitching, the wonderful reproductions, the subtle perfume of new ink, the size (it tucks perfectly in the corner of a bag) – these all combine to a whole that is a pleasure to hold and to read.  M & S and Molly Peacock have done Mrs Delany proud, and she would surely have been delighted.

~ more about Molly Peacock www.mollypeacock.org

The Beauty of Humanity Movement

by Camilla Gibb
Doubleday Canada

Maggie Ly realizes early in her life that a career in art does not need to be defined by her lack of talent.  She becomes a curator and seizes an opportunity to return to Vietnam to catalogue a collection of art which somehow survived the war in a bomb shelter.  She has her own agenda - to look for her father, a dissident artist who vanished after the fall of Saigon.

Her search leads her to Hung, an elderly itinerant cook whose pho is legendary, and it is Hung’s story that is the heart of Camilla Gibb’s new novel.  Hung has made pho at his street cart for decades, moving from place to place, creating a daily challenge for his dedicated customers who continue seek him out, chopsticks and bowl in hand.

Through years of poverty, war and hardship, Hung has endured, changing little as the city changed around him.  In the years since the war, Hanoi has become modern, bustling tourist city brimming with energy and youth.

The importance of family and community flows through Gibbs’s novel, with the elderly Hung holding the threads which gently bind the characters to each other.  They embrace Maggie, sympathizing with her need to find the truth, to understand her beginnings so she can finally feel that she belongs.  “She had always felt herself [to be] an alien to some degree ...you have no attachment to the history or geography of a place ... your roots are buried in some faraway earth.”

Camilla Gibb is a winner of the Trillium Book Award, the City of Toronto Book Award, and the CBC Canadian Literary Award for short fiction.  The jury of the Orange Prize listed her as one of 21 writers to watch in the new century.  She lives in Toronto.

Granta 111: Going Back

Edited by John Freeman
House of Anansi Press

Short stories are often the first thing new writers publish.  They go in and out of popularity, and finding a home for that first story can be difficult.  Since it’s makeover in the 1970's, Granta has played a significant role in providing a market for new writers and artists, publishing short stories, photojournalism, poetry, biographies, indeed anything that is able to loosely fit within its pages.  It is indeed “The Magazine of New Writing”.

Going Back is a ‘themed’ issue based somewhat loosely on “what happens after we go back”. It diverges from Granta’s norm in that the writers and artists are well established. Editor John Freeman has put together a splendid collection of stories, poetry, art and photography about loss, memories, joy and finding the ability to let go.

Janine di Giovanni’s The Book of the Dead brings into sharp focus the human spirit’s ability of to survive under seemingly impossible conditions of deprivation and loss during the war in Sarajevo.  Ian Teh’s stark photography of industrial China (Traces: China 1999 - 2010) speaks volumes and Missing Out by Leila Aboulela tells the story of the collision of cultural values within a marriage.  Elizabeth McCracken’s Property shows the heart of a young widower as he struggles with his loss.

There is a previously unpublished excerpt from Mark Twain’s diaries, and a series of letters written over 30 years by Iris Murdoch to French writer Raymond Queneau. (It is believed that she destroyed his letters to her.)  It is tricky to find a favourite amidst such talent.

Since its inception in Cambridge, UK, in 1889, Granta has published the works of writers such as A. A. Milne, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Arundhati Roy and Sylvia Plath. It was rescued from oblivion in the 1970s, and the rest, as they say, is history.