Biographical Sketch of Author:

Diane Dawber lives near Kingston, Ontario, Canada and is the author of nine books including non-fiction and poetry for both adults and children. She is the founder of the Health Pursuits Study Groups, a unique support group model recently studied and shown to be the only one that helps people, with FM, CFS, MCS, etc., improve. She is the founder of the “Poetry & Company” open mic reading series in Kingston. Her most recent books include Looking for Snow Fleas (younger readers) and A New Spin on the Rotation Diet (non-fiction.) She is the editor of “ ’Scapes” a poetry anthology of emerging Kingston authors.

About the Book:

Driving, Braking and Getting Out to Walk, Diane Dawber’s newest work of poetry, is driven by the metaphor of movement.  She uses travel, be it by car, truck or train to juxtapose pain with serenity and the essentiality of stopping to listen. She brings us a simple message of life choices where trucks metaphorically bring existential trauma that can be diverted by a simple act of free will by choosing a different life path. Driving, Braking and Getting Out to Walk flows, starts and stops with imaginative poetic forms and a skill of toying with style to suite the concrete needs of the poem.  Dawber works to examine the deep, the weighty subjects of life by looking within and without. She takes us on this journey into a style that makes these poems accessible without risk of getting lost.  On this journey you will see how a simple set of paint test strips on the highway of life could bring you happiness if not ecstasy simply by flowing with the experience.

Driving, Braking and Getting Out to Walk:  What is intuition?  Diane Dawber turns the mind/body/environment connections upside down to investigate metaphor as it relates to regaining of the many facets of movement.

Diane Dawber's new poetic work brims with inventive poetic forms and a deftness of style and control that weaves heavy subjects into a form and format that makes them accessible without risk of overload. Here you will find humor, mythology, a sensibility for, and at times a proximity so close as to seem like melding with, nature and all its forces. . . a fine accomplishment.
David Watts
Author of The Orange Wire Problem and Other Tales From the Doctor's Office

"Poet, Diane Dawber, slides into new territory here, uncovering mysteries of things ordinary with a poetic vision that is especially illuminating when she tackles the metaphysics of health/healing"

Lillian Allen is an internationally renowned dub poet and Professor of Creative Writing at the Ontario College of Art & Design

Biographical Sketch of Author:

Kathryn MacDonald’s poems have been published in literary journals such as Descant, The Fiddlehead, and Northward Journal (under the name Deneau) before she took a hiatus from poetry to work at Harrowsmith and Equinox magazines. Since then, Kathryn has worked as a ghostwriter, editor, and article writer, including "Voices from the Edge of the Island," a story that focuses on the loss of culture, which was published in This Magazine during the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of the “New World.” Essays on rurality and food were published in The Farm and City Cookbook (co-authored with Mary Lou Morgan, Second Story Press). More recently, Kathryn has published poetry in Ascent Aspirations Magazine and in The Wisdom of Old Souls. She holds a B.A. from the University of Windsor and an M.P.A. from Queen’s University, Kingston. When Kathryn isn’t writing or offering online and weekend workshops, she transforms stones into amulets.

 
About the Book:

Calla & Édourd share a passion for the stories that shape them and for each other, but when memory merges with the present an abyss opens before them. Their story reveals a transition between the known past and the unknown future. MacDonald’s voice is honest and authentic; her novel is a dance of life and, like life, holds surprises.

Drawing their sustenance from past generations, Calla and Édourd’s love endures when traumatic loss gives way to fragmentation of memory, and past, present and future merge into one. MacDonald creates word paintings of nature and domestic life that linger after the last word is read. This is a beautiful story.

Evelyn Bowering, Family Therapist, Dept of Family Medicine, Queen’s University 

This novella, set in Eastern Ontario, bubbles with the details of everyday life. The cycle of the season is reflected in the lives of the central characters. It is a hymn/lament for that which is passing and that which is past.

Alistair MacLeod, bestselling author of short stories collected in, Island: The Collected Stories, and the award-winning novel, No Great Mischief.

Biographical Sketch of the author:

A three-decade career with a stifling corporation was enough for Mr. Johnston. A retired electrical engineer, he now writes full time - prose, playscripts, poetry. A vegetarian, an egalitarian, a bird watcher, and someone whose private truth is often at odds with our societal DNA, his poetry exemplifies Voltaire's observation - “To hold a pen is to be at war.”

After slugging out six decades in the Toronto melting pool where many of his dreams were obscured by The Big Smoke, he lives and flourishes now in a sacred woods in Cobourg with his wife Carolyn. He helped raise five children (one died from a drug overose) and brags incessantly about four grandchildren.

In 1979, he founded the Unionville Theatre Company where he directed and wrote seven stage plays before retiring from its board of directors in 1991.

He has written a variety of short stories, poems for five anthologies, poems for three literary magazines including Labour of Love, The White Wall Review, and Lichen, and enough poems to fill five chapbooks (self-published). His poetry has been published in a number of Ontario newspapers. He was once the guest editor for the Markham Economist.

He is currently dramatizing in his ninth playscript the horrific details of life growing up in his family of origin where parental alcoholism and domestic violence and abuse caused two sibling suicides, the crushing of his family's spirit, the derailing of his father’s successful writing career. Mr. Johnston is a recovering alcoholic and food addict in twelve step programs.

He travels the world. China, England, South and Central and North America, the Caribbean, the capitals of all the exotic countries that border the Baltic Sea.

A fisherman on the Yangtze. A peasant weaving in Peru. A panhandler in the winter rain of a north Florida town. These populate his pages.

Via his poetry, Mr. Johnston campaigns against the old aphorism - “Language fits over experience like a straightjacket.” He believes that only in poetry can a sentient being experience the elusive spirit of real truth - that proffered quietly by the ever-hopeful universe.

Like a fly to honey he was drawn to the fonts of the great ones - Neruda, Cavafy, Paz, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Eliot, and Tennesee Williams. But it was Allen Ginsberg who revealed writing truth for him when he declared - “I transcribe from the tickertape of my mind.”

About the Book:

Mike Johnston=s poems often disregard the conventions of ordinary syntax yet they have an immediate lucidity. In the tradition of the great naturalists he is uncommonly alert to the world around us. He surprises and delights the reader, stirring the memory, showing what has passed unnoticed; reminding us of what we should not have forgotten. These poems dance upon the page.

Eric Winter (Eric Winter is a retired Professor in the Department of Education at York University and Master of Calumet College. He is the author of the very popular Twelve Days Of The Infanta and has authored six books on geography. Eric once read his poems with Ted Hughes and was a reader at Shakespeare and Company in Paris.)

A delightful collection, sudden sparks of insight along the passageways of being, sometimes touching, sometimes wry, sometimes spiritual, all in a language full of images that sing, a language that calls and questions, or that toys with the sacred icons of a trite and manipulated modern culture, but mostly a language that is on a quest to find the eye of the whirlwind soul.

Wayne Schlepp (Wayne Schlepp holds a degree in Chinese literature from the University of London. He taught Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. His studies in Chines poetics have been published in The Journal of Chinese Linguistics. His poetry translations appear in anthologies and chapbooks. The Darker Edges of the Sky is his first collection of poetry.)

Often spare, always verging on transcendent, Mike Johnson translates messages from the universe into words knitted in lines that are sudden and strike the reader awake to a hint of something not-new but simply previously-unthought. Mike makes poetry do things I wish I could make words do. When he reads publicly, Mike uses his voice-presence to turn listeners' attention into concentration with an ease other poets wish they could command. If this sounds like trivial jealousy, it's not; it is a matter of deep respect and no small degree of wonder.- James Pickersgill

James Pickersgill's book of poetry was "From the Circus to the Streets" Alive PressJames has had more than 125 poems published in Canadian literary periodicals. James has written short stories, essays, short plays, opinion pieces and regular columns. Examples of each have been published in small magazines publishing Canadian literature.

Biographical Sketch of the Author:

Born in Toronto in 1940, and growing up in Markham, Patrick has lived almost all of his life in southern Ontario, whose fields, forests, and lakes he loves. He currently lives in active retirement in Port Hope, though he spends a good deal of time as well at his cottage on Pigeon Lake. He is blissfully married to Cathy Carlyle, to whom in gratitude this collection is dedicated, and is the father of four sons, the stepfather of a daughter and two more sons, and grandfather indiscriminately of an increasing number of children.

As he relates in the preface, Patrick's love for poetry began when he was read A. A. Milne and Beatrix Potter in the nursery, and was transformed by hearing Dylan Thomas reading such poems as Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, and Fern Hill.

Over the years he dabbled occasionally in poetry, but it was only in the last dozen or so years, beginning with a difficult sojourn on Amherst Island in Lake Ontario, that his poetic creative urge came into spate, the collection This Grace of Light being the first serious published result. He participated in the Atkinson College (York University) Writers at Noon poetry group, and more recently in the Cobourg Poetry Workshop, each of which provided both a stimulus to write and a sympathetic audience.

For the rest, Patrick had a day job as a university professor of theology and religious studies, teaching at the University of Toronto, McMaster, and York, in which capacity he published numerous academic articles, mostly on fifth- and sixth-century theological disputes, one book, The Defense of Chalcedon in the East (451-553), and an edition and translation, Leontius of Jerusalem, Against the Monophysites. He continues to do research and to disseminate it at conferences; he plans at least one further academic book, this one on the exploitation of Cyril of Alexandria's status as an arbiter of orthodoxy. He also assisted in various church congregations as an Anglican priest, as he does currently at St. Mark's Anglican Church in Port Hope. He is proud of his abilities as a home winemaker, honed over almost five decades of sometimes disastrous experimentation.

About the Book:

Most of the verse sent to me, while sometimes deeply felt, is hopelessly inept, hopelessly self-indulgent. Your . . . poems I find intelligent, spare, candid and painful. Thank you.

– Richard Outram (author of many books of poetry)

There is a power emanating from This Grace of Light, and a belief there is something out there that can provide us comfort, if we let it. This collection is a kiss on the eyes, a debut collection rich with aural memory.

– David Clink (author of Eating Fruit Out of Season)

This is an uncommonly good collection. Patrick honours our language and he writes with an enviable ease. The longer poems have a strong narrative line making them easy to read even though the content can be quite profound.

– Eric Winter (author of The Man in the Hat)