2024 Publications
$27.95 CAD / $23.95 USD
Softcover: 9781738993321
eBook: 9781738993338
Conversations with a Dead Man
Indigenous Rights and the Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott
by Mark Abley
2024 • Biography
*REVISED AND EXPANDED WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR
When he died, Duncan Campbell Scott was known as a first-rate poet and devoted civil servant. Today, because of his work in the Department of Indian Affairs, he's considered one of history's worst Canadians. When word of this reaches Scott's ghost, he returns to the land of the living, asking poet and journalist Mark Abley to clear his name. In this book of imaginative non-fiction, Abley evokes a man who wrote vibrant poems about Indigenous people while also instituting policies designed to destroy Indigenous culture.
“Abley has produced something seemingly inconceivable: an intelligent, absorbing and, yes, entertaining book about an infamous Canadian villain” — Andrew Stobo Sniderman in Maclean’s
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Mark Abley is a nonfiction writer, poet, and journalist. His many books include The Organist: Fugues, Fatherhood, and a Fragile Mind, a memoir of his father; Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages and The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English, among other books on language; Strange Bewildering Time: Istanbul to Kathmandu in the Last Year of the Hippie Trail, a reflective travel memoir based on his own forty-five-year-old journals; and several poetry collections and children’s books. His work has won international praise and has been translated into five languages. He lives in Montreal.
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“I've been absolutely absorbed by Mark Abley’s revised edition of Conversations with a Dead Man.... It is a book that every Canadian (and American) should read.... [Abley] is doing what all Canadians should be doing: revising his understanding of the place of Indigenous peoples in the country’s history as attitudes change and new evidence keeps emerging.”—Robert Calder, Governor General Award-winning author
Praise for the First Edition:
“Abley has produced something seemingly inconceivable: an intelligent, absorbing and, yes, entertaining book about an infamous Canadian villain who oversaw residential schools at the height of their brutality toward Aboriginal peoples. Abley is a poet, which makes him the perfect biographer of another poet, Duncan Campbell Scott, who happened to have had a day job for over 50 years in the Department of Indian Affairs … Abley resists the urge to discard Scott as a racist imbecile. The villain was a man, and his nation is our nation. Abley’s act of radical empathy makes it harder to turn the page on a chapter of our history we might otherwise slam shut.”—Andrew Stobo Sniderman, Maclean’s
“Compelling … creative … probing … One can’t help but keep turning the pages, wanting desperately, like Abley, to gain clarity on Scott’s actions. Commendably, Abley has addressed a highly charged question in a balanced, compassionate manner. By considering Scott’s plausible role as a scapegoat and comparing him to his contemporaries, he contextualizes the civil servant’s vision, yet never condones it, maintaining a critical eye throughout. All this he does with utmost regard for Canada’s First Nations.”—Kimberly Bourgeois, Montreal Review of Books
“Resurrecting Scott in the pages of the book involved having his lifelike ghost materialize at random intervals in the author’s present-day home. Intent on restoring his posthumous reputation, he’s visible and audible only to his host, who gets drafted into the role of an extremely skeptical Boswell; highly charged and brilliantly rendered conversations ensue. A potentially gimmicky device turns out to be an ingenious choice, drawing the reader into a subject that might otherwise have looked like impossibly heavy going.”—Ian McGillis, Montreal Gazette
“I love this book. I love the idea that Mark Abley wants answers from Scott. Why did he write such lovely, romantic and paternalistic poetry and prose about Indians? Why was a civilized, educated, refined artist developing, fine-tuning, enacting and enforcing such horrendous policies and laws that violated every religious, moral and ethical sensibility? Abley brings weight and dimension to Scott. I heard his words and understood his passions. In the end, I saw a pitiable man. A shadow of a man. Thanks to Abley, he was no longer a cardboard figure to me, representing all that was and is wrong with Canada and its Indian policies.”—Daniel David (Mohawk), journalist, broadcaster, writer
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Published by Stonehewer Books on February 13, 2024
386 Pages • Paperback • 5.5” x 8.5”
Available through your local bookstore, or through Amazon
$25.95 CAD / $21.95 USD
Softcover: 9781738993345
eBook: 9781738993352
The Death of Tony
On Belonging in Two Worlds
by Antanas Sileika
2024 • Memoir
The acclaimed novelist who wrote this book wasn’t always Antanas. Growing up in the immigrant hub of Weston, Ontario — a childhood of Lithuanian summer camp, folk dancing, and booze-soaked Christmases — Sileika was known to friends and teachers as Tony. It wasn’t until he entered university and began to understand his deep attachment to his heritage that he shed the anglicized name and became Antanas Sileika, the writer who straddles two worlds.
“Intelligent and observant... illuminates the experiences of a little-discussed ethnic group while probing the meanings of real and imagined homelands. A thoughtful reading experience.” — Kirkus Reviews
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Antanas Sileika is the author of six works of fiction, including most recently the novel Some Unfinished Business. His short story collection Buying on Time was nominated for the City of Toronto Book Award and the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, and his novel Provisionally Yours has been adapted for both film and television. Beyond writing fiction, Sileika worked as a journalist and taught for many years at Humber College, eventually becoming director of the Humber School for Writers. He is now retired and lives in Toronto.
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“Intelligent and observant... illuminates the experiences of a little-discussed ethnic group while probing the meanings of real and imagined homelands. A thoughtful reading experience.”—Kirkus Reviews
“In The Death of Tony, [Sileika's] voice is casual, balanced, and informative, with the wry humour that makes him special. Readers of any generation will feel they’ve had a satisfying and illuminating conversation with a friend.”—Tėviškės žiburiai
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Published by Stonehewer Books on March 5, 2024
248 pages • Paperback • 5.5” x 8.5”
Available through your local bookstore, or through Indigo or Amazon
$23.95 CAD / $19.95 USD
Softcover: 9781738993307
eBook: 9781738993314
Blue Runaways
by Jann Everard
2024 • Short Stories
Some of the women in Blue Runaways are grieving. Some are looking for a second chance. All are at a turning point. From Iceland to Bali, from the comfortable houses of Canada’s cities to its wild and expansive backcountry, the characters in this collection face the most human of fears: that dear ones die, love is a risk, and no promise is certain.
“With prose that’s vivid, precise, and quite beautiful, Everard writes stories that are at their beating heart mysterious and profoundly satisfying.” — Rachel Cantor
“… a thought-provoking and bittersweet collection…” — Kathy Page
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Jann Everard is an award-winning writer whose stories have been published in Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand in journals including: The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, Grain, The Humber Literary Review, EVENT Magazine, Room Magazine, and The Dalhousie Review. Born in Halifax, Jann settled in Toronto, where she worked in health administration and raised two sons. A life-long traveller and outdoorswoman, she now makes her home on Vancouver Island, hiking, kayaking, writing, and being inspired by nature.
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“… Emotionally rich, absorbing, and taut… [with] appealingly complex characters…”—Brett Josef Grubisic, Vancouver Sun
“… Sensitive and precisely calibrated…”—Steven Beattie, That Shakespearean Rag
“Writing in short, spare sentences, Vancouver Island’s Everard is able to get to the heart of the [characters’] relationship[s]…”—Bill Paul, The British Columbia Review
“Iceland, Vietnam, Bali, Italy—Jann Everard’s vividly-drawn characters may travel far from home, but cannot avoid a reckoning with the fundamentals of life, including death. Blue Runaways is a thought-provoking and bittersweet collection, well worth the read.”—Kathy Page, author of Paradise and Elsewhere and Dear Evelyn
“Each of the stories in Blue Runaways is a gorgeous slice of time and place, filled with characters who struggle with connection and disconnection, passion and compassion, love and its absence. Jann Everard writes with an eye for detail and with lots of heart. Her bang-on observations, delivered with empathy, make these stories a delight.”—Lori Hahnel, author of Vermin: Stories and Flicker
“Jann’s stories travel the world: from Iceland to Bali; from the grasslands of the Canadian prairies to Italy; and more. As skilled as she is at evoking these disparate places, she is equally skilled at travelling the inner human landscape. I have ridden right along with Jann’s heroines as they grapple with life’s big questions and emotions, and have come away feeling enriched. I loved these stories.”—Lynn Thomson, author of Birding with Yeats
“With compassion and sparkling wit, these stories deftly explore the unexpected confluence of loss and desire. Everard has a painter’s eye for landscapes—both foreign and familiar—and a storyteller’s skill in communicating how the natural world shapes our humanity. Read them slowly, and savour them.”—Carleigh Baker, author of Bad Endings and finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
“Blue Runaways is very outdoorsy, with characters in canoes and snowshoes, spelunking in Iceland and touring Bali, but Everard also communes with wine and divorce, human loss and mysterious adaptations, sketching vibrant scenes and scapes with amazing empathy. Blue Runaways is meditative, cathartic, and brimming with life; it sings.”—Mark Anthony Jarman, author of Burn Man: Selected Stories and the travel book Touch Anywhere to Begin
“I had the pleasure of working with Jann Everard on early versions of these stories and was impressed from the start by her confidence, her curiosity, her compassion, and her keen insight into the secrets we keep even from ourselves. The women in these pages are indeed “blue runaways,” trying to escape the uncomfortable truth that they—and those they love—are mortal, and that it is impossible for people to protect each other. Exploring how they come to this realization and how they respond to it, Everard is at once unsparing and deeply kind…But in addition to the ‘blue’ element that human life swims in, there is another world: the natural world in which people seek, and sometimes find, refuge. Reading these stories is a wide-eyed visit not just to the icy challenge of winter camping in Ontario and the dry heat of summer camping in Saskatchewan but also to an Italian garden, a Bali redolent of rambutans and jasmine, and an Icelandic cave full of phosphorescent algae. Everard maps the non-human world as expertly as she does the mind’s divagations and the body’s appetites.”—Susan Glickman, author of Cathedral/Grove and sixteen other books of poetry and prose.
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Published by Stonehewer Books on March 12, 2024
216 pages • Paperback • 5.5” x 8.5”
Available through your local bookstore, or through Indigo or Amazon