We’ve spotlighted many talented and passionate Edmonton authors in 2017! If you’re looking for a new read, check out these local talents.
Billy-Ray Belcourt
“What happens when decolonial love becomes a story you tell yourself after he falls asleep?” This powerful line becomes one of the main threads of Billy-Ray Belcourt’s first collection of poetry, This Wound is a World, in which his queer and Indigenous identity intersect in complicated ways throughout each poem. Part manifesto and part memoir, this book explores Belcourt’s issues with sex and love as he attempts to work through the complex space an Indigenous body takes up in Canada.
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Jennifer Bowering Delisle
How do our ancestors’ homes and histories haunt us? Author Jennifer Bowering Delisle investigates this theme in her moving and fragmented approach to her family history. The Bosun Chair is a lyrical exploration of Bowering Delisle’s ancestors that draws together memoir, poetry, photographs, interviews, and historical documents to create a love letter to Newfoundland and its people. From shipwrecks and wars to resettlement and labour movements, this diverse book collects the lore of the author’s family and their home province.
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Tim Bowling
The past and present entwine—or perhaps entangle—in Tim Bowling’s latest and twelfth collection of poetry. With a title that points to the attractiveness of the words within, The Duende of Tetherball will encircle readers with its riveting language and linking nature. Every poem seems to bring to mind the everyday dilemmas that give a person pause, with lines such as “Remember, the westerly that brings / fine weather does not generally bring fish.”
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Norma Dunning
Norma Dunning began writing the titular story in her collection, Annie Muktuk and Other Stories, because she was angry. After reading an anthropologist’s characterization of the country’s Arctic region, she felt his depiction of Inuit women commodified them, and, as an Inuit woman herself, she wanted her writing to take control of her own agency and sexuality.
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Janice Macdonald
What’s the most Canadian thing you’ve ever done? If you asked author Janice MacDonald over a year ago, she’d tell you the story of the epic road trip across Canada she took with her mother to Expo ’67 in Montreal. And if you asked her now, she’d talk about how she recreated that road trip with her husband to celebrate Canada’s 150th anniversary and her mother’s life. She’s captured both experiences with humour and tenderness in her latest book, Confederation Drive.
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David D. Orr
Not everyone ends up on the right side of history. Set during the North-West Rebellion of 1885, David D. Orr’s Encountering Riel follows the story of Willie Lorimer, a poetry student who’s forced into combat after forgetting to resign his commission to the Canadian militia. His journey to the heart of the rebellion is long and filled with many pitfalls, quickly erasing any heroic notions Lorimer naively held about war.
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