Born Out of This

Publisher: Caitlin Press Inc.

BORN OUT OF THIS, Christine Lowther's first collection of essays, follows her journey from the unutterable loss of her mother to the discovery of her own poetic voice through deep reflection and her intimate connection to the coastal rainforest. Lowther looks back on her mother's poetry and activism. She recalls the day the police arrested her father, and the indifferent beauty surrounding that life-changing moment. Tumbling through the years that follow, Lowther searches for her ownidentity-foster homes, punk rock concerts, activism and wanderings in Europe fill her hours but leave her searching. Ultimately she is drawn back to the forests and coast of her home. With remarkable poetic vision, Chris weaves her words and her mother's poetry into the landscape, until language and land are inseparable. She describes the waning days of spawning salmon: "barely submerged, the dark grey still-living move slowly among the dead, except for sudden splashes, bursts of energy, pinnacles of desperation." Nothing is simple in this dense, temperate jungle, and even this routine tragedy renews: "This landscape of gore nourishes and fertilizes the trees and berry bushes." With over twenty years of poetic devotion to Clayoquot Sound, Christine Lowther entrances readers through the stunning vividness of her writing, profound reflections on our place in the natural world and its ultimate indifference to us: "We ? humans stand between forest and ocean like acupuncture needles, feeling the world pulsing with its endless cycles." Steeped in the immense beauty of the coastal rainforest, this indifference is strangely reassuring.

About Christine Lowther

Christine Lowther has been a lifelong activist and a resident of Clayoquot Sound since 1992. She is the co-editor of two collections of essays, LIVING ARTFULLY: REFLECTIONS FROM THE FAR WEST COAST (The Key Publishing House, 2012) and WRITING THE WEST COAST: IN LOVE WITH PLACE (Ronsdale Press, 2008), and the author of three books of poetry, MY NATURE (Leaf Press, 2010), HALF-BLOOD POEMS (Zossima Press, 2011) and NEW POWER (Broken Jaw Press, 1999). Most recently, several of her poems appear in FORCE FIELD: 77 WOMEN POETS OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Mother Tongue, 2013).

detail

Binding EAN ISBN-10 Pub Date PAGES Language Size Price
Paperback 9781927575550 1927575559 2014-09-29 208 0.00 x 5.74 x 8.02 in $21.95

Publicity

Connect

Multimedia

Contributor Platforms

Recent Press

Promo Quotes

Events

Book Signings and Tour Cities

Surveying the 120th Meridian and the Great Divide

Surveying the 120th Meridian and the Great Divide

by Sherwood, Jay

Surveying the 120th Meridian and the Great Divide is the second book of a two-part seriesdescribing the initial Alberta/BC boundary survey undertaken between 1913–1924. Surveying the 120th Meridian focuses on the years 1918–1924, when the Alberta crew continued the survey of the 120th meridian while the BC crew split off to continue mapping the Great (Continental) Divide...

read more
Mountain Man

Mountain Man

by Tegart, Hiram Cody

Life was one big adventure for Hiram Cody Tegart. At times unbelievable and others just downright impressive, Mountain Man is the celebration of a legend of a man and a legendary way of life that is quickly disappearing.Cody was born in 1950 on a ranch in BC’s Columbia Valley. The bush that surrounded his family’s farm was the best playground any kid could ask for...

read more
DrawBridge

DrawBridge

by Boxall, Joan

In an attempt to rekindle her relationship with her estranged brother Steve, who suffered with schizophrenia, Joan met him at the Art Studios in Vancouver. Schizophrenia had already done its worst, confounding Steve with voices, hallucinations, and delusions. At fifty-five, Steve was in a burn-out phase of schizophrenia with a hunger for creativity...

read more
New Ground

New Ground

by Kujundzic, Ann

New Ground: A Memoir of Art and Activism in BC’s Interior is the extraordinary memoir of a feminist, artist, and activist who fought for change no matter her circumstance...

read more
Free to a Good Home

Free to a Good Home

by Torti, Jules

The German word zugunruhe translates as the “stirring before moving.” It’s used to describe birds and herds of animals, like wildebeests, before migration. Though Jules Torti is neither German nor a wildebeest, she understands this marrow-deep anxiousness all too well...

read more
The Co-op Revolution

The Co-op Revolution

by DeGrass, Jan

“We were undercapitalized, inexperienced, practiced democratic decision-making and some of us smoked dope occasionally. All elements that would make us grow as human beings and as business people. We ran a helluva show.”In the spring of 1975, a free-spirited Jan DeGrass backpacked across Canada in search of adventure and greater meaning in life...

read more
On the Curve

On the Curve

by Nicol, Janet

Sybil Andrews was one of Canada’s most prominent artists working throughout the late twentieth century. From a cottage by the sea in Campbell River, Andrews created striking linocut prints steeped in feeling and full of movement. Inspired by the working-class community that she lived in, her art is known for its honest depiction of ordinary people at work and play on Canada’s West Coast...

read more
Resolve

Resolve

by Parks Mintz, Carolyn

Andy and Phyllis Chelsea met during their years spent at the St. Joseph’s Mission School in Williams Lake, BC. Like the thousands forced into the church-run residential school system, Andy and Phyllis areno strangers to the ongoing difficulties experienced by most Indigenous peoples in Canada...

read more
The Suitcase and the Jar

The Suitcase and the Jar

by Livingston, Becky

Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-USJAAR-SAWhen a brain tumour takes the life of Becky Livingston’s twenty-three-year-old daughter Rachel, her life makes an unconventional turn. Rachel, an avid traveller, had one wish: to keep exploring the world...

read more
Food Was Her Country

Food Was Her Country

by Bociurkiw, Marusya

Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-USJAAR-SAHow can a god-fearing Catholic, immigrant mother and her godless, bohemian daughter possibly find common ground? Food Was Her Country is the story of a mother, her queer daughter and their tempestuous culinary relationship...

read more
Imprint

Imprint

by Sicherman, Claire

Imprint is a profound and courageous exploration of trauma, family, and the importance of breaking silence and telling stories. This book is a fresh and startling combination of history and personal revelation. When her son almost died at birth and her grandmother passed away, something inside of Claire Sicherman snapped...

read more
On Mockingbird Hill

On Mockingbird Hill

by Kelly, Mary Theresa

In the same vein of tree planters and lighthouse keepers, Mary Kelly flips the over-romanticized lifestyle of fire observers made popular by Jack Kerouac and shows us how lonely freedom really is...

read more
Whale in the Door

Whale in the Door

by Le Bel, Pauline

An exhilarating mix of natural history and personal exploration, Whale in the Door is a passionate account of a woman’s transformative experience of her adopted home.   For thousands of years, Howe Sound, an inlet in the Salish Sea provided abundant food, shelter, and stories, for the Squamish Nation...

read more
North of Familiar

North of Familiar

by Milos, Terry

In 1974, Terry Milos moved to rural northern Canada, to pursue her dream of homesteading. Following the seventies trend of the back-to-landers she and her partner left the city life for what they imagined would be a simpler existence...

read more
Making Room

Making Room

by

Making Room: Forty Years of Room Magazine celebrates the history and evolution of Canadian literature and feminism with some of the most exciting and thought-provoking fiction, poetry, and essays the magazine has published since it was founded in 1975 as Room of One’s Own...

read more
How Deep is the Lake

How Deep is the Lake

by O'Callaghan, Shelley

A prudent and intentional examination of privilege and belonging in Chilliwack Lake by retired environmental lawyer and grandmother.Curious about the previous inhabitants of the lake where her family has spent the summer for over one hundred years, author Shelley O'Callaghan starts researching and writing about the area...

read more
The Land on Which We Live

The Land on Which We Live

by MacPherson, Barbara

Legendary tales of pioneers and adventurers cultivating BC's Cariboo Plateau in between the 19th and 20th century.The romantic backwoods landscape known as the North Bonaparte, stretches east from 70 Mile House to Bridge Lake and is full of small remote ranches, hidden abandoned homesteads, and rutted roads leading to graves in forgotten meadows...

read more
What the Mouth Wants

What the Mouth Wants

by Meneghetti, Monica

The redefinition of family values as seen from the eyes of a polyamorous, queer Italian Canadian obsessed with food.This mouthwatering, intimate, and sensual memoir traces Monica Meneghetti's unique life journey through her relationship with food, family and love...

read more
Wherever I Find Myself

Wherever I Find Myself

by Matejova, Miriam

An anthology of Canadian immigrant women and their experiences of being caught between the world of their past and the world of their future.Edited by Miriam Matejova, WHEREVER I FIND MYSELF is a diverse collection of stories about the joys and struggles of immigrant women living in Canada...

read more
Chilcotin Chronicles

Chilcotin Chronicles

by Birchwater, Sage

A collection of historical stories about the early indigenous people, settlers, trappers, and adventurers of BC's Cariboo Chilcotin.A compilation of stories that meld both culture and bloodlines, CHILCOTIN CHRONICLES by Sage Birchwater is set in the wild and untamed country of central British Columbia's Chilcotin Plateau...

read more
Ootsa Lake Odyssey

Ootsa Lake Odyssey

by Sherwood, Jay

From the 1920s to 1952, George and Else Seel lived about sixty kilometres south of Burns Lake near the small farming settlement of Wistaria on the western shore of Ootsa Lake. Like many early twentieth century settlers who migrated to BC’s Central Interior, the Seels came in search of opportunity and prosperity, but the harsh environment posed challenges they could not have imagined...

read more
Not My Fate

Not My Fate

by Romain, Janet

Josephine Caplin (Jo) was born into a world marred by maternal abandonment, alcoholism and traumatic epileptic seizures. In grade three, she was apprehended by child services and separated from her protective brother and her early caregivers, her father and uncle, who were kind men with drinking problems...

read more
The Amazing Mazie Baker

The Amazing Mazie Baker

by Johnston, Kay

In 1931, Mazie Antone was born into the Squamish Nation, a community caught between its traditional values of respect—for the land, the family and the band—and the secular, capitalistic legislation imposed by European settlers. When she was six, the police carried her off to St. Paul’s Indian Residential School, as mandated by the 1920 Indian Act...

read more
No Way to Run

No Way to Run

by Crichton, Holly

On September 3, 2010, the RCMP in Grande Prairie, Alberta, received a 911 call from Mat Crichton about a shooting on a local farm. Seconds later, miles from home, Holly Crichton got a shocking call from her son. “I just shot Dad,” Mat told her...

read more
Gently to Nagasaki

Gently to Nagasaki

by Kogawa, Joy

Gently to Nagasaki is a spiritual pilgrimage, an exploration both communal and intensely personal. Set in Vancouver and Toronto, the outposts of Slocan and Coaldale, the streets of Nagasaki and the high mountains of Shikoku, Japan, it is also an account of a remarkable life...

read more
Your Good Hat

Your Good Hat

by Munk, Barbara

In this twenty-year retrospective of Barbara Munk's work, she pays close attention to the world around her: the man who rustles through garbage cans and dumpsters for his food, the undertaker who wants his ashes spread outside the Elks hall, a robin outside the window. And she invites the reader to look at the world in new ways...

read more
Women of Brave Mettle

Women of Brave Mettle

by French, Diana

In this much-anticipated second volume in the Extraordinary Women Anthology series, Diana French follows up on Gumption and Grit with more stories of the women who have contributed, or who are still contributing, to the vibrant mosaic that is the Cariboo Chilcotin...

read more
Wilderness Dreams

Wilderness Dreams

by Boudreau, Jack

Jack's fourth book documents the amazing adventures of the Bowden family in the rugged wilderness of British Columbia's interior. It is largely based on 40 years of diaries kept by Liza Bowden.

read more
Wild Liard Waters

Wild Liard Waters

by Wenger, Ferdi

As the Liard River faces the threat of hydroelectric development, a group of men make what may be one of the final trips on the Liard. Intrigued with the journals of our ancestors as they fearlessly travelled the waves, Wenger writes this book for those who may never know the grandeur of the river.

read more
Wild and Free

Wild and Free

by Cooke, Frank

Jack Boudreau, author of the bestselling Crazy Man's Creek and Grizzly Bear Mountain, is back with another wild and wooly, scarcely believable but nevertheless true tale of misadventure in British Columbia's northern wilderness...

read more
Whitewater Devils

Whitewater Devils

by Boudreau, Jack

In 1967, in celebration of Canada's 100th birthday, Les Voyageurs left Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, in ten 26-foot canoes. These one hundred gallant men, representing eight provinces and two territories, travelled 5,286 kilometres to Expo '67 in Montreal...

read more
Wax Boats

Wax Boats

by Roberts, Sarah

In Sarah Robert's debut collection Wax Boats, a rural island community comes to life in action-packed, evocative tales. Cougar ladies fight the BC wilderness and the inevitable extinction of their peaceful island lives. An expectant mother turns to Native traditions to guide her through a safe delivery. A Boy Scout troupe rescues their own leader, and learns to welcome someone "from away...

read more

Similar Titles

  • Mountain Man
  • DrawBridge
  • New Ground
  • Free to a Good Home
  • The Co-op Revolution
  • On the Curve
  • Resolve
  • The Suitcase and the Jar
  • Food Was Her Country
  • Imprint
  • On Mockingbird Hill
  • Whale in the Door
  • North of Familiar
  • Making Room
  • How Deep is the Lake
  • The Land on Which We Live
  • What the Mouth Wants
  • Wherever I Find Myself
  • Chilcotin Chronicles
  • Ootsa Lake Odyssey
  • Not My Fate
  • The Amazing Mazie Baker
  • No Way to Run
  • Gently to Nagasaki
  • Your Good Hat
  • Women of Brave Mettle
  • Wilderness Dreams
  • Wild Liard Waters
  • Wild and Free
  • Whitewater Devils
  • Wax Boats
  • Surveying the 120th Meridian and the Great Divide