Publisher: Caitlin Press Inc.

After Sonia Cornwall's father died in 1939, her mother inherited the Onward Ranch and a huge debt. To make the ranch viable, a twenty-year-old Sonia traded paintbrush for pitchfork, labouring alongside the male ranch hands. But after marrying Hugh Cornwall in 1947, Sonia had time for painting once again. She learned techniques from some of Canada's most celebrated artists who came to visit the Onward Ranch, and later her home at the Jones Ranch, from Peter Aspell, Mollly Bobak and Jack Hardman to Group of Seven painters A.Y. Jackson and Joe Plaskett, Cliff Robinson and Zeljko Kujundic. Tales from renowned Cariboo Chilcotin personalities bring Sonia's story to life: old-timer Willie Crosina recalls pitchforking hay to seven hundred head of cattle in sixty below Fahrenheit, and filmmaker Peter Elkington describes the now-defunct home veterinary procedures practised by Sonia's husband, Hugh. Independent and driven, Sonia developed a distinct style that captured the nuances of the rugged interior in oils, mixed media, pastels and watercolours, doing for British Columbia's Central Interior what Emily Carr did for the Coast. The Honourable Judith Guichon, lieutenant governor of BC, describes Sonia's paintings as "very real, warm, alive." Sonia Cornwall died in 2006, but her paintings continue her important legacy of connecting us to rural life and the beauty of simple and unexpected places.

About Sheryl Salloum

Sheryl Salloum was born and raised in British Columbia, and for ten years called the Cariboo home. She is a graduate of Simon Fraser University and taught in the public school and college systems. A freelance writer for over twenty-five years, she has published articles in several Canadian magazines and newspapers. She is the author of three books, including THE LIFE AND ART OF MIDRED VALLEY THORTON (Mother Tongue, 2011) and UNDERLYING VIBRATIONS: THE PHOTOGRAPHY AND LIFE OF JOHN VANDERPANT (Horsdal & Schubart). She has been a finalist for two BC Book Prizes, including the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize.

detail

Binding EAN ISBN-10 Pub Date PAGES Language Size Price
Paperback 9781927575901 1927575907 2015-10-01 240 0.00 x 6.23 x 8.95 in $24.95

Publicity

Connect

Multimedia

Contributor Platforms

Recent Press

Promo Quotes

Events

Book Signings and Tour Cities

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
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
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
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
Walk Myself Home

Walk Myself Home

by

There is an epidemic of violence against women in Canada and the world. For many women physical and sexual assault, or the threat of such violence, is a daily reality. Walk Myself Home is an anthology of poetry, fiction, nonfiction and oral interviews on the subject of violence against women including contributions by Kate Braid, Yasuko Thanh and Susan Musgrave...

read more
Wake-Up Call

Wake-Up Call

by Haynes, Sterling

In his second book, Wake-Up Call, Sterling Haynes begins by telling us that at the age of seventy a left hemisphere stroke rearranged his brain. "My right creative side took over and I started to write poetry and humour. I was left with a partially paralyzed right foot, but a writer's creative right brain. I think I got the better of the deal, a new brain in trade for a foot...

read more
Versions of North

Versions of North

by Lainsbury, G.P.

In this late-modern period of slackened meaning, G.P. Lainsbury's Versions of North attempts to locate poetic consciousness in the drifting concept of north, using avantgarde techniques to reveal connections between disparate elements of signification...

read more
Valley Sutra

Valley Sutra

by Gill, Kuldip

Memorials and the yearning to re-create the past permeate Valley Sutra, award-winning poet Kuldip Gill's new collection...

read more
Unfurled

Unfurled

by

Ambulance lights flash as a baby is born on a busy city street, pine beetles paint forests a palette of new colours, a young boy faces a watery death under the ice of a frozen lake, and a mother stands in a bathtub at midnight wearing only her gumboots...

read more
Understories

Understories

by Rempel, Al

Understories explores the meeting of the natural, suburban and inner-city experiences of Prince George. These poems look beneath the daily observations of a place jostled between stripmalls and pubs, the university and the mill, and a landscape that presses in at every corner, revealing a sometimes gritty underside...

read more
Tse-loh-ne (The People at the End of the Rocks)

Tse-loh-ne (The People at the End of the Rocks)

by Billington, Keith

The Tse-loh-ne from the Sekani First Nation were known as "The People at the End of the Rocks." This small band of people lived and thrived in one of BC's most challenging and remote areas, 1600 kilometres north of Prince George in the Rocky Mountain Trench...

read more
Trappers and Trailblazers

Trappers and Trailblazers

by Boudreau, Jack

In 1934 international entrepreneur and filmmaker Charles Bedeaux hired a team of Canadian men to trail blaze from Edmonton, Alberta, to Telegraph Creek, BC. What started out as adventure for Carl Davidson and Bob Beattie soon became a treacherous and heartbreaking journey...

read more
To This Cedar Fountain

To This Cedar Fountain

by Braid, Kate

Emily Carr recorded the experience of the West Coast soul in her living landscapes and her portraits of BC's towering firs. Kate Braid, in To This Cedar Fountain, engages Carr in conversation as only a kindred spirit could: a West Coaster, an artist, a woman with an affinity for timber. In these poems Carr's sensual paintings envelop Braid; Emily romances the trees while Kate bears...

read more
This Vanishing Land

This Vanishing Land

by Whelan, Dianne

In the spring of 2007 the Canadian Forces and the Canadian Rangers, the regiment responsible for providing a military presence in isolated communities, set out on a treacherous journey across jagged sea ice and over steep and hostile terrain...

read more
This Place A Stranger

This Place A Stranger

by

Sometimes tragic, sometimes uproariously funny, THIS PLACE A STRANGER is a diverse collection of Canadian women writing about their experiences of travelling alone...

read more
This Isn't the Apocalypse We Hoped For

This Isn't the Apocalypse We Hoped For

by Rempel, Al

How do we navigate a world of fast-food joints, big-box stores and traffic jams, where people grandstand in the deli and homeless men announce the end of the world through “slats in the sky”? Where the cumulative result of our lifestyle is a gyre of garbage and plastic in the North Pacific? Al Rempel’s This Isn’t the Apocalypse We Hoped For addresses this concern with humility and...

read more
Thirteen

Thirteen

by Drabek, Jan

The author was born in 1935 in Prague, and in 1948, he and his family escaped to Germany — on skis. This book is his memoir of growing up in Czechoslovakia during the war, a time of dramatic upheaval for his family and for all of Europe.

read more
The Taste of Ashes

The Taste of Ashes

by Peters, Sheila

Isabel Lee's early life in rural BC was forever changed by a brief but powerful love affair with a young Oblate priest. Now a recovering alcoholic, Isabel struggles to pull the tattered fragments of her life together and repair the damage to her relationship with her estranged daughter. Once idealistic and hopeful, Father Álvaro Ruiz now has his own demons to confront...

read more
The Silence of Horses

The Silence of Horses

by Dufour, Lorne

We need no longer hide
behind concepts of alienation
or the language of clever linguistics
while the poor are dying
we need the silence
of our horses...

read more
The Red Wall

The Red Wall

by Hall, Jane

Since 1977, people have asked Jane Hall over and over what it was like to have been among the first few female members of the RCMP, and, like so so many of her peers, she has avoided answering the questions. How could one sentence do the question justice? To truly tell the complete story, Hall needed to tell some of the good as well as some of the bad...

read more
The Promise of Rain

The Promise of Rain

by Milner, Donna

Ethie Coulter was born after her father Howard returned from the war in 1945. She never knew him as he was before, never knew that he had been an open, loving man and a devoted husband. When his wife dies in bizarre circumstances, Howard must take on the burden of looking after eleven-year-old Ethie and her two older brothers...

read more
The Last Three Hundred Miles

The Last Three Hundred Miles

by Nash, G. Stewart

Most of this novel is based on historical fact, including the actual names of rivers, mountains and towns — a few of which were christened by those who actually constructed the telegraph line.

By early 1866, the overland telegraph line had been built to Fort Fraser, east of Prince George...

read more
The Last Patrol

The Last Patrol

by Billington, Keith

In Keith Billington's new book, "The Last Patrol," he shares one of the most tragic stories of the far north. It was a quiet December morning in 1910 when Inspector Fitzgerald and his crew left Fort McPherson, Northwest Territories, on a dog team patrol to Dawson City, Yukon...

read more
The Landscape of Ernest Lamarque

The Landscape of Ernest Lamarque

by Sherwood, Jay

At the age of sixteen, Ernest Lamarque travelled from England to North America, to begin a life as a Victorian adventurer. Born in 1879 and orphaned at age twelve, he would go on to become an artist, a writer and a surveyor, creating some of the earliest visual records of the people of remote regions of Canada...

read more
The Junction

The Junction

by Schreiber, John

In his third book, "The Junction," John Schreiber invites us to join him on a journey into the hidden corners of BC?s Cariboo Chilcotin, where he observes and describes a land of mountains and old trails, coyotes and bighorn sheep, Aboriginal folk, homesteaders, ranchers and the stories of long ago...

read more
The Ice Cream Bucket Effect

The Ice Cream Bucket Effect

by Thompson, Richard

Once again northern Canada's best-known storyteller takes us on a tour of the town of New Totem on the "Vast Northern Prairie." We meet again with the Trotter family and their friends in this second book of tall tales based on growing up in the Peace River country...

read more
The Grande Dames of the Cariboo

The Grande Dames of the Cariboo

by Fowler, Julie

Author Julie Fowler began a quest to find out more about an artist from the Cariboo named Sonia Cornwall (1919?2006). Through interviews, letters, original artworks, articles, exhibition catalogues, imaginings of conversations and occurrences, along with her own reflections on the experience, she pieced together a story of pioneering, love and the pursuit of art...

read more
The Good Hope Cannery

The Good Hope Cannery

by MacDonald, W. B.

In 1895 Scottish entrepreneur, engineer, and outdoor adventurer Henry Ogle Bell-Irving built the Good Hope Cannery in Rivers Inlet, BC. There was a fortune to be made and Bell-Irving was determined to make one, both for the shareholders of the Anglo-British Columbia Packing Company, and for himself...

read more

Similar Titles

  • On the Curve
  • Your Good Hat
  • Wilderness Dreams
  • Wild Liard Waters
  • Wild and Free
  • Whitewater Devils
  • Wax Boats
  • Walk Myself Home
  • Wake-Up Call
  • Versions of North
  • Valley Sutra
  • Unfurled
  • Understories
  • Tse-loh-ne (The People at the End of the Rocks)
  • Trappers and Trailblazers
  • To This Cedar Fountain
  • This Vanishing Land
  • This Place A Stranger
  • This Isn't the Apocalypse We Hoped For
  • Thirteen
  • The Taste of Ashes
  • The Silence of Horses
  • The Red Wall
  • The Promise of Rain
  • The Last Three Hundred Miles
  • The Last Patrol
  • The Landscape of Ernest Lamarque
  • The Junction
  • The Ice Cream Bucket Effect
  • The Grande Dames of the Cariboo
  • The Good Hope Cannery
  • New Ground