Fiction

This haunting, emotionally resonant story delivers us into the world of Alice, a single mother raising her three young daughters on the rez where she grew up. Alice has never had an easy life, but has managed to get by with the support of her best friend, Gideon, and her family. When an unthinkable loss occurs, Alice is forced onto a different path, one that will challenge her belief in herself and the world she thought she knew. The Evolution of Alice is the kaleidoscopic story of one woman’s place within the web of community. Peopled with unforgettable characters and told from multiple points of view, this is a novel where spirits are alive, forgiveness is possible, and love is the only thing that matters.

Reviews
"So many Manitobans have, like a character in an early chapter, only sped by reserves on the highway. Inviting us into a rich community of characters, which stretches deeper than the headlines most of us associate with reserve life, Robertson is doing a service to everyone who calls Manitoba home. And crafting an engaging story of one family’s recovery from loss — at a time when indigenous peoples are increasingly flexing political, economic and cultural muscle in this country — is a gift for everyone hoping for a better future for our divided country…" - Matthew TenBruggencate, CTV Winnipeg

"Pulsing at the heart of this novel are the warmly rendered inflections of storytelling voices like Gideon’s, at once reflective, vivid, and vernacular. And at the novel’s core, the broken but ultimately healing rhythms of Alice’s 'evolution' – her cycles of loving and suffering, of her family’s living, dying, and ultimately hoping to live anew — bring contemporary experience on the reservation and in the big city achingly, joyfully, and always pungently alive." - Neil Besner, Professor of English, Provost and Vice-President, Academic, The University of Winnipeg

Educator Information
Grades 10-12 English First Peoples.

This 2nd edition has been reissued with a new story by David A. Robertson and foreword by Shelagh Rogers.

Additional Information
216 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" | 2nd Edition

The New Wascana Anthology is named for the Cree word "oskana," meaning "bones,"* but this anthology is no literary graveyard. It will introduce you to stories, poems, and essays that can be discussed over drinks, or used to impress friends years after leaving English 100 behind.

Offering a taster's choice of the best Canadian writing, with a special focus on Aboriginal and Prairie writers, this anthology includes pieces selected to introduce you to the English literary canon. Going back hundreds of years, the oldest poems included here have no known author, while the youngest writer is a recent university graduate.

Building on the bones of the canon (including all of Canada's Man Booker Prize-winners and newest Nobel Laureate), The New Wascana Anthology features writers such as Flannery O'Connor, Thomas King, Carmine Starnino, and Ursula K. Le Guin who will challenge your worldview. Most importantly, this anthology is about turning the page, opening your mind, and revelling in the pleasures of reading.

*The bones referred to are the bones of plains bison, a species that once numbered in the tens of millions on the Great Plains.

Educator Information
Contains works from Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers.

Table of Contents

Preface

Poetry

Anonymous
Summer is icumen in
Sir Patrick Spens
Mary Hamilton

Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343–1400)
from The Canterbury Tales
Excerpts from General Prologue

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542)
          The Long Love, That in My Thought Doth Harbour

Sir Walter Ralegh (ca. 1552–1618)
          The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd

Edmund Spenser (ca. 1552–1599)
from Amoretti
          30. My love is like to ice
          75. One day I wrote her name

Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586)
from Astrophel and Stella
          59. Dear, why make you more of a dog than me?

Michael Drayton (1563–1631)
from Idea
          61. Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part

Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593)
          The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
 
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
from Sonnets
          18. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
          20. A woman’s face, with nature’s own hand painted
          116. Let me not to the marriage of true minds
          130. My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun
from As You Like It
          All the world’s a stage
 
John Donne (1572–1631)
          A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
          Death be not proud
          The Bait
          The Flea

Ben Jonson (1572–1637)
          Epigram XXII: On My First Daughter
          Epigram XLV: On My First Son
          Song: To Celia

George Herbert (1593–1633)
          Love (III)
 
John Milton (1608–1674)
          When I Consider How My Light Is Spent
from Paradise Lost, Book 1
          The Invocation

Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672)
          Before the Birth of One of Her Children
          The Author to Her Book

Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)
          To His Coy Mistress
 
Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea (1661–1720)
          To the Nightingale
          A Letter to Daphnis, April 2, 1685

Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
          The Rape of the Lock

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762)
          Addressed to—

Thomas Gray (1716–1771)
          Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Christopher Smart (1722–1771)
from Jubilate Agno
          My Cat Jeoffry
 
William Blake (1757–1827)
from Songs of Innocence
          The Chimney Sweeper
          The Lamb
from Songs of Experience
          A Poison Tree
          London
          The Chimney Sweeper

William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
          A slumber did my spirit seal
          Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
          I wandered lonely as a cloud
          The world is too much with us

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
          Kubla Khan
 
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824)
          She Walks in Beauty
          The Destruction of Sennacherib

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
          Ozymandias

John Keats (1795–1821)
          La Belle Dame Sans Merci
          When I have fears that I may cease to be

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892)
          Ulysses
 
Robert Browning (1812–1889)
          Porphyria’s Lover
          My Last Duchess
 
Emily Brontë (1818–1848)
          Remembrance

Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
          When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
 
Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
          Dover Beach

George Meredith (1828–1909)
from Modern Love
          17. At dinner, she is hostess, I am host

Emily Dickinson (1830–1866)
          F479. Because I could not stop for Death
          F591. I heard a Fly buzz—when I died
          F620. Much Madness is divinest Sense
          F1096. A narrow Fellow in the Grass
          F1263. Tell all the Truth but tell it slant

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898)
          Jabberwocky

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
          The Ruined Maid
          The Convergence of the Twain
          The Workbox

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
          God’s Grandeur
          Pied Beauty
          The Windhover

A. E. Housman (1859–1936)
from A Shropshire Lad
          XIX. To An Athlete Dying Young

Sir Charles G. D. Roberts (1860–1943)
          Tantramar Revisited

Archibald Lampman (1861–1899)
          Heat

William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
          The Second Coming
          Leda and the Swan
          Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)
          Miniver Cheevy

Robert Frost (1874–1963)
          After Apple-Picking
          Mending Wall
          Nothing Gold Can Stay
          The Silken Tent

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)
          The Red Wheelbarrow
          This is Just to Say
          Pictures from Brueghel

D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930)
          Piano
          Snake

Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
          In a Station of the Metro
          The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918)
          Break of Day in the Trenches

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
          Elegy before Death
          What lips my lips have kissed

Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)
          Dulce et Decorum Est

e.e. cummings (1894–1963)
          “next to of course god america i
          anyone lived in a pretty how town

F. R. Scott (1899–1985)
          Lakeshore
 
Langston Hughes (1902–1967)
          The Negro Speaks of Rivers
          Harlem

A. J. M. Smith (1902–1980)
          The Lonely Land
          Far West

Stevie Smith (1902–1971)
          Not Waving but Drowning

Earle Birney (1904–1995)
          Anglo-Saxon Street

W. H. Auden (1907–1973)
          Musée des Beaux-Arts

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)
          My Papa’s Waltz

A. M. Klein (1909–1972)
          Heirloom
          The Rocking Chair

Dorothy Livesay (1909–1996)
          Green Rain

Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979)
          In the Waiting Room

Irving Layton (1912–2006)
          The Birth of Tragedy

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
          Fern Hill
          Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

P. K. Page (1916–2010)
          After Rain
          Planet Earth
 
Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
          For the Union Dead

Miriam Waddington (1917–2004)
          Advice to the Young

Raymond Souster (1921–2012)
          The Lilac Poem
 
Elizabeth Brewster (1922–2012)
          The Night Grandma Died

Eli Mandel (1922–1992)
          Houdini

Anne Szumigalski (1926–1999)
          It Wasn’t a Major Operation

Don Coles (b. 1927)
          Collecting Pictures
 
Robert Kroetsch (1927–2011)
          Meditation on Tom Thomson

Rita Joe (1932–2007)
          Axe Handles for Sale
          I Lost My Talk

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)
          Daddy

Alden Nowlan (1933–1983)
          The Bull Moose

Leonard Cohen (b. 1934)
          A Kite Is a Victim
          Suzanne

Robert Currie (b. 1937)
          Young Boy, Fleeing

Glen Sorestad (b. 1937)
          Ten Years
          Now That I’m Up

John Newlove (1938–2003)
          The Double-Headed Snake

Margaret Atwood (b. 1939)
          Backdrop Addresses Cowboy
          The Nature of Gothic
          This Is a Photograph of Me

Seamus Heaney (1939–2013)
          Bog Queen
          Digging
          The Names of the Hare

Patrick Lane (b. 1939)
          Mountain Oysters

Gary Hyland (1940–2011)
from Arguments in the Garden of Prayer
          1. So many frogs
          14. The first sounds

Beth Brant (b. 1941)
          for all my Grandmothers

Robert Hass (b. 1941)
          Consciousness

Gwendolyn MacEwen (1941–1987)
          Manzini: Escape Artist

Marie Annharte Baker (b. 1942)
          Pretty Tough Skin Woman

Louise Glück (b. 1943)
          Illuminations

Michael Ondaatje (b. 1943)
          The Cinnamon Peeler
          White Dwarfs

Dennis Cooley (b. 1944)
          how there in the plaid light she played with his affections plied them spikes from his heart she stood by pliers in hand he has his pride

Craig Raine (b. 1944)
          A Martian Sends a Postcard Home

Tom Wayman (b. 1945)
          Did I Miss Anything?
 
Linda Hogan (b. 1947)
          Cities Behind Glass

Lorna Crozier (b. 1948)
          The Dirty Thirties
          Poem about Nothing
from The Sex Lives of Vegetables
          Radishes
          Lettuce
          Cauliflower

Beth Cuthand (b. 1949)
          Four Songs for the Fifth Generation

Kathleen Wall (b. 1950)
          Morning Nocturne

Joy Harjo (b. 1951)
          She Had Some Horses

Gerald Hill (b. 1951)
          Becoming and Going: An Oldsmobile Story

Di Brandt (b. 1952)
          completely seduced

Louise Halfe (b. 1953)
          She Told Me

Louise Erdrich (b. 1954)
          Dear John Wayne
          Indian Boarding School: The Runaways
          Jacklight

Jeanette Lynes (b. 1956)
          The Last Interview with Bettie Page

Anne Simpson (b. 1956)
          Grammar Exercise

George Elliott Clarke (b. 1960)
          Blank Sonnet

Michael Crummey (b. 1965)
          Her Mark

Gregory Scofield (b. 1966)
          His Flute, My Ears

Karen Solie (b. 1966)
          Parasitology

Randy Lundy (b. 1967)
          Bear
          Ghost Dance

Stephanie Bolster (b. 1969)
          To Dolly

Carmine Starnino (b. 1970)
          Pepino’s Poem, “Growing Up in Naples”
          Rope Husbandry

Daniel Scott Tysdal (b. 1978)
          Metro

Cassidy McFadzean (b. 1989)
          I smile earwide

Short Fiction

Sherman Alexie (b. 1966)
          The Approximate Size of My Favourite Tumour

Margaret Atwood (b. 1939)
          My Last Duchess

Sandra Birdsell (b. 1942)
          Disappearances

Raymond Carver (1938–1988)
          Cathedral

William Faulkner (1897–1962)
          A Rose for Emily

Richard Ford (b. 1944)
          Sweethearts

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935)
          The Yellow Wall-paper

James Joyce (1882–1941)
          Araby

Thomas King (b. 1943)
          A Seat in the Garden

Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)
          The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

Alexander MacLeod (b. 1972)
          Miracle Mile

Alistair MacLeod (1936-2014)
          The Boat

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923)
          The Garden-Party

Yann Martel (b. 1963)
          The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios

Rohinton Mistry (b. 1952)
          Swimming Lessons

Ken Mitchell (b. 1940)
          The Great Electrical Revolution

Alice Munro (b. 1931)
          The Bear Came over the Mountain

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
          A Good Man Is Hard to Find

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
          The Cask of Amontillado

Eden Robinson (b. 1968)
          Traplines

Gloria Sawai (1932–2011)
          The Day I Sat with Jesus on the Sundeck and a Wind Came Up and Blew My Kimono Open and He Saw My Breasts

Guy Vanderhaeghe (b. 1951)
          Dancing Bear

Dianne Warren (b. 1950)
          Bone Garden

Critical Prose

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002)
          Evolution as Fact and Theory

Trevor Herriot (b. 1958)
from Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds
          A Way Home

Barbara Kingsolver (b. 1955)
          Setting Free the Crabs

Don McKay (b. 1942)
          Baler Twine: Thoughts on Ravens, Home, and Nature Poetry

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
          A Modest Proposal

Copyright Notices

Index of Authors and Titles

Index of First Lines of Poetry

Additional Information
554 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | Paperback

Humour is not only the best medicine; it is also an exceptionally useful teaching tool.

So often, it is through humour that the big lessons in life are learned--about responsibility, honour, hard work, and respect. Cree people are known for their wit, so the tales in Woods Cree Stories are filled with humour. The book includes nine stories--including Boys Get Lost, Foolishness, and Animals Become Friends--and a Woods Cree-to-English glossary.

All the stories are presented in Cree syllabics, Standard Roman Orthography, and English translation and can be enjoyed by those new to the language and more advanced learners.

Educator & Series Information
Woods Cree Stories is part of the First Nations Language Readers series. With a mix of traditional and new stories, each First Nations Language Reader introduces an Indigenous language and demonstrates how each language is used today. The University of Regina Press’s long-term goal is to publish all 60+ Indigenous languages of Canada.

Additional Information
138 pages | 5.50" x 8.50" 

A Night for the Lady explores the terrain of poetry conversation. Each poem arises from conversations with poets, colleagues and intimate friends. They range from a 1998 conversation on healing programs and the fundamentals of world change to a sequence of recent indigenous literary events on the prairies. Within the context of these conversations, an exploration emerges of the roles of woman within local as well as historic literary and global situations. The poems draw together diverse figures from world literature, world religions and myths to lay open the experience of human beings within the “brown-feminine.” Identifying and synthesizing connections across a wide palette of human experience, this collection challenges the divisions of personal and global, indigenous and “everyone else,” all the while celebrating both the humanity and the divinity of the Lady. Playful, erotic and occasionally harrowing, this collection bundles together experimental and inspirational work from a longstanding voice of conscience in Canadian letters. Once again, Arnott carries us into the most intimate terrain, casts her net widely, catches us up.

Acclaimed author Thomas King is in fabulous, fantastical form in this bestselling short story collection. From the surreal migrations of the title story to the misadventures of Coyote in the modern world and the chaos of a baby's unexpected arrival by airmail, King's tales are deft, hilarious and provocative. 

Reviews
"The stories in this volume cover a lot of ground. King touches on the history of displacement, racism and stereotyping, oppressive government policy, marriage and relationships, and Aboriginal-white relations, among other topics." - Dragonfly Consulting Services Canada

Educator Information
Grade 10/11 English First Peoples resource used in the unit The Trickster - A Recurring Presence.

Additional Information
256 pages | 5.31" x 8.00"

In Richard Van Camp's fictionalized north anything can happen and yet each story is rooted in a vivid contemporary reality. The stories offer a potent mix of tropes from science fiction, horror, Western and Aboriginal traditions. The title story pits Torchy against Smith Squad, fighting for love and family in a bloody, cathartic, and ultimately hopeful narrative. Van Camp's characters repeatedly confront the bleakness of sexual assault, substance addiction and violence with the joy and humour of inspired storytelling.

Additional Information
200 pages | 6.00" x 8.50"

Imagine Mercy is a vibrant poetry collection portraying the daily realities of living as an Aboriginal in Canada. David Groulx seamlessly weaves the spiritual with the ordinary and the present with the past. He speaks for the spirit, determination, and courage of Aboriginal people, compelling readers to confront cruel reality with his honest and inspiring vision. The poems in Imagine Mercy portray mixed bloods, resistance, determination, sovereignty, and cultural issues that generate sharply divided opinions and deep emotional struggles. Groulx’s poetic power renders an honest and painful perception of modern-day Aboriginal life with strong voice against prejudice and injustice.

Educator & Series Information
This book is part of the Canadian Aboriginal Voices series.

Additional Information
96 pages | 5.50" x 8.50"

In her debut collection of short stories, Islands of Decolonial Love, renowned writer and activist Leanne Simpson vividly explores the lives of contemporary Indigenous Peoples and communities, especially those of her own Nishnaabeg nation. Found on reserves, in cities and small towns, in bars and curling rinks, canoes and community centres, doctors offices and pickup trucks, Simpson’s characters confront the often heartbreaking challenge of pairing the desire to live loving and observant lives with a constant struggle to simply survive the historical and ongoing injustices of racism and colonialism. Told with voices that are rarely recorded but need to be heard, and incorporating the language and history of her people, Leanne Simpson’s Islands of Decolonial Love is a profound, important, and beautiful book of fiction.

Additional Information
148 pages | 5.50" x 8.50"

Growing up on the Six Nations native reserve, Salt Baby never quite fit in, as a “white” looking “Indian” — fair skin and curly hair made her more of a Shirley Temple type than a Pocahontas type. Salt Baby navigates the native reserve and the city while explaining herself, as well as her blood quantrum, to the world and to “Alligator”: “It’s always different for Indians.”

Reviews
“This hilarious and moving play explores the experience of being invisibly ethnic and raises questions about how we expect Aboriginal people to look.” —Toronto Arts Online

Additional Information
74 pages | 5.40" x 8.40"

Louise Edrich’s Tales of Burning Love is a darkly humorous novel of wild romance and heartbreak set against a raging North Dakota blizzard as five Great Plains women bond over their shared connection to one man.

Stranded in the storm just outside of Fargo, Jack Mauser’s former wives pass the night by remembering how each came to love, marry, and ultimately move beyond Jack. Painful and comic by turns, the women’s tales bind them together.

National Book Award–winning author Louise Edrich’s characteristic powers of observation and poetic prose combine in a tale that is another tour-de-force from one of America’s most formidable writers.

This edition of Tales of Burning Love includes a P.S. section with additional insights from the author, background material, suggestions for further reading, and more.

Additional Information

Canada’s most famous Aboriginal playwright, Tomson Highway, sets his latest theatrical achievement, The (Post) Mistress, in a not-so-distant past, when sending letters through the mail was still vital to communicating with friends and loved ones, and the small-town post office was often the only connection to faraway places longed-for or imagined.

Born and raised in Lovely, Ontario, a small French-Canadian farming village near Lake Huron, Marie-Louise Painchaud has never had occasion to venture much farther than the nearest community – Complexity, a copper-mining town and a somewhat larger dot on the map of the Georgia Bay area. For thirty years, Marie-Louise has worked at the local post office, and, through the many letters she sorts when they arrive and the ones that she stamps before they go out, she has come to know the lives of everyone in town and vicariously experience their various loves, losses, and personal dramas.

In this one-woman musical tour de force, Marie-Louise confides in us the interwoven stories sealed in the envelopes she handles every day. A samba beat offers the soundtrack for the tale of a local woman’s passion- ate but doomed affair with a man from Rio de Janeiro; a rhythmic tango plays as Marie-Louise divulges a friend’s steamy tryst in Argentina. All together, twelve unique musical pieces, ranging from Berlin cabaret to French café chanson to smooth bossa nova, accompany a multilingual French, Cree, and English libretto.

In The (Post) Mistress, Tomson Highway creates not only a rural comedy but also a sublime parody of small-town life – the northern Ontario version of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town or Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.

Cast of 1 woman.

The Gift Is in the Making retells previously published Anishinaabeg stories, bringing to life Anishinaabeg values and teachings to a new generation. Readers are immersed in a world where all genders are respected, the tiniest being has influence in the world, and unconditional love binds families and communities to each other and to their homeland. Sprinkled with gentle humour and the Anishinaabe language, this collection of stories speaks to children and adults alike, and reminds us of the timelessness of stories that touch the heart.

Educator & Series Information
This book is part of The Debwe Series.

Recommended for grades 5 to 9.

Additional Information
99 pages | 5.50" x 8.50"

Sherman Alexie’s celebrated first collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, established its author as one of America’s most important and provocative voices. The basis for the award-winning movie Smoke Signals, it remains one of his best loved and widely praised books twenty years after its initial publication.

Vividly weaving memory, fantasy, and stark reality to paint a portrait of life in and around the Spokane Indian reservation, this book introduces some of Alexie’s most beloved characters, including Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the storyteller who no one seems to listen to, and his compatriot, Victor, the sports hero who turned into a recovering alcoholic. Now with an updated introduction from Alexie, these twenty-four tales are narrated by characters raised on humiliation and government-issue cheese, and yet they are filled with passion and affection, myth and charm. Against a backdrop of addiction, car accidents, laughter, and basketball, Alexie depicts the distances between men and women, Indians and whites, reservation Indians and urban Indians, and, most poetically, modern Indians and the traditions of the past.

Educator Information
Resource for English First Peoples 10-12.  

Short stories.

Additional Information
304 pages | 5.50" x 8.25"

The Place of Scraps revolves around Marius Barbeau, an early-twentieth-century ethnographer, who studied many of the First Nations cultures in the Pacific Northwest, including Jordan Abel’s ancestral Nisga’a Nation. Unfortunately, Barbeau’s methods of preserving First Nations cultures included purchasing totem poles and potlatch items from struggling communities in order to sell them to museums. While Barbeau strove to protect First Nations cultures from vanishing, he ended up playing an active role in dismantling the very same cultures he tried to save.

Through the use of erasure techniques, Abel carves out new understandings of Barbeau’s writing – each layer reveals a fresh perspective, each word takes on a different connotation, each letter plays a different role, and each punctuation mark rises to the surface in an unexpected way. As Abel writes his way ever deeper into Barbeau’s words, he begins to understand that he is much more connected to Barbeau than he originally suspected.

One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface because Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and thirteen-year-old son, Joe. In one day, Joe's life is irrevocably transformed. He tries to heal his mother, but she will not leave her bed and slips into an abyss of solitude. Increasingly alone, Joe finds himself thrust prematurely into an adult world for which he is ill prepared.

While his father, a tribal judge, endeavors to wrest justice from a situation that defies his efforts, Joe becomes frustrated with the official investigation and sets out with his trusted friends, Cappy, Zack, and Angus, to get some answers of his own. Their quest takes them first to the Round House, a sacred space and place of worship for the Ojibwe. And this is only the beginning.