Books published by Caitlin Press

Greenaway tells tales of his adventurous childhood in rural BC, from long days at the river with willow sticks and a hook for a fishing pole, to rolling around in poison ivy just to see what would happen.

"First published 1995 by Polestar Book Publishers"--Title page verso.

Now, more than forty years after the first hippie settlers arrived in Wells, All Roads Lead to Wells tells their earthy, poignant and revealing stories.

Set in Vancouver in 1907, Better the Devil You Know is the outrageous tale of three unique and curious characters: the small-time con man who passes himself off as an evangelical preacher, the scrawny street-worker whom he reluctantly befriends, and the five-year-old hellion left in his care by a former lady friend. In the course of their adventures, these three misfits become involved with a larcenous lingerie salesman, a Klondike miner bent on recovering his stolen poke, a madam intent on revenge for past wrongs, a pugilistic lady barkeep, two doctors determined to acquire a cadaver of their own, a handful of incompetent and corrupt cops, and a piano teacher with reforming zeal. The pace is riotous, the action continuous, and nobody -- good or bad -- ever gets a break.

Maureen Foss's offbeat and darkly funny third novel begins when four quirky and mismatched women answer an ad to join a writing group. Unlikely friendships and wild adventures ensue as their lives start to unravel around them. Bunny, the wife of a calculating, cheating husband, is writing a novel about the best way to carry out spousal disposal and get away with it. Mariah, a closet lesbian, is planning to make a fortune by marketing her romance novels when her home is suddenly invaded by her mother and her mother's blaspheming parrot. The sentimental poet, Sari, makes her living as a funeral home cosmetician, but when her husband kidnaps their son and runs off for a new life without her, quiet, introverted Sari transforms into a wildcat. As the gardening, recipe and etiquette columnist for the local paper, Jemima blends her somewhat unorthodox recipes with her motherly advice. But she suffers a bad case of writer's block when her husband Joe, a wheelchair user, has a stroke and falls face-first into her experimental lima bean casserole. The women's lives intertwine; good scotch is consumed, lovers come and go and almost everything around them changes, but writing is the glue that holds their friendships fast.

"Edited by Meg Taylor"--Title page verso.

In this late-modern period of slackened meaning, G.P. Lainsburys Versions of North attempts to locate poetic consciousness in the drifting concept of north, using avant-garde techniques to reveal connections between disparate elements of signification. Lainsbury borrows from a wide variety of sources, filtering them through the grid of a disenchanted idealism, taking to heart the cyberpunk declaration that information wants to be free. Lainsbury uses the page as physical space: a long line creeps into the margin, and margins float about without justification reflecting a desire to mix and confuse games, to play many simultaneously, to use the vice of poetry to pay homage to the virtue of science. Versions of North engages with the environment of northern British Columbia; it is the manifestation of the poets desire to create a cosmopolitan art in a place that modernity sometimes seems to have skipped right over.

In this jarring collection, Adam Pottle cracks open the world of disability, illuminating it with an idiom that is both unsettling and exhilarating. His subjects are gritty and multifarious: drug related shootings; amputee sex swingers; tattooed Parkinsons patients; institutionalized adolescents coerced into sterilization.

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 Thahn and Susan Musgrave.

The story of the railway has never been told in such a charming voice as in these letters by Bernice Medbury Martin. Bernice Medbury married railroader Leslie Martin in 1912 and arrived later that year in Prince Rupert at the height of rock blasting and railroad building. Lonely for her family in Wisconsin, Bernice wrote frequent letters home in which she described in striking detail the machinery and mudslides, the weather and the wilderness, the local characters and the outrageous cost of supplies. She wrote of her frustration at the slow pace of the railway work and her happiness at an invitation to a social event many miles away. She lived in a tent at Kitselas, a hotel in Hazelton, a shack in the Bulkley Valley and a hand-hewn log cabin at Decker Lake. Bernice's letters span the two final years of Grand Trunk Pacific Railway track building and are neatly woven together by Jane Stevenson's well-researched narration. A stunning collection of photographs illustrates the enormous task of constructing a railway along the Skeena River, through the Bulkley Valley and on to Burns Lake. Bernice travelled to a land her friends and family could not imagine, where she experienced the challenges and joys of the Canadian western frontier and witnessed the construction of the truly "Grand" Trunk Pacific Railway, until the last spike was driven near her home early in the spring of 1914.