Books published by Goose Lane Editions

"Mother, you may have thought that you have had some great thrills in your life but let me tell you that you will never get a real thrill until you get up in the sky and have control of the plane making sharp turns, banks, glides and climbs." Harry L. Gill enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1940 at the age of 18. He flew a Hurricane fighter on missions over France, England, and India and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal before being shot down near Burma in 1943. Hurricane Pilot recreates the heady days of flight and fellowship through Gill's own correspondence with his parents and siblings. Depicting the enthusiasm of youth, a sense of humour, his plans for the future, and an attachment to home, this very personal account of war shows how Gill was transformed from a small-town boy to a mature fighter pilot serving in a global war on another continent.

Claire Harris slices through the boundaries of poetry and prose in this powerful volume, offering a window into the experiences of friendship, love, pregnancy, and motherhood. Spanning a few days and several decades, Drawing Down a Daughter follows a woman-dreamer as she prepares to give birth to a daughter. As she waits for her husband, she talks to her child through dreams, journals, letters, and stories. These musings, both poetic and laden with story, touch on the history of slavery, exile, and expatriation and the co-existence of beauty and horror. All of this, and more, form a compelling narrative and a potent contribution to the literature of identity and consciousness.

Dans Miller Brittain: Quand les étoiles jetèrent leurs lances, Tom Smart démontre pour la première fois la cohésion de l'imagerie de Brittain et les liens entre le réalisme social de ses premières oeuvres ultérieures, des abstractions figuratives et des compositions d'inspiration surréaliste. Miller Brittain a fait irruption sur la scène artistique canadienne à la fin des années 1930, avec ses dessins et ses peintures du corps humain temples d'émotion et admirablement exécutés. Pendant ses études à l'Art Students League, à New York, il avait intériorisé un point tournant de l'art américain, alors que les modes réalistes traditionnels étaient remis en question par une nouvelle génération d'artistes radicaux selon qui l'art se devait de refléter la vie de l'artiste et les conditions de vie des sujets représentés. À une époque où les paysages du Groupe des Sept dominaient la peinture canadienne, Brittain défia l'establishment avec son sens infallible de la ligne et de la composition, et ses récits humains attrayants. Plus tard, alliant l'art figurative et l'art abstrait, il explora les limites du corps et les confines de la raison afin d'exprimer les profondeurs du désespoir et les sommets de l'extase. Au cours de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Brittain s'enrôla dans l'Aviation royale du Canada, fut décoré de la Croix du service distingué dans l'Aviation et devint un artiste de guerre canadien. Quand il partait en mission de bombardement, il emportait avec lui un exemplaire des Chants d'expérience, de William Blake. Dans Miller Brittain: Quand les étoiles jetèrent leurs lances, Smart fait voir comment le célèbre poéme ' Le tigre ', de Blake, inspira le motif omniprésent dans les oeuvres de Brittain après la guerre, c'est-à-dire la cominaison de l'étoile et de la lance. Ce qui au départ représentait des faisceaux de projecteurs et des avions abattus devint au fil des années des représentationsiconiques de fleurs et de tiges, de têtes et de cous, de rayons de soleil et de fumée. Allen Bentley appuie les observations de Smart en montrant la profonde influence exercée par les théories de Blake sur l'oeuvre de Brittain dans l'après-guerre.

A small island off the coast of Nova Scotia declares its independence to the world. In this Utopian world, the ocean delivers many a curiosity, including a dead circus elephant and a raven-haired woman. When the turbulence of the 1960s draws the island's inhabitants into politics, the Vietnam War, and the peace movement, and when civilization lays siege, an unexpected character comes to the rescue. Sound impossible? Not on Whalebone Island, a.k.a. the Republic of Nothing. Where else could a psychic castaway, an anarchist-turned-politician, and American refugees cultivate their eccentricities? This new edition of Lesley Choyce's celebrated novel features an afterword by Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart, leading readers to discover once again that nothing is everything.

In this resonant collection of unbridled fancy, Peter Richardson's characters hunger for soulful connections in the midst of bedlam and loss. Ranging from a literate vernacular to high diction and low humour, these poems confirm that Richardson is a craftsman of the finest kind, all confidence and mischief, "whistling from scuffmark to scuffmark" as he traipses across the page and into the psyche.

For this original, often provocative book, Kerry Clare has assembled essays that face down motherhood from the other side of the picket fence by some of Canada's finest young writers. There are women who have had too many children or not enough. There are women for whom motherhood is a fork in the road. And there are those who have made the conscious choice not to have children and then find themselves defined by that decision. The M Word: it means something to every woman. Exactly what it means is rarely simple.

Wild Apples: Field Notes from a River Farm marks Wayne Curtis's return to the embrace of home and the colourful lives of the people who inspire him. Simple pleasures like fishing on the Miramichi River and chores like cutting wood, planting beans, and picking crabapples take on new depths of meaning in the telling. The birth of his sister at Christmastime, the story of his mother in her own words, and a memorable trip to the circus recall unexpected moments of family love. These personal essays are a poetic blend of fiction and biography, rich in imagery and uncompromising in their emotional honesty. Taken together, they reveal the bittersweet story of a childhood both blessed and burdened with family tradition and obligations, of dizzying love and loss, and of a young man's struggle to change the patterns of the past.

In Miller Brittain: When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears, Tom Smart demonstrates the cohesion of Brittain's imagery. For the first time, he reveals the links between Brittain's early social realism and his later figurative abstractions and surrealist-inspired compositions. Miller Brittain burst upon the Canadian art scene in the late 1930s with masterful, emotion-filled drawings and paintings of the human form. While studying in New York at the Art Students' League, he had internalized a pivotal moment in American art. Breaking free of traditional realist modes, a radical new generation of artists claimed that art should reflect the life of the artist and the condition of the subjects depicted. At a time when Group of Seven landscapes defined Canadian painting, Brittain challenged the establishment with his unerring sense of line, composition, and engaging human narratives. Later, combining figuration and abstraction, he explored the limites of the body and the borderlands of sanity to express the depths of despair and the heights of ecstasy. During World War II, Brittain joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, received the Distinguished Flying Cross, and became a Canadian war artist. During bombing missions, he carried William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience in his pocket. In Miller Brittain: When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears, Smart illustrates how Blake's famous poem "The Tyger" inspired the pervasive motif of Brittain's post-war career: the combination of star and spear. Originally a depiction of searchlights and shot-down aircraft, it became, over the years, Brittain's iconic flowers and stems, heads and necks, sunbursts and smoke. Allen Bentley reinforces Smart's observations by showing the profound influence of Blake's theories on the entire body of Brittain's post-war work.

In the 1860s, New Brunswick experienced its own brand of international terrorism. The Fenian Brotherhood sought the ouster of the British from their beloved Ireland and found support among Irish-American immigrants. Eager to help the cause, the American Fenian sympathizers planned to invade British North America and hold it hostage. New Brunswick, with its large Irish population and undefended frontier, seemed the perfect target. In the spring of 1866, a thousand Fenians massed along the southwest border of New Brunswick. But when Lieutenant-Governor Arthur Hamilton Gordon revitalized the New Brunswick militia, calling in British soldiers and a squadron of warships, the force proved too much for the enemy, who retreated and turned their efforts against the more vulnerable central Canada. The threat of this Fenian attack fanned the flames of an already red-hot political debate, and a year later, in 1867, New Brunswick joined Confederation.

In Take Us Quietly, Tammy Armstrong displays an unusual virtuosity. Her poems team with visceral, sharp-edged images, whether cracking open the rough shell of rural childhood or the accommodations of love in a long-term relationship. With language more astonishing than ever, Armstrong writes with both torque and tension as her poems leap from thought to thought, from one emotional tone to another. By turns nightmarish, erotic, and full of delight, Take Us Quietly exposes the mind's deepest truths, drilling through the surface tension of the present into the artesian well of memory.

What is the meaning of life? What is love? Why don't butterflies live longer? These are just a few of the questions that a curious pachyderm asks the Almighty in this collection of endearing tales. And God answers him, sometimes cryptically, sometimes humorously, but always with love and patience. This new edition of The Elephant Talks to God includes most of the original stories from the popular 1980 collection as well as many new ones. Dale Estey is a writer, teacher, and arts activist, whose curiosity rivals that of his capricious elephant.

""On the seventh day, God rested." He'd had a busy week, forming the earth and everything in it and creating Adam and Eve. But, after all, a week is only a week." In On the Eighth Day, Antonine Maillet imagines a wider, more exuberant world created on "the day when everything is dared and anything is possible." She spins a tale of two brothers -- a giant carved from an oak tree and a scamp shaped out of bread dough -- who set off to find their true inheritance. The story of their travels is a fantastic picaresque -- a cheerful Gulliver's Travels, a comic Pilgrim's Progress, an Acadian Wizard of Oz.

"I am having rather a busy time of it. I consider however I am performing a national service, and I know also there are others who are having worse things to face in performing their part, so am thankful." Daniel MacMillan experienced the Great War entirely from the home front: his farm in the tiny community of Williamsburg. His moving diaries reveal the terrible cost of the war and its aftermath on him, his family, his farm, and his community. In entries written between 1914 and 1927, MacMillan describes the hardships of running a farm in the face of an acute labour shortage and the anguish of losing relatives and friends in battle. His insider's account shows rural people struggling to supply men, equipment, and especially food -- not just for the troops, but for the whole country -- and the post-war results of such sacrifice.

" ... begins with the preparations for war and then tracks the route of the Canadian battle groups and regiments as they fought across Europe and in the Pacific"--Page 4 of cover.

Sailing from New Brunswick ports, pirates and privateers scourged the Atlantic coast throughout the 19th century. Legitimized with letters of marque and reprisal, they fought a private war against the King's enemies -- the Americans. The final act in this enterprise came during the Civil War, when a gang of Saint John ne'er-do-wells captured a passenger steamer, the SS Chesapeake, on behalf of the Confederacy. Amid tales of battles at sea and fortunes lost and won, Faye Kert's exposure of the murky context in which these semi-legal marauders operated reveals surprising truths about Confederation and its promoters.

"I never thought about it that way before." For forty years, CBC Radio's Ideas has challenged listeners with provocative contemporary thought. In IDEAS: Brilliant Thinkers Speak Their Minds, executive producer Bernie Lucht presents twenty selections from the program's rich archive. IDEAS: Brilliant Thinkers Speak Their Minds is a symposium of prominent thinkers who have shaped the culture of our times. On topics including peace and conflict, ideology and the nation-state, and secularism and religion, voices from the past and present resonate together. Tariq Ali and Roméo Dallaire share dedication to personal responsibility, Northrop Frye's views on the Bible complement Bernard Lewis's assessment of Islam after 9/11, and Noam Chomsky and Hannah Arendt's opinions on violence foreshadow James Orbinski's exposure of false humanitarianism.

Rootless, nostalgic, socially inept, Jonas is a hero in need of a quest, an exemplar of generational anxiety eternally on the brink. A work of epic literature for the twenty-first century, Jonas in Frames warps time, mangles space, and fragments expectations in an esoteric glimpse into a fractal, clandestine, tempestuous cabinet of curiosities.