Books published by Rock's Mills Press

"Earth continues to travel in a slightly elliptical orbit around the sun, but some years ago the world started veering to the right."So observes Robert Brym in his introduction to this fifth volume of the proceedings of the S.D. Clark Symposium on the Future of Canadian Society. The aim of the collection is to examine anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, and antisemitism in Canada today, particularly in the context of the rise of right-wing populist movements in Canada and around the world. Abdolmohammad Kazemipur, Akwasi Owusu-Bempah and Carl E. James, Morton Weinfeld, Neda Maghbouleh, and Brym himself draw on the latest research to examine the patterns of prejudice and discrimination that continue to persist in Canadian society. Racism, Islamophobia, Antisemitism and the Future of Canadian Society gathers together the revised proceedings of the fifth S.D. Clark Symposium on the Future of Canadian Society. The Symposium, hosted by the Department of Sociology of the University of Toronto, honours the memory of S.D. Clark, the department's first chair and one of Canada's leading sociologists of the twentieth century.

Growing up in British Guiana in the 1930s and ''40s ...In Demerara Sugar, author Pam Walters provides a child''s-eye view of British Guiana -- the British Empire''s only foothold on the South American continent -- that is by turns poignant, humorous and insightful. The sugar plantations of the Guianese region of Demerara were integral to the economy of the Empire. Expatriate English, Scots and Irish managed a plantation economy only possible with the work of field labour and a colonial society of merchants, teachers and government officialdom."All are childhood memories and what I gleaned from Kitchen-talk and word-of mouth stories from the people around me at the time," the author writes of the sources of her narrative. "[Those people] were the descendants of slaves who had been taken to Enmore from the slave ships and whose families had always lived there."With an unerring eye for detail, the author depicts her own at times eccentric family and household, against the broader backdrop of growing up on a sugar plantation 1930s and ''40s. She mines memories of her childhood with clarity and regard for the class and racial divisions of the day, deftly weaving together her recollections with the historical details of the period.The result is a complex, entertaining and resonant memoir.Includes 24 period photographs

Over the course of three decades, George Bernard Shaw and theatre critic Malcolm Watson of the Daily Telegraph carried out an extensive correspondence. My Dear Watson brings together in book form the previously unpublished letters from Shaw to Watson (those from Watson to Shaw are no longer extant): letters that are significant for the light they shed on the working relationship between Shaw and one of London's major newspapers.Many of the letters include self-drafted "interviews" with Shaw that Watson was able to use (sometimes with considerable embellishment) in his columns in the Telegraph. The letters reveal not only Shaw's views on his own plays, but also important theatrical initiatives of the time. Shaw's attempts to educate Watson on theatre censorship add new dimensions to Shaw's deep engagement with the controversial issue, while Watson's "interview" with Shaw about anticipated raucous audience behaviour at the opening night of Pygmalion, and Shaw's subsequent thank-you to Watson for his cooperation in trying to establish a "new code of manners in thetheatre," speak to Shaw's serious concern about giving actors a fair hearing. All but one of the letters deal with theatrical matters; the exception deals with a personal income tax question that Watson had raised with Shaw and, apart from revealing Shaw's knowledge of British tax legislation, suggests that the professional relationship between the two men had reached a level of comfort and respect that enabled such discussion of personal matters.Shaw's letters to Watson, and the self-drafted interviews that accompanied some of the letters, provide the backbone of the narrative of their relationship. Editor L.W. Conolly has provided relevant context to link the letters, including transcripts of Watson's columns on Shaw. The book also includes full transcripts of, or lengthy extracts from, Daily Telegraph reviews of Shaw's major plays during the years that Watson worked for the paper. The result is a work that sheds significant light not only on one of the English language's greatest playwrights but also on the practice and profession of theatre criticism."Conolly's editing, notes and references are thorough and illuminating, and his subtle editorial approach and impeccable scholarship make this slim volume highly entertaining as well as informative." --Dr. Anne Wright, The Shavian

In The True North: How Canadian Creativity Changed the World, D. Paul Schafer explores the extraordinary legacy of generations of Canadian artists, inventors, scientists, politicians, and activists-a legacy of creativity that has not only shaped today's Canada but has made a huge impact on the world as a whole. Among the many fascinating facts you'll learn while reading The True North:• Alexander Graham Bell is best-known as the inventor of the telephone, but he was active in many other fields of invention, including aviation and the development of the hydrofoil.• Anne Innis Dagg, known for her pioneering work on the behaviour of giraffes, comes from a family renowned for its contributions to Canadian scholarship: her father, Harold Innis, was a celebrated economic historian and her mother, Mary Quayle Innis, a noted author and academic administrator.• When the Toronto Raptors won the 2019 NBA championship, the whole country rejoiced, particularly because the roots of this internationally popular sport can be traced back to the game's inventor, James Naismith, a Canadian, who was born in Almonte, Ontario.• Canada is a world leader in adult education, early childhood education, and the creation of greater opportunities for people with disabilities, with major contributions from such figures as J. Roby Kidd, Fraser Mustard, Henry Enns, Jean Vanier, Terry Fox, and Rick Hansen earning worldwide recognition.In addition to describing the many ways in which Canadian creativity has shaped the world, the author in his concluding chapter also considers how these and other contributions might be enhanced and expanded in the years ahead, particularly in such areas as the environment, multiculturalism, the arts, and artificial intelligence.

L.M. Montgomery's journals speak of simple pleasures and deep joy, dogged worries and profound disappointments. The story of her life from 1930 to 1933 is as gripping as the earlier volumes published by Rock's Mills Press.This volume is different from earlier ones in a surprising way, however: "It has happened. It is too cruel and hideous and unexpected to write about. I have spent two days in hell. I cannot see how I am to go on living. . . . And I have had to keep up a face to the world when something in my soul was bleeding to death" (February 5, 1933). The truth of this "cruel and hideous" event is, for a time, too dificult to commit to her journals; it casts a shadow of shame on Montgomery's life for months. When she finally explains, it is page-turning material that gives a fascinating look into the hidden side of life in Ontario almost a century ago.Montgomery also recounts other difficult situations facing her in those years, including attempts to help a slippery young man facing embezzlement charges and a younger woman's obsessive crush on her. Over 100 of Montgomery's own photographs are included, many never before published. This edition also includes an introduction, extensive notes, and an index of photography, all original to this edition.

Two exceptional personalities interconnect in this short, captivating narrative. Jisbella Lyth's story begins with a hair-raising adventure on her parents' farm in a Hampshire village. She survives-as she later does a remarkable series of other life experiences-and her stories provide fascinating glimpses into a rapidly changing post-Victorian world. Among the most extraordinary of these life experiences are her encounters with a leading proponent of those changes, George Bernard Shaw. In the summer of 1930 a retired soldier named Ambrose Lyth became postmaster of the remote and tiny village of Ayot St Lawrence in Hertfordshire, England. Six weeks after taking up the appointment he died, and his forty-six-year-old widow, Jisbella Georgina Lyth, became postmistress. One of the first villagers to offer condolences and support to Jisbella was Bernard Shaw, world-famous playwright and polemicist, winner of the 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature, and Ayot resident since 1906. Thus began a close business and personal relationship that endured until Shaw's death in 1950. Soon after his death, an Irish writer named Romie Lambkin moved to Ayot. Fascinated not only by Jisbella's accounts of Shaw, but also by her absorbing and often moving pre-Ayot experiences-in menial jobs in turn-of-the-century England; as a nanny and teacher in Hong Kong, the United States, and Canada; and during her sometime desperate search to find employment for herself and her ailing husband in England during the 1920s' depression-Romie wrote Jisbella's life story. Rejected by publishers at the time, Jisbella's memoir has now been published with Romie Lambkin's original preface, and an introduction and extensive explanatory notes by Shaw scholar Leonard Conolly. The publication finally gives Jisbella Lyth her due, not just as a crucial mainstay to Shaw during his declining years, but also as a courageous, determined, independent, and entrepreneurial woman in her own right. She died in 1964 and is buried with her husband in Ayot St Lawrence.

Writer, would-be Catholic priest, editor, librettist, and professor, Eugene Benson surveys ninety years of travel, adventure, and engagement at the very heart of Canadian culture. Born in Ireland, Benson's early recollections recall a world of political troubles, war, and wavering religious devotion. His adventures working and travelling across the globe are both fascinating and sometimes eyebrow-raising. Benson's involvement in Canadian cultural affairs took place at a time when this country was becoming an important presence on the world stage. Benson's memories of many of the key figures that shaped it, including Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, Robertson Davies, Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan, are deeply insightful, and his overall perspective is witty, humanistic, and occasionally cynical."There is a surprisingly broad sweep to Eugene Benson's memoir, in places, people and ideas. He is a seeker and adventurer, delving deeply into subjects as diverse as theology, the barbarism of bullfights and musicology. Benson has written this eloquent, clear-minded book at age 90. His powers of recall reach not just the events, places and people of his life, but actual conversations. And they are interesting! 'The exercise of writing an autobiography is sometimes an exercise in evasion' Benson says at the beginning of his book. He seems to be not guilty of that except for the two most traumatic experiences of his life. He cannot describe the emotional pain he went through in deciding the priesthood was not for him. The other is in late life when his beloved German-Canadian wife dies of dementia. In between are vivid, lively, insightful accounts of his adventures when he emigrated to Canada and taught in a remote Saskatchewan school with all grades in the one room. He held odd jobs in Vancouver, wrote a novel in Mexico, became a dishwasher of no fixed address in Toronto, taught English to immigrant pilots, then did his PhD at University of Toronto. There, caught in the unacknowledged rivalry between Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan, Benson almost failed his oral exam by politely telling McLuhan his questioning was unintelligible. Then began his secure academic career helping to build the Department of English at Guelph University as he contributed important books on Canadian theatre, wrote libretti for avant-garde operas, promoted the Guelph music festival and worked with the prominent Canadian writers of the 1970s and '80s. He became a particular friend of Graeme Gibson and chaired the Writers' Union of Canada in 1983-84. Margaret Atwood called on him to serve on the first executive of PEN Canada. Through his portraits of friendship with the greats of the Canadian music and literary world emerges a fascinating portrait of the talented, valuable Eugene Benson." -Dorris Heffron, author of City Wolves and other novels

Alexander Brodie emigrated from Scotland to what was then the British colony of Upper Canada-now Ontario-in the 1830s. In this fascinating memoir, written in the early years of the 20th century, Brodie describes life on what was still very much the frontier. Among the subjects described by Brodie are the Rebellion of 1837, making maple syrup in the bush, "Indian" raids, and, of course, the transatlantic crossing to Canada.John Steckley, anthropologist, sociologist, and author of numerous books, has carefully edited and annotated his great-great-great-uncle's original manuscript. The result is a fascinating look at early Ontario-a era less than two centuries in the past, yet in many ways an altogether different world from our own.

This unique volume provides a comprehensive overview of social policies in China and their evolution over the 70 years since the People's Republic of China was established in 1949. Particular attention is paid to changes in social policies since the era of "opening up" and economic reform began in the late 1970s. Individual chapters are written by experts in their fields. Weizhen Dong, professor of sociology at the University of Waterloo, has edited the volume, as well as authoring or co-authoring a number of chapters.Topics covered include: family planning policy, including the history of the "one child policy" population mobility and migration policy the hukou system and rural migrants' assimilation healthcare elder care housing policy education policy employment and income policies From the preface: This book is for those who are keen to understand China-students, scholars, entrepreneurs, government officials, businessmen, or an individual with a curious mind. I hope this volume can serve as a bridge between our readers and China. Our readers will find that although China is old-a country with thousands of years of history and cultural heritage-China is also actually quite young: the People's Republic of China is just approaching its seventieth anniversary. In the past 69 years, there are lessons to be learned, there are successes to be celebrated, and there are also a lot of "growing pains". At a time when China is becoming more visible in world affairs, this book serves the purpose of addressing global curiosity about China, answering questions such as: What kind of socioeconomic system does China have? What are the main social welfare benefits the Chinese people enjoy? What are the main social issues facing China and the Chinese people? Is China a communist country? The current climate makes understanding among different countries and peoples more important than ever before.

Lord and Lady Macbeth are being stung, not by scorpions, but by imagery, the medium by which human beings think at the deepest levels. And the kingdom which they seek to conquer and control is not just Scotland, but the kingdom of the mind. Imagery enlightens, but it also obscures; imagery is loyal, but it also betrays; imagery is visible on the surface, but manifests itself at hidden depths. Their mutual struggle -- to live in prose while thinking in imagery -- affects the two Macbeths in different ways.The Project Together, this novel and the journal and notebook that accompany it, comprise the twentieth installment in an on-going novel-writing project in which the author is exploring the concept of form and meaning in the novel, and of the novel as a form of expression in the 21st Century. All of the published journals and notebooks are available for free download at www.johnpassfield.ca.The Making of Full of Scorpions is My Mind - a reflective journal This journal records the author's reflections on the process of the crafting of the novel as it evolved through the stages of planning, writing, editing and polishing. It constitutes an effort to be as conscious as possible of the process whereby the single idea that suggested the topic of the novel is expanded into a complex work of art. Topics range from the nuts and bolts of novel-building to the nature of the novel as an art-form.Planning Full of Scorpions is My Mind - a planning notebook During the writing of the novel, the author kept a hand-written notebook which records the day-by-day development of the novel as it found its shape and style. The notebook - now in print form - reveals how a vast cluster of thoughts was sifted, selected, structured and polished into novel-form.