Finishing School: a novel

By Helen Fogwill Porter

Fiction
214 pages
$19.95, 6"x9" Paperback
ISBN-13: 978-1-895900-88-0
ISBN-10: 1-895900-88-3
(Available in April 2007)


Click on a link below to order this book:
Pottersfield Press
Amazon
Chapters

Forty-nine-year-old divorced hair stylist Eileen Novak has enrolled in a community college to complete her high school education. Her first English assignment is to keep a journal. Initially apprehensive about this exercise, Eileen soon discovers she enjoys writing and the opportunity to really let herself go.

Set in St. John's, Newfoundland, in the 1980s and resonating with a vivid sense of place, Finishing School chronicles Eileen's sometimes traumatic, sometimes funny but fully engaged life during the school months. "Always ready to try anything," Eileen says. She speaks frankly of the day-to-day events of her life that sometimes involve uncomfortable encounters, intimate moments and awkward revelations. She's free-speaking with her wisdom and opinions about the world in general and the people she has known through her life. Eileen is unpretentious and down-to-earth as she reveals her unique way of observing the world around her from her downtown working-class neighbourhood.

The cast of characters in Eileen's life include her three grown daughters, her stepfather Herb, her classmate Tom, her ex-husband Gary, her former boyfriend Bruce, her clients as well as her friends and enemies. Readers are sure to fall in love with this delightful and unlikely fictional heroine.



A native of St. John's, Newfoundland, where she still resides and where most of her work is set, Helen Fogwill Porter has been writing professionally for 35 years. Her material spans many genres, from fiction and poetry to drama and criticism. Published across Canada and internationally, Porter is particularly interested in regional speech and creating a vivid sense of place. Her previous books, published by Breakwater Books, include Below the Bridge, a memoir-history, and A Long and Lonely Ride, a short story collection. January, February, June and July, a novel, was short-listed for the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award in 1989 and won the Young Adult Canadian Book Award that year. Finishing School is her second novel.

Richard Zurawski's Book of Maritime Weather

By Richard Zurawski

Nonfiction: The Maritimes, Weather, Popular Science
160 pages, Includes Photographs
$18.95, 6"x9" Paperback
ISBN-13: 978-1-895900-89-7
ISBN-10: 1-895900-89-1
(Available in May 2007)

Click on a link below to order this book:
Pottersfield Press
Amazon
Chapters
Richard Zurawski's Book of Maritime Weather is filled with fascinating weather facts, myths, climatological oddities, science, folklore, and observations of the diverse and often frustrating topic of weather in CanadaÕs Maritime Provinces. Whether you just like to watch the clouds go by or are a serious student of meteorology, there is plenty to entertain you in this book.

There's virtually everything here you'd like to know about the how and why of our regional weather. What makes our weather the way it is? What drives this ceaseless cycle of hot and cold, dry and wet? Zurawski brings the reader up to date on the modern science of forecasting but also includes historical perspectives about the weather before people made the study of weather into a science. Folklore, myths and anecdotes from days past are included with the modern facts and records of our climate. Weather sayings are not only presented, but scrutinized for their basis and value. Before the days of the super-computer and Environment Canada, the sea-bound skipper was the forecaster of his era and his innate and intimate knowledge of Maritime weather shifts could mean the difference between life and death.

Even with the aid of computers, satellites and ultramodern communications, forecasting the weather is still as much an art as it is a science. Richard Zurawski's Book of Maritime Weather taps the wisdom of the past and the present to give a holistic view of the fascinating and sometimes bizarre world of Maritime weather.



Richard Zurawski is a meteorologist, documentary filmmaker, and television and radio personality who has called Halifax, Nova Scotia, his home for almost two decades. He has been in the science and weather business for the past 25 years. He is the host, creator and producer of the TV series Wonder Why?, The Adventures of the AfterMath Crew and WiseWeatherWhys. His TV series and documentaries are enjoyed around the world. Richard is currently heard predicting the fickle Maritime weather on Rogers Radio in Halifax, Moncton and Saint John.

In Our Hands: On Becoming a Doctor

Edited by Linda E. Clarke and Jeff Nisker

Nonfiction: Medicine, Hospitals, Health Care
192 pages
$19.95, 6"x9" Paperback
ISBN-13: 978-1-895900-86-6
ISBN-10: 1-895900-86-7
(Available in May 2007)

Click on the links below to order this book:
Pottersfield Press
Amazon
Chapters

The experiences of medical training are some of the most profound and the most privileged a person can have. The tradition of physician writers is partly in response to this. Story is one way of helping us to make meaning of the deep events of our lives and to reflect that meaning back into the community. Those of us who welcome these stories do so, in part anyway, because we value the inside view that such voices and stories can provide us. For those of us "with ears to hear," such stories are an entry into very human experiences.

In Our Hands is an anthology written by medical students and residents from across Canada. The collection includes fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry to provide a taste of the wonder, the challenges and the graphic realities that are the experiences of those learning to care for us all. It is an emotionally charged and rich territory indeed, this place of "laying on of hands" that is medicine at its finest.

Our hands are unique maps of who we are, who we have been. For those who are learning the privilege of being a physician, studying the hand is done with extra care. In the anatomy lab, it is a profound and poetic initiation. They will continue on to learn that the art of medicine is one of connection and engagement.



The collection is edited by Linda E. Clarke, a writer and storyteller who has worked in health care and medical education for more than 15 years, and Dr. Jeff Nisker, of the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Western Ontario.

Buddy MacMaster: The Judique Fiddler

By Sheldon MacInnes

Nonfiction: Biography, Music, Cape Breton
180 pages, Includes Photographs
$18.95, 6"x9" Paperback
ISBN-13: 978-1-895900-90-3
ISBN-10: 1-895900-90-5
(Available in May 2007)


Click on the links below to order this book:
Pottersfield Press
Amazon
Chapters

Buddy MacMaster, the renowned Cape Breton fiddler, grew up in Judique, Inverness County. He was influenced by some of the giants in the music at that time like Bill Lamey, "Little" Jack MacDonald, Angus Chisholm and Mary MacDonald. In 1949, Buddy began performing at local square dances. By the mid-1960s, Buddy was making regular appearances at dances in Canada and the U.S. that contributed to sustaining the old-time music and the dance tradition. He developed a reputation as a master fiddler and made his first visit to Scotland to perform in 1970.

Through more than 70 years in music, he has travelled extensively to perform and record. His most recent recording was with his niece, the popular Natalie MacMaster. He has received numerous awards for his service to community and culture, including the Order of Canada and the Order of Nova Scotia as well as honorary degrees from St. Francis Xavier University and Cape Breton University.

Buddy's music adheres to the Gaelic fiddle tradition that he cherishes as much as life itself. The story highlights his devotion to family, faith and community, as well as to his music. He is seen at home, at school, on the farm, and at the CNR where he worked for 45 years. The book looks at his visits to Scotland, the land of his ancestors, as well his visits to American-style music camps and festivals. The legend of Buddy MacMaster is also presented in accounts from many friends, relatives and musicians.



Sheldon MacInnes teaches at Cape Breton University and works at the archives of the Beaton Institute. He is the author of A Journey in Celtic Music - Cape Breton Style.

The DEW Line Years: Voices from the Coldest Cold War

By Frances Jewel Dickson

Nonfiction: The Arctic, Canadian History
214 pages, Includes Photographs
$19.95, 6"x9" Paperback
ISBN-13: 978-1-895900-87-3
ISBN-10: 1-895900-87-5
(Available in April 2007)

Click on the links below to order this book:
From Pottersfield Press
Amazon
Chapters

The Arctic seems an unlikely theatre of war. Yet in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, thousands of young men from various countries were recruited to build and operate a complex radar system across the Arctic Circle from Alaska across Canada to Greenland.

The Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line, as the mammoth radar fence was known, was spawned from American fear that Soviet bomber aircraft might penetrate Canadian Arctic airspace and drop nuclear weapons on American cities and military bases.

This books tells the stories of those DEW Liners who worked in the hostile, remote climate of the North. Survival was a daily preoccupation in a land where outdoor temperatures can dip to minus 50 degrees with winds exceeding one hundred miles an hour while blinding snowfall whiteouts make vision impossible.

The stories of the DEW Liners reveal real danger here - not from Soviet bombers but from close encounters with polar bears, job-related accidents and airplane crashes, such as the one that claimed the author's father. There are, however, also tales of fun, practical jokes, comradery and human kindness that boosted the morale of those stationed in the far north.

The veterans of this northern experience, whose narratives have been collected by the author, reveal all about their sentinel role in that tense time half a century ago when they dedicated their lives to helping to prevent nuclear war.



Frances Jewel Dickson, born in St. Hyacinthe, Quebec, has worked for the federal government, writing human resources policy for the Speaker of the House of Commons. She has lived and worked in Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa and Halifax. She now lives in East LaHave, Nova Scotia, where she has been researching this, her first book.