Skipper: The Sea Yarns of Captain Matthew Mitchell

Skipper: The Sea Yarns of Captain Matthew Mitchell

Frances Jewel Dickson

Nonfiction: The Sea, Oral History
$15.95
112 pages
6" x 9" paperback
ISBN: 978-1-897426-10-4

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Skipper Matthew Mitchell was born on the Burin Peninsula of Newfoundland in 1917. Now a lively 92-year-old, he looks back on his lifelong relationship with the sea, from wooden dories to steel trawlers, to shore captain at the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. The author has gathered his many stories into this exuberant volume.

Captain Mitchell's keen memory spares no details of his exceptional life and his recollections vibrate with his colourful native Newfoundland vernacular. We follow him from a boy of 12 watching his native village of Port au Bras devastated by the earthquake and tidal waves of 1929 to learning the secrets of salt fishing and preserving from his father and uncles. Later he is recruited on numerous schooners beginning at the age of 14, eventually taking command of fishing trawlers based in historic Lunenburg. He began his life at sea fishing in two-man dories, braving the rigours of the North Atlantic. Nova Scotia-based schooners took him to Lunenburg during the Great Depression, where he lived in boarding houses until he married and started a family in his adopted town. He fished through World War II, facing new dangers with submarines lurking off the East Coast. He would take command of his first fishing trawler when the captain of the Cape North retired.

When the sea agreed to let him go after 45 years, he was hired as shore captain at the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic, where he would remain for another 30 years. As shore skipper he entertained thousands of visitors from all over the world with stories of the bygone days of sailing fishing vessels, when he and thousands of other fishermen risked their lives repeatedly to earn a modest living. Captain Matthew Mitchell's captivating memoirs stand as a monument to the era of wooden ships and iron men.


Frances Jewel Dickson, a native of Quebec, has lived on Nova Scotia's South Shore since 1987. She has held management positions in human resources administration, written personnel policy for the Speaker of the House of Commons and led audit teams in evaluating the performance of government departments across Canada. Her first book, The DEW Line Years: Voices from the Coldest Cold War, was published in 2007 by Pottersfield Press.

Death Ship of Halifax Harbour

Death Ship of Halifax Harbour

Steven Edwin Laffoley

Nonfiction: Nova Scotia History, Medicine $19.95
192 pages
6" x 9" paperback
ISBN: 978-1-897426-09-8.

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"On an uncomfortably muggy morning in early autumn, I found myself standing at the far end of a wide, battered wharf in Eastern Passage, Nova Scotia, looking for a man in knee-high, white rubber boots answering to the name of Captain Red Beard.

"I'd come in search of a death ship, or at least the historical whispers of a death ship - an elegant old steamer that limped into Halifax harbour during the early hours of April 9, 1866, with more than a thousand Irish and German emigrants squeezed into its cramped, creaking holds. And I'd come in search of what travelled with them and, in fact, inside many of them: Asiatic cholera. And, finally, I'd come in search of the intertwining tales of those lives inexorably changed by history's worst cholera epidemic, which killed tens of thousands from Mecca to Manhattan to McNab's Island in the mouth of Halifax harbour."

So begins another strange and surprising adventure of writer Steven Laffoley as he explores historic McNab's Island in search of Halifax during its time of cholera.

As he investigates the rich history of the island and searches for clues to the many dark cholera-ship tales, Steven confronts the nature of fear and the fear of nature, including fetid marshes, abandoned buildings, a berry-mad bear, a love-starved beaver, a gaggle of naked maidens, and two drunken revolutionaries just looking for some fun. Death Ship of Halifax Harbour is a fascinating and engaging tale of fate, fear and hope.


Steven Laffoley has been a curriculum writer, a university professor, a school principal, and a dues-paying member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. A freelance writer, columnist and broadcaster, he is the author of Mr. Bush, Angus and Me and the award-nominated Hunting Halifax: In Search of History, Mystery and Murder, in which he investigates a 150-year-old murder. He lives with his wife and daughter in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Canadian Angels By Your Side

Canadian Angels By Your Side

Karen Forrest

Nonfiction: Angels, Spirituality
$15.95
112 pages
ISBN: 978-1-897426-08-1
6" x 9" Paperback

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Do you believe in angels? Canadian Angels By Your Side is a collection of heartwarming angel stories from people across Canada. These are personal stories about events ranging from everyday encounters to profound moments of healing. These Canadian angel encounters will make you laugh, make you cry, but above all inspire you. Did you ever wonder how to personally make contact with your angels? Following each story is relevant, angelic information to assist you in connecting with your angels.

Read about loving angel messages, heartfelt prayers and meaningful angel tips. Learn how you can summon angels in your daily life and how to ask for and recognize their divine guidance. The book is written in a conversational, down-to-earth way by Karen Forrest, author and internationally recognized Angel Therapy Practitioner. Through her practice, Karen progressed from just simply believing in angels to experiencing angels in her daily life. Learn how to invoke Archangel Raphael, how angels visually appear to you and how to send angels to other people. Read comforting messages from your angels reassuring you your deceased loved ones are at peace. Learn how to free yourself of your fearful thoughts and enjoy safe travel.

Focusing on inspiration and faith, Canadian Angels By Your Side encourages you to make contact with the angelic/divine realms to lovingly guide and heal you in all aspects of your life. Transcending various religious and spiritual beliefs, the book focuses on personal connections to angels and God. Read the stories, follow the offered insights and begin leading a life of peace, love and purpose.


Karen Forrest, BN, CD, Angel Therapy Practitioner (certified by Doreen Virtue), is the author of Angels of the Maritimes By Your Side. She is a motivational speaker and radio co-host and has received extensive spiritual training. A retired mental health nursing officer in the Canadian Armed Forces, Karen works from a diverse background. With a vision of assisting people to personally connect with their angels and God in honouring their life purpose, Karen offers private angel/medium readings and workshops through her practice, Words of Wisdom Counselling. She counsels and heals with a heart of compassion. Karen's website is www.karenforrest.com.

Nova Scotia: Visions of the Future

Edited by Lesley Choyce

Nonfiction: Nova Scotia, Energy, Politics, the Future

192 pages, $19.95, 6" x 9" Paperback

ISBN-13: 978-1-897426-07-4

Available in May 2009

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In the spring of 2009, Pottersfield will launch this most insightful book that may set in motion some serious action that can help Nova Scotia live up to its full future potential. The writing is personal, reflective, proactive and thoroughly captivating by more than 30 contributors from many diverse fields of expertise.

In the summer of 2008, Pottersfield publisher Lesley Choyce sent a letter to a select and varied list of Nova Scotians asking them to contribute to a book about this province's future. He invited some of the best minds (and hearts) around the province to present their vision of this possible province of the future. Absolutely anything goes.

Two things prompted this grandiose plan. First, Choyce became a grandfather in May. His daughter Pamela had a boy - Aidan, whose arrival made Choyce think about the world he will inherit and what he will see and experience in his lifetime. Second, while Choyce was away in Yellowknife in June, a forest fire nearly took his house. The flames were not exactly licking the door, but it was headed its way with a strong north wind and a lot of fuel in the form of forests ravaged by Hurricane Juan and clear-cutting. When he got home, he went hiking up into the charred land several times. Once the sadness wore off, he started thinking about renewal... and about the future.

That's when he decided to pull this book together. He invited many Nova Scotians to write anything they wanted to, hoping contriutors would cover environment, technology, immigration, social aspects, urban life, rural life, energy, politics, government, family, economics, forests, the ocean and much more. The bolder the vision, the better. Stories and personal aspects were okay. Controversial ideas were fine. Which future? Anything beyond ten years and up to a thousand.

Some of the contributing writers include Marq deVilliers, Peggy Hope-Simpson, Richard Zurawski, Premier Rodney MacDonald, Budge Wilson, Alan Wilson, Dr. Richard Goldbloom, Carol Bruneau, Tom Gallant, Geoff Regan, Sunyata Choyce, Neal Livingston, Barb Stegemann, Bill Carr, Bob Howse, Ralph Martin, and Stephen Clare among others.

When You Look For Me

By Kevin Bonang

Nonfiction: Biography, The Maritimes

160 pages, $17.95, 5 1/2" x 8 1/2" Paperback
(Includes photographs)

ISBN 978-1-897426-06-7

Available in April 2009

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Here is the true story of a parent's worst nightmare come true. Kevin Bonang's family learns that their oldest daughter, Tiffany Tanner, has suddenly gone missing while kayaking on an inner city canal in the northern industrial city of Hamm, Germany. Kevin and his wife Lisa immediately make the journey from Nova Scotia to Germany to help in the search. Once at the site, the true reality of their daughter's fate becomes obvious. No matter how optimistic local search officials try to be, Kevin and his wife fear the worst.

When You Look For Me takes the reader through 17 days of the massive search, including encounters with police, search dogs, an unkind media but much kinder everyday Germans who share their compassion for Tiffany's parents. After many grim conversations with search officials, the Bonangs begin to realize that they are not able to bring their daughter back home to Nova Scotia alive even though there had been some small glimmer of hope.

The book then chronicles the many different stages of having to eventually bring their deceased daughter home and, in their own way, learn how to say goodbye to her. The author writes in an open and honest way, of learning to cope with seeing his dead daughter and the anguish of visitations, funeral and burial -- and even what they truly believe have been Tiffany's visits home afterward. Kevin speaks eloquently of dealing with the emotions that stem from the grief of losing a child, from the numbness and disbelief to the pain of loss, to the healing that takes place to allow his family to move on. Kevin also describes a visit to his home by the spirit of his departed daughter and how that has helped to give this family comfort and hope.


Kevin Bonang lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, where he was born and raised near the many lakes and trails within the city's boundaries. He lives with his wife, Lisa, and two remaining children. A carpenter by trade, Kevin felt compelled to write this, his first book, in memory of his daughter and to remind other grieving parents that they are not alone. This book is a true story of a tragedy but one that ultimately offers a message of hope.

Gold Rush Ghost Towns of Nova Scotia

By Mike Parker

Nonfiction: The Maritimes, History, Mining

176 pages, $21.95, 6 3/4" x 9 3/4" Paperback
(Includes 164 photographs)

ISBN: 978-1-897426-04-3

Available in April 2009

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Gold Rush Ghost Towns of Nova Scotia tells the fascinating stories of abandoned communities, not haunted buildings and paranormal encounters, although the occasional resident spirit does make an appearance.

The story of gold mining in Nova Scotia is one of Canada's oldest, yet it is the province's best kept heritage secret. More gold was mined worldwide in the 1800s than during the previous 5,000 years. Since Canada was one of the world's largest gold producers, auriferous tales and legends abound from that era of motherlodes found and fortunes lost. Nova Scotia heralded the first of its three gold rushes 37 years before men braved the Yukon's Chilkoot Pass heading to the Klondike. Adventurers from the world over were drawn to Nova Scotia's burgeoning nineteenth-century gold districts, as was a motley crew of day labourers, farmers, fishermen, ruined mechanics, drunkards and gamblers.

An air of mysticism shrouding ghost towns holds a fascination for historians, social scientists, treasure and relic hunters, geocachers and nostalgia buffs. Mike Parker tells the stories of characters and con men, industry and labour, prosperity and recession. Although abandoned gold mining settlements are the book's central theme, ghost towns built upon coal, iron ore and copper are featured as well. Scores of exhaustively researched images, supported by informative, entertaining text, tell the story of a great heritage that has been nearly erased from our history books.

Born and raised in Bear River, Nova Scotia, Mike Parker has been called Nova Scotia's Storyteller, a reference to the diversity of themes covered in his many books of popular history. The best-selling author has been researching and writing about his native province for more than 20 years. This is his twelfth book. Mike is affiliated with the Gorsebrook Research Institute for Atlantic Canada Studies at Saint Mary's University as a research associate. He is a graduate of Acadia University and a long-time resident of Dartmouth.

Black Snow: A Story of Love and Destruction

By Jon Tattrie

Fiction

192 pages, $19.95, 5 1/2" x 8 1/2" Paperback

ISBN-13: 978-1-897426-05-0

ISBN-10: 1-897426-05-4

Available in April 2009

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The ship burns in the morning sun, floating lazily in the harbour. Hundreds crowd the dockside to watch. Flaming barrels shoot into the sky and burst like fireworks to cheers. Then the big ship thumps into the pier.

Tommy Joyce looks away. Just back in Halifax from the horrors of the war in Europe, he's lost his appetite for disaster. All he wants is his wife, Evie, and peace. He's worn out from lying, from poisonous jealousy. He knows his wife was unfaithful. He knows the bruises he left on her won't heal. He knows he has to forgive. He hopes he can be forgiven.

The ship blows. Two thousand people are dead and the city is burning. Tommy staggers to his feet, his broken mind scattered between the trenches and this new terror amid the screams of the dying. Thousands dig through the ruins for signs of life as a fierce blizzard smothers the devastated city. Tommy joins the rescue effort, searching hospitals and morgues for his wife, and redemption.

Black Snow is a love story set during the Halifax Explosion. The 1917 disaster was the largest man-made blast the world had ever known, and it cut Halifax off from the rest of the world for the darkest 36 hours in its history. Rich in fact and shocking images, the story sets a blistering pace following one man's search through a ruined city for the love of his life as he confronts the wreckage of his past.

Jon Tattrie is a journalist and writer based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He freelances for the Chronicle-Herald and Metro. Over several itinerant years, he worked in a shelter for homeless men in Ireland, as a shrine-cleaner in Buddhist monasteries in England and as a vegetarian cook on the Isle of Iona. His first journalistic job was on the Edinburgh Evening News, followed by a stint on Scotland's national newspaper, The Scotsman. His first published work of fiction was an adventure mystery called Midsummer Murder, which appeared in the Halifax Daily News.