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Last Chance to Use Discount Code SUMMER10

September is nearing, and you know what that means? There’s one week left on our 10% sitewide discount! Use code SUMMER10 and fill your cart with some amazing reads. We’ll even give you that bookstore experience: grab a book, open it up, and read the first paragraph before deciding it’s the one for you . . .

Like Rum-Drunk Angels
Tyler Enfield

Spring, 1884
Nowhere, Arizona

It’s well after midnight when the boy named Francis Blackstone urges his horse up the limestone ridge. There’s no trail. He just looks for open channels in the stark, mean brush — so dense it rakes at his shins. Clouds pass over the moon. The terrain falls dark, almost black. When the moon’s glow returns, agile and bright, Francis finds himself atop a bone-white crest, gazing down upon the distant lamplights of Nowhere.

A Song from Faraway
Deni Ellis Béchard

The first time I met my half brother I was seventeen and he was fourteen. I had organized my assignments for the trip and jacketed my textbooks in butcher paper, but when I arrived at the airport in Virginia and saw the hale blue-jeaned boy and his mother, as thin and erratic as the menthol 100 she soon lit up, I knew I should have left my schoolwork behind.

The Forbidden Purple City
Philip Huynh

I never saw my father again after leaving Vancouver five years ago, in our beat-up Corolla bound for Los Angeles. I kept meaning to come back to visit, but I just never got around to it, and the days passed. I slept in my Corolla on Santa Monica Beach while bussing tables until I could afford to rent a tiny pad, meanwhile auditioning for bit parts. I sold the Corolla when I lost my bussing job, all the while auditioning for more bit parts. I was scared of crossing the border to see my father in case I wouldn’t be able to cross back to America.

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Alexa!: Changing the Face of Canadian Politics
Stephen Kimber

You should.
I can’t.
What do you mean, you can’t? Of course, you can.
But I’m a social worker.
I was a social worker.
I have two young kids.
I had three young kids.
But if I ran, I’d have to run against my husband’s law partner.
That’s okay. I ran against my husband’s medical partner for my nomination. And I beat him.
But I don’t know enough.
Not good enough.

Unicorn in the Woods: How East Coast Geeks and Dreamers Are Changing the Game
Gordon Pitts

Chris Newton didn’t really expect much from the meeting. He would have been content to spend the day coding software in his tiny office along a dark corridor of the University of New Brunswick’s computer science building in Fredericton. But officials of the university — who, after all, were his employers — had insisted he go along to a gathering of alumni and potential investors in the hope of turning his little software idea into something commercial, something that might actually be sold.

Anything but a Still Life: The Art and Lives of Molly Lamb and Bruno Bobak
Nathan M. Greenfield

Near 4:00 p.m. on 16 February 1996, Molly Lamb Bobak and Bruno Bobak sat with several hundred other well-dressed men and women in the ornate ballroom in Rideau Hall, the Ottawa residence of the Governor General. After His Excellency Roméo LeBlanc gave a short speech about the importance of service to the nation and the nation’s duty to recognize that service, Molly and Bruno heard their names called. Together, the couple — who two months earlier had passed their fiftieth wedding anniversary and were fast approaching the same anniversary of their demobbing from the army, in which they had both been war artists (she the only official female war artist and he the youngest) — walked to the front of the room. They stopped and stood in front of the man who, back in Fredericton, was known simply as Roméo. One of his aides opened the box containing Molly’s white-and-gold medal, showed it to her, and then pinned it over her heart. Then he did the same with Bruno’s. And as quickly as that, the first formal investiture of married artists into the Order of Canada was complete.

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The Fool
Jessie Jones

“Itinerants”

What is a precipice, if not a morning?
Why did we expire the night in favour of rising?
Why did we say enough when we clearly meant another?
And another?
Where did we come from?
What is luck if it never finds us?
Will we know its worth if we cannot buy it?
Will you reveal my true form to me if I keep posing?
How does one unlearn the self?
Can want exceed pleasure enough to pay off doubt?
How much pleasure can we permit in ourselves?
Will its fervour signal lightning, act a kind of metal?
Why did it take so long to find a weapon in weather?
Where will we come from?
How does one take to the sky, or two?
Will we always possess the desire to continue?
When we at last arrive, will desire conclude?

In the Vicinity of Riches
Chris Hutchinson

“When We Were Young”

When we were young we pushed poetry against ourselves
up against ourselves and (into) each

other but when we were old we pushed poetry through the tunnel
of our ambition beyond

any addressable anyone until we were older
still and the world pushed us and we should have pushed back

instead of pushing each other around.

Future Possible: An Art History of Newfoundland and Labrador
Mireille Eagan

Titling this publication An Art History — not The Art History — acknowledges that there’s no one definitive story. It reflects this position: the cultural histories of Newfoundland and Labrador should be told in many voices. It also points to the responsibility of the curator, of each writer and of the institution — in this case, The Rooms — to recognize that what we all provide is developed and expressed through our individual experiences, research and lenses. The form of the story changes both in the telling and the listening, but it is the exchange that matters.

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