by Kate Beaton,
University of Alberta Press, 2025
“I wanted, so badly, to be an artist from a very young age,” writes Cape Breton-based author Kate Beaton. “But I’m from a have-not place.” Beaton is the author of Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands—a best-selling graphic memoir that won CBC’s Canada Reads. Her new book—the text of the Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture she gave at the U of A—is a poignant and funny exploration of class and art. Growing up working-class, she writes, you’re always aware of “the money you don’t have, and possibly never will.” But “I am here today with a career as an artist, as a cartoonist, a writer, the whole nine yards, because I am the beneficiary of a long history of a community that values art. And that is a working-class legacy also,” she writes. “Art for each other, art for shared history, for storytelling, for pleasure, art through hard times, art because it has value.”
by E.A.J. Gibbs,
Self-published, 2023
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Liz Gibbs, a registered nurse with 45 years experience, was assigned to be a screener at the entrance to a Calgary hospital. This self-published book is her journal from 2020 to 2022. It’s raw, but it is an invaluable record—not least of the increasingly weird assertions used by anti-vaxxers to try to enter the hospital without following protocols. “The extreme right will threaten our democracy so long as there are gullible people, easily led to believe in conspiracy theories, lies and nonsense about vaccines or any other issue,” she writes near the end, musing on Camus’s The Plague. “We must be on our guard.”
by Scott Charlton Paul,
Self-published, 2024
“I’ve lost more than I gained during this messed-up pandemic. I’d like to imagine something positive coming out of it.” Digger lost his construction job after deciding not to get vaccinated during COVID-19. Now, to fulfill his mother’s dying wish, he drives from Lethbridge to Ottawa to deliver a letter to a sister he never knew existed, Sarah. It’s a complicated reunion—Digger’s journey coincides with the “Freedom Convoy” of truckers driving east to shut down the capital, and in Ottawa Sarah recently lost her husband after a preventable COVID-19 outbreak in a long-term care home. The debut novel by Lethbridge author Scott Charlton Paul, The Sunbeam Room makes space to put down the lingering anger and sorrow of the pandemic and to pursue new connections in whatever unusual shape they take.
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