“Other than Apicius, there were no other cookbooks authored in Europe until the 13th century when they began to appear in local languages. The popularity of cookbook writing began in the 10th century in Baghdad and then spread all over Europe. I’ve found no clues as to what Italians ate before Apicius’ Persian-influenced cookbook De Re Coquinaria.” Edward Henderson contributes his essay, Persian influence on Italian cuisine, written initially as a Graduate Liberal Studies term paper at Simon Fraser University.
“Memories and anecdotes from the past make their way into many of the essays. He writes about family, high school, friendships, travelling, loneliness, and most significantly his relationship with Litia, his wife. Two of the essays are about the family dog. The author, who lives in Vancouver, is witty, curious, nostalgic, analytical and overly solemn. He has a way of noticing odd details and meaningful moments that pass us by when we are with those closest to us.” Bill Paul reviews Decadence, by Richard Kelly Kemick (Windsor: Biblioasis, 2026) $24.95 / 9781771967136
“The momentary victory didn’t seem complete, though, as my marble season was forever marred. I couldn’t play my winnings without some kid declaring that any marble with defining features was once theirs and trying to lay claim.” Marcella Kyrein explores the game of marbles battlefield during her Prince George elementary school years in her essay Marbles and the Art of War.
“I did however ask myself: Why have things degenerated so markedly from the zenith of lounge singing? We’ve learned to disdain crooners, haven’t we? Is it because Bill Murray’s Nick Winters (or ‘fill in the blank’) and others have tapped into crooning as a vein of satire, a motherlode of spoof? This comedic riffing can’t have been solely responsible for their demise, could it? Surely not. No, there had to be better reasons than that to explain this phenomena especially when viewed against the almost unimaginable backdrop of Bublé’s commercial success.” Graham Ware contributes the essay When the crooner was King: The rise & fall of an old musical aristocracy.
“Our daily speech also overflows with Latin prefixes and suffixes, such as circum-, con-, contra-, e- or ex-, extra-, inter-, intra-, multi-, ob-, pre-, post-, sub-, super-, trans-, and ultra-. But we don’t need to be told what each of these prefixes means: we have acquired them subconsciously, by osmosis to use a Greek term, through a host of words such as transport, pre-natal, or supermarket.” Christopher Levenson contributes a Word in Your Ear essay to The British Columbia Review: Small Latin and Less Greek
“Byers provides compelling vignettes of encounters with workers returning to work after injury; pre-emptive inspections of structures that could lead to repetitive strain injury; and at times antagonistic encounters with supervisors. These are stories of inspection, vigilance, witnessing, and recording.” Wendy Burton reviews Coming Home from the Candy Factory, by Jane Byers (Qualicum Beach: Caitlin Press, 2025) $24 / 9781773861746
“Although the convention attracted its fair share of critics at the time, situating it in the context of what came before and after suggests it was not a write-off but an effective strategy (at least in theory) for mobilizing confederation supporters and keeping the colonial government on alert.” Sam Kiiskila, recent UVic graduate, contributes the historical essay “A ‘Lover of Beauty’ on his way to Yale”: Revisiting the 1868 Yale Convention
“I drove to Toronto in the five-year-old blue Plymouth I used at UVM, its body cancered by Vermont’s salted roads. While it was liberating to be leaving my riven country, I was plenty nervous about the unknowns that lay ahead.” Ken Klonsky contributes a chapter of his upcoming memoir Out of the Fire: A Life Seeking Justice.
“Other animal behaviours too live on in our everyday speech. Even if few of us have ever literally taken ‘the bull by the horns’ or ‘bought a pig in a poke’ (what is a poke in this instance? a bag or sack, nowadays an obsolete or dialect word, so the phrase means ‘to buy something without seeing or being able to test it’) most of us flounder at times or try ‘to feather our nests.’” Christopher Levenson urges us to contemplate the origin of such phrases as ‘free rein’ and ‘ride roughshod over’ in his A Word in Your Ear essay ‘Animals and Language.’
“Food is never merely sustenance; it is narrative layered with memory and meaning. In October 2025, I travelled to Rome and Oxford as part of Simon Fraser University’s Graduate Liberal Studies Program, culminating in a project that combined two themes: Italy in the ancient and modern imagination (with a focus on food history) and life writing (an exploration of how lives are represented across time, genre, and media). I deepened my understanding of the links between food writing, memory, and culture by studying the works of three contemporary authors. Ada Boni (1881-1973), codified Italian home cooking and idealized domesticity during Mussolini’s era; Elizabeth David (1913-1992), a wry aristocrat who sought to liberate postwar Britain from culinary blandness by introducing Mediterranean sensuality; and Patience Gray (1917-2005), an eccentric British artist who followed a vein of marble through Italy with her sculptor partner, documenting rural foodways for posterity. Melanie Monk presents her essay Minestrone and Women’s Lives: A Culinary Palimpsest of Lives Written, Tasted, Remembered.
“On Sunday, the 22nd, we were relaxing and having breakfast outside after a successful day previous in presenting my Tai Chi talk and demo (there’s an irony!), when we heard some anxious buzz from folks in the building that something was going on. At almost same moment, we saw clouds of heavy dark smoke drifting in just past our building and the big shade tree behind us, as if a house or store was on fire nearby.” Author and poet Trevor Carolan reports from Puerto Vallarta on his recent experience.
A memoir-in-essays, an “unabashedly queer view of life, loves, and the bringing up of the generation to come,” ranges widely and speaks candidly. —Carellin Brooks reviews Staying Power: On Queerness, Inheritances, and the Families We Choose, by Zena Sharman (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2026) $24.95 / 9781834050164
“I know this collection of work by these women is something readers will refer to time and time again, knowing each time they do, they will find something new to inspire them at exactly the moment they need it.” Valerie Green reviews Something Has Changed: An Anthology of Women’s Voices, by The Pen Pals Writers’ Collective (Nanaimo: Pen Pals Publishing, 2025) $20 / 97810694399505
“If the first part of the book hooked me with these bargain bites, the middle sections settled into a focus on some meatier topics. While remaining agnostic about parenting and pet ownership (he is neither a parent nor a current pet owner), there is a chapter on the costs of each, which provided fascinating reading. Always, he brings in the human element, relating conversations from folks he interviews.” Trish Bowering reviews Cheapskate in Lotusland: The Philosophy and Practice of Living Well on a Small Budget, by Steve Burgess (Madeira Park: Douglas & McIntyre, 2026) $26.95 / 9781771624633
“I had been helping Craig with his book. It also happened that my wife and I had plans to visit the Okanagan for a week in September which corresponded with the dates for the 2025 Okanagan Columbia run. I was very eager to be introduced to Chief Clarence and perhaps even hang out.” Richard Butler reflects on his time attending the 2025 Salmon Celebration.
“Liz Hammond-Kaarremaa begins with a conversation about her discovery and research into the one empirical example of an ancient practice, the raising of almost but not quite domestic animals who lived in isolation to protect them from inbreeding and physical damage, animals bred to provide the weft in essential weavings.” Linda Rogers reviews The Teachings of Mutton: A Coast Salish Woolly Dog, by Liz Hammond-Kaarremaa et al (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2025) $36.95 / 9781998526024
“Think of all the books that live in our heads that never become books or only make it to a few chapters on paper before they’re abandoned due to life’s interruptions. That makes it all the more exciting when a completed, edited, published book takes its place on bookshelves both physical and digital and has your name on it.” In advance of the entry period for the 2026 SCWES Book Contest, Cathalynn Labonté-Smith starts off her latest essay with “any book that gets written is a miracle.”
“Little Brown Birds” and “Someone,” excerpts from Seventy-Two Seasons: A Memoir About Noticing, by M.A.C. Farrant (Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2026) $22.95 / 9781553807438
“Apart from inveterate crossword puzzlers or Scrabblers, most of us get by with a tiny fraction of the words that could be available. In conversation people often say ‘you know what I mean?’ and for the most part we do, more or less, but for people such as teachers, lawyers, journalists, and writers, who use language professionally, ‘more or less’ isn’t good enough.” In the essay The world’s favourite second language, regular contributor Christopher Levenson asks the question: What is the language?
“This book offers expression and relief from the wounded land of immobilisation, where people must shrink their lives and selves to fit into hell. Redemption appears in unusual ways. The stories are not completely mired in torture or isolation. Overall, the atmosphere emanates a compassionate moonscape, revealing people trapped in numbing routines or chaos, getting through each day with no hope, yet most keep going.” Lee Reid reviews Off the Map: Vancouver writers with lived experiences of mental health issues by Betsy Warland, Seema Shah, and Kate Bird (eds.) (Vancouver: Bell Press, 2025) $22 / 9781738716784
