For more than two decades, Hilary Peach worked as a transient welder – and one of the only women — in the Boilermakers Union. This is her story.

The City of Vancouver has been through a lot in its first 127 years. It has been a hotbed of political activism, technological innovation, and bitter racial tension. It is the site of the West Coast’s first electric light, and the nation’s first female police officers, as well as home to world-renowned actors, deadly snipers, twisted serial killers, UFOs, the founders of Greenpeace, an official Town Fool, and even the headquarters for the Canadian Ku Klux Klan. It’s a city on a journey … This Day in Vancouver is the story of that 127-year journey, one day at a time.

This Drawn & Quartered Moon makes pre-millennial San Francisco its epicenter, and from there ranges out in time and space. Characters abound. The reader will meet a plagiarist, a Vietnam vet named Othello, a Mafia don, a drug mule en route to jail, Elvis Presley (the poet’s father was his doctor), a “Sculptor of the Lower Fillmore Head Shot,” a dying Arab king and a pre-fame Courtney Love.

Clear images combine with a distinctive sense of rhythm and music to shape a collection both straight-ahead readable and carefully thoughtful, serious, and playful.

Winner 35th International 3-Day Novel Contest

Jack Minyard is a private eye down on his luck. He’s badly overweight and on the wrong side of sixty. He’s lost his marriage, and maybe a little of his mind, too. After narrowly escaping charges in a statewide fraud and money laundering scandal . . .

1940s Vancouver. The Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbour and racial tension is building in Vancouver. The RCMP are rounding up “suspicious” young men, and fishing boats and property are soon seized from Steveston fishers; internment camps in BC’s interior are only months away.

The stories in Jim Christy’s latest collection span time and space, taking us from the depression-era Deep South to the modern-day Vancouver commute. Private eyes. Old drunks. Yuppies, hippies, and everyone in between gets the trademark Christy work-over.

“Gaps, blank spaces in the language of polite conversation—academic discourse being but one example—are linguistic manifestations of human psychology. They are like black holes into which we conveniently drop undesirable concepts referring to things we fear on the deepest levels, things we would rather not face without a hedge of psychological defences: sex, death, bodily wastes, things unmentionable in polite society. But these things do not go away by virtue of their unmentionability; and neither do the words referring to them, though most are now relegated to the status of street language, slang, or ‘obscenity.’”

Four disparate people confront each other, their memory and their responsibility at the emergency room of a hospital when brought together by the crisis of a teenager suffering a psychiatric episode.

Touched renders the emotional and intellectual implosion experienced by Jade King, a young university student. This debut novel challenges the social stigma attached to such altered states and traces the effects of physical violation and psychic trauma.