Sono Nis Press - About Our Authors

An avid outdoors person, Ann Alma lives on a hobby farm in the Kootenay mountains of British Columbia, with her dog, a border collie named Shira. Her books have received many awards, including the Canadian Children's Book Centre's "Our Choice" Award, a Red Maple, and two Silver Birch Award nominations.

Jane Austen (1775-1817), author of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and other great novels, spent most of her life in rural Hampshire, and her usual principle was to write about "3 or 4 families in a country village."

When Karen asked her Finnish-Canadian grandparents to record their life stories, she was given a glimpse of her grandmother's brave yet mysterious battle against tuberculosis as a young mother. The idea for Saara's Passage took tangible shape after Karen read letters written by her grandmother to her infant daughter, Karen's mother, letters that were discovered after her grandmother's death.

Roberta L. Bagshaw was born in Pennsylvania and lived in Ontario before moving to British Columbia. She is a teacher, public lecturer and writer. She holds an MA in historical geography from Simon Fraser University. Her graduate work and published articles relate to Bishop Hills and the influence of the Church of England on white settlement in British Columbia.

Maxwell Bates was born in Calgary, Alberta in 1906. He spent the years 1931-1939 in London, exhibiting regularly with the Twenties Group. As a member of the British Expeditionary Force sent to France in 1940 he was captured by the Germans and was interned in a prison camp from 1940-1945. Returning to Calgary in 1946 he worked as an architect before coming to Victoria, B.C., in 1961. His work has been exhibited in London, Paris, Tokyo, Mexico City, Manchester, Auckland, Philadelphia and all major Canadian cities.

Mary Bentley was born in British Columbia and has lived on Bowen Island since 1991. Mary holds a BA in Education and a Textile Certificate from Capilano College. She currently teaches weaving at the University-College of the Fraser Valley.

Ted Bentley was born in British Columbia and has lived on Bowen Island since 1991. Ted holds a Ph.D in Statistics and teaches mathematics at Capilano College. He shares with Mary a love of nature and interest in native cultures which he expresses through photography.

Patricia Bovey is Director of The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. She has served on the Board of The Canada Council and contributed greatly to the visual art community of Canada.

Brian Brett lives and farms on Salt Spring Island. He is a wonderful cook and, in 1998, will hold the post of writer-in-residence for the Yukon Territory.

A Victoria-based author and archivist, Kathryn Bridge holds an MA in history from the University of Victoria. She works for the British Columbia Archives and has a young and energetic family.

Denise Cammiade lived in Victoria, British Columbia, and worked at Munro's Books for thirty years. For much of that time she was in charge of the children's book department. Her wide-ranging interests encompassed science, history, gardening, and art and artists of all descriptions. Her poetry appeared in the Vintage anthology and The Malahat Review.

Penny Chamberlain loves old houses, especially ones with ghosts. She lives in a ninety-year-old house on the outskirts of Victoria, B.C., and she is a member of the Friends of Point Ellice House. The Friends are currently working on restoring the dining room of Point Ellice House to its former grandeur at the turn of the century.

Born in Yorkshire, England, Barbara Colebrook Peace grew up in Northumberland, not far from the border of Scotland. She loved classical literature from an early age, and especially classical poetry, taking her first degree in Honours Classics at the University of Manchester. On being awarded a fellowship at the University of Victoria, B.C., she enjoyed the adventure of coming to Canada and studying for a master’s degree, writing her master’s thesis on Aeschylean drama.

Raymond F. Corley was born and educated in Toronto. He received the Bachelor of Applied Science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Toronto. He worked in the Rolling Stock and Equipment Department of the Toronto Transportation Commission. In 1974 he returned to the Toronto Transit Commission where he became Superintendent of Design and Development, Equipment Engineering, a position which he held until his retirement in 1989. He now serves as a consultant in this field.

Born in India and educated in England, Canada and the USA, Peter Corley-Smith served as an RAF pilot with the Special Operations Executive in the Second World War. After the war he became in turn a miner, surveyor, cartographer, commercial helicopter pilot and college instructor before becoming a history curator. Now retired, he is serving as a Research associate at the Royal British Columbia Museum. In 1990, he was recipient of the Helicopter Association Internationals' Excellence in Communication award. Peter died in November 2002.

Jan de Groot was born in 1932 in The Hague, Holland. He lived through the German occupation of Holland in the Second World War, and later, at the age of eighteen, he became a merchant mariner and roamed the world by sea. In 1957 he emigrated to Canada and in 1960 married a young Dutch woman who had also emigrated to Canada. They had two children, and Jan pursued a landlubbing career for thirteen years in the corporate world. In 1970, he returned to a seagoing life and operated a charter yacht in the Caribbean until 1980, divorcing and remarrying along the way. Jan is a certified master of seagoing vessels, and upon his return to Canada in 1980 he became a marine surveyor, inspecting ships and yachts for prospective purchasers, banks, and insurance companies.

A fifth-generation Californian, Eileen Delehanty Pearkes has been a resident of Canada since 1985. She has lived in Nelson, in the Columbia Mountains of southeastern B.C., since 1994. She has published numerous essays and articles exploring the connection between nature and the human imagination, as well as The Geography of Memory, her first book. She is a mother of two sons.

Walter Dexter was born in Alberta, and received his diploma in ceramics from the Alberta College of Art in Calgary, after which he continued his studies at the Swedish School of Arts and Crafts, and with Hal Reigger. He has taught ceramics in many Art Schools and Colleges in British Columbia, and his work has been recognized internationally. From 1976 to 1978 he was President of the B.C. Craftsmen's Association and Provincial Director of the Canadian Crafts Council.

In the small world of the "private press" – the international community of people who make books the old way, setting the type, rolling the ink and printing the pages by hand, on handmade paper – Elsted is well known. In the sanitized world that the rest of us inhabit, Elsted has remained one of the best-kept secrets of Canadian culture. He belongs to an invisible minority: the devotees of genuine handwork, the servants of true craft.

One of Charles Fairfield's books Street Railways is a reprint of an 1892 guide to state-of-the-art design, operation, and general management of horse car systems, cable car lines, early electric street railways, and elevated systems.

Dorothy Field is a visual artist as well as a writer. Besides several books of poetry, she is the author of a children's book, In the Street of the Temple Cloth Printers, and Paper and Threshold, both of which have grown out of her frequent travels in Asia. She lives in Victoria beside a seedling Garry oak.

Douglas Franklin lives in Ottawa. He is Director of the Heritage Canada Foundation, an organization dedicated to the preservation of Canada's historic, built, natural and scenic heritage.

Leona Gom is originally from northern Alberta, where her parents were homesteaders and where she lived on an isolated farm for twenty years. She received a B.Ed. and M.A. from the University of Alberta and taught there in in the Department of English for two years. She also taught English and creative writing at UBC and at Douglas/Kwantlen College, where for ten years she was editor and poetry editor of the literary magazine Event. She has been writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, University of Lethbridge, and the University of Winnipeg, and has been published extensively in journals and anthologies around the world. Her impressive list of works also includes eleven published books (six poetry, five novels), and two full-length plays produced by the CBC. Leona Gom now lives in White Rock, BC, where she writes full time.

Alisa Gordaneer grew up in Victoria, BC and was educated at the University of Victoria. She now resides in Detroit, Michigan where she is features editor for the Metro Times.

A globe-trotting half-French, half-English expatriate Kiwi and a former contracts lawyer and First Peoples' land claims negotiator, she now lives on Gabriola Island, British Columbia, where she continues to write about B.C.'s historical, environmental, political and cultural issues and to work with First Peoples on intergovernmental relationships and strategy development. She is also on the Board of Directors of the First Peoples' Cultural Foundation, an NGO working to ensure that B.C.'s indigenous languages remain a vibrant, living part of Canada's future.

Lyn Hancock has been a distinguished author, photographer, photojournalist, lecturer and film maker for over 40 years, publishing 20 books and thousands of articles in newspapers and magazines around the world. Born in Australia, she has hitchhiked from Cape Town to Cairo and from Alaska to Baffin Island (Winging it in the North), and for 25 years has lived and travelled in the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut.

In one of Jackman's books, The Journal of William Sturgis, the end of the eighteenth century saw the Americans and the British actively trading with natives for the extremely valuable sea otter pelts. In 1799, William Sturgis, aged 17, made his first visit, keeping journals in which he described his impressions of life at sea, of fur trade practices, and of the native people. His journal contains one of the first attempts at a phonetic dictionary of the aboriginal dialects.

John Koerner's powers of observation, his oneness with the natural world around him, his insights into people and the innate understanding of various cultures are very much the tools he uses in creating his works. They are also the gifts he gives to viewers: his ability in so many languages and in the international language of visual art. His work connects in a truly meaningful way across a significant breadth of cultures, and enriches us all.

H. Dude Lavington was born in Alberta in 1907. He has lived the life of a pioneer: breaking trail, breaking horses, breaking bones. He eased into the cowboy life aboard a bronco named Calamity. His colloquial, down-home style and stories are major additions to the Canadian cowboy mythos.

Andrea Lebowitz is a charter member of the faculty at Simon Fraser University and a founder of the Women's Studies Department in which she teaches. She is the editor of an anthology of women's nature writing in Canada, Living in Harmony, which includes a selection from Gilean Douglas' writing. Lebowitz resides in North Vancouver and Hornby Island and is an avid gardener — an avocation shared by both Jill Milton and Gilean Douglas.

Charles Lillard is known as a poet and as an historian specializing in the Northwest Coast. His last volume of poetry, Circling North won the 1988 B.C. Poetry Book Prize.

Ted Lindberg, a freelance writer and curator, has recently completed a cultural biography of Myfanwy Spencer Pavelic; her life and times in Victoria, London and New York, titled Myfanwy.

Born in Edmonton in 1957, Richard Mackie moved to Vancouver Island when he was 11 and soon started digging up Victorian-era bottle dumps on the margins of mud flats on Tsehum Harbour, North Saanich, starting beneath his parents’ home and moving out from there. He probed the muddy shorelines with a metal rod and learned to distinguish between buried glass and rock. Soon he had a bedroom full of old bottles and pottery pieces. This was worthwhile salvage work because the tidal estuaries tended to get filled in for parking lots or dredged for marinas.

Hereditary chief of the Ahousaht First Nation of Clayoquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, born in 1926 in the village of Maaqtusiis, on Flores Island. He received traditional training from the elders at Maaqtusiis, as well as learning the skills of fishing and a sea-going life from his father, McPherson George. He also worked as a logger and with the Canadian Coast Guard, eventually earning his skipper's papers. He took on a major role in Nuu-Chah-Nulth treaty negotiations with the provincial and federal governments, and as an elder, began a university education, receiving a B.A. in history and an M.A. in geography from the University of Victoria.

Ron Martin is the eighth child of Robert Martin Sr. and Cecelia Martin (née Lucas) of Opitsaht. Opitsaht has been the ancestral home of the Martin family for many generations. It is situated on Meares Island, across from Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Ron's father, Robert, was a hereditary chief (Ha'withl) of the Tla-o-qui-aht (formerly known as Clayoquot), one of the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations.

Sylvie McClean was born in Algeria, educated in France, Germany and Canada and has lived in Canada since 1960. She holds MA degrees from both the Sorbonne and UBC and works as a professional translator. She is married and lives in Vancouver.

Jill Milton, a longtime resident of Cortes Island, knew Gilean Douglas for the last 20 years of Douglas' life. Although 50 years separated them, they were good friends, and Douglas named Milton her literary executor. Douglas requested in her will that her Literary Executor work to bring her writing back into print, and Milton feels honoured to help carry out that task.

Jeremy Mouat has written an earlier book on the history of the Kootenays, Roaring Days, as well as numerous articles for scholarly journals. Born on Saltspring Island, he now teaches history at Athabasca University in Alberta.

Darryl Muralt, born in Victoria in 1944, was raised on a farm in the nearby Highlands District. After completing high school he embarked on what was to be a short, but distinguished career as an officer in the Canadian Army. He was injured in a motor vehicle accident which left him hospitalized for much of a ten year period. During his stays in military hospitals in eastern Canada, he became interested in model railroading and railroad history.

Peter Murray brings the experience of over 25 years with the Victoria Times newspaper to The Vagabond Fleet. He has been a reporter, features editor, book page editor and reviewer. As well, he has published The Devil and Mr. Duncan: A History of the Two Metlakatlas, and edited a volume of the collected columns of Jack Scott, called Great Scott!

Rona Murray was born in London, England, and spent her early childhood in India, before coming to Canada. She was educated at the University of British Columbia and at the University of Kent. She has taught at a number of Colleges and Universities and is the author of four collections of poetry. Her play, Blue Duck's Feather and Eagledown was performed in the 1958 Centennial celebrations of British Columbia, and her poems and stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies in North America.

Rosemary Neering has been writing about the Canadian west for some 30 years. Her award-winning books include Down the Road: Journeys through Small-Town British Columbia and Wild West Women: Travellers, Adventurers and Rebels, as well as a variety of guides to and histories of B.C. She lives in Victoria.

Sylvia Olsen was born and brought up in Victoria, BC. At seventeen she married and moved to Tsartlip First Nation. For more than thirty years she lived and worked and raised her four children in the Tsartlip community. Sylvia is a historian specializing in Native/white relations in Canada. As a writer, she often finds herself exploring the in-between places where Native and non-Native people meet. She is particularly interested in relationships--in what happens in the contact zone that forms when human beings come together.

David N. Parker is a curator at the Royal BC Museum, a position he has held since 1973. He has produced over 20 exhibits during his tenure at the museum and has published books and articles on both emergency services and aviation. Presently, he is preparing a history of the BC Ambulance Service.

Douglas Parker was born in Toronto and received his Bachelor of Arts degree at United College in Winnipeg. He taught for several years in the public school system in Victoria, British Columbia before pursuing M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Washington in Seattle. On his return to Canada he was appointed a professor in the departments of elementary and secondary education at the University of Alberta. Parker retired from the University in July, 1992.

Kelly Parsons lives in Victoria, B.C. with her son John and works as an administrative assistant for a non-profit society. She also attends the University of Victoria part-time, focusing on manuscript studies, medieval mysticism and medieval history in art. She has published her poems in literary journals and in a chapbook, In the Slipstream of Angels.

As I have said many times before, I cannot separate drawing and painting from living. Each new paper or canvas holds for me the same possibility for discovery and growth — as each new day. Possibility, yes, but only after countless hours — eager — hesitant, sometimes seemingly hopeless hours, there will come that rare moment of realizing a deeper understanding. And, from that small step forward — one starts again.

Barbara Pedrick is an award-winning photographer with her own portrait studio in Victoria, British Columbia. She received her first camera for her 12th birthday, immediately began taking pictures of her little sister, and has been photographing people ever since.

Sallie Phillips was a freelance broadcaster in Vancouver in the years following WWII. She broadcast her varied and detailed programs over many Vancouver radio stations, but most of her work was for the CBC and was enjoyed by listeners locally, nationally, and internationally. With a smooth and expressive voice that "could really take it off the paper," and infinite curiosity, Sallie was a natural for radio. But she was also a natural for public relations, and her highly successful career in that field eventually overtook her work as a freelance broadcaster. After retiring in the late 1960s, Sallie and her husband Dick travelled extensively and moved to Vancouver Island in 1972. They have lived in Victoria since 1986.

One of David Rees-Thomas's books Timber Down the Capilano is a brief history which recalls the Capilano Timber Company's legacy in B.C. More than fifty miles of railroad was laid down; over 400 million feet of high grade timber was taken out; and millions of dollars were expended locally on wages, supplies, and equipment.

From very modest beginnings and little formal education, Ed Reierson became a successful businessman and property owner. A man with a good dollop of old-fashioned pioneer blood in his veins, he can often be found in the bush. Otherwise, he spends his time divided between Quesnel and Salmon Arm, British Columbia.

Terry Reksten is a full-time writer and lecturer who lives in Victoria, British Columbia. Terry has served on Heritage Advisory Committees in Oak Bay and Victoria. She has been interviewed about her research on Rattenbury by the History Channel and by various other media including the Financial Times in London, England. In 1985, Terry was named an Honorary Citizen of the City of Victoria in recognition of her writing and her work in heritage preservation.

Linda Rogers is a teacher, essayist, children's writer, and multi-award-winning poet obsessed with the human story. She currently teaches at the University of Victoria and is Past President of The League of Canadian Poets.

Schofield is what he calls a "Coast Dog," having flown as a commercial seaplane pilot along the full stretch of coastal British Columbia and throughout much of North America and the Canadian Arctic. Following his flying career he founded Aviator Magazine, a Canadian national trade publication that he recently sold after 13 years as its editor and publisher. Schofield has adapted his first two books to a screenplay for TV titled Blackie's Coast. The author lives on Mayne Island in the B.C. Gulf Islands.

Martin Segger lives in Victoria and is Director of the Maltwood Art Museum and Gallery and Adjunct Professor in Art History at the University of Victoria.

Sandy Shreve was raised in Sackville, New Brunswick, and now lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. Shreve founded and coordinated (1995-1998) Poetry in Transit, a project that displays poems in SkyTrain cars and buses throughout B.C. Her latest book, Belonging, was short-listed for the Milton Acorn People's Poetry Award. Her earlier books are The Speed of the Wheel Is Up to the Potter (Quarry Press, 1990) and Bewildered Rituals (Sono Nis Press, 1992).

Suzanne Steele was born in 1956 in Vancouver, B.C. She holds a B.Mus from the University of British Columbia and a M.L.I.S. from the University of Western Ontario. Her writing and journalism includes opinion, profiles, travel, homelife and horticultural, book reviews and technical pieces including a Hughes/Griffith Observatory award winning article on Astronomy and the Internet.

Susan Stenson has been published in many literary magazines including Geist, subTerrain, Fiddlehead, and CV2. She has received numerous awards for her work including The ARC Poem of the Year Contest, subTerrain's Lush Triumphant contest, The Rona Murray Prize for Literature, the Great Canadian Literary Hunt, This Magazine's poetry contest, the League of Canadian Poets National Contest, the Best Book of Poetry (people's choice prize, Monday Magazine), and the Hawthorne Poetry Chapbook Award.

Born in England, award-winning author Nikki Tate travelled the world before settling down on a tiny farm on Vancouver Island. Horses, goats, ducks, cats, dogs, and koi keep her busy when she isn't dreaming up ideas for new books or working out in her garden. The author of more than twenty books, Tate also works as a freelance broadcaster with CBC radio and is a professional storyteller, retelling the stories of King Arthur's court. Her writing workshops are popular with aspiring writers of all ages.

Nancy Turner is internationally known for her work in Ethnobotany, the study of plants and cultures. She is a Distinguished Professor in the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria and has published many books, scholarly papers and popular articles. Her studies have taken her all over British Columbia and to other parts of the world.

Robert D. Turner is a multi-award-winning author of fifteen books, with several more in the works, and over 350 articles on railway and steamship history. He has had several thousand photographs published in books, magazines and journals as well as presented in exhibits. He is Curator Emeritus at the Royal British Columbia Museum, where he was Chief of Historical Collections for many years. Bob has travelled around the world photographing and documenting surviving early railways, the lives of workers and communities, and industrial history in South American, Africa, many parts of Asia and Europe.

Dick Wells speaks from personal experience – and from love of the seafaring life. He describes a way of life that has very largely vanished, and which is not to be characterized by "good riddance," but rather to be regarded with a feeling of deep loss. We have here, though, a small segment of that way of life as it took place in our coastal waters not too many years ago. For this we are profoundly grateful.

Born in Calgary, Alberta, Bob Whetham spent his early years in South America before returning to Canada to attend school and university. He lives with his wife and daughter in Cranbrook, B.C. He is currently Director of Planning for the Regional District of East Kootenay. He has a love of travel, vintage railways and photography.

Julie lives on a horse farm in Armstrong with her husband, Robert, a former jockey, where they raise thoroughbreds for racing and jumping. She rides every day and competes in jumping classes at horse shows, often against her two grown daughters. She's a Pony Club examiner, riding instructor and course designer. Julie White's first book, The Secret Pony, received an Our Choice Award and was nominated for a Chocolate Lily Award.

Dave Wilkie's railroad photography is internationally acclaimed, from publication in many widely circulated books and magazines. A well-known authority on western railroad history, he has co-authored three books, The Cordwood Limited (with the late George Hearn), Shays on the Switchbacks (with Elwood White), and The Skyline Limited (with Robert Turner). His interests have long focussed on the Great Northern in British Columbia. He is retired and living in Victoria, B.C.

Helga Williams (The Word Lady) was born in Halle, Germany October 10, 1939 and passed away on September 6th, 2006 at the Saanich Peninsula Hospital after a lengthy illness. A love of travel took Helga around the world and back, always seeking new adventures. She and her family lived in England, Australia, and the United States and, after immigrating to Canada in 1969, Banff, Calgary, Fort McMurray, Vancouver, Salt Spring Island, and Victoria.

Patricia Young has published nine collections of poetry and one of short fiction. She has won numerous awards for her poetry, including the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the Dorothy Livesay Award, the Bliss Carmen Award, the National Magazine Award, the League of Canadian Poets’ National Poetry Competition and Arc’s Poem of the Year Competition. Two of her collections have been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry.