Product Description
Sharon Butala knows that we are all searching, reaching for ways to nurture our soul, define our inner selves and connect with the natural world. In her No. 1 national bestseller, The Perfection of the Morning -- which has been shortlisted for a Governor General's Award and three Saskatchewan Book Awards -- she shared her deeply moving, intimate journey through her inner and outer landscapes. Now she offers wisdom, hope and inspiration for what she calls "soul-building."

Coyote's Morning Cry is a series of meditations on the meaning of everyday life; the importance of being true to oneself; the inexorable connection between body and soul; the often intangible significance of dreams; and the value of communion with Nature.

Remarkable for its understanding and written in Sharon Butala's scrupulously honest, luminous style, Coyote's Morning Cry is a beautiful book to read and to give to others, perfect for nature lovers and those seeking inspiration in the simplicity of everyday life. ... Read more

Product Description
Author Verna Reid explores the evolving perceptions of "self" in the work of four Canadian women - visual artists Aganetha Dyck and Mary Pratt, and writers Sharon Butala and Mary Meigs. All four came into prominence in middle age, doing their most significant work in their mature years. They, along with the author, are members of a transitional generation of women, occupying the space between the traditional world of their mothers and the postmodern world of their daughters. The multiple roles they have played are reflected in the strong autobiographical content present in their work.Applying feminist and autobiographical theory, Reid considers the work of Butala, Dyck, Meigs, and Pratt in light of the influences that have shaped their senses of identity. As a contemporary of her subjects, Reid was able to interview all four women for this project, infusing her exploration of their lives and work with a sense of intimacy and immediacy. Reproductions of pieces by Aganetha Dyck and Mary Pratt are also included. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A special field of dreams
You don't have to know much about Saskatchewan or about the Prairies in Canada to find this book worth reading. Open your mind to the fascinating and magnetic presence of a `field' - not only a field of dreams, but also one of realities, past and present, that reveal themselves over time.

Although a very personal journey of discovery, through time, history, and culture, it is a very engaging journey that you will not regret sharing.On the contrary, Butala's insights and experiences will draw you in and you will explore some important messages for yourself.

The description of the unique landscape in Southeastern Saskatchewan, its flora and fauna is beautiful in itself and worth reading. After finishing `Wild Stone Heart', you will want to visit the `field' yourself. Although you will have learned by then that you will not see what Sharon Butala has learned to see and to discover over many years of visiting this captivating spot.You will have to find your own `field' to discover and re-discover your place in time and in nature.Highly recommended reading: more than once and not only for those who enjoyed `The Perfection of the Morning' ... Read more

Product Description
A moving and mournful elegy to a land and a way of living that have all but disappeared, completing the loosely-linked trilogy that began with "The Gates of the Sun" and "Luna". ... Read more

Product Description
This is a treasure trove of stories that reach beyond the buildings of timber and nails and put a human face on the history of these towering structures that once represented prosperity and stability on the prairie landscape. Through a series of biographical sketches and photographs, this book portrays a vivid picture of life in and around prairie grain elevators over the past century; how they influenced the communities that depended on them; and how they molded the lives of farmers and elevator agents and their wives and children. McLachlan's own experience, following her husband to nine communities in 20 years as he toiled in the grain dust, is central to her deft and vivid descriptions of lives shaped by the grain industry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Gone But Not Forgotten
This is local history. The writer is not accomplished. The book is precious in that it preserves the stories of people and a way of life - Canadians in the prairie provinces, chiefly in the 1930s - which are past. Whole communities, each of them centered on grain elevators, are gone. There is almost no way these people and these places could be visited save through the efforts the writer made to produce this volume.

A wistful and warmly written contribution
Gone But Not Forgotten is the true story of the history and modern disappearance of a daily facet of prairie agriculture and daily life. The simple wooden grain elevator functioned not only as a practical tool, but as a symbol of prosperity and stability for over a century. Black-and-white photographs illustrate the story of the grain elevator's widespread use, innovations to make it more effective, and its decline as agribusiness changed the way food is grown . A wistful and warmly written contribution to agarian memory and heritage, accurately commemorating the role of a once indispensible tool for small farmers.

... Read more

Product Description
Decidedly quirky in their vision yet punctuated with breath-taking beauty these photographs rejoice in a Saskatchewan landscape known only to insiders. From brash to subtle, John Conway’s keen eye for unusual detail, colour, and irony celebrates an unsung landscape with warm affection and brilliant light. With essays by Sharon Butala, David Carpenter, and Helen Marzolf, this fine blending of text and image will both surprise and invite wonder on the occasion of Saskatchewan’s centennial. “John Conway’s photos, startlingly original in their view of this province, have captured exactly what strangers have failed to see…” Sharon Butala“These images speak eloquently to me of the hopes of people like my grandparents, hopes dashed and tattered and rising once again, upbeat and sassy…” David Carpenter ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A truly beautiful collection that instills a great appreciation for the wide open spaces of nature in the reader
Saskatchewan: Uncommon Views is a stunning, full-color photographic gallery of Saskatchewan's countryside. Only the barest minimum of commentary supplements this collection of stunning images of grasses, open parklands, crop fields, prairie, snowfields, hills and more. A truly beautiful collection that instills a great appreciation for the wide open spaces of nature in the reader. Award-winning photographer John Conway proves his exquisite gift in this superb compilation particularly for those who appreciate the majesty of landscape photography.

Excerpts from review by Christopher Wiebe, Dec 4, 2005, Vue Weekly, Edmonton
...And now, the University of Alberta Press has published John Conway's amazing collection of photographs, Saskatchewan: Uncommon Views. The fruit of 12 years of photographing the province's changing countryside, the collection is an unlikely centennial gift that grapples with the tensions between the province's collective imagination and the testament of the land. Conway's photographs are driven by questions: there is beauty here, yes, but it is not a pretty postcard end in itself; rather, the beauty is a crowbar used to pry open our habitual ways of seeing-the way we edit and ignore much of what we see around us. The result is a book that is soul-searching, ironic, invigourating, depressing, demystifying, and yet, in the end, that celebrates the enduring power of place and the transformative potential of dreams.

The first photograph depicts a Yellowhead highway billboard that read "Future Home of Something." It's a poignant beginning for the exploration of a province that in its settlement phase was figured as a blank canvas awaiting European narratives. After establishing the familiar pastoral genre (bison spread on bald, snowy prairie) Conway shifts to the unexpected, to Saskatchewan's recreation as an industrial/scientific landscape. Many of these photographs centre around a manmade object that dialogues with or "interprets" its landscape context: signs next to plots of experimental crops; a row of piebald, rusting oil tanks in crop of barley; a tousled, Edward Burtnysky-esque grain tarp on a desolate field. In another, a pile of rocks and glacial erratics, plucked by a rock-picker from a stony field, becomes a sort of modern drumlin left behind by modern farming ideologies. Elsewhere, an abandoned farmstead (covered with decades of high-school grad graffiti) becomes a stage for different rites of passage, while a landscape and animal mural in Duck Lake conveniently ignores the 1885 battle that put it on the map.

Throughout, Conway records the land's exquisite, subtle range of texture, as well as the centrality of the sky where the drama of light and clouds plays out. He captures, as few others have, the gorgeous clarity of winter light on the prairies-the pinkish-white light at the horizon dissipating to powdery cobalt-a light that moves me in ways that exceed mountains or seascapes. Though Conway occasionally places short texts alongside the photographs, the reader for the most part is left to identify their own thematic progression.

In the 1970s, writers asserted that Western Canada needs to be "written into being." This makes sense. But the visual representations of a place are of similar importance. Saskatchewan's image continues to be swaying fields of grain, hip-roofed barns and grain elevators, a land still knit together in a gloriously productive quarter-section patchwork. Fact is, family farms have dwindled and agribusiness now exploits the land on a mass scale-filling sloughs, bulldozing copses and shelterbelts...

This disjuncture, between imagination and what one finds in the field, is what Conway records in his brilliant collection of photographs. Art historian Helen Marzolf's introductory essay theorizes Conway's "post-pastoral" photographs, seeing them as visual anecdotes that correct "the distorting lens of nostalgia" and act as unflinching "witness to inexorable change." I would add that Conway picks up where people like poet Andy Suknaski or photographer Sandra Semchuk left off in their explorations of ancestral legacies and prairie landscape. By comparison, Conway's vision is in a sense depersonalized, though no less valuable. Untouched by layers of family memory, he examines the land through the lens of public history and the collective imagination.

Alberta thirsts for this kind of "revisionist" book. The lunar devastation of the tar sands, the boreal forests slashed by seismic lines, the blighting of rural landscapes with dumps and power projects that benefit urban dwellers: all these cry out for a skilled photographer's eye. But Alberta just may be too jittery with its own adrenaline these days to be so thoughtful. Saskatchewan has won and lost at Lady Fortune's wheel and in doing so has developed a lovely, quiet grace. Uncommon Views beautifully captures these provincial qualities in rich tableaux that captivates, surprises and challenges. By framing typical, "forgettable" views, Conway reveals, as Sharon Butala writes, "what strangers have failed to see, and what it would not occur to us to explain to others." ... Read more

Product Description
Calling the Prairies Home is a keepsake guide to the people and places in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. Recounting the region's history and retelling its many legends, this revised and updated edition hosts an engaging tour of Canada's enormous heartland. Full of fascinating facts about the prairie populace — from artists to politicians, farmers to folk heroes — this is a perfect book for tourists and visitors, as well as a warm and engaging read for prairie people everywhere. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Calling the Prairies Home
The prairies are considered by many a vast expanse that you just want to get through. Not us. We started travelling by motorhome in 1995 and REALLY enjoy the Canadian prairies (we're from NY). We've made friends with a farming couple from Manitoba - they've read the book and agree that it is a good reflection of prairie life. I found this book in 2000 and have loaned it to others and now want to get a second copy. ... Read more

Product Description

Upstream is a Fifth House Books title.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A perfect gem
Some books are good because they tell a good story; some are good because they are funny; some present new and intriguing ideas; some are simply well written.Sharon Butala's Perfection of the Morning is good because it is uncompromisingly honest, and that alone gives it tremendous impact.She writes about her transformation from an urban, academic feminist when she marries a rancher, moves to rural Saskatchewan, and finds herself living among rural women in the midst of nature.It would have been easy for her to have either romanticized the rural life, or to have poked fun at the men and women in whose world she had come to live.She writes about what can best be described as spiritual experiences in nature, and she could have exaggerated them and couched them in "feminist" or "New Age" terms.Instead, she writes about her perceptions and reactions simply and clearly, without fanfare.

She writes of her life on a ranch in the middle of virgin prairie grassland, her frustrations and her achievements, and her insights into her relations with her new neighbors, both human and non-human, domesticated and wild, animate and inanimate.The book is wonderful because she is careful to be truthful and clear about the changes she went through, not glossing over either her difficulties or her breakthroughs of understanding.She describes the lives of rural people who spend most of their time out of doors, and in particular, the lives of ranchers who spend many hours of every day in all kinds of weather with their animals on the prairie.She talks about how living in the midst of nature affects the way people think and feel, their awareness of the world around them and their relation to it. The book describes cultural differences which are so profound that it is difficult to explain them to those of us who have grown up in suburban and urban environments.And yet she succeeds in this gem of a book to make us crave the opportunity to experience the awareness she describes.It is a pity that so few of us will be able to do so.

Disappointing
The author claims that having left behind her urban comforts to live in rural Saskatchewan eventually put her closely in touch with nature. Unfortunately, I was deeply disappointed with her version of'in touch with nature'. I expected to read the words of someone who respects animals and wilderness. Instead I read about her views on mice as pests, how she and her husband made their living fattening cows before the slaughter, and her twisted comments about hunters having a greater capacity for pain and suffering than the animals they cruelly kill. Exploiting animals has clearly become an inherent part of her livelihood on the farm. She thinks nothing of attending rodeos where animals are wantonly abused, and she has no trouble inflicting pain on cows through branding without anesthetics. She describes environmentalists as mostly "urban" people who are only capable of fighting the corporate world and governments by attempting to put Nature in their own terms. (Huh?) She fails to realize that if us crazy "urban" environmentalist all moved out into the wilderness, there would be no wilderness left! (I for one am proud to live in the city, leaving wild areas free for the animals to roam.) The author also totally fails to acknowledge that an animal-based diet (which she and her husband directly rely on for their livelihood) is behind much of the mass-destruction of wilderness observed in the last century. I suppose I wouldn't have been so shocked reading this book had it not been advertised as "an apprenticeship in nature". I'd sooner see it called "a treatise in exploiting nature".

An Encounter With Nature and With Yourself
Sharon Butala has written a deeply personal book with universal application.She tells of her journey from a fulfilling but hectic urban life to one of isolation and introspection.She joins her new husband on a cattle ranch in southwest Saskatchewan and leaves behind her universityteaching, her graduate studies, her support network of feminist friends,and her teenaged son.In her long, lonely hours of interaction with"Nature," she encounters the mysteries and messages of thenatural world and experiences the gradual healing of her own wounds.As Iread Butala's book I found myself stopping to write about my own pains, myown healing, and my own mysterious encounters with Nature.It was ajourney we took together, and I am stronger for the experience. ... Read more

Product Description
Word count: 3697. ... Read more

Product Description
Sharon Butala quitte sa vie confortable en ville et une carrière prometteuse à l'université pour aller s'installer avec l'amour de sa vie, Peter, sur un ranch du sud de la Saskatchewan. Confrontée à la solitude et l'isolement dans un monde qu'elle ne comprend pas, elle part, guidée par la nature qui l'entoure, à la découverte d'elle-même, de l'écriture, de la sagesse.Perfection du matin est sa démarche et ses luttes intérieures qui lui feront découvrir le courage d'écrire.Perfection du matin, dans sa version française, ouvre la porte des Prairies à tout le lectorat francophone.Perfection of the Morning a été finaliste au prix du Gouverneur général en 1994. ... Read more