Mother Tongue Publishing Limited

West Coast Literary Publishing | Creating a Legacy of Art & Literature | Salt Spring Island

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N E W in June

Mona Fertig
ISLANDER
New Poems

The mythopoetic seasonal life of islanders and their love of being islanded are captured with luminous sensitivity in Fertig’s engaging new book of poetry, her first in 14 years.

Through the lyrical and the local tossed with the pepper of folklore and the salt of the personal, joy and wisdom are deeply rooted in this multiplicity of island poems. Three sections open this beautifully designed collection: “Village Life,” “Huddling,” “Joies de la Vie,” and two powerful long sociopolitical poems, “The Weather Is Political” and “Sleepless in Strathcona” complete the book.
 
978-1-896949-89-5 |116 pages
French Flaps and green endpapers
$22. Order Now

“In Mona Fertig’s, Islander, encounter the wise wild heart of a woman’s life, and follow along under ‘wonder’s canopy.’ The poems in this book emerge from a ‘wild devotion’ to natural rhythms, to beauty, to time’s gifts and changes. Intimate and tap-rooted in the stories of love, wilderness, communities together, these pages speak with vivid clarity of the pasts that shape us, the love that binds and liberates us. And always, inhabited by the green mind, releasing with care, bringing us back to balance amid precarity. Islander walks with us along each page mending memory and moment to now with such tenderness, so much, enough to mend ‘all the heartbreaks of the world.’”––shauna paull, author of blue gait.

“This effervescent collection of sensitive poems express the joys found in connections to loved ones and the natural world. They are a hymn to the emotional bounty of an island life lived close to nature. Life affirming in these dark times!”––Matsuki Masutani, author of I Will Be More Myself in the Next World, winner of the Canada-Japan Literary Award.
 
“Within the imagined life made true, true as in the cognizant measure, cohering to dreams, memories, childhood memorialized, adult life choices, the unwavering positivity of engagement with verdant daily life, transcendent, is the poetry examined close to, in this stunning new collection of poems...the colouration of the natural world here is denser, fog deeper, the cougars closer, storms darker, and the fresh sunshine more sharply brilliant...a handbook for the grateful, the engaged, the politik, the loving, the angry and the forgiving, “both praise and a warning”....The prescient awareness of choice, precious as photographs, electric as morning, focuses the mind.”––Cathy Ford, author of Flowers We Will Never Know the Names Of.
 
“Reading poetry is too often approached as if it were a solemn duty rather than a pleasure. Anyone reading Islander in this fashion will have missed what should have been a pleasant summer’s afternoon strolling through the vagaries of a delightful poet’s thoughts and experiences. Not that these experiences are all sweetness and light: her husband’s nearly fatal work injury, the loss of old friends, COVID mingle with memories of visiting her grandchildren, a girlhood trip to Bowen Island, a honeymoon expedition to the Gulf Islands. But Ms Fertig takes all these varied aspects of a life well-lived to fashion an important, illuminating and, yes, highly enjoyable retrospective of the past fifty years as they appeared to an acute and sensitive observer living on Salt Spring Island.”––M.C. Warrior, author of Disappearing Minglewood Blues.

Mona Fertig
Mona Fertig is a BC poet, publisher, editor and founder of The Literary Storefront, Canada’s first literary centre (1978-1985) and Mother Tongue Publishing. She grew up in Vancouver’s Kitsilano and Burnaby and went to the Vancouver School of Art. She has been writing poetry since she was a teenager and has given hundreds of readings in many cities and towns across Canada as well as NYC and San Francisco. Her books, and many chapbooks and broadsides of poetry, include Mouth for Music (1979), 4722 Rue Berri (1986), Sex, Death & Travel (1998) and The Unsettled (2010), well as The Life and Art of George Fertig (2010). Fertig has edited many poetry ms as well as the anthologies Love of the Salish Sea Islands (2019), The Summer Book, 111 West Coast Literary Portraits (2012), Rocksalt (2008). She assisted in curating the George Fertig and Jack Akroyd exhibitions at the Burnaby Art Gallery, and the Unheralded Artists of BC Exhibition at Mahon Hall. She was a founding member of the Feminist Caucus of the League of Canadian Poets, The Federation of BC Writers, the BC Book Prizes, and has been the BC/Yukon Rep of The Writers’ Union of Canada and P.E.N. Canada. The Vancouver Public Library made her a Literary Landmark in 2016 with a plaque on a lamppost at 131 Water St., Gastown. She has lived on Salt Spring Island for over 34 years with her husband Peter Haase.


  
Mona Fertig retired from full-time Publishing in 2021. These were the last books published in that capacity.

Debut books of poetry by Linda K. Thompson and Matsuki Masutani, new fiction by Bill Stenson and new poetry by shauna paull.

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Honours



Mother Tongue Publishing is a small literary publisher, home-based that published 4 titles a year from Salt Spring Island, B.C. in Canada. It is Home of great regional fiction, poetry, anthologies, creative non-fiction and the Unheralded Artists of BC series. From 1994-2007 we published 28 limited edition Canadian poetry chapbooks, letterpressed poetry broadsides, covers, linocuts and book art. From 2008-2021, we have published 52 literary trade titles. Check out our book shop. Thanks for your support.

* 2023 Winner of the Canada-Japan Literary Award
* 2022 Shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize
* 2022 Shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
* 2021 Winner of the ReLit Poetry Award
* 2020 Long-listed for the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry
* 2019 Top Publisher in Canada-The Writers' Union of Canada Publishers’ Report Card
* 2018 Two books short-listed for the Victoria Butler Book Prize
* 2018 Long-listed for the ReLit Prize
* 2018 Finalist for the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize
* 2018 Finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize
* 2017 Short-listed for the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry
* 2017 Short-listed for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize
* 2016 Short-listed for the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry
* 2016 Mona Fertig was made a Literary Landmark in Vancouver, B.C.
* 2016 B.C. Historical Federation Writing Competition, Honourable mention    
* 2014 Winner of the F.G. Bressani Literary Award for Short Fiction.
* 2014 Runner-Up Winner for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award
* 2014 Short-listed for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize
* 2013 Short-listed for the Victoria Butler Book Prize
* 2013 Top twelve publishers in Canada-TWUC members publisher report card
* 2013 Honoured as Publisher at the Galiano Literary Festival
* 2012 'Everything Was Good-bye' Voted Top 5 Canada Reads Choice in BC/Yukon
* 2012 Finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award
* 2012 Short-listed for the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize
* 2011 Long-listed for the ReLit Prize
* 2011 Winner of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize
* 2011 Recipient of Pandora's Collective Publishers Award
* 2011 Honor Roll of Publishers by the Pacific Northwest Chapter of American Society of Indexing

  
Authors



Gurjinder Basran, Marilyn Bowering, Adrienne Brown, Peter Busby, Trevor Carolan, Claudia Cornwall, daniela elza, Blaise Enright, Eufemia Fantetti, Mona Fertig, Cathy Ford, Patrick Friesen, Rhonda Ganz, Kerry Gilbert, Shirley Graham, Peter Haase, Joan Haggerty, Diana Hayes, Christina Johnson-Dean, Theresa Kishkan, Chelene Knight, Eve Lazarus, Julia Leggett, Kerry Mason, Matsuki Masutani, Peter Morin, Kathryn Para, Wendy Newbold Patterson, shauna paull, Barry Peterson, Al Rempel, Linda Rogers, Sheryl Salloum, Bill Stenson, Linda K. Thompson, Monika Ullmann, M.C. Warrior, Gillian Wigmore, Onjana Yawnghwe.

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We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Province of British Columbia through the B.C. Arts Council. Mother Tongue Publishing acknowledges the unceded territory and the ancestors of Salt Spring Island, the Coast Salish First Nations peoples of Salt Spring and surrounding areas, who continue to use and steward these lands. © 2022.