Read Our Exceptional Authors Fantetti to Friesen

Eufemia Fantetti

My Father, Fortune-tellers & Me, a Memoir

A Recipe for Disaster & Other Unlikely Tales of Love

Finalist for the Canada Book Club Award for Non-Fiction
Danuta Gleed Literary Award Runner-up
F.G. Bressani Literary Prize Winner

Fantetti is a graduate of SFU’s Writer’s Studio and the University of Guelph’s Creative Writing master’s program, is a three-time winner of Accenti Magazine’s annual writing competition. Her work appears in Event Magazine, The New Quarterly and the Globe and Mail and is listed as notable by the Best American Essays Series. Fantetti is also an award-winning playwright and former stand-up comic. She teaches writing at Humber College and edits for the Humber Literary Review. Her debut book, A Recipe for Disaster & Other Unlikely Tales of Love, runner-up for the 2013 Danuta Gleed Literary Award and winner of the 2014 F.G. Bressani Literary Prize for short fiction, is also available from Mother Tongue Publishing.

Mona Fertig

Islander, New Poems

The Unsettled

Sex, Death & Travel

111 West Coast Literary Portraits

Rocksalt

Love of the Salish Sea Islands

The Life and Art of George Fertig

Long-listed for the ReLit Prize

Mona Fertig runs Mother Tongue Publishing and has been deeply involved in the literary community on the west coast since 1975. She was made a Literary Landmark by the Vancouver Public Library in Vancouver.

“I have always been struck by three qualities in Mona Fertig’s poetry: a sensuousness, an honouring of the sometimes beautiful, sometimes awkwardly real world at the poet’s feet, and a spiritual density that cracks through anywhere. Mona has one of the strongest voices among our poets, and that is why the publishing of The Unsettled is an occasion. In these new poems Fertig’s vision spirals through the world we inhabit, catching different aspects of it in its lyrical nets, but especially the contradictory worlds confronting us here on the western edge of this continent: worlds of progress and wilderness, men and women, youth and age, comedy and tragedy. Nowhere is this more evident than in the volume’s stunning, closing hymn to Salt Spring Island, ‘This is Paradise.’”–John Lent

"The new poems [The Unsettled] are beautiful, dark. You know the shadows, the joys. Many thanks for sharing your visions."– Robert Kroetsch, 2010.

Cathy Ford

Flowers We Will Never Know the Names Of

the art of breathing underwater

Forcefield, 77 Women Poets of BC

Rocksalt

Love of the Salish Sea Islands

Long-listed for the ReLit Prize

Ford is the author of fifteen books of poetry and numerous chapbooks and folios, including poetry, long poems, fiction and memoir, published by blewointment press, Intermedia Press, Caitlin Press, Véhicule Press, Harbour Publishing, gynergy books, Mother Tongue Publishing and others. She was born in Saskatchewan, grew up in northern British Columbia and has lived for many years in the Southern Gulf Islands and in Sidney, B.C. She attended the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University and has a BFA and an MFA in Creative Writing. Cathy Ford served as President of the League of Canadian Poets and is a founding member of the Feminist Caucus of the LCP. She is also matron and editor of the Living Archives Series of chapbook publications. She was the elected LCP representative to Access Copyright for four years, working to improve respect for the individual creator’s copyright and to increase cultural recognition through fair compensation for use of copyright materials. She is a community and arts activist committed to world peace, addressing the issues of violence against women and children and seeking to improve the status of women, especially writers and artists in Canada and internationally.

Patrick Friesen

Songen

Short History of Crazy Bone

Rocksalt

111 West Coast Literary Portraits

Finalist for the Victoria Butler Prize

Friesen is formerly of Winnipeg, now lives in Victoria. He writes poetry, essays, drama, song lyrics and text for dance and music; he has also co-translated several Danish poetry books with Per Brask. He has collaborated with various musicians, choreographers and dancers and has recorded CDs of text and improv music with Marilyn Lerner, Peggy Lee and Niko Friesen. He was short-listed for the Governor General’s Literary Award In Poetry in 1997, the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in BC in 1998 and 2003, the Griffin Poetry Prize (a co-translation with Per Brask of Frayed Opus For Strings & Wind Instruments by Danish poet Ulrikka Gernes) in 2016, and the Fred Cogswell Award For Excellence in Poetry in 2016. He received the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award in Manitoba in 1996 and the ReLit Award for poetry in 2012. In 2018 his play A Short History of Crazy Bone was staged by Theatre Projects Manitoba and won best playwright award.

Mother Tongue Publishing Limited