Review
Review of the weather from the west
Since 1998, Creekstone Press in Smithers has resolutely not operated as a back-to-the-land press that encourages everyone to make log houses or provides home-birthing techniques for cattle.
Run by Lynn Shervill and Sheila Peters, Creekstone has endured for nine years as the lone, ongoing, situated-in-northern-B.C. imprint within the Association of Book Publishers of B.C. ever since the untimely death in 2005 of Cynthia Wilson, who managed Caitlin Press from Prince George.
Caitlin continues to publish writers from central B.C., but its headquarters have shifted to the Sunshine Coast.
Thus far Creekstone has released nine books of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, photography and painting. Theirs is a modest but realistic mandate: roughly one book per year.
Their newest title, the weather from the west ($24), is an overtly artsy book of 42 poems by Sheila Peters and 23 paintings by Perry Rath—a sophisticated “synergistic” interplay between landscape, heart and mind.
Creekstone books attempt to do nothing less than reflect life in northwestern B.C. from places such as the Bulkley Valley, Smithers, the Hazeltons, Vanderhoof, the Kispiox Valley, Terrace, the Skeena and Bulkley watersheds, the Spatsizi or Tatlatui Wilderness Parks, Haida Gwaii, the Nechako and Fraser watersheds, the Inside Passage and other traditional Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en territory—almost half the province.
Sometimes, maybe those of us below the 50th parallel should think of ourselves as the sub-boonies.