Welcome to the second season of Thistledown 2.0. I am delighted to have the opportunity to build on the legacy of this venerable publishing company, founded in 1975. We now have a shiny new website as well as a vibrant social media presence.
We also have a new logo whose floating asterisks are meant to suggest the lightness and germinative energy of the down of a thistle. And a new slogan: Read what we sow. The prairie resonance is deliberate, because being a Western Canadian press is a huge part of who we are.
Our spring 2022 season is a bracing blend of the established and the new. Phoebe Tsang is an exciting new talent, and her first short story collection, Setting Fire to Water, showcases that talent to amazing effect. Saskatchewan poet Robert Currie has had a long and illustrious career, and the breadth of his quiet, closely observed poetics is evident in Shimmers of Light: New and Selected Poems. Finally, we are chuffed beyond measure to have secured a work of fiction (his first in over a decade!) by John Bemrose, the author of The Island Walkers. This new novel, The River Twice, immerses the reader in the trauma and sorrow and confusion visited upon one Southern Ontario family by the First World War. The characters are haunting and complex. It’s a novel you won’t soon forget.
JoAnn McCaig
Publisher
