Sustenance: Writers from BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food brings to the table some of Canada’s best contemporary writers, celebrating all that is unique about Vancouver’s literary and culinary scene. Punctuated by beautiful local food photographs, interviews with and recipes from some of our top local chefs, each of these short pieces will shock, comfort, praise, entice, or invite reconciliation, all while illuminating our living history through the lens of food. Sustenance is also a community response to the needs of new arrivals or low-income families in our city. The contributors have donated their honoraria to the BC Farmers Market Nutrition Coupon Program. A portion of sales from every book will go towards providing a refugee or low-income family with fresh, locally grown produce, and at the same time will support B.C. farmers, fishers, and gardeners.
Award-winning chefs, poets, and writers in Sustenance include: Frank Pabst (Chef, Blue Water Café), Renee Sarojini Saklikar, Mark Winston, Susan Musgrave, Lorna Crozier, Thomas Haas (artisan chocolatier), Meeru Dhalwalla (Chef, Vij’s and Rangoli), Ayelet Tsabari, Joan Kane, Thomas Larson, John Pass, Sarah Leavitt, Amber Dawn, Daphne Marlatt, Carleigh Baker, Russell Thornton, Evelyn Lau, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Brian Brett, Jen Currin and many, many more.
Praise for Sustenance: “Sustenance addresses multi-facetted issues of the subject of food in a vivid and down-to-earth manner. It is both a thought-provoking discourse of the subject of how we source and handle food as well as a poetic homage to food as a connector that bridges cultures and brings societies together. In this way, it is a homage to Vancouver as an open-minded, multi-cultural city, where everyone can thrive to make this city their home.” — Ulduz Maschaykh, Spacing.ca
“Rose, however, is cooking up more than food with this anthology. She acknowledges, ‘Words of pain and hope from within our fractured literary community sing on these pages, as we collectively struggle to find a way through our own complicated inheritances.’ […] Sustenance is a must-have book for any teacher, student, poet, or consumer of food. If, in fact, ‘food, art, and kindness can change the world,’ as one writer (A.L. Carlson) writes in her bio, then, Sustenance should do much to advance such change.” — Gigi Berardi, BC Studies
Recently a fellow at The University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, Rachel Rose has won awards for her poetry, her fiction, and her non-fiction, including a 2014 and 2016 Pushcart Prize. She has published work in journals and anthologies in Canada, the U.S., New Zealand and Japan, including Poetry, The Malahat Review and The Best American Poetry. A chapbook, Thirteen Ways of Looking at CanLit, (BookThug) and her fourth poetry collection, Marry & Burn (Harbour) were both published in 2015. Her non-fiction book, The Dog Lover Unit: Lessons in Courage from the World’s K9 Cops was released from St. Martin’s Press in the fall of 2017. Rachel is the current Poet Laureate of Vancouver (2014–2017).
