Publishing New Brunswick Stories

Cultural Heritage • Natural History • Literature of Place

Chapel Street Editions is dedicated to publishing books that spring from a sense of place, portray cultural heritage, and speak to the relationship of land and people.

poems and drawings by

Jane Spavold Tims

mnemonic is a book of precisely worded and carefully phrased poems that carry the reader on a journey through the soundscapes of the author’s home terrain—rural New Brunswick. Birdsong commands primary attention and flows like a canopy across each section of this book. Jane shares her drawings of birds, which add the image of form to the aura of music. An orchestra of other surrounding sounds prompt the author’s poetic rendering, revealing a world chock-full of interesting information for those alert to its resonance.

Note: This title has been postponed until March 2024.

Portraits and Stories of Grand Manan Island
Photographs and Text

By Peter Cunningham

Grand Manan, the last in the chain of the large islands that run with the prevailing wind, ‘down east’ from New York to New England and then into the Gulf of Maine and Bay of Fundy. They are islands with a common historic maritime culture. The visible remnants of traditional fishing culture have persisted longer here than on its sister islands to the south. This book bears witness to Grand Manan's ongoing struggle to maintain self-reliant island individualism in the context of a nearly ubiquitous global economy.

Elizabeth Robinson Scovil 1849-1934
New Brunswick’s Pioneer of Professional Nursing

By Virginia Bjerkelund

A Nurse for All Seasons is an intellectual and vocational biography of Elizabeth Robinson Scovil entwined with the story of New Brunswick’s Scovil family. Elizabeth Scovil is a featured character(Aunt Bessie) in Virginia Bliss Bjerkelund book Meadowlands. She was the anchor of the Scovil family from the late 1800s through the early 1930s. But that is only part of the story. Elizabeth Robinson Scovil made a decision at the age of twenty-nine that warrants a biography. A Nurse for All Seasons is that book.

Tonight We Sleep with the Window Open

Poems and Drawings from Belleisle Bay

By Melanie Craig-Hansford

Tonight We Sleep with the Window Open will take its place with my beloved, spine-worn volumes of poetry created by writers who have rendered landscapes with emotional precision —poets of place." – From the Foreword by Beth Powning

In her new book Melanie Craig-Hansford combines verse and visuals in an exploration of place; bringing physical and emotional landscapes together in a powerful reflection of her journey home to heed the call of a creative life.

Emily Dickinson Goes Camping

and Other Wildly Domestic Poems

By Karen Davidson

Karen Davidson’s new book begins with twenty poems exploring her affinity with Emily Dickinson. She gently interrogates “the Myth of Amherst” and lifts up the subtle, wry, and serious humour often hidden in Dickinson’s poems. This sympathetic touch gives Emily Dickinson Goes Camping an aura of unique interest and poetic surprise. Forty-two additional poems complete the book. In poem after poem, a distillation of language fulfils the promise of the subtitle. “Wildly domestic” is an unusual voice to hold in tension and harmony. But, like Emily Dickinson, Karen Davidson has made it the signature of her art.

A Harbour for the King

The Loyalist Dream on the Island of Grand Manan

By Wendy Dathan

Two and a half centuries ago a group of Empire Loyalists made their way to Grand Manan off the coast of New Brunswick and built communities sustained by the harvest of abundant fish and lobster. In A Harbour for the King, Wendy Dathan tells the story of these settlers and the path of their decendents as they created livelihoods and a rich legacy across the generations.

Atlantis: An Elegy

By George Peabody

Atlantis: An Elegy gives us a flagship poem for the memory of life along the Wolastoq before the building of the dam at Mactaquac. When the Wolastoq—also known as the St. John River—was dammed at Mactaquac, western New Brunswick lost the heart of its great natural abundance—the annual migration of Atlantic salmon and a large swath of prime agricultural land. George Peabody has created a classic elegy for this circumstance of great loss. However, with the passage of time and the end of the dam’s working life in view, Atlantis also evokes the awareness that Wolastoq will outlast this unwise human interdiction.

The George Frederick Clarke Project

Reprinting the Books of New Brunswick’s Master Storyteller

In 2015 Chapel Street Editions, in collaboration with Mary Bernard, began publishing new editions of George Frederick Clarke's long out of print books. From salmon fishing to adventure stories to archeology, Clarke's writing was immensely popular with multiple generations and is a foundational touchstone of New Brunswick's literary heritage.