Charlotte Gill

Winner of the BC National Award for Non-Fiction, and short-listed for both the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and the 2011 Hilary Weston Writer's Trust Award. A tree planter's vivid story of a unique subculture and the magical life of the forest. Charlotte Gill spent twenty years working as a tree planter in the forests of Canada. During her million-tree career, she encountered hundreds of clearcuts, each one a collision site between human civilization and the natural world, a complicated landscape presenting geographic evidence of our appetites. Charged with sowing the new forest in these clearcuts, tree planters are a tribe caught between the stumps and the virgin timber, between environmentalists and loggers. In Eating Dirt, Gill offers up a slice of tree planting life in all of its soggy, gritty exuberance, while questioning the ability of conifer plantations to replace original forests that evolved over millennia into complex ecosystems. She looks at logging's environmental impact and its boom-and-bust history, and touches on the versatility of wood, from which we have devised countless creations as diverse as textiles and airplane parts. Eating Dirt also eloquently evokes the wonder of trees, which grow from tiny seeds into one of the world's largest organisms, our slowest-growing ""renewable"" resource. Most of all, the book joyously celebrates the priceless value of forests and the ancient, ever-changing relationship between humans and trees. Also available in hardcover. Published in partnership with the David Suzuki Foundation.

Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-planting Tribe

Eating Dirt

A Memoir

Almost Brown

A collection of the best poems and short stories written about various, sometimes risky wilderness experiences and adventures around the world, written for The Banff Centre's Mountain and Wilderness Writing program.

The Best of Mountain and Wilderness Writing

Rock, Paper, Fire

"A Canadian masterpiece." —Toronto Star A tender and incisive memoir tracing the journey of a biracial, globe-trotting family that reckons with diversity, race, and identity, from the award-winning author of Eating Dirt. It wasn’t simply a question of skin, or belonging, or the Englishness of Mom, or the Indianness of Dad, or some murky middle state in between. It had become a curry of emotion and allegiance and identity, everything cooked together, all at once. With an Indian father and an English mother, young Charlotte Gill’s family houses a dizzying blend of two distinctly different cultures, featuring turbans and tube socks, chana masala and Cherry Coke. Until, one day, the family implodes. Her parents divorce, her intercultural world fractures, and a silence falls between Charlotte and her father. Charlotte heads off to university. Inheriting her family’s nomadic nature, she takes off backpacking and eagerly wears her passport down to a pulp. And as the years pass, her father’s absence feels heavier, a loss that only seems to grow. She begins to unravel how connection to family is inextricably linked to identity: her childhood, her understanding of race and diversity, and her ability to reclaim space for forgiveness and love. Almost Brown is an exploration of diasporic intermingling involving two deeply eccentric parents from worlds apart and their half-brown children, who experience the paradoxes of life as it’s lived between race checkboxes. It’s a funny, turbulent, and ultimately heartwarming memoir about the brilliant messiness of a mixed-race family and a search for answers to the question, What are you?

A Mixed-Race Family Memoir

• Winner of the BC National Award for Non-Fiction • Nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and the 2011 Hilary Weston Writer's Trust Award. During Charlotte Gill’s 20 years working as a tree planter she encountered hundreds of clear-cuts, each one a collision site between human civilization and the natural world, a complicated landscape presenting geographic evidence of our appetites. Charged with sowing the new forest in these clear-cuts, tree planters are a tribe caught between the stumps and the virgin timber, between environmentalists and loggers. In Eating Dirt, Gill offers up a slice of tree-planting life in all of its soggy, gritty exuberance while questioning the ability of conifer plantations to replace original forests, which evolved over millennia into intricate, complex ecosystems. Among other topics, she also touches on the boom-and-bust history of logging and the versatility of wood, from which we have devised countless creations as diverse as textiles and airplane parts. She also eloquently evokes the wonder of trees, our slowest-growing “renewable” resource and joyously celebrates the priceless value of forests and the ancient, ever-changing relationship between humans and trees.

Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe

Robert J. Stokes

This book explores multi-year community-based crime prevention initiatives in the United States, from their design and implementation, through 5-year follow ups. It provides an overview of programs of various sizes, affecting diverse communities from urban to rural environments, larger and smaller populations, with a range of site-specific problems. The research is based on a United States federally-funded program called the Byrne Criminal Justice Initiative (BJCI) which began in 2012, and has funded programs in 65 communities, across 28 states and 61 cities. This book serves to document the process, challenges, and lessons learned from the design and implementation of this innovative program. It covers researcher-practitioner partnerships, crime prevention planning processes, programming implementation, and issues related to sustainability of community-policing initiatives that transcend institutional barriers and leadership turnover. Through researcher partnerships at each site, it provides a rich dataset for understanding and comparing the social and economic problems that contribute to criminality, as well as the conditions where prosocial behavior and collective efficacy thrive. It also examines the future of this federally-funded program going forward in a new Presidential administration. This work will be of interest to researchers in criminology and criminal justice, particularly with an interest in translational/applied criminology and crime prevention, as well as related fields such as public policy, urban planning, and sociology.

Case Studies and Lessons Learned

Innovations in Community-Based Crime Prevention

Ladykiller is the astonishing debut collection of seven smart stories from an exciting new voice in Canadian literature. Charlotte Gill is a brilliant young writer who is not afraid to stare down the truth and shame the devil. She conjures compelling stories about escape, self-sabotage, and the power of unconscious desire. A couple plots against a crying baby in the apartment below as their dysfunctional relationship begins to veer off course. A hot-shot scuba-diving instructor falls for a teenaged girl in a perilous Lolita-like romance. Twin sisters travel to exotic lands in search of romance in order to rescue themselves from their own dark, intense bond. A woman reconnects with the son of her father’s mistress, and together they begin an obsession with the past. A medical student embarks on an affair with a professor and discovers revolution in disastrous consequences. An unfaithful man takes his girlfriend to his ailing mother’s for Christmas, only to find himself at the crossroads of sexual impulse and mortality. Ladykiller is peopled with characters who succumb to the allure of trouble, who find it more satisfying to ruin than create. Gill explores this terrain with empathy and wit. Shot through with comic irony and gentle satire, these are compelling stories about the foibles of the human heart. Ladykiller is a brave collection of short fiction that reveals the strange wisdom embedded in our darkest instincts.

Stories

Ladykiller

David Weisburd

Jerry Ratcliffe

Cody W. Telep

Breanne Cave

Kate Bowers

John E. Eck

Gerben Bruinsma

Elizabeth Groff

Julie Hibdon

Joshua C. Hinkle

Shane D. Johnson

Brian Lawton

Cynthia Lum

George Rengert

Travis Taniguchi

The book summarizes what we know about crime and place, and provides an agenda for future research in this area.

Place Matters

Charlotte Gill

Books

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