“As soon as she was gone from this earth, I felt an overwhelming need for more of her. I had to find her again. But how do you find someone after they’re gone for good?”

After her mother succumbed to a rare form of dementia, Myrl Coulter turned the eulogy she had written for the funeral into a series of meditations on absence. The result is fifteen personal narrative essays that move through the vacations, holidays, special occasions, and ordinary days each year brings. Coulter reaches for the mother who is gone, yet ever-present, no matter where she is or what she is doing. In every captivating detail of Coulter’s world, A Year of Days offers readers an intimate odyssey of experience and catharsis.

Myrl Coulter was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She has a PhD from the University of Alberta where she taught in the Department of English and Film Studies for eight years. She won a 1995 National Screen Institute Drama Prize for her short screenplay Willpower. In previous careers, Myrl has been a cashier, a blank clerk, an X-ray technician, a stay-at-home mom, a receptionist, a sales representative, a small business owner, and a stills photographer in the film industry. She has been a writer all her life. Myrl lives in Edmonton, Alberta.

Myrl Coulter's profile page

• Winner, Independent Publisher Book Awards, Bronze in Essay/Creative Non-Fiction
• Runner-up, INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards / Foreword Reviews

"A Year of Days is light without ever treading Hallmark grounds, funny while still acknowledging the gravitas of death and full of the remembered warmth or loss of not only the 'special' days, but also the days that lie around them by the hundreds: days at the lake, Mexican holidays and days in which we simply move and live. 'Keep moving,' Coulter writes. 'Movement is life.'"

Alberta Views

#3 on the Edmonton Journal's Bestsellers list (Edmonton Nonfiction) for the week of May 22, 2015

Edmonton Journal

"The book spans a single calendar year, but Coulter says what it’s really about is the process of living through the same dates and events, time and time again, even as our experiences of them change dramatically as we age." [Full article at http://bit.ly/1E0p6TF]

Edmonton Journal

On the Edmonton Journal's Bestsellers list (Edmonton Nonfiction) for the week of May 8, 2015

Edmonton Journal