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Biography & Autobiography Women

Every Day We Disappear

by (author) Angela Long

edited by dee Hobsbawn-Smith

Publisher
Radiant Press
Initial publish date
Sep 2018
Category
Women, Personal Memoirs
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781775183938
    Publish Date
    Sep 2018
    List Price
    $20.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781775183945
    Publish Date
    Nov 2018
    List Price
    $9.99

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Description

Playful, thought provoking and evocative, Every Day We Disappear recounts Angela Long's travels around the world. In this, her first book of non-fiction, she writes about many things: falling in love with an aspiring monk, meeting her birth mother, being hugged by a saint, tree planting and witnessing firsthand the lives of those who live in poverty. She also learns to sit still and listen. This is masterful and poetic storytelling told from the viewpoint of an adventurous spirit.

About the authors

At the age of eighteen, Angela Long flew from Toronto to Frankfurt to begin a long-term love affair with faraway lands. She hitchhiked, cycled, bussed, walked, drove, sailed, and rode trains throughout Europe, Mexico, Central America, Northern Africa, India, America, and Canada. She stopped long enough in Montreal to obtain a diploma in Ceramics, and in Vancouver to complete a degree in Creative Writing. But mostly she kept moving. She volunteered in soup kitchens, orphanages, literacy centres, and farmers' fields. She worked in restaurants, tree-planting camps, hotels, hostels, English-language schools, tutoring centres, gardens, pottery studios, and transition houses.The Toronto Star first published Angela in 2000. Since then, her poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction have appeared in numerous Canadian and International publications, including The Globe and Mail, Utne and Poetry Ireland Review. Her poem "Testament" won first place at the 2008 Surrey International Writing Conference. She has also won awards from Room, Other Voices, Accenti, and The Brownen Wallace Memorial Award. She's received grants from the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts.Her debut poetry collection, "Observations From Off the Grid," explores living off-the-grid both literally and metaphorically. Part docu-poetry, part travelogue, the book begins with her experiences teaching English in war-torn Guatemala during the early 1990s, and continues to explore other parts of the world and mind. Barbara Carter, poetry editor of The New Quarterly, writes: "Angela's poetry captures well what is said and not said. Language has its limitations. As Earl Birney said, 'words are dull servants/ who say less or more than we feel.'"Currently, Angela lives in a log cabin on Haida Gwaii trying her best to capture feelings with words. Even though she's living in paradise, she often looks wistfully at her backpack.

Angela Long's profile page

dee Hobsbawn-Smith's award-winning poetry, essays, and short fiction has appeared in publications in Canada, the USA, Scotland and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in Writing and
her MA in English Lit at the University of Saskatchewan. Her debut poetry collection, Wildness
Rushing In, published in 2014, was a finalist for Book of the Year and Best Poetry Collection at the Saskatchewan Book Awards. What Can't Be Undone: Stories was published in 2015. She's a
local foods advocate, active in Slow Food for more than twenty years, and has written a stack of books about food, including the award-winning Foodshed: An Edible Alberta Alphabet. She
served as the 35th Writer in Residence at Saskatoon Public Library in 2015. Bread & Water: Essays, published in 2021, won the Saskatchewan Book Awards' nonfiction prize. A new poetry
collection, Among the Untamed, is forthcoming next spring. dee lives on the remnants of her family's farm west of Saskatoon.

dee Hobsbawn-Smith's profile page

Excerpt: Every Day We Disappear (by (author) Angela Long; edited by dee Hobsbawn-Smith)

"It was like I'd flown to the end of the world; this was what would become of us when all the systems we held dear came toppling down. I'd stood in the centre of a roundabout, stranded until it was clear to cross. I'd watched the chaos swirl around and around, somehow none of it colliding with a sacred cow. I'd waited for it all to explode or implode or even just stop for a moment and take a breath. But it hadn't. 'A functioning anarchy,' was how a friend with a penchant for politics had described it with admiration."

Editorial Reviews

In lyrical prose that is sometimes irreverent, Angela Long takes her readers to places they might never go unaccompanied. As she searches alone for self-fulfillment and love in the British Columbia bush or a Ganges River ashram; in a Roman piazza or a Kashmiri houseboat, her readers learn about themselves too.
Lynne Bowen, author of Boss Whistle

Engaging, insightful, and delightfully entertaining. Every Day We Disappear takes memoir to a whole new level.
Andreas Schroeder,, author of Dust Ship Glory

The writing is so unaffectedly deft and alert that it would be tempting to race through this chronicle at one sitting, as if it were a deck of soothsayer's cards laid out one after another. That would be a mistake, for each card has a revelation that lingers like a poem. Angela Long travels the world and the heart's unruly byways disguised as an innocent waif, with a wickedly kind eye and ear for place, culture, and character. The innocence is real, though - vulnerable, heartsick, too easily bruised by encounters with poverty, unfairness and simple endurance, and yet at the same time it is completely and wonderingly mischievous.
Sean Virgo, author of The Shadow Mother

Angela Long writes of hash dens and tulip fields, avocados dropping like bombs in Guatemala, plotting to free an elephant in the cardamom forests beyond Madurai; she writes with a clear eye, a big heart, a wry wit. She offers tender hope for the f-word (the future) in this engaging, endearing, life-affirming book.
Susan Musgrave, author of A Taste of Haida Gwaii: Food Gathering and Feasting at the Edge of the World

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