The Earth Remembers Everything is a masterful blend of history, travel and fictional narrative, tracing the author’s journeys to some of the most difficult destinations in the world: the Cui Chi Tunnels in Vietnam, Hiroshima in Japan and Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, First Nations sites such as Mosquito Lake on Moresby Island, Haida Gwaii and Chinlac, and a deserted Carrier village at the confluence of the Stuart and Nechako rivers, where the Chilcotin massacred the Carrier in 1745.

These places where violent eruptions occurred throughout the history of humanity have created deep cracks in the emotional bonds between the people who were there, as well as forever transforming the spirit and essence of the land where the violence occurred. In this first book by Adrienne Fitzpatrick, she struggles with how to speak the unspeakable, and questions what it is that we find so compelling about the places we are drawn to. The answer, she finds, lies in the memories that are stored in the earth.

The Earth Remembers Everything is an intimate, powerful story in which Place is the main character and we are taken along to bear witness to these sites that still hold the sadness and secrets of the past.

Adrienne Fitzpatrick grew up in the north and returned to complete her Masters in English at the University of Northern British Columbia; her creative thesis won the John Harris Prize for the best in Northern Fiction. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Prairie Fire, CV2, subTerrain, The New Quarterly and Thimbleberry. Her art reviews have appeared in Border Crossings, C magazine and Canadian Art and book reviews in the BC Review. She explores the phenomenological experience of place in her work and her first book, The Earth Remembers Everything, is based on her experiences travelling to massacre sites in Europe, Asia, the Central Interior and Northwest Coast of BC; it was also short-listed for the 2014 George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature. Instructions for a Flood, based on her experiences of living and working with Indigenous Nations in the Central Interior and Northwest of BC, was published by Caitlin Press in Spring 2023.

Adrienne Fitzpatrick's profile page

• Short-listed, George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature