Oi! I could dance a jig 8) Patrick lane the first VANCOUVER ISLAND resident to win 2005 British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.
And for one of the best books I have ever read!!!!! My day has been made 8)
Patrick Lane's newest book, There Is a Season - A Memoir, which will also be published in the USA by Shambhala Publications in the fall of 2005 and retitled What the Stones Remember, is Patrick Lane's exquisite - and shocking - memoir of love, despair, hope, and staggering courage. One of Canada's finest poets, Patrick Lane is not only an accomplished writer, he is also an avid gardener and an observant naturalist. He lives on Vancouver Island, a place of uncommon beauty where the climate is mild, the air is soft, wildlife is still plentiful, and the growing season lasts all year.
Less well known about Patrick Lane is that he is an alcoholic and, in 2000, came face-to-face with the inevitable choice: he could continue drinking and expect to die in short order, or he could quit and live. He went into rehab and, in the first month of the new century, returned to his beloved garden, shaky but alive. For a year, he stayed close to home, gardening and slowly retrieving himself from the grip of alcohol and cocaine dependency, all the while casting his mind back over his life, especially his childhood years, searching among the memories he'd tried to drown for the roots of his addiction.
In There Is a Season - A Memoir, Patrick Lane takes readers on the roller-coaster ride of his first alcohol-free year, expertly weaving memories of his hard early life in the interior of British Columbia with wondrous descriptions of the activity in his garden - his own and the lives of the plants, animals, and insects that also inhabit it. Lane has gardened for as long as he can remember, and his garden's life has become inseparable from his own. A new bloom on a plant, a skirmish among the birds, the way a tree bends in the wind, and the slow, measured change of seasons, invariably bring to his mind an episode from his eventful past.
And for one of the best books I have ever read!!!!! My day has been made 8)
Patrick Lane's newest book, There Is a Season - A Memoir, which will also be published in the USA by Shambhala Publications in the fall of 2005 and retitled What the Stones Remember, is Patrick Lane's exquisite - and shocking - memoir of love, despair, hope, and staggering courage. One of Canada's finest poets, Patrick Lane is not only an accomplished writer, he is also an avid gardener and an observant naturalist. He lives on Vancouver Island, a place of uncommon beauty where the climate is mild, the air is soft, wildlife is still plentiful, and the growing season lasts all year.
Less well known about Patrick Lane is that he is an alcoholic and, in 2000, came face-to-face with the inevitable choice: he could continue drinking and expect to die in short order, or he could quit and live. He went into rehab and, in the first month of the new century, returned to his beloved garden, shaky but alive. For a year, he stayed close to home, gardening and slowly retrieving himself from the grip of alcohol and cocaine dependency, all the while casting his mind back over his life, especially his childhood years, searching among the memories he'd tried to drown for the roots of his addiction.
In There Is a Season - A Memoir, Patrick Lane takes readers on the roller-coaster ride of his first alcohol-free year, expertly weaving memories of his hard early life in the interior of British Columbia with wondrous descriptions of the activity in his garden - his own and the lives of the plants, animals, and insects that also inhabit it. Lane has gardened for as long as he can remember, and his garden's life has become inseparable from his own. A new bloom on a plant, a skirmish among the birds, the way a tree bends in the wind, and the slow, measured change of seasons, invariably bring to his mind an episode from his eventful past.