For this week’s Small Press Saturday, I’d like to introduce you to a press with which I have a more personal connection. So full disclosure, Edmonton’s NeWest Press gave me my first real job in the publishing world… my first two actually, first as a Production Assistant, then as a Promotions Coordinator. But NeWest’s literary credentials easily stand on their own merits.

Founded in 1977, NeWest Press grew out of a literary magazine, NeWest Review, established two years prior by such CanLit notables as Rudy Wiebe, Douglas Barbour, and Diane Bessai. Still going strong after more than four decades, NeWest has benefited from a continued connection with these literary roots, with Doug still serving as the President of the press. These days NeWest publishes literary fiction and nonfiction, poetry, drama, and even a series of mystery novels, with a particular interest in books by Western Canadian authors. Their list of awards includes being five-time winners of Publisher of the Year at the Alberta Book Publishing Awards, and most recently having Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear by Heidi L.M. Jacobs win the 73rd Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.

Back when I worked there, NeWest had its offices up on the third floor of the Tipton Block on Edmonton’s historic Whyte Ave, above the original location for the now shuttered Greenwoods’ Bookshoppe. As such, one of the key qualifications for being a NeWest production assistant was being able to carry boxes of books up and down those stairs, useful experience for a lifetime living, and moving, with books.

But it was my time as Promotions Coordinator that I remember most fondly, in particular getting to take Thomas Wharton on his first promotional tour for Icefields, still one of my favourite novels.

Icefields was Tom’s first published novel, part of NeWest Press’ Nunatak First Fiction series. Set in Jasper, Alberta, Icefields weaves together a story of exploration and discovery in which the mountains and glaciers are as much characters as the people. Begun in a creative writing class at the University of Alberta taught by Rudy Wiebe, Icefields was eventually picked up by NeWest, where Rudy then served as the Board Editor for the final publication.

This publishing story comes full circle with the second NeWest novel I want to share with you, Bruce Cinnamon’s brilliant and powerful The Melting Queen. Twenty-four years later and now himself a creative writing professor at the University of Alberta, Tom taught Bruce in the creative writing class where The Melting Queen first took form, and, as Rudy did for him before, Tom served as Board Editor for NeWest Press in releasing The Melting Queen, the 48th title added to the Nunatak First Fiction series.

The Melting Queen presents a vivid alternate history of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada’s northernmost capital city. Where glaciers and mountains were characters in Tom’s Icefields, the river and the winter are characters for Bruce in The Melting Queen, but also real historical figures intermixed with a rich cast of fascinating characters I can only wish were real. At its heart, The Melting Queen is an emotional but ultimately liberating story about the search for self-identity, cultural meaning, and truth.

And at its heart, NeWest Press is its own kind of search for identity and meaning, giving a literary voice to western Canada and the prairies, and we are all the richer for it.

I encourage you to check out their current catalogue on their website.

Happy reading!

– Winston