Nanaimo authors Carol Matthews and Liza Potvin launch new book

Dog Days, a new book by Nanaimo authors Carol Matthews and Liza Potvin, explores questions of travel, friendship, the importance of family, the attraction of adventure and the comfort of home.

Matthews is retired Dean of Instruction, Human Services Programs and Community Education at Vancouver Island University, while Potvin teaches English in the Creative Writing and Journalism department.

At the time of their email correspondence in the summer of 2001, Matthews and Potvin had no idea they were actually collaborating on a book that would come to be called Dog Days. The title reflects the Roman belief that the rise of Sirius, the Dog Star, marked the onset of the dog days that resulted in increased heat, indolence, and the coming to an end of things in late summer.

The book, an email account of the dog days that followed the September 11 attacks in 2001, tracks the communication between Potvin and Matthews throughout a year during which Potvin took her two children to a monastery in Mysore, India where she taught English to Tibetan Buddhist monks. Matthews was at home on Protection Island with husband, Mike, and Victor, the energetic terrier puppy that was rescued from the streets of Nanaimo by Potvin’s children just before the family’s departure.

Potvin’s family left the dog, Victor, in the care of Matthews and her husband. Matthews recalls the plea for this arrangement from Potvin’s daughter. "Kazz phoned me and said that, if we could look after this puppy for the year during which they’d be in India, it would be ‘the best thing anyone could do for me in my entire life’." It was only later that Matthews discovered that Kazz had gone through her mother’s Rolodex and been refused by many other people before finding Victor a refuge in the Matthews home.

"Victor changed our lives," Matthews acknowledges, "and not just for that one year." When Potvin and her family returned, it was agreed that the two families would co-parent the dog, and he now goes back and forth between the two homes.

The book tracks the connections made between these two writers when they were living continents apart in very different circumstances. It explores questions of travel, friendship, the importance of family, and the attraction of adventure and the comfort of protection.

Both Matthews and Potvin have written a number of books. Matthews’s short stories were published by Oolichan Books as Incidental Music. She has also published a cancer memoir, Reflections on the C-Word, and a book about grandmothering, as well as a number of professional articles and reviews. Potvin has authored a collection of stories, The Traveller’s Hat, an award-winning memoir called White Lies for My Mother, as well as a number of academic articles and regular reviews for Event magazine. She has also published a biography of a cougar hunter turned conservationist, entitled Cougarman: Percy Dewar.

Dog Days was edited, designed, and published by VIU Creative Writing student Louise Hamilton, who made the book her project in a publishing class. Both Matthews and Potvin doubt that the book would have come into existence without the enthusiasm and skill of Hamilton, who has recently established herself as an independent publisher.

"This book is truly a collaborative effort," says Potvin. "It was a collaboration first between two correspondents, and then between a student and other faculty in the Creative Writing and Journalism Department of VIU." She notes that Professor Rhonda Bailey in that department has encouraged students to venture out on their own, and several successful publishers on Vancouver Island are indebted to her for her support. Now Louise Hamilton follows in their footsteps. "It was a lot of fun working with this project," says Hamilton, "and it’s exciting that it’s about to be launched into the world."

A standing room only crowd attended a book launch for Dog Days at Back Page Books at #5 – 321 Wesley Street earlier this week.

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Dog Days: Between the Lines by Carol Matthews and Liza Potvin; with a foreword by Marilyn Bowering. Louise Hamilton: Nanaimo, 2009. ISBN 978-0-9812795-0-3. $16.95

Editor’s Note: Matthews is retired Dean of Instruction, Human Services Programs and Community Education at Vancouver Island University, while Potvin teaches English.