Shirley Harshenin's Book Recommendations

Shirley Harshenin's Book Recommendations:

My most recent reading obsessions are the storytelling game-changers, Dear Current Occupant: A Memoir, by Chelene Knight and Persephone's Children: A Life in Fragments, by Rowan McCandless. Written in creative, structurally inventive forms befitting of fragmented memory, these deeply personal, courageous stories moved, excited, and hugely inspired me. 

On a lighter note, the books I have read and read and read are hands down the original Lucy Maud Montgomery Anne of Green Gables series. The pages are worn, corners curled, covers faded and creased, but when I open and start reading, they’re brand new all over again. Unforgettable characters, kindred spirits, and heartwarming, often “tragical” storylines, pluck me out of everyday life and plop me onto the rolling hills and blossom-lined paths of 1870s Prince Edward Island, where all my worldly worries slip into the “blue—blue—blue” "past all modes and tenses of emotion” Lake of Shining Waters. 

Shirley Harshenin writes from her home in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia. She believes in angels, caffeine, and the human spirit’s extraordinary resilience. Her work has been published in Room Magazine, Contrary Magazine, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Entropy: Woven, Nailed, Crack the Spine, The Nasiona, and others. Her "Invisible Walls: A Decentred Hermit Crab Sticky Note Narrative" was published in the 2022 creative nonfiction issue of The Fiddlehead. www.shirleyharshenin.ca