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9781772584240

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Don't Tell not only spills the tea about family secrets; it also delves into the conditions of their endurance in old letters and faded photos, and their revelations via DNA testing, slips of the tongue, and uncomfortable silences. This collection reminds us of the lengths families go to maintain silence, safety, or respectability, and of the courage of those who reach into that dark rain barrel of the past and draw up the truth, dripping and wriggling, into the present day. If you've ever discovered - or been - the family secret, Don't Tell is the book for you. --Tanis MacDonald, Professor, Department of English and Film Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University, and author of seven books, including Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female A secret becomes an ugly starved thing...writes one of the authors in this compelling anthology. Co-edited by sisters Arleen Pare and Donna McCart Sharkey, tales of sadness, loss, murder, grief--even humour--emerge through poetry and story. This brave collection redefines what secrets we believe should be disclosed. With each quest, the revelation of a once toxic family secret creates a path to closure and understanding, or to continued searching. Readers may feel uneasy about the skeletons cloistered in their own lives; but, not telling is no longer an option. --Barbara Herringer, Ph.D. Dean, School of Health and Human Services (ret'd), Camosun College Family secrets breed silence and shame, for which language alone is the antidote. The stories and poems in this volume transmute shame into understanding and empathy. They will offer insight, comfort, confidence, and purpose to anyone whose family history has been scarred by mental illness, adoption, suicide, abandonment, crises of identity, or intergenerational trauma. --Susan Olding, author of Big Reader and Pathologies: A Life in Essays

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Donna McCart Sharkey grew up in Montreal and now lives in Ottawa. Her most recent books are Falling Together: A Family's Memoir of Mental Illness and Grief and Always With Me: Parents Talk About the Death of a Child. She is a former professor at the State University of New York and her research has been published in numerous academic journals. Arleen Paré is a Victoria writer with nine collections of poetry, including a recent chapbook. She has been short-listed for the BC Dorothy Livesay BC Award for Poetry and has won the American Golden Crown Award for Poetry, the Victoria Butler Book Prize, a CBC Bookie Award, and a Governor Generals' Award for Poetry.

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