The Language of Family Stories of Bonds and Belonging

What is family? Is it defined by blood and birth? Or can we invite whomever we want into that intimate embrace? The Language of Family: Stories of Bonds and Belonging invites readers to pull up a guest chair at the family table. Twenty contributors from across British Columbia—including museum curators, cultural luminaries, writers and thinkers young and old from our First Nations, LGBTQ, Japanese Canadian and Punjabi communities, amongst others—share their vastly differing perspectives on what family means in this superb collection of personal narratives, poems and essays. This collection will provoke, tease, enlighten and infuriate. Isn’t that what family does best?

Michelle van der Merwe has been the publisher at the Royal BC Museum and Archives since 2015. Her background includes design and journalism, and her extensive editing experience comes from many years of both in-house and contract projects that have included fiction and non-fiction books, magazines and corporate communications. Michelle has been a contributing editor at Geist Magazine since 2004 and was a member-at-large on the board of the Magazine Association of BC in 2014–2015. She has been a director on the National Executive Council of the Editors’ Association of Canada for the past four years and is an active member of both the Association of Book Publishers of BC and the Association of Canadian Publishers.