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Copyright 2007 Cathleen With - Vancouver Author: "Skids" and "Having Faith in the Polar Girls Prison" (2009 release)
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Cathleen With has written a book of short stories called Skids. Create
a Real Available Beach is about "Crab Park" at the foot of Main Street
in Vancouver and is the setting of a girl who is going to see her
child, who is in foster care, at Crab Park. She is a singer at the
famous Balmoral Hotel deep in the heart of the infamous Downtown
Eastside, the sight of controversial gentrification by the BC
government at Vancouver's mayor Sam Sullivan to move out the meth
addicts, crack addicts, heroin addicts, and alcoholics to make room
for beautiful apartment complexes like the new Woodward's complex to
clean up the DTES for the 2010 Olympics.
Skids includes stories from Davie Village, St. Paul's Hospital, Fraser
Street, East Hastings street, and the Downtown Eastside. The stories
in Skids also focus on patients in UBC 6A Psychiatric Unit, Vancouver
Psychiatric Assessment Unit at VGH, and recovery and rehab houses like
Westminster House in New Westminster, Turning Point in Vancouver,
Aurora House in Vancouver, Peardonville House in Abbotsford, and Great
Northern Way Detox Centre, 314 Great Northern Way, Vancouver. Most of
the characters are dealing with issues like heroin, meth, ice, crack,
cocaine, pot, weed, alcohol addictions, and sexual abuse, child
physical, mental, and sexual abuse, rape, sexual assault, and gang
rape, prostitution in Vancouver and the Lower Mainland.
Having Faith in the Polar Girls' Prison focuses on a young part
Inuvialuit, part white girl in the Western Arctic fictional town of
Jackfish Bay, off the eastern channel of the Mackenzie River near
Inuvik, Northwest Territories, who has her baby in a juvenile youth
facility. She was involved in a murder of a store clerk with her
former boyfriend. She recounts the past, especially her upbringing in
this town that has Arctic oil and gas workers, native Gwich'in and
Inuvialuit, and white social workers and teachers, near Inuvik, NT.
The Western Arctic communities lie on the vast Mackenzie River,
snaking up toward the Arctic Sea. The Dempster Highway, which ends in
Inuvik, NT, is the most northerly road in the world, only to be
leangthened by the ice road, or Iceroad that forms in November up to
Tuk, or Tuktoyaktuk. Trista, the protagonist in Having Faith in the
Polar Girl's Prison, has her mentally disabled baby, Faith, in prison,
and attempts to sort out her life, her memories of the abuse she has
suffered in this vast, cold northern community, to come to terms with
her life and to find hope in her future.
Khmer Rubbings is about a young Khmer or Cambodian boy named Sohmetea
who tries to get out of the child sex trade ring he is in in Siem
Reap, to make money from Angkor Wat temple rubbings instead.
Phreeques is about a group of former sideshow circus and carny workers
from around the world who come together to empower each other and
create their own megashow in Las Vegas.