Sourcebooks for Our Drawings by Danny Jacobs
• Winner of the The Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick Book Award for Non-Fiction
Sourcebooks for Our Drawings is a book steeped in place: the rural idyll of a Southeastern New Brunswick farmhouse, the author's childhood suburbia, and the commercial sprawl of contemporary Atlantic Canada. Each piece provides a snapshot of New Brunswick in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, a place at once unique and startlingly not-so in our globalized world. Part fragmentary memoir, part genre hybrid, and entirely a compilation of familial lore, Jacobs’ new book—his first in prose—is a singular and idiosyncratic portrait of New Brunswick, an alternate history and an antidote to dry regionalism. A formally innovative and very personal work, Sourcebooks for Our Drawings nevertheless addresses universal concerns about our fraught relationships with nostalgia and memory.
"Sourcebooks is a collection of essays that startles, illuminates, engages. In writing equal parts deeply personal and deeply (deeply) stylish, Jacobs puts his own life up for inspection, writing about libraries, family illness, a town that can’t stop lighting itself on fire. This collection is a handful of confetti and loose change tossed into a ceiling fan: bedazzlement and danger within a single moment." – Richard Kelly Kemick, author of I Am Herod