Part family memoir, part poetry, part love letter to Newfoundland and its people, The Bosun Chair is a lyrical exploration of how we are fortified by the places of our foremothers and forefathers and by how they endured.

Like 'ballycater,' the ice that gathers in harbours along the coast, Jennifer Bowering Delisle gathers fragments of history, family lore, and poetry—both her own and that of her great-grandparents—to tell stories of shipwrecks, war, resettlement, and men and women's labour in early twentieth-century Newfoundland. With deftness and haunting imagery, The Bosun Chair reveals the inherent gaps in ancestral history and the drive to understand a story that can never fully be told.

Jennifer Bowering Delisle (she/her) is the author of the lyric family memoir The Bosun Chair (NeWest 2017). She is a settler living in Edmonton/ Amiskwacîwâskahican/ Treaty 6 territory.

Jennifer Bowering Delisle’s lyric family memoir The Bosun Chair was published with NeWest press in 2017. She has a PhD in English, and is also the author of The Newfoundland Diaspora: Mapping the Literature of Outmigration. She joined the board of NeWest in 2018, and regularly teaches creative writing at the University of Alberta Faculty of Extension. She is a settler living in Edmonton/ Amiskwacîwâskahican/ Treaty 6 territory with her husband and two young children.

Jennifer Bowering Delisle's profile page