What is family? Is it defined by blood and birth? Or can we invite whomever we want into that intimate embrace?

The Royal BC Museum's new book, 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 – museum curators, cultural luminaries, writers and thinkers young and old, from First Nations, LGBTQ, Japanese Canadian and Punjabi communities, among others – share their vastly different 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's profile page

STORIES, POEMS AND ESSAYS BY Sadhu Binning, Martha Black, Don Bourdon, Kathryn Bridge, Tzu-I Chung, Shushma Datt, Mo Dhaliwal, Zoé Duhaime, Barbara Findlay, Lynn Greenhough, Judith Guichon, Lorne Hammond, Joy Kogawa, Patrick Lane, Jack Lohman, Luke Marston, Bev Sellars, Monique Gray Smith, Ann-Bernice Thomas and Larry Wong.

"Connecting is exactly what The Language of Family does. It takes us out of our own ideas of family and offers something different. It offers stories that, in their very difference, serve to unite us instead of break us apart." — Claire Sicherman, BC Booklook