Demeter Press has recently published What We Hold in Our Hands, 10 stories in a debut collection by Kim Aubrey.
The stories explore the difficult choices inherent in caring for children, siblings and partners, and the limits and limitlessness of love. They are about a teen mom longing for a different kind of life, a divorced dad struggling to come to terms with his ex-wife’s involvement in their son’s life, a woman caring for a dying younger sister and a granddaughter wondering about the man her grandmother killed.
“Kim Aubrey writes deftly orchestrated stories of domestic surfaces disturbed by memories, dreams and unspoken impulses,” writes Governor General’s Award-winning novelist Douglas Glover in an endorsement. “Aubrey’s narrators are sharply observant and observed yet often haunted by unexpressed desires. A brave first collection.”
“This is a book for grownups,” writes author K.D. Miller in another endorsement. “It contains not a shred of sentimentality. Its joys are hard-won and its smiles tinged with sadness. That said, the writing is beautifully sensuous, giving the reader exact shades of colour and subtleties of fragrance and sound. These stories are all about difficulty of loving, and the even greater difficulty of being loved.”
Demeter Press is an independent feminist press committed to publishing peer-reviewed scholarly work, fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction by and about mothers, mothering and family issues. It is the publishing arm of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, founded and directed by York women’s studies Professor Andrea O’Reilly.