This and That : The Lost Stories of Emily Carr; Revised and Updated

A new edition of Emily Carr’s final writings, This and That is a collection of autobiographical stories that gives fans of her work insight into the artist’s childhood, education, and development as a painter and writer.

Written in the last two years of Emily Carr’s life, the stories collected in This and That (which Carr wrote under the working title “Hundreds and Thousands”) were buried in the BC Archives for decades after their author’s death, not published in book form until 2007. This revised edition includes five more stories and an updated introduction, and is illustrated with some of Carr’s own artwork.

Centred on the Carr home on Government Street, the collection includes vivid snapshots of family life, told from the frustrating but often comical position of being the youngest of four strong-minded daughters. We meet beloved family pets, a plant-loving father with a fearsome temper, a hated aunt, siblings, neighbours, shopkeepers, and local personalities.

In these pages Carr traces her beginnings as a writer, her time at art school in San Francisco, visits to places like Nootka and Skidegate, and the early reaction to the change in both her painting style and subject matter these trips brought about.

Carr’s stories conjure the world of folk tales with a generous dash of Nancy Mitford. Taken together these anecdotes comprise a slant-wise autobiography of an artist ahead of her time in Victoria at the turn of the twentieth century.

Emily Carr (1871–1945) was a painter and writer whose lifelong inspiration was the coastal environment of British Columbia. Though widely known as an artist, she turned to writing later in her life and produced six autobiographical works including Klee Wyck (1941), her debut collection of stories about Indigenous life in Canada, which received the Governor General's Award for literature in 1942.

Ann-Lee Switzer is a historian, researcher, and writer with an interest in the Japanese Canadian experience as well as the work of Emily Carr. She is the editor of This and That: The Lost Stories of Emily Carr, which she discovered in the BC Archives. She is co-author, with her husband, Gordon, of Gateway to Promise: Canada’s First Japanese Community, which won second prize in the BC Historical Federation’s historical writing awards in 2013. Over the years she has written for magazines and newspapers. She and her husband live in Victoria, BC.