Books
Ivan's award winning and critically acclaimed books, available for purchase.
recent books
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Ivan E. Coyote is one of Canada's best-loved storytellers; her honest, wry, plain-spoken tales of growing up in the Yukon and living out loud on the west coast have attracted readers and live audiences around the world. For many years, Ivan has performed in high schools, where her talks have inspired and galvanized many young people to embrace their own sense of self and to be proud of who they are. One in Every Crowd, Ivan's eighth book with Arsenal Pulp Press, is her first specifically for queer youth.
Comprised of new stories and others culled from previous collections, One in Every Crowd is for anyone who has ever felt different or alone in their struggle to be true to themselves. Included are stories about Ivan's own tomboy past in Canada's north, where playing hockey and wearing pants were the norm; and about her adult life in the big city, where she encounters both cruelty and kindness in unexpected places. Then there are the tales of family and friends who live their lives by example, like Francis, the curly-haired little boy who likes to wear dresses, and the brave kids she meets at queer youth camp.
Funny, inspiring, and full of heart, One in Every Crowd is really for everyone; it's about embracing and celebrating difference and feeling comfortable in one's own skin, no matter what the circumstance.
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Ivan E. Coyote is a master storyteller and performer; her beautiful, funny stories about growing up queer in the Canadian north and living out loud on Canada's west coast have attracted big audiences whether gay, straight, or otherwise. Missed Her is Ivan's fifth story collection, following 2008's Lambda Literary Award-nominated The Slow Fix, 2004's Ferro-Grumley Award-nominated Loose End, and 2006's Bow Grip, her novel that was named a Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association (now in development as a feature film).
In her passionate and humourous new collection, Ivan takes readers on an intimate journey, both literal and figurative, through the experiences of her life: from her year spent in eastern Canada,to her return to the west coast, to travels inbetween. Whether discussing the politics of being a butch with a pet lapdog, or befriending an effeminate young man at a gay camp, or revisiting a forty-year old heartbreak around her grandmother’s kitchen, Ivan traverses love, gender and identity with a wistful, perceptive eye, and a warmth that's as embracing and powerful as Ivan herself.
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Shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award (lesbian fiction)
Ivan E. Coyote is one of Canada's most acclaimed storytellers; her first three collections were insightful, deeply personal stories about gender, identity, and community. Ivan's most recent book, Bow Grip (2006), was her first novel; it won the ReLit Award, was shortlisted for the Ferro-Grumley Fiction Prize in the US, and was named a Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association.
With The Slow Fix, Ivan returns to her short story roots in a collection that is disarming, warm, and funny while at the same time subverting our pre-conceived notions of gender roles. In "By Any Other Name," Ivan gets into some serious male bonding with her Uncle Rob; in "The Curse?" a cousin's stepdaughter helps her to overcome her lifelong dread of buying tampons; and in the title story, she does her best to fix what's wrong in the world by telling the homophobe in the barber's seat next to hers to shut up.
Ivan excels at finding the small yet significant truths in our everyday gestures and interactions. By doing so, she helps us to embrace not what makes us women or men, but human beings.
Now in its second printing!
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Winner of the ReLit Award for Best Novel
Shortlisted for the Ferro-Grumley Award for Women's Fiction
An American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book
Ivan E. Coyote is acclaimed as one of North America's most beguiling storytellers; Ivan's honest, down-to-earth tales, many of which are based on personal experience, are compelling for their simple human truths. Her 2005 story collection, Loose End, was also shortlisted for the prestigious Ferro-Grumley Award for Women's Fiction.
Bow Grip, Ivan's long-awaited first novel, is a breathtaking story about love and loneliness, and the long road one must travel between them. Joey is a good-hearted, fortysomething mechanic from small-town Alberta whose wife has recently left him for another woman. When a stranger named James approaches his shop and agrees to purchase a beat-up blue Volvo in exchange for a beautiful, hand-crafted cello, Joey sees it as an opportunity to finally make some overdue changes in his life.
But some troubling suspicions about James, and a desire to close the door on his failed marriage, compels Joey to hit the road and travel to Calgary, the big city by the Bow River. He stations himself at a rundown motel, where he struggles to learn how to play the cello, and strangers with their own complicated pasts―an older gay man, a single mother―become confidants. With quiet authority, Bow Grip is about one man's real rite of passage―trying to keep the ghosts of personal history at bay with a heart that's as big as the endless prairie sky.
German-language rights sold to Verlag Krug & Schadenberg
Now in its third printing -
Ivan E. Coyote has developed a reputation as one of North America's most disarming storytellers; her tales of life on the roads and trails of the North as well as rural America are rich in their plainspoken, honest truths. In Loose End, her third story collection, Ivan focuses her attention on the city: urban life, specifically in the East End of Vancouver, a diverse neighborhood of all types—old, young, gay, straight, white, black, Asian—communing at local coffee bars over hot rods, the art of skinny-dipping, and changes in the weather. Ivan presides over this circus of activities with her cool gaze, whether it's trying to impress the woman with the hot tub next door, or showing her mother how to use a cordless drill.
Ivan's world is the world of being out and open and unafraid; it's also a world in which no ghettos—racial, cultural, or defined by sexuality or gender—exist. With the calm, observant eye of a master storyteller, Ivan E. Coyote shows us how to break free of the rigors of authority and be true to ourselves, warts and all.
Finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award (Publishing Triangle, US) -
In Close to Spider Man—which won a Danuta Gleed Literary Award—readers were introduced to the crystalline storytelling voice of Ivan Coyote. The talent evident in that first collection is confirmed with One Man's Trash, a series of connected stories about searching out new frontiers, and being on the road.
The characters in One Man's Trash make evident the child in all of us, when heroes and superheroes won the day. Tales of being on the road: to the northern tundra or the southern desert, through cities and towns, on horses, in trucks and vans, with friends, family, and lovers.
This is a collection of journeys, adventures, and quests. The moral of these stories is that the games people play are not much different than those played by children. In achingly personal tones, Ivan Coyote paints beautiful and honest portraits of life, the road, and the spirits within. -
Close to Spider Man is Ivan Coyote's debut collection of stories. A collection of connected stories whose female narrators seek out lives for themselves amidst the lonely, breathtaking landscape of the Yukon. The young women in Ivan Coyote's deeply personal stories are looking to make a break from their circumstances, but the North is in their bones: so is their connections to family, friends, and other women. Like the protagonist in the title story, a waitress whose attempts to help a young co-worker saddled with a lunatic father finds her running across rooftops and climbing ladders; by getting close to Spider Man, she gets closer to freedom.
Startling in their intimacy, the stories in Close to Spider Man make up a moving scrapbook of what it's like to be a young queer woman in the North, journeys imbued with the colours of a prescient sexuality and an honest heart.
Runner-up, Danuta Gleed Award for Short-Fiction -
Edited by Ivan E. Coyote and Zena Sharman
Named a Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library AssociationLambda Literary Award finalist
In the summer of 2009, butch writer and storyteller Ivan Coyote and gender researcher and femme dynamo Zena Sharman wrote down a wish-list of their favourite queer authors; they wanted to continue and expand the butch-femme conversation. The result is Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. The stories in these pages resist simple definitions. The people in these stories defy reductive stereotypes and inflexible categories. The pages in this book describe the lives of an incredible diversity of people whose hearts also pounded for some reason the first time they read or heard the words "butch" or "femme."
Contributors such as Jewelle Gomez (The Gilda Stories), Thea Hillman (Intersex), S. Bear Bergman (Butch is a Noun), Chandra Mayor (All the Pretty Girls), Amber Dawn (Sub Rosa), Anna Camilleri (Brazen Femme), Debra Anderson (Code White), Anne Fleming (Anomaly), Michael V. Smith (Cumberland), and Zoe Whittall (Bottle Rocket Hearts) explore the parameters, history, and power of a multitude of butch and femme realities. It's a raucous, insightful, sexy, and sometimes dangerous look at what the words butch and femme can mean in today’s ever-shifting gender landscape, with one eye on the past and the other on what is to come.
Includes a foreword by Joan Nestle, renowned femme author and editor of The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, a landmark anthology originally published in 1992.
Now in its second printing
About
Ivan Coyote was born and raised in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. An award-winning author of six collections of short stories, one novel, three CD’s, four short films and a renowned performer. More »
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Books by Ivan
One In Every Crowd
Short Stories
Missed Her
Short Stories
The Slow Fix
Short Stories
Bow Grip
Novel
Loose End
Short Stories
One Man's Trash
Short Stories
Close to Spider Man
Short Stories
Persistence - All Ways Butch and Femme
Short Stories
