On the Threshold

In 1993, a group of five Kingston women--T. Anne Archer, Mary Cavanagh, Elizabeth Greene, Tara Kainer, Janice Kirk--began to compile ananthology about Canada at the point where one millennium becomes another. As the newly-formed Foxglove Collective, they solicited manuscripts that reflected origins (how the past shapes the present), life at the end of this century, and projections past the year 2000. They envisioned a book that wove together established, emerging, and previously unpublished voices from the Yukon to the Maritimes: that book is On the Threshold: Writing Toward the Year 2000.

No millennium library would be complete without a copy of this timely and unique collection of literary musings by some of the nation's best. A wonderful weave of poetry and prose, this anthology reflects on moments both private and public, personal and political, which have formed the crucible for life in the twenty-first century as we know it. Tasked with commenting both on the century that lay behind and the century that beckons, each author fashioned a piece exemplary of the crises, successes and transformations inherent in an arc spanning more than a hundred years of nation-building and social upheaval. Whether unabashedly optimistic or unapologetically critical, these writers make their peace with the past while invoking the future.