Filidh publishing February 2026 newsletter

March 1, 2026

Zoe

http://filidhbooks.com Phone: 250-589-2385 E-mail: info@filidhbooks.com

Volume 3, Issue 02

February, 2026

Welcome to the February Newsletter

Your gateway to stories, events, and creative community.

New & Noteworthy

To Tumbler Ridge Residents:

With great sadness, we have learned of the events in Tumbler Ridge and offer our support and compassion. Be strong, neighbours. We see you. The porchlight is on. May comfort and peace find their way home.

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Join us at the Local Authors’ Spring Book Fair on March 14th

Offers of the Month –

VIP Book Club Discount

Buy 4 or more copies of any Filidh title and get 25% off plus a FREE Book Club Discussion Guide. Enter code at checkout VIPBOOKCLU

BOGO on 2025 Releases

Buy One from our 2025 New Releases and Get One Free. Enter code BOGO2025 at checkout. Share your love of reading or find a new favourite author. Filidhbooks.com/New

FREE Books!

Join our official Reviewers’ Team and get free books. Email info@filidhbooks.com for details.

In the Spotlight –

Author of the Month: Allan Jefferson Reid

Allan Jefferson Reid was born and raised on British Columbia’s West Coast, where he has lived most of his life, but for a notable twenty-one-year absence to Alberta. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English, with distinction, from Athabasca University. Since October 2016, he has been contributing to the monthly restaurant review, Voracious, published in Victoria’s Monday Magazine (a Black Press masthead). Allan has one previously published short story, Son-of-a-Bitch, that appears in The Platinum Collection (Filidh Publishing, 2023), and he is currently working on an ambitious near-future dystopian trilogy. Allan and his husband, Dennis, have enjoyed thirty-six years living and working together and enjoying travel, especially when experiencing other cultures, but he is always happy to return home to Victoria, where culture is closely tied to the marriage of ocean to mountain, and the diversity of life on earth is ever on display while living every day.

Read a Page Excerpt of the Month (The Guardian, by Allan Jefferson Reid)

Tanya barehands the dark rubbery stems and the slimy, squishy mess of kelp leaves to disentangle a length of yellow rope and stuff it into the large black trash bag that Mr. Thompson gave her. Standing, she surveys her fellow students spread out across sand, rock and driftwood, heads bowed, searching.

The band of kelp, freshly washed up and stretching the whole length of the beach is reminiscent of a cloud’s shadow under a clear blue sky…and it contains a lot of litter, as if returned by the sea, unwanted. As if to say “It’s yours. You deal with it.”

Using tongs, she picks up a sea-stained baseball cap, Seattle Mariner’s logo centred on white above a blue visor, and wonders how much of all this comes from the other side of the strait, where the Olympic Mountains rise like a wall rising above the marine layer fog bank. She stuffs the cap in the bag and snags a paper cup with its ubiquitous green mermaid logo. The Coho ferry that mere moments ago had sailed past is now a speck fading under that distant fog. Sometimes, when the light is right and the air is clear, she can make out the unnatural angles of Port Angeles’ seafront structures, but today, one would never guess that anyone lives over there.

Something blue catches Tanya’s eye. Mom will be thrilled to receive a piece of blue beach glass. Not so much glass of any colour on beaches anymore, but blue glass is extra rare. In Mom’s days, all pop and juice were sold in glass bottles, but this blue is just a chip of plastic, and she drops it into her bag. Was micro-glass as much of a threat as microplastics are today?

Something large and unnaturally orange draws her attention away from the kelp and up into the piles of driftwood and boulders that back this stretch of beach. No one searching nearby. Clambering boldly over driftwood logs and jagged rocks…a life vest, its outer covering worn, torn and stringy, its inner foam exposed and yellowed, pinned under a log clearly too heavy to move. Wracking her brain. Looking around. Some kind of a tool. She spots Liam, skateboard strapped to his back, head down like the others, sifting though a pile of sea-polished stones with his tongs, black bag hanging limp in his other gloved hand. “Liam!”

Liam wedges himself, unencumbered back against the log, Chucks pressed against the nearest boulder, knees bent ninety degrees, giving every ounce of his body might to help Tanya move that log, but it’s no use. Returning to the beach, he searches among the piled driftwood looking for a suitable piece. Something long but light enough to be maneuverable, thick enough not to break under pressure, and with one end narrower than the other.

“I’ll wedge the narrow end under the log, and use that big rock behind as a fulcrum,” he explains. “Help me carry it.”

Even this small log is heavier than Tanya expects, but crab-walking together, one at either end of the log dangling between legs, lifting on down-stretched arms, they manipulate it up and into place above the greater log. She helps Liam work the wedge end into a void between the log and a nearby rock until he declares himself satisfied, and heaves downward with all his strength. The big log moves, but not enough.

“I’m going to do it again, and you shove stones underneath.”

Tanya obeys. After several adjustments, adding many more and larger stones and smaller bits of driftwood, the life vest comes free…

(Want to read more? Purchase A Whale of a Tale: Anthology of the Sea at https://filidhbooks.com/new

Come Say Hi

Friendly Authors Networking Socials (F.A.N.S.)

March 14, 2026, 10:30 am – Noon

Tillicum Mall, near the bottom of the escalator,

in the Local Authors’ Spring Book Fair.

info@filidhbooks.com

(https://www.facebook.com/groups/295883593397579)

Just the Deets

The February FANS meeting focused on sharing samples of our writing and upcoming vendor opportunities. Tillicum Mall has granted us a good space for our March 14 event. We are going to work together to support a FANS table at the Moss Street market (weekends). Interested authors, please contact. Space can be arranged for authors at Buccaneer Days (May 8-10) on the Filidh table. Ron has applied for a booth at Pride (July).

Monique Jacob shared the following excerpt at our meeting:

Paper Prisons by Monique Jacob

The stack of paper in the corner just keeps growing. It leans to the left and threatens to avalanche with each new story I add.

My very own literary burial mound.

There are no essays in the pile, no brilliant theses, no letters or informative articles. Just stories about people who come knocking on my imagination and won’t go away. None of them are real. It’s all just fiction and fantasy.

That’s what I keep telling myself.

It started with an insistent voice in my head. She just wanted to come out and play, so I put pen to paper and gave her something to do. Then her friends showed up and I dutifully wrote them into her story. They lived it up and they had fun, but now they’re on the bottom of the pile. Not their fault, I know, but there were other voices and they wanted to play a different game.

Now they all languish in their paper prisons, shackled in ink, sentenced to an eternity trapped between mouldy pages that they have no hope of escaping.

It’s likely they’re frustrated and angry with me; after all, their only crime was having a story to tell. They must regret stumbling into my thoughts.

Even more tragic are the abandoned, half-finished tales. I was once passionate about each one, eager to sort them into their proper adventures before they lost interest in me and vanished, like those dream tendrils of ragged mist that you can never recapture. But it turns out I was the betrayer, the fickle one easily enticed by each shiny new story that came along.

It must be getting crowded in there. Are my earlier victims suffocating beneath newer, unsuspecting hopefuls? I pray they haven’t begun to seep through the pages onto those below. Clashing personalities and territorial squabbles would be the least of their problems. I fear for the innocents who might encounter my more predatory characters, and shudder to think of the horrors that would ensue in that mountain of pulp.

They don’t deserve their fate. They should be celebrated, read and enjoyed by everyone. I would let them out if only I could. But it’s a trap of my own making.

(Find Books by Monique Jacob https://filidhbooks.com/collections/monique-jacob)

Explore These Literary Events

I. Vancouver Writers Fest - https://writersfest.bc.ca

II. Gibsons Art and Words Festival 2025 - https://gibsonspublicmarket.com/event/art-words-festival-2024-august-22-25/

III. Surrey International Writers Conference - https://www.siwc.ca

IV. Victoria Festival of Authors - https://victoriafestivalofauthors.ca

V. Federation of BC Writers - https://www.bcwriters.ca

VI. Canadian Authors Association - https://canadianauthors.org

VII. Victoria Writers’ Society – http://victoriawriters.ca

VIII. Pride In The Word - https://victoriapridesociety.org/pride-2024/literary/

IX. Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival - https://denmanislandwritersfestival.com/festival-2025/

X. Elephant Mountain Lit Fest – Nelson, BC - https://www.emlfestival.com