When Creekstone Press pushed a tentative toe through publishing’s door five years and four books ago, its stated aim was to provide a vehicle for creative writers and artists in northern British Columbia.

With its latest offering, The Rosemary Suite by the Kispiox Valley’s Leslie Barnwell, Creekstone continues a tradition of matching quality writing and graphics with thoughtful design.

Using poetry, prose and art, Barnwell crafts a chronicle of her dear friend Rosemary’s life and, sadly, her death due to breast cancer. Wife, mother, artist’s model, gardener, librarian, museum assistant, yoga instructor - ... Rosemary Hauswirth, of the Kispiox Valley near Hazelton was in the midst of a full and fulfilling life.

Then, in March 1994, while helping her friend Leslie hang a show, Rosemary received a telephone call advising her she had breast cancer. "I could see her face change to ash," Barnwell wrote several years later. "When she hung up, she just stood there, stunned. We held each other for a while, crying."

The phone call signaled the start of a new dimension in their long friendship, and in their individual lives, one in which Barnwell would add the art of emotional and physical support to her visual and literary accomplishments, and Rosemary would struggle to rise above fear and the spectre of death.

"She lived her last years with uncommon courage and awareness," Barnwell says. "Her body may have slowed down but her mind and spirit remained active and growing until the day she died."

Gathered from Barnwell’s journal entries over seven years, the story takes the reader inside the women’s world from the perspective of a loving friend. Barnwell says she wrote "not to create a book, only to help myself along the way.

"When I read to her some of the poems I’d been writing, she made it clear that she would be happy if those words were shared." The result is a moving tribute to a woman who worried she would have nothing tangible to leave behind.

The story is about love and community and life. There are essentially two parts to the story; the emotional, evocative experience of Rosemary’s death, followed by a straight up account of the details of her life. Who, what, when, where and sometimes why. The details provide a perspective that completes the picture of the person Rosemary.

Barnwell’s poetry creates an intimacy rarely achieved in narrative. Combined with pen and ink illustrations made over the course of their long friendship, Barnwell gives us an experience of her friend that is as comfortable in its nakedness as Rosemary was

This is not a story of heroics, but of ordinary people dealing with fear and loss and rage through love and courage. It speaks of riches that cannot be bartered or traded, riches that accumulate with love and generosity, and that feed us in ways we cannot name.
the world’s breath moves
across the land whispering.
whispering, nothing harsh
today death is our companion
while wind blows prayer
flags in the garden
as he left Rusty moved
towards the door then returned
smoothed the hair
from Rosemary’s forehead and kissed her brow
a smile erased her weariness
for almost a moment
and Rusty whispered
just in case

It speaks of Rosemary, who she was, who she is and what and who she leaves behind. In its simple elegance The Rosemary Suite exposes a template for courageous living in the face of an inevitable death. Leslie creates a space for her friend Rosemary in the hearts of all who read her words ... and Rosemary fills it.

An accomplished artist and writer, Leslie Barnwell has mounted more than 30 exhibitions of her work and was most recently published in Creekstones, an anthology of work by 27 writers and seven photographers from the Skeena River Basin in northwest British Columbia. Selected, an exhibit of her new and previous art, was on display at the Smithers Gallery through October.

(Christine Yates is a writer and farmer who lives in Quick.)

The Rosemary Suite Creekstone Press 120 pp $24.95