“These are stories about ordinary Canadians, the kind that used to be told on winter evenings when the work was done. They are not intended to be representative but are about people I interviewed or talked to or saw or heard about. The intention is to add acquaintances to the variety of people you already know.

Most of the stories are an attempt to portray what the person told me as it was presented, others are fictional constructs of some aspect of an event. Some names have been changed, some have not.

I am of the opinion that history cannot be told through recitals of the deeds of mad kings, but only through descriptions of the work of ordinary citizens.” — from the Introduction

To order, click on “ordering information” on the right.

The Globe and Mail discovers Helen Potrebenko’s Taxi as a “Buried Treasure”.

“In the 1970s and ’80s, Helen Potrebenko was a cherished and important Vancouver writer, well known for her early writing in Pedestal, Canada’s first women’s-liberation newspaper, and for her numerous books that included short stories, novels, poems and plays. Hers was the significant working-class urban feminist voice. She also had jokes, good ones. Modern Times, a major bookstore in San Francisco, had a big sign telling customers that if they only read one book in 1975, it should be Taxi!” — Anakana Schofield

Check out Anakana’s blog, Have You Read Taxi? for the story of Taxi!’s 30th birthday party at Vancouver Public Library on April 29, 2010.

“A hard hitting social satirist, Potrebenko attacks conventional middle-class assumptions by understanding them from within.” — The Vancouver Sun

“Helen Potrebenko’s collection of short fiction, Hey Waitress and Other Stories, is just plain good reading. Her stories expose us to a medley of ordinary lives; stories of office temps, bank clerks, secretaries, and waitresses are told with honesty, accuracy and warmth.” — Quill and Quire

“… so real and touch that postmodern jargon seems incapable of deconstructing it.” –Canadian Literature

190 pp; 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 , $12.00, paper
ISBN 0-920999-12-3. 1989

“They asked me a long time ago to write about you; I tried but the writing was just a flat piece of paper whereas you were still round and filled out and vital and would not flat out to fit on paper. I could not explain in writing the inadequacy of writing. You were walking through the woods, with that nice smile, speaking at a rally, rushing off somewhere with multi briefcases, mulling over the Scrabble board…”

In a series of letters/stories, Potrebenko, a long-time friend of social activist and feminist Maggie Benston, tells Maggie what’s been happening in the world since her death in 1991.

For more information about Helen’s work, visit her blog.

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