Cathleen With’s book of short stories, Skids (Arsenal Pulp Press), takes a closer look at the human beings who inhabit this community and other communities like it.

Joshua Key, a patriotic small-town Kansas boy, signed up for the U.S. Army to support the war effort in Iraq, seek vengeance for the 9/11 attack and support his growing family.

In Half Nelson (THINKFilm), Ryan Gosling plays Dan Dunne, a strung-out teacher working in an inner-city middle school in New York, where, as the teacher, he is the only “white kid” in the classroom. Dunne’s passion for teaching history and his genuine respect for the kids is equalled only by his severe substance addiction, and each day he arrives at school a little more messed up than the day before.

On February 22, 2007, the folk singer-songwriter Josh Ritter stepped on stage at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, played three songs and said little more than “I’m excited to be here.” Uh-oh, I thought. After a few songs he absorbed the warm glow from the audience and launched into some hilarious stories about his GPs lover, high school proms and bizarre, recently invented sports involving BB guns.

In Half Nelson (THINKFilm), Ryan Gosling plays Dan Dunne, a strung-out teacher working in an inner-city middle school in New York, where, as the teacher, he is the only “white kid” in the classroom. Dunne’s passion for teaching history and his genuine respect for the kids is equalled only by his severe substance addiction, and each day he arrives at school a little more messed up than the day before.

In Dharma Punx—A Memoir (Harper), Noah Levine begins his story as an adolescent punk in Santa Cruz, California, plunging in and out of mosh pits, acid trips, battles with bottles of Jack Daniels, small-time theft, post-“experimental” narcotics and juvie.

Both nature and nurture must have inspired Elizabeth May in her book How to Save the World in Your Spare Time (Key Porter). May is the executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada; she is also the daughter of Stephanie Middleton May, an activist with the Committee for Sane Nuclear Policy, which was instrumental in closing down eight major nuclear testing sites in the 1950s.

In The Rice Queen Diaries (Arsenal Pulp Press), Daniel Gawthrop grapples with his own version of white male seeking Asian girls: gay white male seeking Asian men. He starts with a high-school crush on Bruce Lee, then describes his initiation and experiences as a rice queen in “nature walks” at Wreck Beach, muddy romps on the banks of the Assiniboine River and encounters with an endless stream of bodies in Thailand and Vietnam.