Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.
Carol Shields
Republic of Love
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At one time, Zeigler’s Department Store had a grocery department and a hardware department, but no longer.
1990; Penguin, 1991
The store assortment has changed. The role of the department store has changed. Downtown Walley has changed. And, perhaps most significantly, Murray has changed.
When the story opens, Murray’s father is telling him that he [...]
When Hazel Curtis travels to Scotland, she tells people that it was a trip that she and Jack had always planned to take together.
1990; Penguin, 1991
And now that she’s a widow, Jack cannot contradict Hazel, speak out to say that he never wanted to take that trip.
For now that she’s a [...]
Some writers might take a book to do it. Carol Shields did, in Swann. Timothy Findley did, in The Wars.
1990; Penguin, 1991
Alice Munro takes a short story to build a life from fragments left behind.
In this case, in “Meneseteung”, the fragments are culled from a book called Offerings (“Gold lettering on [...]
As with “Friend of My Youth”, the bulk of “Five Points” concerns a story told by one of the characters, Neil, who is speaking of events from his past, when he was a boy in British Columbia.
1990; Penguin, 1991
In both stories, the story rooted in Neil’s memories and the present-day story of [...]
The title story of this collection begins with talk of an act being “too transparent in its hopefulness, too easy in its forgiveness”.
1990; Penguin, 1991
On first reading, this seems a straightforward observation about the narrator’s relationship with her mother.
She has been dreaming of her mother on occasion.
And this recurring dream [...]
“In the lane, I had already lost a boot and fallen on my knees so that now my trousers were soaked and one of my socks was sodden and the bottoms of both my sleeves were freezing against my wrists.”
Harper Collins, 1990
This is Timothy Findley, writing in his journal in November 1976, [...]
House of Anansi, 2013 Astoria Imprint
The clear skies and no wind?
That’s not often true, actually, in Théodora Armstrong’s debut collection.
The characters herein are faced with stormy conditions and life is in flux.
But 100% visibility?
That’s true: her vision is impeccable, her scope expansive but her perspective incisive.
Readers know what to [...]
Gaspereau Press, 2008
When I was in high school, it mattered a great deal : what radio station you listened to. There were more than two, but there only two that mattered: CJBK or CKSL.
Knowing which station someone’s radio was tuned to revealed a cornerstone to their identity, but although I fervently and [...]
When Tamara Levine was diagnosed with breast cancer, she began sending e-mail letters to about fifty family members, friends and colleagues, to keep everybody in the loop.
Second Story Press, 2012
Almost immediately, these letters took on a great significance in her Healing Journey, offering a kind of ‘therapy’ (Greek for healing), “helping to [...]
It’s the summer of 1974, twenty-five kilometres north of Quebec City, and eighteen-year-old Gerry Fostaty is on a cadet training assignment.
Goose Lane Editions, 2011
A cadet training assignment on a Canadian Forces base?
I know nothing of this world, beyond what I’ve gleaned from “Private Benjamin”, “An Officer and a Gentleman” and a [...]
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