“Stories don’t go away, I have learned that. Whatever happens is with us forever. Whatever has ever happened in this house and in this room is with us forever. That other life endures in these walls, all of it. We are a family. We love each other deeply. We will return to ourselves. We hold […]
Music is powerful. Faced with a trying situation, even that sometimes maddening memory, when looking for peace we often turn to music. A particular song, composition or even a melody can move one to another place, chase away the turmoil and bring peace. Crafted and expanded upon from a short story, Jim Nichols’ new novel, […]
“My name is Fabian Vas. I live in Witless Bay, Newfoundland. You would not have heard of me. Obscurity is not necessarily failure, though; I am a bird artist, and have more or less made a living at it. Yet I murdered the lighthouse keeper, Botho August, and that is an equal part of how […]
“All of us are better when we’re loved.” By the time I came upon those words at the end of Alistair MacLeod’s 1999 novel, No Great Mischief, I was changed, altered as a reader. I found this work by sheer accident. I was not looking for anything in particular to read, just something with which […]
“The quote is important to Dene. This there there. He hadn’t read Gertrude Stein beyond the quote. But for Native people in this country, all over Americas, it’s been developed over, buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there.” In the beginning it was the […]
“When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you.” – George Saunders And more aware I am, now that I have finished this beautiful work by Elaine Ford. Ford is no longer with us, but the totality of work she […]
“The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more”— Ralph Waldo Emerson And wonder is what I walked away with after having read The Overstory by Richard Powers. I have always been enamored with trees. In every place I have lived there was a tree that somehow spoke to me. From the […]
The written word is powerful and made more so by time. And if that time was spent manning a lighthouse, and what you have written is eventually found by family, well, there’s no telling the impact it could have on a life lived then and lives being lived now. On Porphyry Island in the Thunder […]
‘”Otto,’ The letter began, in blue ink, ‘I’ve gone. I’ve never seen the water, so I’ve gone there. Don’t worry; I’ve left you the truck. I can walk. I will try to remember to come back. Yours (always), Etta.’” And with that stark opening, a journey begins not only for Etta and Otto, but also […]
Sometimes people are simply meant to find one another. Often it is in the romantic sense, but sometimes it is out of a need to survive in a difficult time and place in one’s life. In Alice Greenway’s award winning novel, “The Bird Skinner”, two people are brought together, neither realizing the impact they will […]
