The Possibilities of Story, Vol. 2

Andrea Geary is an agricultural reporter for The Manitoba Co-operator.

These two collections include short stories by Canada’s most renowned
authors, from Margaret Laurence and Jack Hodgins to Alice Munro and
Timothy Findley.

Editor Tim Struthers, who has selected stories from different periods
in the writers’ lives, prefaces each story with a short biographical
sketch of the author. The selection of stories reflects his attempt to
highlight four types of short story: the realistic model, the romantic
or gothic tale, the autobiographical sketch, and the intellectual satire
or parody. He also aims to reveal how a writer’s style, rhetoric, and
purpose vary at different points in his or her career. But his main goal
is simply to provide an enjoyable read, and here he certainly succeeds.

Margaret Laurence’s talent shines through in “Mask of the Bear,”
in which a young girl watches as the pain that characterizes the
relationships in her family comes to a peak upon her grandmother’s
death. Struthers contrasts this story with Laurence’s “Living
Dangerously . . . By Mail” in Vol. 2, an autobiographical piece about
Laurence’s love-hate relationships with her many correspondents.

This pair of collections gives us Canadian short stories at their best,
and a glimpse of the people who have crafted them.