After Sixty: Going Home

Helen Hacksel is a Toronto-based freelance writer.

This collection of mixed-form fictions from Saskatchewan writer Gertrude
Story starts with a poem, continues with several short stories
(including one science fiction) and a fictional meditation on Canada’s
pioneers, and ends with a travelogue.

The opening poem, “Girl’s-eye View, After Sixty” sets the tone of
the entire collection, with its feminist sensibilities and its
down-to-earth voice. Throughout the body of the work, the narrative
voices are perhaps too determinedly feisty, and could be more various.
The protagonists of all but three of the pieces are aging females in
quite different situations, but with almost identical mindsets.
Nevertheless, these portraits of women, aging and alone, are presented
with honesty and insight.

The main themes are also present in the opening poem: the emotional
pull that home exerts, the viewing of the world from the later years
(“after sixty”), and the role of memory in relation to both. Going
home sometimes means leaving home. In “And So It Goes,” Ulla is 60
years old before she realizes where she really belongs: not on her
Saskatchewan farm but in Germany, the land of her ancestors. Above all,
it is an inner voice, a yearning, that guides the way home. Jason, the
alien of “Embodied,” is literally led back to his true home by inner
voices and ancient memories. Again, it takes a lifetime to complete the
journey.

While dealing with inner truths, dreams, and other realities, the
pieces are grounded in the everyday world of McDonald’s restaurants
and humble Saskatchewan farms, and this makes for an interesting tension
between the two worlds.

The book’s dedication—“For The Writer Inside: The Dream
Maker”—is a fitting one, for After Sixty: Going Home is also about
the writing process, which for Story, entails a journey toward
self-knowledge and the necessity of listening for, and to, an inner
voice.