93: Best Canadian Stories

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

These stories do live up to their billing. They present an interesting
mixture of new and established writers, with the new in the majority. On
the established side, the collection includes a major new story, “A
Wilderness Station,” by Alice Munro. In epistolary form, it tells of
the extraordinary life of Annie McKillop, a pioneer woman in Southern
Ontario who confesses to a murder she has not committed. Told from the
perspective of several letter writers, the story provides a fly’s-eye
view of Annie, leaving the reader with the task of fathoming her
motives. There is also an important recently published story by the late
Bronwen Wallace. “Lillian on the Inside” also uses letters. In this
case, they are written by the title character to her husband and
children. After raising several children and living through more than 30
years of marriage, Lillian, at age 50, is making a break for it. Sitting
in a cubicle in a public washroom, she writes the letters that explain
why she is doing what she contemplates.

There are also several notable stories by less-well-known writers.
Jennifer Anne Mitton’s “Spies” recounts the bizarre and desperate
actions of two children left alone with an abusive father. In “The
Etruscans,” Arnold Windley shows how a young woman confronts mortality
when she takes on the job of caring for a terminally ill older man.
Vivette J. Kady’s “Composition for Suzanne” has to do with a
daughter recalling her deceased father and finding an unexpected gift he
has left her.

Aside from Munro and Wallace, the writers in this collection are not
all that well known. If the stories here are typical of their abilities,
this obscurity will not last for long. Helwig and Helwig have done it
again.