Perilous Departures

Linda M. Bayley is a freelance writer based in Sudbury, Ontario. She is
the author of Estrangement: Poems.

Perilous Departures is an apt title for Margaret Macpherson’s first
collection of short stories. The inhabitants of these 15 stories are all
leaving home—some literally, some merely venturing out of their
comfort zones. In one, the daughter of white idealists finds her life
disrupted by the Christmas arrival of a Native man on a day pass from a
nearby prison. In another, a young woman flees the Northwest Territories
in the hopes of finding herself, and gets halfway to the bottom of South
America before she starts to make sense of things. The last story
features three siblings in a pickup truck trying to traverse the
thousand miles between Edmonton and Yellowknife before the ice breaks up
in order to bring their father’s ashes back home.

Macpherson has a beautiful writing style, formal in most instances,
lyrical even (if a reviewer can still write such a thing without its
being a cliché). My heart stumbled when I read the line “My mother
died and I planted a tree. The tree died.” So much hope and sadness
packed into 11 words. Macpherson also has a talent for comedy. For
example, in “Rubber Bullets” some Japanese tourists mistake the
narrator’s husband for Bill Clinton, and a short time later an FBI
agent calls wanting Bill (the husband and the president share the same
first name) to be a stand-in for the American president when he goes on
tour. Who called? Bill wants to know. “‘The FBI,’ says I. And then
I repeat it real slow so it sinks in: ‘Federal Bureau of Intelligence.
Americans.’” “Rubber Bullets” is the kind of story you want to
read out loud to your friends for the sheer enjoyment of it.

Margaret Macpherson is an excellent writer, the perfect guide across
the literary landscapes she presents. Perilous Departures may be
dangerous for its characters, but its readers will be safe in the
knowledge of a good journey ahead.