The Traveller's Hat

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

This collection of stories is no travelogue of geographical spaces but
rather a look at our journey through life. What makes the stories such a
pleasure to read is the sensuality of the writing. The female
protagonists frequently deal with difficult male relatives—an abusive
father, a bullying husband, a colicky child, a disabled son—but they
also smell the colours of the country and hear the whisper of the stars.
In the opening story, the habitual cruelties of an alcoholic father hang
heavy like the succulent smells of food in a family outing but cannot
deny the abused child an epiphany over the first white tips of spring
asparagus.

Not all is distress. In “After Hours, After Years,” a woman feels
the Ontario humidity twist her “unclothed flesh like an unwelcome
blanket” as the heat brings warm memories of an Algerian lover long
gone. In “Open Skies,” the most beautiful of the stories, a young
woman stands naked in the rain and weeps with the joy of being alone. In
“Blue Moon,” a woman walking with her distant husband experiences
the air as “deliciously complicated.” It is the duality of pain and
the lyrical presence of nature that draws the reader into these stories
and imbues them with hope. Like poems, they always reward a second
reading.