Carol Shields: The Arts of a Writing Life

Naomi Brun is a freelance writer and a book reviewer for The Hamilton
Spectator.

Carol Shields had a gift—an often criticized gift, but a gift
nonetheless. She had a talent for capturing the daily rhythms of
ordinary life with truth and grace. Her characters worked at regular
jobs, bought groceries, cooked dinner, and ate in relative harmony with
their agreeable spouses. Conflict, if it existed at all, occurred
internally, without any great rage. Some of her detractors kindly
advised her to tackle more important issues, more bombastic characters,
but Shields always demurred. For her, all life held value, and
presenting reality as she saw it became an enduring passion. When she
succumbed to breast cancer in July 2003, these views survived in a
legacy of exceptional writing.

In this volume, friends and colleagues have assembled a collection of
pieces almost at shedding further light on Shields’s writing
philosophy. There are formal critical essays, such as “Stone and
Flowers,” in which Leona Gom explores the fluid meanings of these
symbols in Shields’s work. Other articles are more casual in tone, but
just as illuminating. Perry Nodelman, in one such reflection,
investigates the relationship between the real Winnipeg and its invented
counterpart. The musings are delightful, as are the personal pieces in
which we hear from Shields herself. Joan Thomas, for example, includes
an epistolary interview with Shields in which she shares memories from
her peaceful, suburban childhood and comments on its significance in her
literary imagination.

After reading this anthology, I felt I knew just a little bit more
about Shields as a writer and, more essentially, as a human being.
Intelligent, moving, and beautiful, it is a fitting tribute to one of
Canada’s finest authors.