The Penguin Book of Contemporary Canadian Women's Short Stories

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including The
Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret
Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

The short story is a wonderful genre. In Moore’s excellent
introduction she calls the beginning of a story the most difficult part
to write: “Casual, intimate, grandly sweeping, austere, arresting, or
delicately simple, it must have an iron grip.” The 22 stories she
selected for this fine collection prove her point. Many of the writers
are household names, such as Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Elizabeth
Harvor, Frances Itani, Alice Munro, Carol Shields, and Jane Urquhart.
Others will prove welcome as new friends.

In “Bloodwood” by Jacqueline Baker, 71-year-old Perpetua admits to
herself that she has loved four people: her mother, her father, her
sister Magda, and her brother Martin; she does not include her husband,
although she was very fond of him, and she blames this on a “too happy
childhood.” In “Reunion” by Libby Creelman, the first-person
narrator squirms during her high-school reunion; the hopes and dreams of
her 18-year-old self turn out to be anything but “a nice walk down
memory lane,” but rather “one goddamn battle after another.” In
“The Nature of Pure Evil,” Zsuzsi Gartner’s protagonist likes to
make bomb threats. It amuses Hedy, as she sits on the 19th floor of the
TD Tower, to see people streaming out of the building, and she thinks of
Jesus ordering people out of the temple. Hedy’s next target will be
Christ Church Cathedral, but when she learns that her husband has just
married someone else, her mind snaps. This very unusual tale is the
blackest of black comedy.

Carol Shield’s “Chemistry” takes off from the narrator’s
memories of a classmate at the Montreal YMCA in January 1972. The music
students are all in an advanced recorder class. The narrator’s memory
serves as the first-person voice for her thoughts as the students sit on
folding chairs: “Music and hunger, accident and intention meet here as
truly as they did in the ancient courts of Asia Minor.” Shield’s
sensitive prose conjures up the cold, the heat, and the students’
passion for music. One student reflects, “We don’t just play the
music, we FIND it.”

This unusual anthology firmly grips the reader’s attention. Moore
compares the stories to swimming pools, where readers could be “fully
submerged.”