What's Come Over Her

Ilana Stanger-Ross, a former senior editor of TheArtBiz.com and fiction
instructor in the English Department at Temple University, is currently
a fiction writer in Toronto.

The characters in these 10 stories are defined in part by their
relationships to rural Saskatchewan. In “Circles,” Clare, a
farmer’s wife, tries to convince her husband that the crop circles
that have mysteriously appeared in their wheat fields are sacred spaces
that must not be disturbed. In “Coming Home,” Marcy, who has
recently moved back to her hometown divorced and disappointed,
rediscovers her small-town-girl identity during a local game of curling.
In “Swimming into Light,” Enid struggles to steer a canoe through a
dark lake, and then to rescue her husband when it overturns.

Several of the stories share characters and settings. Enid and her
husband Dutch appear in three, two take place in the fictional town of
Glendale, and all share common themes: the difficulty of maintaining a
farm, the danger of the oil rigs, the alternating comfort and oppression
of small-town life. These themes resonate through the lives of
Mourre’s women: middle-aged or elderly; married, divorced, or widowed;
worried for their children, mourning them, learning to let go.

At times, the similarity between the pieces works against them. The
first two stories, for instance, repeat the perspectives of farmwives
hoping to avoid cleaning their kitchens on a hot day. A few others
present overwrought drama—apocalyptic foreshadowing in one, a lone
death in another—that seems out of place with the quiet lives
described. But ultimately, the stories work together to offer a
compelling portrait of rural Saskatchewan: farmers clinging to their
land; small-town neighbours connecting through acts of kindness; women
struggling to maintain the well-being of their families while yearning,
however modestly, for renewed happiness in their own lives.