Wild Apples: Field Notes from a River Farm.

Randall White is the author of Voice of Region: On the Long Journey to
Senate Reform in Canada, Too Good to Be True: Toronto in the 1920s, and
Global Spin: Probing the Globalization Debate.

To only a slightly less extent than the work of the younger and more famous writer David Adams Richards (the subject of one of the fifteen essays in this collection) Wayne Curtis’s subject matter remains solely Miramichi-based.

Most, if not all, of his selections have been published elsewhere, including two national and three provincial newspapers as well as literary reviews and other publications specializing in the author’s favourite pastime, salmon fishing on—where else—the Miramichi River. He also has a fondness for the works of the New England poet Robert Frost, and tells us at the conclusion of an essay on the poet, that he, like Frost, “grew up on a farm … suffered hard work, insensitivity, hay fever, and many of the same hardships the poet had endured. His landscape was my landscape.”

This is a work to savour slowly while sipping a dry wine before a wood stove. Curtis is rural in his themes, but his writing style is graceful, often witty and always sensitive. My favourite essay is “Brycie Coughlan Curtis (in her own words)”—a sketch obviously of one of Curtis’s close relatives. (I suspect his grandmother, although he doesn’t identify her beyond her married name.) It is a poignant yet amusing and realistic account of a young woman’s entry into adulthood amid the crushing rural poverty so prevalent in the Miramichi area of New Brunswick during the black days of the Dirty Thirties. Written in the first person, Curtis becomes his female narrator as she describes her life as a dirt-poor teenager who stumbles into a marriage that we know will be happy for her and John Curtis, her chosen mate. The descriptions of rural life stay with you long after you have finished the essay’s thirteen pages. Curtis is a talented writer.