Entering the Landscape

David E. Kemp, a former professor of drama at Queen’s University, is
the author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

If the American Dream deals in part with the conquering of the land, the
Canadian sensibility—as expressed in our literature—has tended to be
more concerned with questions of identity and survival. In the work of
earlier writers such as Frederick Grove, Sinclair Ross, W.O. Mitchell,
and Margaret Laurence, there is often an underlying implication that
life is something to be endured and that the physical landscape, by
extension, cannot be tamed but only accommodated.

The nine writers whose short stories make up this collection do not
exalt nature so much as accept it for what it is. Our profound
connection with the natural world, they suggest, is not easily
articulated. A fine attempt is made in Bill Guston’s “The Northern
Cod,” which resonates with the primitive barrenness of Newfoundland. A
Russian/Jewish rural community, with its attendant traditions and
superstitions, is wonderfully evoked in Lillian Nallel’s story, “The
Stranger in the Woods.” Joan Clark’s whimsical and lyrical
“Latitudes of Melt” (essentially the opening pages of her epic novel
of the same name) deals with one woman’s mythic origins, the way in
which communities divide and shift under the weight of time, and sundry
Newfoundland mysteries in a manner that is intensely evocative of the
Rock.

Other contributors to this excellent collection include Madeline Sonik,
Nadine McInnis, Mark Anthony Jarman, Alexander MacLeod, Kelly Cooper,
and Mary Desaulniers.