Earthen Vessels

Ellen Pilon is a library assistant in the Patrick Power Library at Saint
Mary’s University in Halifax.

Ann Copeland is one of Canada’s best fiction writers, as each of the eight short stories in Earthen Vessels shows. Copeland’s style involves a slow unfolding of detail, and every detail, carefully placed, is relevant. Only by the end of a story does the reader have all the parts of the whole. For example, in “Meeting” a woman is teaching James Joyce to three men in a classroom on a weekly basis. The characters of the men and the teacher gradually emerge, but not until the end do we learn she is teaching inmates in a prison. Copeland is brilliant in releasing the details of her story: not too little, not too much. The reader is not surprised, disappointed, or annoyed by the end, but feels satisfied that he now sees the whole. Reading one of Copeland’s stories is like watching an artist slowly fill a canvas.

The characters in the stories are so well drawn in Copeland’s careful prose that the reader is immediately involved. Copeland seems to have an unerring ability to observe and understand character, and to delineate it. In “Will,” we gingerly try to ease ourselves into non-prison life with ex-convict William Akorn. In “Hostess,” we lean on the deck railing with the two brothers and watch them discuss their mother, remembering things of the past and talking about an event in the present.

One black mark is the shoddy publishing job done by Oberon Press. Almost every page has one or more errors, not misspellings so much as wrong or superfluous words. This interferes with the smooth flow of a story. These mechanical faults jolt the reader out of the perfect little world Copeland has created in each story.