Great Stories from the Prairies

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

Great Stories from the Prairies spans a hundred years of prairie
storytelling, from Frederick Philip Grove’s hoary chestnut,
“Snow,” to Bonnie Burnard’s cryptically modern “Ten Men Respond
to an Air-Brushed Photograph of a Nude Woman Chained to a Bull.” In
his perceptive introductory essay, “Energy and Light,” the editor
calls the stories “engaging and readable.”

It is an admirably accurate assessment, whether he is referring to the
pre-World War II tales of Sinclair Ross, W.O. Mitchell, and Jack Ludwig;
to stories by Merna Summers, Sandra Birdsell, and Fred Wah that deal
with the immediate postwar period; or to stories representative of the
1960s and beyond, such as Greg Hollingshead’s “In the Sixties,”
Sharon Butala’s “Eden,” Kristjana Gunnar’s “Kolla Ticks,”
Guy Vanderhaeghe’s “Man Descending,” and Carol Shields’s “Mrs.
Turner Cutting the Grass.”

Besides delineating the chronological structure of the anthology,
Sproxton uses Robert Kroetsch’s articulation of the indigenous prairie
theme of horse and house (“The horse enables travel; the house gives
motivation and purpose”) to insightfully cross-reference W.D.
Valgardson’s “God Is Not a Fish Inspector,” W.O. Mitchell’s
“Melvin Arbuckle’s First Course in Shock Therapy,” Sinclair
Ross’s “One’s a Heifer,” and Margaret Laurence’s “Horses of
the Night.” Equally interesting are his perceptions and literary
analyses of the city and country theme, as found in Edna Alford’s
“Head,” Jack Ludwig’s “Requiem for Bibul,” Meeka Walsh’s
“Light Reading,” and Joan Cates’s “Betwixt and Between.”

While the stories alone are well worth the price of the volume,
Sproxton’s thoughtful critical insights are a welcome bonus.