Tom Thomson's Shack

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

The author, who works and writes in the B.C. interior, was invited to
Toronto to promote a book of his poems entitled Iodine (1994). In this
collection of very short prose pieces, Rhenisch spins a tale of the
forests and farms where he lives and the dream city he flew into. He
takes us from the making of wine in British Columbia to the hunt for a
Golden Russet apple in Ontario; from the struggle of those who work the
land in Keremeos and Hedley to Tom Thomson’s Ontario studio in the
McMichael gallery. He tells us about the town of Hedley where a Catholic
church was once used as an engine repair shop, where all the boys in one
Grade 7 class grew up to do time in jail, where new houses burn down
every winter, where neighbors stay loyal to each other while the town is
“slowly falling in on itself.”

Tom Thomson’s Shack is often funny, sometimes dark, never
sentimental, and always real. Each small piece is a huge pleasure to
read.