Dreaming Home

R. Gordon Moyles is professor emeritus of English at the University of
Alberta, the co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities:
British Views of Canada, 1880–1914, and the author of The Salvation
Army and the Public.

“These nine stories,” writes the editor in her introduction, “are
about home, whether that home is a place, a person, or a sense of
security or belonging. Home is both a real and psychic place which we
leave behind again and again, which we create and the recreate, and
which we arrive at, more or less happy to have arrived.” The stories
Gibson has gathered—by Judith Kalman, Antanas Sileika, Michael
Crummey, Joanne Gerber, Andrew Pyper, Elizabeth Hay, Mark Sinnett,
Shauma Singh Baldwin, and Struan Sinclair—all resonate with the
thematic vision of home as “a place and an experience of family,” as
“childhood memories,” and as “a collection of sensory images.”
They include Kalman’s poignant depiction of a home in Hungary so
besieged by civil war that a new home in Canada must be reluctantly
sought; Sileika’s very funny recreation of an immigrant family’s
efforts to build a new home (and a house) in Canada; and Crummey’s
delightful portrait of a Newfoundlander’s experience of a new home in
a new town. Regardless of the collection’s overarching theme, each
story stands on its own as an satisfying artistic creation.