Us, Now: Stories from the Quilted Collective, edited by Lisa Moore (St. John's: Breakwater Books, 2021). Paperbound, 150 pp., $22.95.
P. K. Page, Metamorphosis: Selected Children's Literature, edited by Margaret Steffler (Erin: Porcupine's Quill, 2020). Paperbound, 232 pp., $22.95.
Patricia Robertson, Hour of the Crab (Fredericton: Goose Lane, 2021). Paperbound, 248 pp., $22.95.
David Adams Richards, Darkness (Toronto: Doubleday, 2021). Hardbound, 294 pp., $36.95.
The Quilted Collective is a racialized group of writers brought together, as Lisa Moore explains in her introduction to this collection, by mandate of the Office of Immigration and Multiculturalism of Newfoundland and Labrador, which commissioned Moore to offer a series of writing workshops with a view to creating a book. From this inorganic genesis comes a collection of stories that works remarkably well to highlight diversity in Newfoundland writing and also to offer perspectives on being an immigrant somewhere other than Toronto. What is perhaps surprising, given the relative inexperience of some of the writers collected here, is that the quality of the work is consistently high, and there is a wonderful diversity of writing styles, from Prajwala Dixit’s “Ondu Nenapu,” which is composed as a series of short, poetic prose pieces, to Sobia Shaheen Shaikh’s intense, secondperson story, “Softly, With Niyyat.” The voices collected in this fine anthology introduce a powerful company of storytellers to the rest of the country.
A collection of works for children by P. K. Page might at first seem a
stretch. One could argue that even her works “for” children, such as
her trilogy of fables, The Sky Tree, are also meant for an adult audience.
But for Page the idea of childhood, as Margaret Steffler points out in
her excellent introduction to this book, is a state of being that represents
curiosity about and wonder for the world, and that sense is
something that unites the work here. The book is organized around
genre and this helps highlight the many ways that Page did write for
and about children. So we get the fables and stories that were published
first as illustrated children’s works, and also an essay by Page
on folk tales, and, wonderfully, a set of one‐act plays for children that
Page wrote when she was involved with the Theatre Guild of St. John
in the 1930s. Metamorphosis is the sixth volume of a larger project of
the Collected Works of P. K. Page by Porcupine’s Quill and an excellent
addition to the set.
This masterful collection of stories makes an immediate impression
because of the quality of the writing. Patricia Robertson’s language is
memorable, and she writes with a sure‐footed immediacy using tested
narrative tools to get the reader’s attention. The first story, which gives
the book its title, begins: “Kate, walking along the beach, found the
body.” Before long, though, we realize that we have surpassed the
“murder‐mystery” genre and are into something more compelling
and human. “Fire Breathing” is set in British Columbia in the near
future when the “fire season” doesn’t end and forests continue to burn
in November and on into March. Rather than preach about climate
change, however, Robertson invests us in a story about an aging firefighter
whose wife is about to have a baby and leaves us wondering
about the future the baby might inherit. Other stories subtly raise
timely issues of lost language, refugees, and migration, and do so with
cinematic strokes of brilliance.
David Adams Richards is a profound voice in Canadian writing,
partly because his darkly vivid style and his careful observations of
human fallibility remind us of the great Russian writers of a century
ago, and partly because he has so firmly rooted his stories in the
Miramichi region of New Brunswick as to give the place a kind of life
for outsiders. His latest novel, Darkness, is an examination of blame
and the need to hold someone accountable, even when the evidence
is uncertain. The narrative structure of the book seems at first an odd
choice. The novel opens with an announcement about a symposium
on a report by John Delano which was aimed at “rehabilitating the
memory … of Orville MacDurmot,” and the first chapter gently shifts
into the story of the day that Delano sat down with Cathy MacDurmot,
Orville’s sister, and told her the results of his report in person. That
talk is the rest of the novel and the choice to deliver the story to readers
as a conversation creates a passive and distant sense of the reveal of
events. It feels like the device ought to frame a more direct, third‐person
telling of the story, but such is not the case. Richards takes a risk
with this approach because narrative tension builds slowly in Delano’s
telling of the tale. For the dedicated reader, though, there are great
rewards as Richards takes us deeper into the complexities of the case.
By the time we are nearing the end, the book’s pages turn swiftly.
—Jay Ruzesky