The Kootenay Wolves: Five Years Following a Wild Wolf Pack by John E. Marriott, Rocky Mountain Books, 2022. “Photographing wild wolves is notoriously difficult,” writes Canmore photographer John E. Marriott. “You can’t let them smell you, see you, hear you or even sense you.” As the colour photos in this beautiful coffee-table book attest, Marriott is good at that task; we see close-up shots of wild wolf pups near a den. But simply getting a great shot was not his main goal. “Wolves in Kootenay and other mountain parks… face millions of tourists, roads, railways, towns, golf courses, ski hills and other developments,” he writes. “My sole purpose in tracking the Kootenay wolves was to tell a conservation story that would resonate with readers.”
Ruin by Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich, Demeter Press, 2022. After the end of her marriage to a narcissistic Ottawa surgeon, main character Enid muses on how her former home, where her children were now living part time, “would be like an archeological site, with family photos still in situ… no longer reflections of a living set of meanings but mirrors, artifacts, relics, ruins, objects belonging not to the present but to the past.” Set during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ruin tells the story of “Enid’s journey into herself”—in which she travels from Ottawa to Greece and then back to Calgary, where she grew up and now finds a kind of solace—“excavating, pulling back the detritus of all the years, to find solid ground on which to mindfully rebuild.”
