by Betty Jane Hegerat
SHADOWPAW PRESS
2025/$22.99/146 PP.
Early in Betty Jane Hegerat’s new collection, in a story called “Kick,” a 14-year-old boy who is the butt of jokes at his school receives some advice from his only friend, a girl who is familiar with the spiritual traditions of Canada’s North. “You have to be a bear,” she tells him. “Nobody messes with Bear.”
Being in touch with one’s inner Bear is an idea that recurs to the reader while absorbing the 14 stories in Elephants in the Room, stories in which characters have choices to make, decisions that call for strength and are sometimes made harder because of the interference of voices from past lives.
In “You Must Remember This,” a fine story of attempted recompense, a woman remembers both good and bad advice. “Do not ever begin a sentence with ‘You should,’ ” someone once told her, which would be good advice for all of us to remember. But she is also hectored by the voice of her late husband, trying to persuade her that whatever action she takes, it is certain to be the wrong one.
Most of Hegerat’s characters, it seems, have plenty of Bear in them. They are stalwarts, people who do what needs to be done. In the story “Elephants,” however, we find the Bear theme turned upside down, with one of the two main characters being a man who insists on being taken care of… and, perhaps obviously, another being the one who does the caring. It is not one of my criteria for a story that it should move me to tears, but I might mention that one story—“A Practical Woman,” involving aging people and pets—did just that.
Although the short story is usually considered to be a single genre, it really ought to be seen as two, so differently do its longer and shorter versions work. All but one of the stories in this collection are in the shorter form, which does not mean lesser but simply different.
The longer form has been favoured by some of our greatest writers: Alice Munro, Alistair MacLeod, Guy Vanderhaeghe et al. The shorter form, however, is considered more difficult to do. Short-form writers must first of all prospect for an idea that will work in their chosen length, since not all ideas will do that. That this challenging form continues to thrive at all is at least partly due to the encouragement of literary competitions, most of which specify low word counts.
Most stories need the extra space. But as Hegerat’s new collection proves, space isn’t everything. A good writer, if she is also a good prospector, can tell the truths that only fiction can convey, and do it compactly and with style. Good things, it turns out, really can come in small packages.
Merna Summers is an Edmonton writer.
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