How Bison Returned to Banff National Park
by Karsten Heuer;
foreword by Leroy Little Bear;
introduction by Harvey Locke
GREYSTONE BOOKS
2026/$28.95/192 PP.

Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch once said he believed that “Books find their writers.” A book will come into being when it finds the writer most likely for the story. Viewed from this perspective, the Porcupine caribou herd found Karsten Heuer to tell their story in his 2007 book, Being Caribou: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd, and his life partner, Leanne Allison, to film it in Being Caribou. “Karsten,” writes conservationist Harvey Locke, “was an adventurer with an enormous capacity for rough travel and an appetite to initiate big projects.” Heuer’s big project to hike and explore the possibility of a wildlife corridor running north–south through the west resulted in his first book, Walking the Big Wild: From Yellowstone to the Yukon on the Grizzly Bears’ Trail. In his latest, Buffalo Lessons, he writes: “Y2Y’s vision to connect and protect reserves along the Rocky Mountains with wildlife corridors was so meaningful to me that I decided to hike its 3,400-kilometre distance, as a wolf or grizzly might, to see if the concept was possible. I discovered it is.” From the start, then, Heuer’s biology degree and his desire to see the world from the points of view of other animals coalesced to make him the perfect warden for the reintroduction of buffalo to Banff National Park, and an ideal storyteller for northern caribou and plains bison. As Leroy Little Bear writes in his foreword, Heuer and Allison were first “cariboued,” and then they were “buffaloed.”

The chapters are sequenced chronologically as the project unfolds and are titled as a series of the “lessons” Heuer and his small team learned both from experienced buffalo managers and from the animals themselves. Some of the titles sound managerial (“Seize Opportunity,” “Leverage Your Success”) and others more like insights into bison psychology (“Embrace Individuality,” “Make Your Idea Their Idea”). Given that an attempt in the 1970s by Parks Canada to restore bison to Jasper National Park failed when the animals dispersed way beyond the park, Heuer undertook a lot of research and preparation in advance. While the book might work too as a manual for wardens and ranchers, its scientific, ecological and even spiritual material makes it a compelling read akin to the works of Alberta naturalists Andy Russell and Charlie Russell, former park warden Sid Marty and UBC forestry professor Suzanne Simard. It also reminded me powerfully of Freeman House’s Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species, another rich account of species restoration.

For a book that details the reintroduction of these animals, it is surprising when the prologue begins with Heuer having to shoot one of the buffalo whose life story he had been party to from its birth. But it has ventured beyond the invisible, largely unfenced boundaries of the park, a trespass the Alberta government will not forgive. Even prior to the first chapter, then, two deaths, both premature, have been recorded or anticipated: that of this young wayfaring bull and that of the author himself. Heuer wrote the book during the final months of his life, and it has been published posthumously. The loss of this man who, together with Allison, in essence apprenticed himself to other-than-human animals to understand their specific ways of being, is deeply tragic.

Throughout, Heuer details the remarkable amount of labour involved in this ambitious project. I was blown away by the physical work, skill range and stamina demanded of the wardens, and the logistics. Heuer had to plan for everything from age, number, biological sex and genetics right down to rubber tubing for the animals’ horns so they would not gore one another during transport from Elk Island to Banff National Park. First Nations’ managerial and spiritual expertise with the buffalo were also integral to this project of ecological restoration and reconciliation. Heuer writes that when not sorting animals “I helped erect teepees, partook in pipe ceremonies and listened to prayers, speeches and songs to bless the animals and the upcoming transfer [from Treaty 6 to 7]…. Looking across the teepees and feeling the drumbeats of Native singers in my chest, I saw I was just a Parks Canada pawn in something much larger about to play out: the prophecy of bison returning from the sky and the mountains.” Anishinaabe writer Richard Wagamese characterized humility as “the ability to see yourself as an essential part of something larger. It is the act of living without grandiosity.” This sense of humility with which Heuer approached the world, allowing him to enter at times into profound relationship with the land, also finds ironic expression in his mildly self-deprecating humour about his role in parks bureaucracy and playing “poker” with wily bison.

Buffalo Lessons does not aspire to didacticism but to be a gift to those who come after in the same way as the buffalo are a gift to the land and the people who live here. Printed on FSC-certified glossy paper with lots of photographs of the bison and some of the wardens, including Heuer, who reintroduced the animals into their ancestors’ territory and witnessed how they transitioned to a free-roaming life in the mountains, this book represents only part of Karsten Heuer’s legacy of science, activism and commitment to the multispecies world we inhabit, whether we realize it or not. Buffalo are now living wild in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta!

Pamela Banting writes articles about park warden literature, multispecies studies and ecocriticism.

_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Buffalo Lessons appeared first on Alberta Views.

by Ted Binnema, François Lanoë and Heinz W. Pyszczyk
University of Alberta Press
2025/$39.00/232 pP.

When it comes to navigating in unfamiliar terrain, today’s travellers have many options based on GPS systems. I’m a bit of a luddite with my boat anchor of an iPhone, but it does have the county map on it showing every quarter section of land, and landowner’s name, for miles around. If all else fails, I have topo maps for old school route finding, thanks to generations of cartographers who have plotted the entire country in a series of grids based on calculations of latitude and longitude. But in Cartographic Poetry we learn that Indigenous people, the Siksika and Gros Ventre, had a totally different way of navigating, based not on mathematical measurement but on landmarks, particularly rivers, that were, and are, of cultural, historical and spiritual significance. The authors note that “Poetry is language condensed: Siksika cartography is landscape distilled,” that is to say, not only landmarks but the history of a nation was distilled in the minds of the First Nations travellers and guides. Every river, every mountain, every buffalo jump was a living story in the mind of the people.

This was the mental cartography the early fur traders relied on, while exploring the west with Cree and other Indigenous guides. One notable explorer was Peter Fidler, a Hudson’s Bay Company surveyor and map maker. In 1792, guided by Sakatow and his band of Piikani, he made a winter journey from Buckingham House on the North Saskatchewan River south to the Oldman River gap. Nearly a decade later he established the short-lived HBC trading post of Chesterfield House, where he asked the Siksika leader Ac ko mak ki (Old Swan) to draw a map of the land south of the post, an area that at the time was a blank spot on European maps. Fidler, writes author Ted Binnema in one of his chapters, took great care in getting his guides to draw on paper the maps they held in their minds. Among explorers in that era, he “was unique in his systematic efforts to preserve and document Indigenous cartographic conventions.” Indeed, Cartographic Poetry contains a wealth of ethnographic detail on place names thanks to the meticulous care Fidler took with his Siksika and Gros Ventre informants.

The maps drawn for Fidler are very different from the European tradition of mapping. They are minimalist by necessity, since they would have been typically drawn in the snow, in sand or mud, or upon a piece of hide using charcoal or other medium. They show the Rockies, the “Back-Bone of the Earth” to the Piikani people, as a pair of double lines in Alberta bending east to the Musselshell River in Montana and then south again to the Big Horn Mountains. From it, the major rivers are drawn simply as lines leading out to the plains with the Indigenous names attached by Fidler. We are then shown their transition in Fidler’s hands to maps a fur trader might understand. Next, this Indigenous knowledge passes from the HBC to the famous British cartographer, Aaron Arrowsmith, for his 1802 map of North America. The authors point out that Fidler, if allowed, would have made a much better map than Arrowsmith. The latter, to “…make his depiction plausible to a western reader, invented sinuous river courses and confluences even though he had no evidence for them.” His map was relied on by Lewis and Clark for their much-ballyhooed continental transit in 1804 (which had already been done with zero fanfare by Alexander Mackenzie in 1793), but Arrowsmith’s map “…contributed nothing to the success of the Corps of Discovery.”

Today these maps “are priceless treasures,” write the authors. In publishing them they hope others will “become as fascinated by the maps, their authors and the territories they depict as we are.” With this respectful, evocative study, they have succeeded.

Sid Marty’s most recent book is Oldman’s River, which won the Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize in 2024.

_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Cartographic Poetry appeared first on Alberta Views.

by Randy Nikkel Schroeder
NEWEST PRESS
2026/$23.95/342 pp.

I’ve never read a book like Sinner’s Banquet. Randy Nikkel Schroeder has created a dark (and funny!) romp of a novel that fuses real and imagined Mennonite culture, noir tropes, Shakespearean-style insults and a deep goth sensibility.

The opening chapter drives you into the narrative at high speed with the surprise of Lethbridge, Alberta, being called “LA” and the energy of Schroeder’s similes such as “white as a peeled creamsicle.” The novel’s wild plot, which takes as many twisting turns as the protagonist’s turbocharged Cressida, involves the plight of Luke, a shunned Menno (due to adolescent sexual shenanigans in a church) now residing in Vancouver and working as a dealer, who gets on the wrong side of Serendipity Hamm, the “benzo queen,” after he tries to pull a scam. Fleeing back to his past with his doomed buddy Buddha to attend his uncle Ezra’s funeral, Luke just gets more wacko as he meets up with childhood accomplices, such as the deviously erotic Nora, and they plot revenge. I can’t give away the gory deliverance, but I must warn you, it’s intensely abject and not for the faint of gut.

The trio’s initial plan turns ever more complicated as it draws in a dastardly embalmer, a vicious gravedigger, an incipient deacon, Andy, who got the moniker Ratzy (for being a tattler), two dashing cops, a Hutterite and a nasty biker called Moby Dyck. The story recalls Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled tales, spiced with Trainspotting-style vice, with characters plucked from the mouth of The Big Lebowski’s Walter Sobchak (“I’ll dry your socks on your mother’s cross,” “I’ll make egg rolls with your foreskin.”) Benjamin Hertwig’s Juiceboxers and Susan Perly’s Death Valley also come to mind. But Sinner’s Banquet is unique, with uncommon scenes involving the history of Nazism, Dionysian cannibalism, a mysterious drug called Rumijch and the desecration of corpses. Grim, yes, but rollicking too.

The short chapters are full of clever allusions to everything from A Tale of Two Cities to Melville, insertions of Plautdietsch lingo (that “meidung” feeling), a plethora of jokes (at times repeating their “badabum” a bit too often, as when Luke inserts his “you’re a real poet” riposte with four different characters), and even some beautiful descriptions of the prairies (“the dark slopes of the Porcupine Hills and the windswept ridges of the Whaleback”). At the end of this unravelling world, Luke remains, both altered and unchanged by his brutal experiences, the entire narrative a kind of meditation on the Thomas Wolfe saying “You can’t go home again.” Sinner’s Banquet is a terrifically startling read, and putting it down, I wonder, “How am I gonna stir my butter now?”

Catherine Owen is the author of 17 books of poetry and prose.

_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Sinner’s Banquet appeared first on Alberta Views.

by Katherine Koller
ENFIELD & WIZENTY
2026/$22.95/180 pp.

Katherine Koller is a screenwriter, playwright, university lecturer, novelist and short-story writer in Edmonton. Earthen is her second short-fiction collection. Per the title, these pieces all connect to the natural world. The characters may be living in an ancient culture, a dystopian future or the present—they may not be human—but they all exist, commune and often suffer in connection with the earth.

The first story, “You Can Have More,” finds elderly Mavis catching a teenaged potato thief in her garden one night. The boy is as feral and hungry as a coyote, and over just a few pages, his need and Mavis’s will to meet it with her own loneliness and abundant offerings feels so primordial in its humanity that I was ambushed by tears.

There is enormous loss in these stories: bereft mothers recall lost children; a girl loses a favourite tree to a chainsaw; another is drugged at a party and nearly loses her life; a man loses his wife in a car accident; a young woman loses her hands and mothers her baby with stumps. The tone of the collection often feels elegiac, as if in sympathy with the besieged natural world. And yet there is hope, escape and renewal in these stories too.

Many of the pieces are complete stories, while others are vignettes. I found occasional shifts in point of view, deus ex machina coincidences, and unconvincing dialogue distracting at times, but the audacity and range of the writing kept me turning pages despite whatever unevenness.

Koller is masterful at scene setting with telling detail. In the story “Harvest Supper,” two catty sentences deftly convey all the disapproval a widowed mother feels toward her son’s boorish family while indicting her daughter-in-law’s lack of thrift: “As usual, Peter and his family arrived a half-hour late and placed their pinging cellphones face up beside their water glasses. The two teens, Jaylee and Jonathan, unaccustomed to bones and skin from a whole chicken, picked at their meat.”

A bumper crop of fantastical narratives comes in the final third of the collection. “Maiden of the Plains” is a story of magic and brutality rivalling the grimmest of the Grimms’ fairy tales. “The Plug” is a tight and suspenseful dystopian story of renegade human survivors fleeing an AI-managed society. “Apple Bread” is written from the point of view of a blighted apple tree with a special connection to the homeowner in whose yard the doomed tree stands. I marvelled at Koller’s imagination, skill and bravery in producing this diverse collection under the banner of the organic. As she writes in “The Plug”: “It’s a risk, all that tilling, bending, digging, patting, then watering, watering every day until something green begins to show.”

Jane Kubke is a writer in Calgary.

_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Earthen appeared first on Alberta Views.

edited by Jennifer Brady and Jacqui Gingras
UNIVERSITY OF REGINA PRESS
2025/$45.95/384 PP.

As an anthropologist-turned-doctor that cares for people who are at high risk of poor health outcomes yet also face the highest barriers to care, I found Changing Care: Advancing Social Justice in the Health Professions to be a lifeline. Edited by two Canadian feminist scholars—dietitian Jennifer Brady and sociologist Jacqui Gingras—the book is rich with subversive strategies, examples and practical tips demonstrating not only why but also how we can arrive at more socially just health and social care. The collection transcends discipline-based silos while challenging oppressive practices and structures. Drawing broadly on anthropology, nursing, social work, occupational therapy and more, the authors guide us through geographies traversing classrooms, clinics and communities from coast to coast.

Sarah L. Dobrowolski’s chapter, “Critical Rooting,” will resonate with those who feel that education of healthcare providers too often promotes a detached, scientific “gaze” while disregarding, in the name of objectivity, the practitioner’s own position vis-à-vis patients and clients. Dobrowolski describes how we can counter such habits by practising and teaching “critical reflexivity,” a “process of deepening our understanding of who we are and how we are in relationship with others.” This focus, she explains, better equips healthcare providers to create and sustain a collaborative, social justice-oriented practice.

“Documentation as a Tool for Oppressive Violence and Resistance,” a practical chapter by occupational therapists Marie-Lynn Grenier and Janna MacLachlan, challenges the myth of healthcare practitioner neutrality. How we document clinical encounters is identified as a “deeply political act” that wields “the potential to either sustain or resist dynamics of power and hegemony.” Moving quickly beyond theory, the bulk of the chapter workshops how to teach and model clinical charting and note-taking in a way “that includes the service user’s truth, affirms their rights and recognizes/honours world views other than the ones held by Western institutions.”

At the peak of the COVID-19 and drug poisoning epidemics, many jurisdictions in Canada were instructed, for fear of virus transmission, to cease rescue breathing and give only chest compressions when responding to an overdose. Communities where drug poisoning events were skyrocketing faced a terrible dilemma. My favourite chapter in Changing Care describes how a peer-led group in Toronto resisted this policy. In “The Right to Oxygen,” by Christian Hui, Nick Rondinelli and Samuel Lopez, voices of lived experience and expertise detail how non-medical responders were trained to use a hand-held mask in place of mouth-to-mouth rescue breathing. This both empowered community members and saved lives. The authors point out that “[g]iving lay responders more tools and options will make all the difference and is simply the right thing to do.” At that time in Calgary, a grassroots group I work with did the exact same thing. It was physically, mentally and emotionally taxing. Sometimes, it was heartbreaking. I am grateful to these authors for their tenacity in finding a way to care for their community under great strain, for demanding that policy makers take heed, and for reporting it here so others can learn from and be inspired by their knowledge and courage.

Although Changing Care is full of techniques that individual practitioners and small communities can apply to effect change, more attention could go to policy- and systems-level advocacy. Additionally, the editors acknowledge gaps regarding mental health, disability, non-binary and trans justice, but also declare their intention to address these issues in a second volume. If they do, I look forward to reading it. In the meantime, Changing Care is both a refreshing critique and practical guide for anyone who holds a stake in health and social care. That is, all of us.

Bonnie Larson is a clinical assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Calgary.

_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Changing Care appeared first on Alberta Views.

by George Colpitts
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PRESS
2026/$34.99/258 PP.

As European settlers pushed in greater numbers into the Canadian west in the early 20th century, they found huge numbers of fish in Alberta’s lakes, streams and rivers—and excellent sport fishing. But as the pressure on those fish populations grew and catches declined, sport fishermen turned to conservation. Their attempts to protect the rivers and streams—and the battle over whose  interests to prioritize—is the focus of George Colpitts’s newest book, Troubled Tributaries.

Colpitts is a professor at the University of Calgary who specializes in environmental history. His book tracks “anglers,” sport fishermen using rod and reel, who pulled major hauls from Alberta’s rivers before the First World War but then saw ever more people lining the banks. Colpitts tracks the different paths taken by local groups that sprang up to protect fishing holes or to lobby for the closure of specific streams and areas. In High River, for instance, a “massive, grassroots movement” emerged to protect the upstream “nursery” areas of the Highwood River to “guarantee a supply of fish” downstream near town. In contrast, in the coal mining area around Crowsnest Pass, where “fish was still a major staple in coal miners’ diets, poaching was rampant, and stream dynamiting common,” conservation-minded anglers pursued a more inclusive approach that included co-operation in conservation efforts. They even pushed for the use of hatcheries to help increase fish populations.

The introduction of the automobile brought major tensions between small-town anglers and their big-city counterparts. Calgary outdoors enthusiasts could now reach what were once secluded fishing spots, pulling out the best fish and leaving behind a mess. Protecting the fish from this onslaught was a major concern of local angler groups.

But other forces were at play, which we can better see now in hindsight. Around Crowsnest Pass, notes Colpitts, “the industrialization of the river threatened to wipe out cutthroat, mountain whitefish and especially the bull trout population.”

Largely missing from this narrative of fishing in the early 20th century are the voices of Indigenous people. That likely says less about narrative choices and more about the fact that settlers coming west paid scant attention to the Indigenous people they were quickly outnumbering and displacing.

What Colpitts brings to light is an early conservation debate and the way settlers viewed their new environment. While the narrative is at times dry, it’s still a fascinating look at what was considered important for conservation more than a century ago.

Justin Bell is a journalist in Edmonton.

_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Troubled Tributaries appeared first on Alberta Views.

by Trina Moyles
KNOPF CANADA
2026/$36.00/328 PP.

Dear reader, first I have to tell you this is a biased book review. I met Trina Moyles in a non-fiction workshop for our Master of Fine Arts degrees, where she wrote a piece that discussed the stupidity of pheasant hunting. As someone who self-identifies as a pheasant hunter, I took great affront to this insult to both my heritage and my life calling. So, to counter her making fun of my life’s passions almost a decade ago (but I hold a grudge), I will tell you all about why you shouldn’t read her latest memoir, Black Bear.

When Trina was 5, her wildlife biologist father brought home an orphaned black bear cub before sending it south to the Calgary Zoo. This sparked her lifelong fascination with bears. When young, she also revered her older brother. But as they grew up, and he went to work in the oil patch and partied, this relationship grew difficult. If you like books that soft-pedal a delicately balanced conversation about addiction and the toll it can take on family relationships and dynamics, as well as how we can perhaps better understand those going through struggles, then don’t read this. Trina says she wasn’t sure who she understood less, her brother or the bear. Her writing about these relationships is provocative, yet tuned to moments of joy, and as the book unfolds you can see how thin is the line we all walk between heartbreak and love.

Don’t read this book if you like stories that seek to bridge the urban and rural divides of life in Alberta. Trina counters her upbringing in Peace River and the facets of life in a resource-extraction-driven town with her young adult years in Edmonton. But there’s not a lot of overlap. As someone who spent his formative years trying to be funny in Drayton Valley and then significantly less funny in Edmonton, I was brought back to the way the transition to the city can be jarring for those who know a very different style of life than an urban existence. To the book’s benefit, Trina doesn’t sugarcoat rural life but instead tells it like it is, allowing the reader to gather their own information about imposed machismo, the inherent fear and expected roles that women are often placed in, and the rampant abuse of booze and drugs that exists. But with all of that, Trina also shows the reader the beauty and complexity of the boreal forest and the characters, both human and bear, that inhabit it.

Throughout the book there’s a constant sense of impending climate catastrophe, whether that’s loss of wildlife, habitat, the changing weather systems, fires, human–wildlife conflict. Trina weaves her observations and research on these subjects into the personal narrative in a way that’s accessible yet articulate. She includes scientific terms but doesn’t twist the story to push an agenda. So, if you want a book that is thought-provoking and hard to put down, then I guess this might be your thing.

Trina is well known for her previous memoir, Lookout, about her experiences working in a fire tower in northern Alberta, scanning the forest through a spotting scope while also navigating challenges in her love life. Black Bear expands on that immersive experience but in a different way. Trina forms a relationship with a mother black bear and her cubs at the lookout tower. As I read about the similarities of that relationship to the one with her brother, I thought of my own past and the connections I probably misread. Maybe I misread that initial encounter with Trina and she didn’t actually make fun of pheasant hunting (she did). But maybe I was wrong about holding a grudge and you should definitely read Black Bear.

Conor Kerr is a Métis/Ukrainian author in Edmonton. His novel Prairie Edge was shortlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize.

_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Black Bear appeared first on Alberta Views.

Edited by the Land and Labour Poetry Collective,
Fernwood Publishing, 2025

It’s been over 30 years since Paperwork, the last of Tom Wayman’s classic trio of work poetry anthologies, and there’s been a dearth of such books until now. That gap in time, note the editors of I’ll Get Right On It, “coincided with the ascendency and dominance of neoliberal governments, markets and ideologies that have promoted individualism and market-based solutions while eroding unions, communities of care and solidarity among working people.” Things haven’t become more secure for workers. And climate change has made things worse. The editors—a collective of six poets that includes Moni Brar, Jenna Butler, Samantha F. Jones and Kelly Shepherd from Alberta—sent out a call for poems “about what it’s like to do your job (paid or unpaid), make a living or just get by in our age of climate change and uncertainty.” The resulting anthology, with some 90 contributors, is varied in approach. In “Bitumen Refining and Its Outcomes: A Short Course,” oil sands worker Ross Belot recalls being called a “hero” when he was employed at a mine and then, in retirement, realizing “we were not heroes, I watched/ California burn.” In “988,” suicide crisis line responder Fiona Conway writes of talking to a 13-year-old girl “so afraid of the way/ her breath warms the world.” And yet there is hope. As Ikeoluwapo B. Baruwa writes in “The Advocate,” his poem about working in a chemistry lab:

“…the storms outside
The floodwaters, the rising heat
Are not just nature’s chaos //
Each hazard I find is a reminder
We build the risks we face
But in the building
There is hope for unbuilding, too.”

_______________________________________

Briefly noted by Alberta Views

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post I’ll Get Right On It appeared first on Alberta Views.

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.

_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Elephants in the Room appeared first on Alberta Views.

by Thomas Wharton
Random House Canada
2025/$35.00/272 pp.

Almost everyone loves a good dog. Most people love a good novel. Thomas Wharton’s new novel, Wolf, Moon, Dog is typeset in ITC New Baskerville, which, as we read in “A Note About the Type,” is “a cheeky nod to The Hound of the Baskervilles.” This book, inspired by fables, is itself a “cheeky nod” to the notion of a novel. It’s a compendium of tales that span the imaginary life (or lives) of a single character, a protagonist named Wolf, the first and archetypal ur-dog, who crosses the species threshold from wolf pack into human society, and then travels through time and space in an epic series of picaresque adventures. Wolf is three-headed Cerberus, and an overbred consort in a medieval court. He inspires a famed Zen koan, illuminating the nature of being; and is Laika, a Moscow street dog and first living creature to orbit the earth. Wolf is abandoned at an airport in Colombia and remains faithful, and heartbroken, until his solitary end. He is a protagonist in tales of ancient Egypt and in narratives akin to Homer, Austen and Joyce. He is companion to a famous Proustian novelist, and “something of an expert on narrative himself,” who “lives other, more memorable lives” not in evanescent memory but through his nose: “Each lamppost, tree and fire hydrant held the phrases, paragraphs and entire chapters of an ongoing saga that was his alone to read.” Through it all, of course, “There was nothing finer, he was certain, than a bone.”

In short, Wolf gets around. He’s seen and done many things. It’s a charming, flexible, capacious narrative gambit, like something from the Italian maestro Italo Calvino: an Oulipo-inspired structure or “machine” for creating stories, with the dog as Forrest-Gumpian figure who doesn’t need to run between scenes in order to pop up amidst familiar narrative styles and strategies, taking a star turn in sterling moments of historical dog-dom. Wolf is “Good Dog,” “Underdog” and “Moondog”—as chapter titles attest. He is a guard dog, rescue dog, hunting dog and a creature trained to go against instinct in chasing down humans held in bondage. He’s an unhoused dog, a dog dosed by hippies, a film star and a time-travelling avatar of speculative fiction, where in a distant future dogs work together and find “ways to help the planet heal itself.”

Wolf, Moon, Dog is a playful literary provocation, a bravura flight of research and performance that reaches for profound moments of imaginative insight. Wharton is one of Alberta’s finest writers. His 1994 novel Icefields was recently republished in a Landmark Edition by NeWest Press, and his 2023 novel The Book of Rain was an ambitious, multi-layered narrative exploring the complexities of resource extraction and climate change. Readers need to encourage writers to take risks in innovating within familiar forms, as Wharton does with Wolf, Moon, Dog. We need to reimagine our relations with non-human nature, creating a new ecological knowledge in which rivers, plants and animals are members of our communities, as Wharton does here. This is one reason we love dogs, after all. And gardens. And books that help us cross the threshold between nature and culture, which is an imaginary divide, after all.

Wharton’s writing is concise and clear, deeply imaginative and easily accessible. For these and other reasons, I wanted to like this book more. The wide-ranging fragments pulled the book apart with a powerful centrifugal force, however, such that the narrative centre could not quite hold. Standing alone, many of these stories shine. But for this reader at least, this cheeky series of fables just about refused to cohere.

Ian MacRae is an associate professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University.
_______________________________________

Click here to sign up for our free online newsletter.

The post Wolf, Moon, Dog appeared first on Alberta Views.