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.

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by Lynda Williams
GUERNICA EDITIONS
2025/$22.95/250 pp.

Lynda Williams describes the flavour of her debut short fiction collection, The Beauty and the Hell of It & Other Stories, as “what if Raymond Carver wrote feisty women.” It’s an apt comparison. Williams’s characters, like Carver’s, are bruised by life; their self-knowledge is hard wrought. But the comparison falters when you encounter Williams’s audaciously original humour. In one story, a woman’s disillusionment with life is described through her relationship with a bra. Her expectant delight as she unwraps the new bra from its delicate Victoria’s Secret tissue fades as the underwire digs into her skin and the bra sags after multiple washings. A woman clearing out her mother’s house seatbelts a statue of Jesus into the passenger’s side because she doesn’t “want there to be any confusion about who was saving whom.”

But while dark humour can open psychic distance from trauma, it has a shadow side. In “The Fault is Yours,” the narrator understands that her manic episodes supercharge her charisma: “I was sick in a way that transformed me from flat tap water into sparkling wine,” she says. Invited to speak on a panel of people experiencing mood disorders, she has her audience in stitches. She later regrets this performance, vowing she’ll perform in a circus before offering up her hypomanic episodes for entertainment.

The carefully realized architecture of these stories validates Williams’s tenacious apprenticeship to become a serious writer. She studied at MacEwan and Mount Royal universities and did a mentorship at the Humber School for Writers. In 2024 Williams won the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award. In one story the writer protagonist vows she’ll “give Alice Munro a run for her money” before she turns 30. Disturbed by her relatively uneventful young life, she sets a goal of “collecting strange experiences to weave into fiction.”

Eventually the protagonists of these stories seemed to me interchangeable, their voices similar. One story that stands out is “Miles to Inches,” centred on a brutal rape and the only story narrated in second person. Addressing herself as “you” offers the protagonist space to process her post-traumatic vulnerability. The story’s construction is brilliant: snippets of life as a distracted supermarket cashier are juxtaposed with memories of the rape and subsequent trial, and the narrator’s obsessive perusal of her used copy of the DSM, “wandering through the diagnostic criteria of its disorders as if it were a forest, the same forest where Hansel and Gretel nearly get eaten alive.” It’s been awhile since I’ve read such an original, exciting collection of fiction. Lynda Williams is a writer to watch.

Jannie Edwards is a writer and editor in Edmonton.

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by Blaine Newton
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PRESS
2025/$29.99/182 pp.

According to philosopher Byung-Chul Han, “we no longer have any narratives that provide meaning and orientation for our lives,” as storytelling in the digital age is increasingly reduced to mere sound bites of distracted and disconnected information. Reading a short-fiction collection such as Blaine Newton’s Rag Pickers might be one kind of remedy. As its title suggests, the tales aren’t bent on ambitious puffery but are instead humble—and sometimes hilarious—pieces cut from the cloth of humanity. Newton is an award-winning playwright, and his first book features characters engaging with each other in a way that now, sadly, can appear old-fashioned.

The encounters are subtle, nuanced in a way Henry James would surely appreciate, emotive with melancholic perplexity,  with characters who often appear out of place, who gaze anxiously from behind curtains, who, like the protagonist in the title story, receive cryptic and useless messages that state “I wish you were dead” concealed within a thrift store jacket lining. The longest story in the collection, “Conversations with Cows,” was a Fringe Festival play and, with its two acts, mirrors the production, in which a young couple wrestle with the shifts in their relationship occasioned by a widening gulf between the kowtowing of making corporate money and the freedom of creating art. Newton is able to impart an essential message here, but rarely with a heavy hand (though perhaps with a surfeit of accretive clauses).

Similarly to Stephen Leacock, Newton is adept with the mistaken identity plot (“Coffee Break”) and the satire (“The Reluctant Poet,” a laugh-out-loud romp in seven cantos). Although he is often funny, even down to incongruous similes, as in “The Ascent of Hank,” when the titular character compares his crush’s eyes to a “standard company-issue Bic Cristal,” Newton is even more attuned to the small gestures between the old and infirm and those assisting them as movers or carers.

Consistently, Newton makes the reader feel. Even as one is guffawing at the erasure of stick people on a divorcee’s car, one is stirred by the way the mother’s hands “that had carried the weight of the bags” were now “fists,” or the “wonderful loaf” William finally wholly accepts at the close of “Downsizing,” or the aged man who imagines himself back on the ice, shooting the puck with a boy he sees “from a distance” before realizing “Time is still and hard, the wind like a hand pushing my face away.” Han stresses that narrative can “stabilize life” with its attention to the temporal. Newton’s rag pickers hit this empathic cue: they slow us down, send us deep.

Catherine Owen is the author of Moving to Delilah (2024).

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Graveyard Shift at the Lemonade Stand
by Tim Bowling
FREEHAND BOOKS
2025/$22.95/275 pp.

Where would you find a lemonade stand after midnight A haunted sideshow An abandoned carnival Tim Bowling knows. The prolific Edmonton-based author uncovers these places, both bitter and sweet, in Graveyard Shift at the Lemonade Stand. It’s his first collection of short fiction, which I was surprised to learn, as the book is assured and compact and was a pleasure to read.

The collection’s first story, “The Living,” sets the tone. A teenager on a fishing trip with his parents encounters a sinister tramp, skulking along the river, whose vernacular-laced tales of adventure (plagiarized, the boy knows, from books he’s read) easily draw his father into his orbit. One of the collection’s strongest stories, it’s gothic and creepy, full of Bowling’s exacting detail (“Aunty Muriel wears her grey hair in a severe bun and is always sucking air through her teeth.”). Many other stories here feature adolescent boys presented with ethical dilemmas in which they’re either found wanting or, in an achingly sad moment, realize their parents are all too human.

“Bartleby, the Sessional” (taken after Herman Melville’s story “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and originally published in Alberta Views, May 2021) follows a misanthropic, failed academic’s stumbling to success via the lows of the post-academic hustle. It’s scathing and poisonously funny, ventriloquizing Melville’s interiority and his common themes of deceit and free will (and giving some additional nods—the professor meets a student at Starbucks; poetic signifiers like “salt spray” are dotted throughout). In other hands, stories such as “Bartleby” could fall on the side of the cringe-inducing, overly satirical and sneering. It’s clear, however, that Bowling cares deeply for these characters, here and in other tales that riff on literary themes and writers—such as the John Cheever-inspired “This is a Test of the Emergency Book Buying System,” and a fable-like story, “Tidal Change,” where a blue heron transforms into a man and discovers the blessings and curses this brings, turning the pathetic fallacy inside out.

Taken as a whole, the collection reads like the work of a reader’s writer—you can feel how many authors and books Bowling has absorbed over his lifetime. Canadiana (and Americana) thread through the stories; fans of work from David Adams Richards to The Body-era Stephen King will love it. As much a truly delightful read as an exemplar of craft—and it is—the collection may be best experienced by dipping in and out, one tale at a time, though you may find that difficult to do. As the title hints at, these are stories to be gulped down and read into the late hours.

Bryn Evans is a writer and clinical social worker.

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by Mikka Jacobsen
FREEHAND BOOKS
2025/$22.95/240 pp.

A satisfying short story resolves itself neatly in the end; the most resonant ones, though, drop you off a cliff. The 11 stories comprising Good Victory, the first fiction collection and second book from Calgary essayist Mikka Jacobsen, belong to the latter category.

Jacobsen illustrates quotidian urban prairie life at a slant: a teenager’s addiction to the supernatural encounters she has while asphyxiating herself; one woman’s homoerotic encounter with an ex-frenemy at a West Edmonton Mall psychic fair; another maimed by a ride at the Calgary Stampede. Jacobsen is at her best when interrogating the raw edges of femininity; she presses on the bruises of girl-on-girl cruelty and abject desire, the basest want to be wanted. Take, for example, this child’s attempt to lure the attention of her absent father: “It dawns on Lizzie that Ferris is trying to flirt with their father. The sun attacks her eyes. An ache hammers behind her earlobes. There is an uncomfortable hum in the pit of her stomach. It feels like watching people kiss naked in a movie.”

Each story contains a novel’s-worth of world-building, down to the backstories of protagonists’ mothers and names of secondary characters’ dogs. Jacobsen’s richly realized inciting incidents and conflicts, however, are rarely resolved; the stories’ endings feel spare in comparison to their beginnings. As if taking a rough ride on a seesaw, the reader is sent flying from one story into the world of the next, left to wonder what, exactly, just happened. While this could be a kind way of describing the stories as imbalanced, Jacobsen’s technique seems to serve a higher purpose. In the collection’s final story, “The Spider Olympics,” the protagonist—herself haunted by a family history of ghost-sightings, an eerie life coach, and a dead-end job as a writing teacher at a trades school—takes to reading, then writing, stories inspired by Alice Munro. Where people want clarity, the protagonist reflects, Munro frustratingly doles out “opacity and moral ambiguity.” But she also offers truth—frustratingly important truths.

Following Munro’s tradition, Good Victory trains the reader’s eye to the oblique terror of real life but doesn’t try to make sense of it. Instead, the work of processing lies with the reader. One possible thesis of the book is this: people don’t necessarily act poorly because of trauma or logic. Rather, Jacobsen reveals that desire defies logic in the first place; maybe this is why it feels so shameful to say what we want out loud. Good Victory, then, is not a collection for a reader who needs a narrative tied in a bow. But those who do take it for a spin will be rewarded with something much more thrilling.

Kate Black is the author of Big Mall (Coach House, 2024).

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by Richard Kelly Kemick
BIBLIOASIS
2024/$22.95/248 pp.

Hello, Horse is ex-Calgarian and new-ish Vancouverite Richard Kelly Kemick’s first collection of short fiction, which is not to say he isn’t seasoned at the short story. Nine of these 11 collected stories have been previously published, with the tenth shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s novella contest. His other books include I Am Herod (Goose Lane, 2019), a comical look at the Badlands Passion Play, and Caribou Run (Goose Lane, 2016), a collection of poems.

What makes Kemick a powerful writer is his range of emotional depth and subject matter, and the speed at which he establishes his narrative worlds. He wastes no time introducing a story; rather, he assumes the reader’s intelligence, beginning most stories at a healthy trot and some, such as “Our Overland Offensive to the Sea,” at a gallop.

Love (or longing for love), as well as a persistent sense that we are both snared by and performing within our environments, are key themes that emerge throughout the collection. Kemick’s characters seem to love while in another’s shadow. In the titular story, “Hello, Horse,” a young woman can’t quite tame and make tender a wild thing full of grief. Her revelation is that others exist outside of herself, within their own pain. In “Patron Saints,” our narrator loves a newly famous author whose memoir records a tragic love story that will forever shadow theirs. Our narrator waits in Paris for his lover to return from a high-profile book tour while a Bengal tiger prowls, loose from the zoo, both hunting and being hunted: “There’s a certain respect you’ve got to have for something that sticks around so long where it obviously shouldn’t.” In “Sea Change,” two British Columbia teachers attending a conference in politically tense Cuba flirt with adultery. Their affair never transpires, remaining constantly in a state of delay, but their ruminations on how their lives have led to this moment spark two very different personal revolutions. A young man is captivated by an older magician in “The Great and the Gone,” becoming her lover and her assistant. There’s a palpable distance between them, however, caused by a great loss: the only thing the magician has managed to make disappear but never find again is her own daughter.

Alongside explorations of lovers and longing, each story in Kemick’s collection is disarmingly comical, emotionally rich apart from and as a product of that comedy, and delightfully absurd. Throughout the book is a masterful tension in the idea that reality is always already stranger than it seems. From talking dogs to brutal, cross-checking nuns, Hello, Horse is smart writing.

Colby Clair Stolson is a writer from Ponoka.
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Years later, when Josie describes Holy Ghost Ministries, she stresses that on any given Sunday in northeast Calgary someone is giving testimony in the lobby of a cinema, or in the back room of a 3D-printing shop, or in the basement of a conference centre. In a half-hour stroll through the McCall and Horizon industrial–commercial districts, you could miss 11 sacred spaces if you weren’t paying attention. Holy Ghost Ministries’s sacred space was three floors above a bowling alley. The head pastor, Uncle Wale, had been inviting the Ohuruogus to attend for years. Pa would politely decline in public (My guy, we are Catholic. Maybe another time.) and vehemently in private (Tufiakwa! So Wale wants us to go roll on the floor?).

A few months after Pa landed at Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Josie, Ma and Aunty Glo drove past St. Thomas More Catholic Church and turned left onto 36 Street. The Great Gateway Bowling Centre was nestled between a thrift store and an autobody shop.

Perhaps she would be stuck inside the hyphen between Nigerian and Canadian all her life.

The day before Josie, Ma and Aunty Glo attended their first service at Holy Ghost Ministries, they’d sat in the Ohuruogus’ living room and watched precolonial Igbo village dramas. They’d sat on the same peeling pleather couch that Josie would find Ma half-dead on 10 years later. Then, it was 2010 and Josie, Ma and Aunty Glo were indulging in their Friday tradition. Aunty Glo was providing running commentary. When a chalk-marked dibia sat before his shrine, Aunty Glo pointed out the Alusi, from Amadioha to Ekwensu, and how their carved figurines were like St. Thomas More’s sculpted Blessed Virgin Mary. When a king’s younger brother plotted for the throne, Aunty Glo invoked the earth, Ani. If the brother killed the king, the king’s blood on the earth would cry out for vengeance and Ani would rise up and mete out justice. When the mmanwu danced across the screen at harvest festivals, adorned in raffia and wooden beads, Aunty Glo told Josie that they were watching their reanimated ancestors. Aunty Glo was convinced that great-grandmother Lotachi had returned in Josie, as they shared a hexagon-shaped birthmark on their left wrists, an overappreciation of onions and a fear of dogs.

Josie had never been to Nigeria, but she felt she knew all she could because of Aunty Glo. It almost didn’t matter that, outside of her household, her lessons covered people and places that felt far removed. In social studies the class had learned about the pagan reaction, and Eleanor, her closest friend, pointed at a map of Poland in their textbook and said, “See, see That’s where my family’s from.”

In hindsight there were many potential stimuli driving Ma to take up Uncle Wale’s invitation. Money was tight and the economy was crashing, so maybe she was looking for a miracle. Pa had annoyed her, what with packing off to Lagos and leaving Ma to raise Josie, so maybe she was trying to spite him. St. Thomas More was very white and very stiff, so maybe she was searching for colour and rhythm. Whatever the reason, Josie, Ma and Aunty Glo alighted from the family car and ambled towards a door marked with a SERVICE UPSTAIRS—HOLY GHOST MINISTRIES poster. Behind the door was a damp stairwell, four flights of stairs and muffled music beckoning them upwards.

Josie thinks back to that stairwell and its promise of salvation when Eleanor kisses her for the first time. They are standing in the stairwell of Eleanor’s apartment and Josie is begging Eleanor not to join the nunhood. While Josie was dreaming about medical school acceptance letters, Eleanor was dreaming about the nunnery. The former was years in the making. The latter was revelatory. “A convent?” Josie had whisper-yelled. “You’re going to a fucking convent?”

“A monastery, Josie. It’s different.”

“Either way, you’d really become a nun?”

“I want to be happy, Jos-Jos. Church helps me be happy.”

Josie can’t argue with that. When Eleanor had stopped eating and her yellow hair began falling out in tufts, Josie wanted to believe it was her coaxing that improved things. But she knew it was Eleanor’s parish and its stained glass walls and domed ceiling. For weeks Josie skipped her bioethics seminar to accompany Eleanor at Friday vigils. Eleanor’s hair grew back. Now Eleanor is kissing her, saying goodbye.

“Our ancestors believed in different ways, and they were good people. Isn’t that all that matters?”

Josie didn’t remember much about Holy Ghost Ministries except for the venue, the music and the speaking in tongues. The venue. A low-ceilinged space starkly lit by fluorescent tubes. The pews were made up of metal folding chairs and the lectern was a music-sheet stand. Josie, Ma and Aunty Glo were on time, which meant they were early, and half the seats were empty. They sat in the third row. There were five rows. Everyone present and arriving was Black, except for one shaggy-haired man wearing a kente shirt. Josie recognized a third of the attendees from cultural events held by the local Nigerian association where she shadowed Ma and eavesdropped on wives’ stories about disrespectful children, cheating partners and racist bosses. Then, since Ma spoke to everyone, she’d listen to husbands who insisted gossip was for women yet always had supplementary, catastrophized commentary. The music. A drummer, pianist, saxophonist and three-person choir played through an opening set in the corner left of the lectern. They were definitely livelier than St. Thomas More’s choir; there were riffs, claps and solo moments. Stuff that Josie heard on the radio. Almost everyone was standing, dancing, raising their hands in the air. More and more families shuffled into the room. In the row ahead, Josie watched a girl around her age and tried to mimic her movements. The way she swayed from side to side and tossed her head back as she sang. The speaking in tongues. After a sermon, much longer than St. Thomas More’s, Uncle Wale exclaimed, “We are filled with the Holy Ghost!” and the room erupted in noises Josie could not comprehend.

She wanted so badly to comprehend. The people, the noises, her place in it all.

Josie would feel the same loneliness during her first trip to Nigeria. After that first service, Ma and Josie returned to St. Thomas More, but Aunty Glo was transmuted. She joined the choir at Holy Ghost Ministries. She began attending their bible studies. She started proselytizing at train stations. Then Aunty Glo got engaged to an associate pastor at Holy Ghost Ministries.

The Ohuruogus flew to Nnewi for the wine-carrying ceremony, where the dense shrubbery, red Anambra soil and whole cows roasting on spits were just like Josie had seen in the village dramas. Most similarities stopped there. Josie’s agemate cousins were sure to remind her that Nigerians had running water, only aunties listened to highlife music, and her attempts at Igbo were subpar. Further, Josie’s vocal fry was reminiscent of a valley girl, and Josie could not properly pronounce her own surname. As far as her cousins were concerned, Josie was an oyibo.

There she was, in her mother’s family compound with a backpack full of Chinua Achebe books, finding out that she was Canadian in Nigeria. It would hurt less if she didn’t feel Nigerian in Canada. Josie had needed that trip to feel like a return home. She had fantasized about what it could feel like to not be the odd one out. But perhaps she would be stuck inside the hyphen between Nigerian and Canadian all her life. In the parlour, Josie cried in Ma’s lap. Who could she have been if she’d grown up in Anambra Surely her tongue would have grown flexible enough to navigate sharp proverbs, to curse out her critics. Canada had softened her resolve and dampened her potential. She was just like her English teacher, who, when he heard she was visiting Nnewi, said, “Nigeria Aren’t there terrorists there Will you be safe?” She was a stranger, an interloper, a fraud.

Ma had wiped Josie’s tears and whispered, “Ozugo.”

“But Ma…” sniffled Josie.

“This is your home too.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“The same blood of our ancestors runs in your veins.”

“Like great-grandmother Lotachi?”

“Yes. And she always loved a good game.”

Slowly, dramatically, Josie wiped her tears and left to play Ludo with Obinna and cousin Azuka under a thatch canopy in the yard. Every time they passed the dice, they asked a true or false question. Azuka handed the pair of dice to Josie and said, “Only those who believe in Jesus will find heaven.” Obinna rolled his eyes. Azuka was always seeking to evangelize, even the evangelized.

“False,” said Josie, and she felt her brother’s eyes on her. Josie and Obinna were born a decade apart and rarely spoke after years of sibling squabbles. Obinna’s first memories were of Nigeria, and Josie could only imagine. To her, he was selfish and flippant, defying Ma and Pa whenever he could. She felt he thought her spoiled and goody-goody.

“Come again, little one?” said Azuka, eyeing her skeptically.

“Our ancestors believed in different ways, and they were good people,” insisted Josie, slowly shaking the dice inside her small, fisted hand. “Isn’t that all that matters?”

Later, when Josie and Obinna were sitting in the parlour and eating egusi with poundo, her brother asked, “Where did that come from?”

“Huh?”

“Doubt,” smiled Obinna.

Josie grinned back, downed her glass of water. Something inside Josie was hardening, and perhaps it was the holy ghost.

Back in Canada, Josie walked with slightly more assuredness.

In junior high, Josie’s hair was always braided, but one long weekend Ma split her ring fingernail and couldn’t plait Josie’s hair. Not for lack of trying. The two of them sat in the living room, Ma on the pleather couch and Josie on a leather pouf, her shoulders tucked between Ma’s sturdy thighs. Josie had transitioned out of relaxers by then, because of burns, breakage and Aunty Glo bombarding Ma with articles linking lye-containing products with endocrine disruption and fibroids. When Ma began to braid, Josie’s curls dug into her exposed nail bed. She would have continued had Josie not pulled away.

The next day Josie went to school with her hair both untwisted and unrelaxed for the first time. Ma had packed Josie’s hair into a tight bun but, after Ma left for work, Josie wincingly combed out her dry hair. She then patted it into the tight, perfect circle she’d seen on her parents’ highlife CD covers and in black-and-white photos of the civil rights movement. Her afro wasn’t as big as Nelly Uchendu’s on Love Nwantiti or Angela Davis’s in her trial photos, but it was close enough. At school, Josie traipsed across the courtyard, through the main doors, into her mathematics classroom, and there Eleanor was. She had nerve then, enough nerve to ask Josie, “Do you ever wish your hair was like mine?” when Josie sat beside her at their designated table.

“What?”

“You know. Straight, long, blonde.”

“Hmm.” The only times Josie thought about being a straight, long, blonde was when watching true crime television. She remembered taking solace in not having the features the serial killers and kidnappers on Forensic Files seemed obsessed over. “No, Eleanor, I’d rather my hair wasn’t pale and stringy.”

Ma had gotten a kick out of that one. Maybe Josie had said what she said because she knew it would make Ma laugh. For years, when silence settled between them in the family car, or an amusement park ride, or a cashier lineup, one of them would say, sternly, “Straight, long, blonde,” and they’d both scatter into laughter.

Another weekend, Aunty Glo invited Josie to a Holy Ghost Ministries youth group meeting. Pa was in town and hesitantly dropped Josie off. Before they pulled up to the curb, he said, “We’re Catholic, Chidalu,” seemingly nervous Josie would enter Holy Ghost Ministries and convert on the spot. Josie stifled a laugh. By then, Pa had been abroad for two years. It had been hard to stay close over long-distance phone and Skype calls.

The youth group leader, Eunice, met Josie in front of the bowling alley doors and led her up the flights of stairs. Eunice was a freckled 20-something whose ambivalence towards marriage was unconvincing. As they walked up the stairs, Eunice rambled, “You know, I used to be so angry scrolling through Instagram, seeing all my mates getting married. But God reminded me that everything comes in time. Who knows if those couples are even happy, you get They could be in abusive partnerships. They could hate each other. I’m leading this group because the youth need saving. So much insecurity, peer pressure, unhappiness.” They reached the final landing at last and Eunice looked back at Josie. “Josephine, I want God to save you.”

“Oh,” said Josie, “I’m already… saved.”

Eunice solemnly opened the door before them. Back inside the low-ceilinged space, Josie counted seven teenagers. A senior pastor arrived after they’d all grabbed stacked chairs from the corner and formed a circle, and Eunice said, “Ms. Blessing here will be providing the biblical perspective.” When everyone was seated they began. What does it mean to have faith How can God work through you Why is prayer important Eunice raised each question and a few people raised their hands, some shyly, some confidently, all hopeful. Each question was re-answered by Ms. Blessing, who always began with “Yes, but…” Josie felt the Holy Ghost Ministries youth group was anathema to the improv course she’d taken in Mills Estate with Eleanor months back.

“Can you reach heaven without accepting Jesus Christ?” asked Eunice.

Josie raised her hand, gave the same answer she’d given Azuka all those months ago, felt the same skepticism.

“Yes, but…” Ms. Blessing cleared her throat. “Our ancestors may have lived good. As in, they may have been good people, abi But they were not living to the glory of God. In fact, some of us are still paying for it. Look at Africa. Our lineages, the generational curses. You understand. And the Bible says…”

Eunice looked at her. “Josephine, I want God to save you.” “Oh,” said Josie, “I’m already… saved.”

Improv requires an improviser to adopt “Yes, and” thinking: accept your colleague’s premise and expand on it. In Mills Estate, Josie and Eleanor had improvised a scene about an astronaut who discovered his emptiness was a result of never meeting his twin sister. His mother had sent his twin away for having the wrong hair colour and ruining her tarot card alignment. The astronaut found peace by moving to Madagascar. Improv forces cooperation and flattens hierarchies. Josie was sure her God was one of parallel earth, not hierarchical heaven.

After the youth group meeting, Josie told Ma about Ms. Blessing as Igbo nwelu Eze flashed across the living room flatscreen. Aunty Glo had sworn off secular movies, but Josie and Ma had continued to watch village dramas chock full of mysterious murders, wailing concubines and poorly exe-cuted CGI. Josie had spent every minute since leaving the youth group thinking about Aunty Glo. How Aunty Glo, who’d lionized Ọdinani, who’d told her that her great-great-grandfather was a dibia, who’d insisted that great-grandmother Lotachi had returned in Josie, led her to Ms. Blessing. Ma didn’t respond for a long time, and Josie figured she was too entranced by Queen Amarachi dripping poison into a jug of palm wine.

“Ma?” asked Josie.

Ma simply pulled Josie into her chest, whispered, “Our heaven won’t be full of only oyibos. Tufiakwa.”

Eleanor kisses Josie in the stairwell, and Josie wants to ask how Eleanor could dedicate her entire life to a blatantly imperfect Church. Did Eleanor remember that the same blood that led the pagan reaction still ran inside her veins As a nun, would she get to question the catechism, or the Pope, or the sexual abuse cases Why does Josie have so many questions Maybe Josie didn’t believe enough. Maybe if she did, the universe would have told her that Ma was dying before it was too late. Ma, the sole constant in Josie’s life. Maybe Josie should have gone to all the youth group meetings, joined a monastery, made a shrine. Maybe Josie shouldn’t have kissed Eleanor back.

Now, Josie is on her knees at 5 a.m. in Nose Hill Park. Two days ago Josie found Ma curled up on the pleather couch, coughing up blood, and drove her straight to the hospital. The Bible said no weapons fashioned against the righteous shall prosper, but the virus was propagating, replicating, and Josie couldn’t even hold Ma’s hand. There are no visitors. There is no vaccine. There is no contact. The soil in Nose Hill Park is gummy underneath Josie’s fingernails. If she focuses enough, Ani will swallow her whole. This is the land of Moriah, Josie an offering. Little else matters. Aunty Glo is texting, telling her to drink blended ginger, beetroot and garlic. Obinna and Pa are flying back to Calgary. Eleanor is at St. Clare’s monastery. But, fuck, none of that really matters. Not really. Not when Josie’s thinking about Amadioha and Jesus and antivirals. She’s pouring libations on the earth and reciting pray for us sinners and meditating on medication. It doesn’t make sense.

She doesn’t care which holy ghost answers her prayer.

Mirabelle Chiderah Harris-Eze is a Canadian-Nigerian-American, and the 2022/23 national president of the Black Law Students’ Association of Canada. She won the Writers’ Union of Canada’s Short Prose Competition for Emerging Writers in 2021.

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by Steve Passey
Cowboy Jamboree Press
2024/$12.99/124 pp

Pick up Steve Passey’s latest book of short stories, In Line at Walmart with All the Other Damned, read a few pages, and most likely you’ll immediately have a question: “Why have I never heard of him before?”

There’s no good answer to that question—the Taber-based fiction writer and poet has been published widely in magazines and anthologies, and has released three previous books, both fiction and poetry. Maybe his dark, at times painful, stories just aren’t the sort of thing that gets writers into Canada Reads or the ever-shrinking books section of The Globe and Mail. It’s a goddamn shame.

“It’s a goddamn shame” could be the epigraph for most of the stories in this book. Passey writes about what might be called the gritty side of life—the characters in his stories, like those of Mark Anthony Jarman or Cormac McCarthy, have little to lose and, as the saying goes, “few illusions.” Except there’s no such thing as somebody with no illusions, and everyone has something to lose. Passey’s gift is showing us the importance and the beauty of the lives we might prefer to characterize with a patronizing word or two and then move on.

Take “The Mick”—a story about a skinny, not exactly bright, would-be boxer whose big achievement is successfully sparring with a woman (he can’t spar with men because he’s too underweight for the other guys at the gym). You could tell the story from the point of view of an observer and make it a minor tragedy. You could tell it from the same point of view as a bitter comedy. Or you could tell it from the boxer’s point of view, as a triumph. Passey takes all these approaches simultaneously, leaving the reader with the feeling God might have been looking down at one of his weak, put-upon but touchingly happy creations. There’s pity, sure, but there’s love.

Passey’s love extends from his characters to their stories, and from his stories to the way they tell them. One of the pitfalls writers of the gritty fall into is either hewing so closely to realism that their characters’ voices—the voices of society’s left-behinds—crystallize into caricature rather than blossom into personality. The opposite is true sometimes—we end up confused by high-school dropouts whose voices sound like those of an MFA student. Passey breezes between Scylla and Charybdis to craft voices that stretch credulity but never break it. A retired railway worker with a gun called the ROCKY MOUNTAIN BEAR FUCKER says, philosophically, “Animals, indifferent to suffering, hunt for sustenance,” and we believe that’s how we talk. It’s unlikely. It’s in character. It’s real. It’s beautiful. Welcome to Steve Passey’s world.

Alex Rettie is a long-time reviewer for Alberta Views.

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I’m too hungry to give up. I unbutton my shirt, get my arms out, fling the make-believe net over one surprised fish.

“Aha. You’re one who didn’t get away.”

Beanie laughs, the first I’ve heard from her. She has a knife she stole from the dining room. Not very sharp, but I manage to slit the tender belly open below the gill like I watched my mother do before the School. I scrape the insides into the river.

“Yuck. That’s good enough.” We have to build a fire, keep it small. I climb along the riverbank and stumble on a small circle of ashes in the wall of rocks at the end of the bridge. Someone here before us.

“Beanie, look. Another runaway, you think?”

“Shush. Hush.”

I’m making too much noise. She is nervous, afraid of getting caught. She hasn’t told me what happened before she was returned to the School. She hasn’t talked about Mr. B, either. I don’t push it.

“Tonight we’ll move out.” Beanie sounds like that western story Sister read at school.

About once an hour a car rumbles over the bridge. I wait for silence after one passes, light the mini collection of dry leaves and sticks I’ve piled in the fire pit. The tiny flame catches. I thread the fish onto a stick and prop it over the fire on the rocks. Perfect, I breathe, quiet, waiting for Beanie’s approval.

Crackle, snap, splat. The stick burns through, dumping the fish into the fire. “Oh, shit.” It feels so good to swear. I scrape the fish clean on a rock, rebuild the fire.

This time the stick holds. Smoke flares, then dies. Only a little daytime exposure.

“Jeannie Squirt, you’re a genius.”

Beanie gawks at the smoky, fat slab of pink fish spread on green nettle leaves. The colours are majestic, almost like not real. Our miracle food is eaten in seconds, once we get over the shock. Beanie has called me my kid’s name—from back when.

“Tonight we’ll move out.” Beanie sounds like that western story Sister read at school. Outlaws, horses and cowboys chasing. The bad guys getting caught—or killed.

Geese are on the move. Honk, honk, honk. They fly in Vs over the bridge, one group swooping at the river, the next following. It’s that time of year. I watch their direction. South by southwest, my father always said; that’s where they go. Are we near home Somehow I feel home is very far away.

“Beanie?” She’s asleep in the middle of the day.

Resting up for tonight. I lie down next to her on the tarp. She doesn’t know I’m here until I squirm, move my legs. She pokes me in the ribs. Sleep, sleep. I’m back at the School, watching for Mr. B. He is the worst of the teachers, the most dreaded. Beanie won’t talk about him, what happens when he twists her arm and takes her away during the night. I hunch over my sketchbook, draw the dorm beds in endless rows. Miss Crosbie has taught me to use long strokes for distance and short ones for close up.

I dream about fat red pieces of fish sizzling on racks over a fire my mom is poking to stir up the heat. I want to catch another fish in the river, but Beanie is stuffing our packs, ready to leave. My shirt is crispy dry from the sun.

It’s a dark night. Clouds shadow the stars. Good cover for runaways. We walk from one farm road to the next, occasional dots of light in scattered buildings down a gravel track. Beanie says we have to get to a city before there’s a place to sleep proper. I don’t know how she knows this. Is it wishful thinking I’m too hungry to protest. Our fish feast was a long time ago.

“Shush. Listen. I think it’s a train.” Our village was on a train line. That’s how they took us to the School. Off to the right in the direction of the train sound, a light flickers low, between rows of corn. We crouch in the ditch by the road seconds before a pick-up careens past, belching black exhaust in our faces. No letup. No discovery of two runaways frozen in headlights.

We walk without making a sound towards the flickering glow on the ground, make out a smaller flame nearby. A train whooshes through, passenger cars, moving fast.

A deep voice comes from the bigger fire. “We’ll wait for the next one. It may slow for the switch coming up. If it does, put out your fire and run for the car with the open door.”

“I ain’t puttin’ out ’til I know,” says an answer from the almost invisible fire on the edge of the trampled grass where three men are squatting, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.

“Put it out before you run,” the deep voice says. “I’ll give you a couple of matches to restart if you need them.”

“You ain’t got all the answers, big man,” says the little-fire voice. In the distance a train whistles at a level crossing, slows. I feel familiar vibrations in the ground. It’s a long freight approaching.

The three tramps douse their fires, roll their belongings in seconds and take off for the tracks. We follow just out of sight. Beanie shows no sign of fear. I haven’t discovered her bravery, where she gets it or if she cares.

There’s an open space in a boxcar, directly in front of us. I give Beanie a leg up and she pulls me in beside her. The three tramps are as stunned as we are when we discover each other in the same place at the same time. Are we all runaways from school I want to ask, but my English isn’t up to it. The deep voice holds out a bag of peanuts in their shells. Beanie and I cup our hands to receive this gift from Manito.

“Thank you,” I say in Cree.

“You’re welcome,” the big voice answers in English. “Gotta cut the Indian crap. Gives you away, and you don’t want anyone to know you’re a runaway.”

“How did you know?” I blurt out with the peanut shells.

“Where do you think we all come from?” the voice in the corner mutters. “Here, have a drink of water. Don’t mind my used canteen. Only one I grabbed on my way out. Sure good to have. G’night.” I watch him slide into his bedroll, snug and warm.

Beanie and I scoot into the opposite corner and wrap our tarp around our shoulders. Big Voice slips into the shadows away from the sliding door. There is another figure, the third one at the camp It’s a boy, maybe younger than us. I think he’s asleep already. The empty boxcar sways, jerks, stops, rolls forward. Where are we going Does anyone know?

He says no Indian. English words, yes, but not my mother’s way of talking, so much of which I can’t remember. The School has done good.

The train motion puts everyone to sleep. I dream we are going home. Slowly, more slowly, then movement stops. Brakes screech. A wall of the boxcar slides open.

“Yep, they’re in here,” a man yells.

“Up, you guys. Better hurry.” He tells us what to do as if he’s a conductor.

We jump out of the boxcar onto the ground. I feel my ankle crunch and try to rise to run.

Beanie grabs my arm; the other three are already gone. The boxcar rolls back, erasing our escape.

There’s a maze of tracks in front, on the sides, in back. I test my ankle; decide it isn’t too bad.

Beanie pulls me over rows of steel rods. Finally, a grassy field.

We walk to a road. The lights of a town. A city Beanie and I have never seen either.

We rest in a ditch. My ankle is twice its normal size. Beanie moves it around a bit.

“Don’t. That hurts.” I’m careful not to scream with pain.

“Just trying to see if it’s broken,” Beanie says. We both agree it’s probably only sprained. Sunrise outlines a jagged collection of tall buildings with lower squares spreading from the centre like blocks of wood. We walk, hobble, into a new day.

A car slows behind us. Stops. A woman’s voice asks if we have a place to walk to.

Beanie tries to sound grownup, independent. “We’re going over there.” She points to the buildings in the distance. “My sister has sprained her ankle,” she adds.

“Please let me give you a ride. I’ll take you to the Catholic church. They have a shelter. Even a guest house if you have a little money.”

“No, thank you,” Beanie says. “We’re not Catholic.”

“You don’t have to be Catholic to go there. They will be serving breakfast to everyone by the time we arrive.” The lady moves toward her car, opens the rear door for us.

At the thought of breakfast, we get in.

It’s a nice place. We use the washroom, clean our filthy hands. Sit next to three other new arrivals. I recognize Deep Voice when he reminds me, “No Indian.”

“Promise,” I answer. Someone comes over my shoulder with more pancakes. It’s the lady with the car. How can I be so lucky I was in that damn school for 10 years. I’ve been out for less than 10 days and I’m eating pancakes in a Catholic church, the same thing that kept me in the School. Then I can’t swallow. Will they take me back?

“Whatsa matter?” Big Voice asks me.

“Back. Will they take us back?”

“Nah. Too much trouble. Besides, we’ve come a long way. At least I have. Prob’ly you too. We’ll need their shelter for a while, ’til we get jobs ’n’ everything.” Beanie is listening from my other side. She’s on her fourth pancake.

“My English. Not so good,” I sputter.

“You’ll get it. Just no Indian.” He sounds so sure, so old.

I watch the brown-skin girl across the table. She looks new too. I mutter under my breath thank you in Cree and she smiles.

When we finish breakfast, the lady with the car takes us down a hallway to a dorm room with 12 cots, six on each side facing each other. “This is where you can sleep,” she says in her cheery voice. Beanie and I look at each other and turn to leave, but my ankle stops me. It’s too sore to let me go on.

“Just for tonight,” I tell Beanie. “Until the pain is better.”

“Just one night,” Beanie says. “Too much like the School.” She shivers, tightens her sweater around her arms.

“I’ll get you some ice,” the car lady offers and goes back towards the kitchen. I don’t know what she means. Ice for what?

I sit on the cot, swing my swollen ankle up to rest. The car lady appears with ice wrapped in a towel and puts it around my ankle. It’s cold but feels good.

“My name’s Claire,” she smiles in my face, pinning me in my place on the cot. I look away, over at Beanie, who is lying on her back staring at the ceiling. “Lunch is at 12; supper at 5:00.”

My sister and I sleep. Sister Jolene chases a rat around the dorm beds; a giant toad jumps out and trips her. I wake up laughing. A bell rings. Lunch time. My ankle is way better after the magic ice.

Jeanne Louise. I print my name on the name tag by my plate. Beanie writes Minnie Mouse. She looks up, past my matted hair.

“Tomorrow we go.” It’s a statement, no maybe. There’s a fresh towel on my cot when I return and I don’t know when a hot shower has felt so good, especially as most of our showers at the School were cold. Beanie’s long hair is shining black after her shampoo. Beau Noir, the girls at the School called her. She has brushed it every night since I can remember.

It’s a dark night. Clouds shadow the stars. Good cover for runaways.

We leave after breakfast. My pants and shirt and underwear I rinsed in the shower are sticky dry, good enough, like my ankle that’s still swollen and sore.

A car stops on the road, offers a ride and Beanie accepts.

“Where to, pretty ladies?” a harsh voice asks.

“Downtown,” Beanie answers. Are we really pretty ladies?

The car moves forward, swerves around a tight corner, throws Beanie against the driver.

“Stop. This is our place.” She has seen an Indian sign for tobacco at a house near the road.

“Ain’t downtown yet.” He doesn’t stop.

At a red light, Beanie leans across me and flips the door handle. Good thing I’m holding on or I would have fallen out before Beanie pushes me. In a flash we are free.

“Gotta be careful of these guys,” she mutters.

How does she know I wonder again. What has she seen with Mr. B or when she ran away?

We walk on a sidewalk along a busy street. Stores, people, mostly white faces. Almost unconsciously we follow someone that looks like Big Man from the train and church. He turns a corner, away from the busy street, disappears behind a blank wall. We walk past the building, duck into an alley with a beaten path that leads to an open doorway. We know we need a shelter. We’ve heard stories about runaways at the School. So here’s a place to sleep at night, sort of.

When my eyes adjust to the dark, I see brown faces lying on pieces of mattress or tarps like we have. Someone is cooking and I feel faint from the thought of food. Beanie discards her pack on top of our tarp, eases mine off my shoulders, guides me to the soup line on the back wall of the huge open space. I can only think Cree, Manito. No Indian out loud. I remember.

I pick up litter around a school yard and someone—a teacher?—plants some dollars in my hand. Beanie goes out at night and returns with enough money to rent a room of our own. Two flights up, two beds, dirty toilet on the landing, a wisp of heat. Beans from a can, stale bread dumped behind the corner store. No Sisters with whips, no Mr. Bs. I figure the new ones pay. Beanie brushes her hair every night before she goes out.

During the day she sleeps. I walk, learn the city. There’s a river park where walkers, mostly brown-skinned, gather, drink from paper bags. I watch as pills and needles are passed around, hidden in the bushes. There’s a tension, everyone watches everyone, and themselves.

Alize, the Indian girl from the Catholic church sleeps—passed out—on a bench. No one pays attention. I draw the river curving around a bend, park benches, low buildings in the distance. By some miracle I still have my runaway bag and my exercise book of drawings I’ve kept since I was kidnapped from my home in Grade 1. I keep the bag in hiding, even from Beanie. I don’t want her to see herself on my pages. She might tear them up. Everything’s a bigger secret with my sister.

Whoop whoop. Lights flashing. Police swarming the park, behind the bushes. I am pushed into the back of what looks like the boxcar on the train.

I end up at what they tell me is an old prison; another school, I think, only no nuns, no Father LeBlanc. I am in a room with a metal bed and blanket, no mattress. Where is Beanie?

Someone leaves a bucket of water, a pile of rags. “If you do some work, you can eat. The washrooms are all yours. Get them clean the first time. Or you’ll have to do them again.”

They aren’t too bad. It actually feels good to do some work.

Beanie doesn’t come.

They let me stay three nights, four… hoping Beanie will show up A worker—someone like Claire—tells me to get a job.

I try at 7-Eleven; they say come back the next day. I return three times, three days in a row. “Come in clean clothes and you can sweep the grounds.”

I can’t find Beanie. I check the room we rented and there’s a drunk man sprzawled on my bed. I recognize him from the river park where I got arrested for doing nothing.

“She ain’t here. Go fuck yourself. Halfbreed.”

At the jail, Alize is lying on a cot next to mine when I return from my search for Beanie. “Where you from?” she whispers in Michif.

During the day she sleeps. I walk, learn the city. There’s a tension. Everyone watches everyone, and themselves.

“Don’t know,” I answer in English. “Beanie says she knows, but she’s missing. Can’t find her nowhere—anywhere.” I’m trying to speak good. I’m learning, but I need Beanie.

A V of geese invades the horizon. Honk, honk. I follow their formation, try to draw them, like I remember from close-up at home. Flying south, free.

I have four coloured pencils left. I make miniatures. Pale sky, pillow clouds, ripples for a river—in a three-inch square free as air. A tiny Beanie, two inches tall walking a cornfield, pack on her back. The train boxcar with three sets of tracks going nowhere in another corner of the paper. I’m saving the pencils, paper too.

I’ll keep the drawings for Beanie. The pictures will talk to her, get past her secrets. I have hope.

It’s a dark night. Something jars my shoulder. Maybe a rat I jump out of bed, stare into Beanie’s eyes.

“Get your stuff. Let’s go.” Where now I grab my pack, shove the pencils and exercise book in first.

Born in Chicago in 1938, Janice Kenyon emigrated to Victoria, BC, where she worked as a nurse. She moved to High River in the early 2000s to be near her daughter and grandchildren in Calgary. As a 66-year-old she took an epic cycling trip, which inspired Bike Ride with a Twist: 8,321 km Across Canada (Kachina Press/Sandhill, 2006). Janice’s other books include the biography Any Damn Thing (Gomer Press). Her fiction won honourable mention in the WGA 2020 Pandemic Postcards Contest. Janice passed away July 29, 2023. On the day before she died, she joked this would be the year she won Alberta Views’ fiction contest. She was prescient.

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by Tim Ryan
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PRESS
2023/$24.99/188 pp.

When Tim Ryan won the 2017 Alberta Views short story contest for “Scottie,” he told the magazine it was only the first in a collection of short stories he was working on. On the other side of a six-year gestation comes an expanded universe in East Grand Lake, a novel in 14 stories told from 14 different points of view over the course of just a few days at the Murphy family lakeside reunion.

Inherent to this type of sprawling architecture is the risk that a novel may not have a centre to hold it upright and keep the reader’s attention. Ryan mitigates this risk with the character of Shayne, whose narration weaves through the other stories, binding them together in the process. “The Camp is this place my mom’s family, the Murphys, have on East Grand Lake. It’s not a ‘camp’ in the sense of tents, cooking fires and sleeping bags. It’s a cottage,” he reflects on the drive there. “If it were any other year, I would have put up a big stink.” It is only upon arrival that Shayne makes his reluctance known, refusing to leave the car and interact with the extended family whom he barely knows.

It might not be hard to imagine a kid today spending their lake vacation in a car, sprawling on the backseat with the glare of a smartphone on their face. But East Grand Lake is an exercise in nostalgia, far removed from the loneliness epidemic and smoke-filled skies that plague us today. This is 1972—a time when cottages were redolent of glowing cigarettes, Olympic games were proxy battles of a Cold War and kids fell into books instead of video games. Shayne’s sightline overtop of his Hardy Boys novels serves as the central focal point, his cousins battling waves on the lake, rocketing water balloons at tree forts and capturing frogs in buckets, all in a steady stream of motion orbiting the backseat of the car.

The book, however, is not merely a gesture to simpler times, and Ryan reminds us that childhood angst and conflict don’t vanish in the summer sun. When Shayne ruminates on his father, a former academic, following a path less travelled, we learn this: “I think this attitude got Dad into trouble at the university and frustrated Mom, but it also meant he got interviewed on TV, got invited to places like Oxford and New York and Tokyo to speak, and meant he never had to wear a suit. People wanted to hear him talk about what he’d seen walking that other direction. He walked in that direction my whole life… until he didn’t.”

While East Grand Lake may catch us yearning for the warm months of summer, it ultimately demonstrates the futility of escapism. Then again, perhaps there is no better place to confront inner turmoil than at the shoreline of a lake, amongst the rustling leaves and lapping waves.

Geoffrey Picketts works and writes at Alberta Views.
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