Sharon Butala's memoir chronicles her midlife marriage and move away from the city to an isolated cattle ranch on the Great Plains. Evocative and moving, Perfection of the Morning articulates Butala's struggle to adapt, her spiritual rebirth as woman and writer, shaped by the landscape and guided...
To see it I have only to walk a half-mile out onto the prairie, up a sage and cactus strewn slope, around a thinly-grassed hill or two, retreating further and further from civilization into that gorge where only coyotes, deer and rabbits come, till I reach the place below an abandoned eagle’s nes...
Emery to the boarders drifted into sleep. But Old Man Wetherell could still be heard walking about, his footfalls, steady, but not loud enough to keep anyone awake. Sophie lay, despite her exhaustion, staring into the darkness as the long hours of the night began to pass and Wetherell walked ceas...
It is probably sandstone, although rock identification is not something I’ve expended much energy on since it is not in my nature to be obsessed with what natural objects themselves are made of, or how or when, or what their proper names might be. Although I had wanted to learn the names of plant...
Get a move on.” There was no answer, but feet began thumping down the stairs. Without turning around Bonny called, “Where’s Jason?” The radio was playing softly beside the sink and she reached with a soapy hand to shut it off. “An aboriginal man claims that he’d been driven by the police to the o...
She feels exhausted and strained, yet no dream, no echo of the passing of the night lingers. Something is tugging at her memory though, but whatever it is refuses to dredge itself up and confront her. The room’s shadows are lucid but convey no information. She waits motionless inside the cool san...
She had been worried, imagining her small nieces deprived of a family Christmas for the first time in their lives, imagining Tony spending Christmas with them (since he had refused to go with his parents to his younger sister’s in Edmonton), morose and lonely, imagining, with Diane not present, a...