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Canadian short stories
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From: Tana Elias <telias>
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 1999 23:45:19 -0500
Ken, thanks for your two recommendations - Martha Brooks and Gillian Chan. I did read Travelling On Into the Light by Martha Brooks (and her earlier collection of stories Paradise Cafe and Other Stories). Unfortunately, for my article on short stories I had to limit myself somehow and arbitrarily picked the criteria of stories published in 1995 to the present - Travelling was published in the US in 1994.
As Sarah Ellis mentioned the lone vs. communal hero, I reflected back on my reading experience and discovered that her suggestion did indeed work for me in some cases, particularly in the case of W.D. Valgardson's Garbage Creek, a book of intertwined stories about children finding ways
- large and small - to impact or care for their environment. Though I'm a public librarian, I imagine Garbage Creek would make a great class read-aloud, both for the memorable and sometimes quirky characters and for the variety of topics it could subtly introduce for classroom discussion on community or the environment.
I'm also thinking about the connections with weather and climate that Ken mentioned recently. This is in fact one of the themes in Budge Wilson's Sharla, a novel featuring a girl who moves to a small town with frequent "polar bear alerts" and has to move beyond her "city" ways and prejudices her in order to become a part of her new community. There's much more to the story than that, but weather and aloneness vs. community are two major ideas that are explored on nearly every page.
Finally, I will say that several people have emailed me offline in order to comment that they appreciate one or another Canadian author but haven't had the chance to read a book by Sarah Ellis. I'm not surprised. I discovered many Canadian authors through their short stories, but have had to interlibrary loan more books by these authors from as far away as Michigan and New York. And many of the books I most want to read simply haven't been published and made available in the US. I'm guessing that's not true of American books in Canada - in fact, when I was in Vancouver three years ago, I noticed a lot of American titles. So while the average Canadian child or young adult probably reads many books set in the US, the average American child might have only a few chances to read some really wonderful literature that explores or is set against the Canadian landscape. I think that is quite unfortunate.
Tana Elias Madison (WI) Public Library
Received on Thu 16 Sep 1999 11:45:19 PM CDT
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 1999 23:45:19 -0500
Ken, thanks for your two recommendations - Martha Brooks and Gillian Chan. I did read Travelling On Into the Light by Martha Brooks (and her earlier collection of stories Paradise Cafe and Other Stories). Unfortunately, for my article on short stories I had to limit myself somehow and arbitrarily picked the criteria of stories published in 1995 to the present - Travelling was published in the US in 1994.
As Sarah Ellis mentioned the lone vs. communal hero, I reflected back on my reading experience and discovered that her suggestion did indeed work for me in some cases, particularly in the case of W.D. Valgardson's Garbage Creek, a book of intertwined stories about children finding ways
- large and small - to impact or care for their environment. Though I'm a public librarian, I imagine Garbage Creek would make a great class read-aloud, both for the memorable and sometimes quirky characters and for the variety of topics it could subtly introduce for classroom discussion on community or the environment.
I'm also thinking about the connections with weather and climate that Ken mentioned recently. This is in fact one of the themes in Budge Wilson's Sharla, a novel featuring a girl who moves to a small town with frequent "polar bear alerts" and has to move beyond her "city" ways and prejudices her in order to become a part of her new community. There's much more to the story than that, but weather and aloneness vs. community are two major ideas that are explored on nearly every page.
Finally, I will say that several people have emailed me offline in order to comment that they appreciate one or another Canadian author but haven't had the chance to read a book by Sarah Ellis. I'm not surprised. I discovered many Canadian authors through their short stories, but have had to interlibrary loan more books by these authors from as far away as Michigan and New York. And many of the books I most want to read simply haven't been published and made available in the US. I'm guessing that's not true of American books in Canada - in fact, when I was in Vancouver three years ago, I noticed a lot of American titles. So while the average Canadian child or young adult probably reads many books set in the US, the average American child might have only a few chances to read some really wonderful literature that explores or is set against the Canadian landscape. I think that is quite unfortunate.
Tana Elias Madison (WI) Public Library
Received on Thu 16 Sep 1999 11:45:19 PM CDT
