Fiction Short Stories (single Author)
Boundary Country
- Publisher
- Thistledown Press
- Initial publish date
- Apr 2007
- Category
- Short Stories (single author)
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781897235256
- Publish Date
- Apr 2007
- List Price
- $18.95
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Description
Stories that stalk the borderlands between people, eras and geographies - half the tales roam today's BC Interior valleys, and half range from the US Civil War, to 1930s Europe and Toronto, to contemporary Vancouver.
Boundary Country is a hitchhiker's guide to the quirks and foibles of those who live in British Columbia's distinctive Kootenay mountain region. The stories capture those precise moments where history becomes memory, desire transforms into belief, and where some locale or condition alters and we name it a boundary. Deploying a heady mix of settlers' descendants from the US Civil War and 1930s Europe to contemporary resource industry employees, back-to-thelanders, and the new wave of transplanted urban professionals, Wayman's first person narratives capture those voices in near perfect pitch - their personalities echoing their geography, their substance steeped in authenticity and their collective truth reminding us that the only true wilderness that remains is within ourselves.
About the author
Excerpt: Boundary Country (by (author) Tom Wayman)
My family was haunted by the murder, even in the New World. I can't remember when I first was told the tale, since I'm unable to recall a time I wasn't aware my great-grandparents and a great-aunt died at the hands of an assailant in Amlin. This was the shtetl in Byelorussia where my father's people came from, a little distance northeast up the Dvina from Vitebsk. Perhaps I heard about the crime originally from my Aunt Zifra, my father's twin sister, or from my uncles on my father's side, or maybe from Reb Lucharsky. He was a melamed who came from Velizh, a town in the neighbourhood of Amlin, and so he was classified as a landsman and welcomed as such in our house. "A terrible, terrible thing," was the invariable comment that followed yet another retelling of how my zayde's father and mother and younger sister perished one dark night. - from "The Murder"