A culvert anchors a key scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The 39 Steps and a scene in Two for the Road starring Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney. Culverts appear in books by Tony Burgess, Dennis Cooley, Alice Munro, Annie Proulx, and Virginia Woolf. Culverts called to Brenda Schmidt’s imagination as well. As a child she played in and around their steel dark openings and took risks. In the daring poetry and prose of Culverts Beneath the Narrow Road the risk-taking continues. In her journeys, she asked people from all walks of life — construction workers, farmers, biologists, writers, musicians — about their culvert stories. Their recollections of experiences with or near culverts, both dark and light, gave voice to her own experiences, providing another sense of the connections we share and the way stories emerge and flow. Schmidt does this by using the stories as a jumping off point when they call up her own memories. She expands on interview quotes, stretching and bending them to create new stories and poems.

Brenda Schmidt, is a writer, visual artist, naturalist and active blogger based in Creighton, a mining town on the Canadian Shield in northern Saskatchewan. Brenda grew up on a farm in the Coteau Hills of southwest Saskatchewan. She has a BA in English, from the University of Waterloo. Schmidt is the author of three previous books of poetry, A Haunting Sun (Thistledown Press, 2001), More Than Three Feet Of Ice (Thistledown Press, 2005) and Cantos from Wolverine Creek (Hagios Press, 2008). Her cross-genre book of essays and letter fragments, Flight Calls, is forthcoming from Kalamalka Press in 2012 as part of the Mackie Lecture and Reading Series. Brenda was finalist for the Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry in 2001, winner of the Alfred G. Bailey Prize for Poetry in 2003 and a finalist for the CBC Literary Award for poetry on four occasions.

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