Sheila Peters makes her impressive fiction debut with a collection of loosely linked stories whose characters, whether they live in the Queen Charlotte Islands or the Prairies, are ordinary men and women who have seemingly everyday experiences that glimmer with the extraordinary. Her spare, stripped-down prose, leavened with sly humour and a gift for poetic resonance, reminds one of the work of Alice Munro or Sandra Birdsell.

Peters creates people who often feel out of sync with the spiritual, emotional, and physical environments they find themselves in. Two old people on a farm try to comprehend the inevitable fate befalling them, all the while contemplating the strange goings-on of neighbours. A young woman on the lam from Texas finds herself beached in the Queen Charlottes on her way to Alaska. A punked-up Vancouver girl accompanies a crusty grandmother on a tense hunting trek in the drizzly woods. Their universe is our universe, but with a twist that makes it refreshingly new and decidedly different.

Born and raised in the coastal town of Powell River, BC, Sheila Peters went to Carleton University in Ottawa to study journalism; after graduation, a newspaper job brought her to Smithers in Northern BC. Her work has appeared in several Canadian literary journals, including Event, Prairie Fire, Grain, the Malahat Review and Descant. She is the author of Canyon Creek: A Script (Creekstone Press, 1998) and Tending the Remnant Damage, a collection of linked short stories (Beach Holme Press, 2001). Sheila and her husband own and operate Creekstone Press. They have two grown sons and live in Smithers, BC.

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