Book: Half-Wild and Other Stories of Encounter
By Emily Paskevics
Published by Thistledown Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
It’s entirely rare that a first book packs a punch like Emily Paskevics’ Half-Wild and Other Stories of Encounter. The Ontario writer’s auspicious debut is multi-layered, engrossing, and technically well-wrought, and it credibly features the no-nonsense, hunting-and-fishing folks who populate Ontario’s hardy wilderness communities.
If you love gothic literature, you’ll devour these dozen stories. Think taxidermy. Animal fetuses in jars. Hitting a strange creature with your car on a dark, lonely road. Often characters are fleeing, or someone close to them has recently died, and the remote landscapes—rife with bears, wolves, coyotes, harsh climate and dangerous waters—brilliantly parallel the characters’ dire situations, their psychological turmoil, and the endangered ecosystem.
“Bear Bones” is set in Sadowa, where “deer-crossing signs [are] half-battered with buckshot,” a snowstorm’s afoot, and Louisa’s gone missing in a “man’s oilskin coat”. There’s a touch of magic realism at play, but the next story—also featuring loner characters—is 100% dirty realism. Two unhappy, teenaged outsiders meet in a marshy bird sanctuary. The narrator says: “I bought a pair of binoculars from the rummage sale at the People’s Church in town. One of the lenses was busted, but if I closed my left eye slightly I could still get a decent view”.
Paskevics’ characters are hardcore. They understand the forest—and perhaps thrive better within it than they do within towns, cities, and relationships. The women muck through marshes, know bird calls, use chainsaws, and can identify scat. Evelyn (“The Best Little Hunter”), at age fourteen, shot, skinned and tanned a black bear, and had been “a card-carrying member of the [Sadowa Hunting Club] since she was old enough to hold a rifle steady”. Professor Ladowsky (“My Father’s Apiary”) is divorced, has lost her parents, and has suffered repeated miscarriages. Heidi, from “Predators,” got an education in the city, but returns home to Sadowa to waitress at a “dingy pub”.
And here’s Paskevics’ skill re: details. A woodstove fire fills a room with scents of “smoked cherry wood, beeswax, and crushed herbs”. Night “comes alive in a rush of dry heat and cricket song. An acrid note of smoke hangs in the dry air from the wildfires up north”. Sylvia, from the title story, returns to her deceased mother’s home in the boreal forest and catches “the scent of spearmint in the overgrown grass by the front steps”.
“Wolff Island” is marvelously moody—one of the book’s best: Martin’s wife and child go missing on Wolff Island, where a warden tells him “You can’t go missing on this island”.
Paskevics’ “half-wild” characters will draw you into their woods, and, as the song goes, you’re in for a big surprise.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM THE SASKATCHEWAN PUBLISHERS GROUP WWW.SKBOOKS.COM