Mike Spry

Michael Harris’s Field Notes: Prose Pieces 1969–2012 begins with the story of an ill-fated trip to the Hamptons where “a well-intentioned and fastidious cleaning-person” discarded ten years of his writing. Two books of poetry and over four hundred pages of prose by the Montreal writer, editor, and teacher were consigned “to the keening atten- tion of the seagulls circling above the local Long Island landfill.”

A playwright in Larry Tremblay’s The Orange Grove, a tertiary character representing the author himself, asks, “Why should he not have the right, as an artist, to talk about war?” – even if he hasn’t been exposed to it. The novel argues that a writer has permission not only to discuss war he has no intimate relationship with, but also to enter into racial and religious conversations beyond his scope as a white, North American writer.

Bock’s characters are immersed in trying to find their context in a Quebec that is experiencing the same struggle. These stories are rich in both the tacit and tangible manifestations of a people who at once belong and do not, are citizens and are not, are Canadians and are not.