Petersen herself comes across completely at ease, open and welcoming. Ten seconds into our first conversation, she has asked me up to her place in the country, offered me a place to stay, and invited me along on her favourite hikes. Her cobwebby accent is soft, and she is disarmingly candid – about both her literary process and her personal map. After deciding not to pursue an academic career, she confesses, “like the art historian who fancies herself as an artist, I had to learn to write from the beginning.” There is nothing hiccupy in these stories, perhaps because of the genuine pleasure Petersen seems to derive from the creative spark: “I like starting with a small thing – a plant that fascinates me, like corpse weed, or a scrap of graffiti. Then I interrogate the object until I get a human story to attach to it.”

 Our friend Brian, in “Champlain’s Astrolabe,” stumbles upon a piece of metal in the woods – just junk, but it calls to mind the eponymous explorer’s lost apparatus, found in a farmer’s field in the mid- nineteenth century. “Poor Champlain,” Brian muses, “vertiginous with anxiety as the pole star came up and he found himself in a land whose known reach extended no further than the length of his extended arms.”

“I wanted to write a story about losing your astrolabe, or living in an era where you have to constantly invent your own astrolabe,” Petersen says, herself no stranger to following her pole star: she crossed the globe from her native New Zealand in 1994. First landing at Queen’s University, Petersen eventually followed her Montrealer husband to La Belle Province. Before migrating, she says, other than Anne of Green Gables, “all I knew of Canada as a child was a TV program called The Beachcombers.” There is little more Canadian than Relic and Jesse Jim; then Petersen out-Beachcombered herself, building a log cabin in the Mauricie, where much of the book takes place. We are brought again and again to a fictional Lac Perdu, where dead husbands are mourned and their ashes scattered, fathers are relinquished to their adult lives, promising new love founders. Place is a character more than a mere backdrop, and Petersen’s quiet, patient enracination is obvious. “The stories set in Quebec were part of my digging into the country, putting down personal roots by turning what I saw around me into stories.” After years of spending summers and weekends at the cabin, she has now settled there permanently, to see, she says, “how it is to live in the forest.”