MY DEEPEST APPRECIATION goes to Patrick Lane, for his love and belief in me. I also want to thank Rob Sanders, who encouraged me to write this book, and Barbara Pulling, who did more than her usual inspired line-by-line editing. She helped me find the shape of the book and gave me the perspective I needed to complete it. There is no editor like her. My thanks also go to the Swift Current Museum for assisting me with my research. Finally, my thanks to the University of Victoria for its support of my research and to the Saskatchewan Writers/ Artists Colony at St. Peter’s Abbey, where I wrote the early drafts of this book. To my brother, Barry, to Ona and to Lynda, apologies for any factual errors I might have made, and a warm thank you for letting me tell our stories and use your real names. In several other cases, I have changed people’s names.
The book’s epigraph comes from Apology for Absence: Selected Poems 1962–1992 by John Newlove (Porcupine’s Quill, 1993). John Berger’s Here Is Where We Meet (Blooms–bury, 2005) inspired the last chapter. Its title, “Not Waving but Drowning,” comes from Stevie Smith; it is the title of her poetry collection published in 1957 by Andre Deutsch. The quote from the Talmud, along with the description of the Mycenaean Greek afterlife and their name for the dead referred to in “My Mother for a Long Time,” come from Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being (Vintage, 2000).
Earlier versions of some of these stories appeared in Geist, Focus, Perfectly Secret: The Hidden Lives of Seven Teen Girls, Dropped Threads and Dropped Threads 3.