Tag: Reading

BOOK REVIEW: In the Bear’s House by Bruce Hunter (Frontenac House, 2025)

“And how a person tells a story tells so much about them.”

At first glance, In the Bear’s House by Bruce Hunter is a coming-of-age story, but it is more. In his twelfth book, award-winning Hunter weaves a complex braid of stories that sits comfortably beside W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, giving us the story not only of a boy who seeks the wisdom of an ‘outsider,’ but a story that captures a place and time that is now history but oh, so relevant. At the heart of In the Bear’s House is the fraught reality of a young deaf boy – Will/Trout – who is lost in his silent world and mostly misunderstood by schoolmates and elders. An angry boy, Trout acts out his frustration. This thread of the braid is told by an omnipotent narrator. The second narrator is Clare, Trout’s mother, who tells her story in alternating chapters. The third thread of the braid is ‘place and time’ which become a character. Hunter reveals Calgary on the edge of the oil boom as well as the Kootenay Plains at the time of the Bighorn Dam that flooded the territory of the Stoney Nakoda. Each of these threads could have become individual books, but Hunter skillfully weaves them into a heartbreaking story of our failure on all three fronts.

Seven of Hunter’s books have been poetry and this novel brims with poetic writing. One of the first tropes, which I noticed, is the conch shell, a shell that was carried to the prairies from Wickham, New Brunswick by Trout’s great-great auntie in 1882. She tells Trout, When I was a girl, we’d put it to our ears and hear the sea. I always thought it looked like an ear (30). Trout calls his early hearing aids contraptions; they, his auntie, and the conch are forever intertwined:

Through the crackle of his contraption, he listened, not to the sea, but to the river, the hiss of water, and once more, to his auntie’s stories (32).

The conch, a reminder of the gift of hearing and imagination. In the Bear’s House is grounded in 1960s Calgary and Kootenay plains, as W.O. Mitchell’s iconic novel, Who Has Seen the Wind, is grounded in the prairies. Hunter links the two protagonists, while also paying tribute to his mentor. He writes,

It was not the first book in which Trout recognized himself, but it was the first where he recognized the place in which he lived (59).

In the Bear’s House is more than an Albertan novel. You don’t need to be prairie- or foothills-born to find a piece of yourself in the story. . . .

To continue reading please go to Maple Tree Literary Supplement, click here.

Reading/Presentation/Workshop Descriptions

Kathryn is available for readings of her poetry and fiction, welcoming opportunities to meet with readers and writers at all levels. She facilitates workshops and especially enjoys meeting with writing groups.

Journal-Pen image LR-1

Participatory presentations and workshops include topics such as:

  • Writing Your Passion: Writing Place (Part 1); Writing Character (Part 2)
    • These two workshops are each facilitated over four Monday evening this fall (Part 1 begins September 11, 2017; Part II begins October 16) at the Belleville Public Library. Check out previous posts on “Workshops and Events” (scroll down) for details.
  • Telling Our Stories: Offered as a two-hour presentation, or a weekend-long writing workshop. Participants are provided a handout or workbook of ideas, strategies, and encouragement that lead to inspiration or, for workshop people, a short creative memoir and a skill-set to carry forward. Besides group work and sharing, writers receive individual feedback to guide and direct.
  • Writing Foreign: in this travel writing workshop – a brief two-hour overview to a weekend of trying your hand, to a 10-day travel experience – participants will explore such topics as:

o Finding Your Voice
o Capturing Place
o Writing People and Culture
o Nitty Gritty (from research to the literary toolbox)
o Movement (from the known world into the unknown and back again)

Relevant here is the work Kathryn did in a Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)-Queen’s University program in development education (1986-1992).

  • Kathryn offers schools and groups two-to-four hour participatory workshop/presentations with “Talking Fantasy Literature” topics such as:

o Fantasy in our Lives
o Portals we Cross
o Through the Unknown
o Magic of Change

This could be followed by a Tapping Your Fantasy writing workshop.

Kathryn taught 14-week-long fantasy literature for credit (through Loyalist College and Ontario Learn online, 15 years). She has also taught fantasy writing at the college level.

Kathryn enjoys traveling, sailing, hiking, photography, and sketching. Born in Southwestern Ontario, Kathryn has lived in Ottawa, Winnipeg, and rural Eastern Ontario. Her home is now in Belleville on the Bay of Quinte. Kathryn holds a B.A. from the University of Windsor and an MPA from Queen’s University, Kingston.

For information about these topics and to discuss others, please contact Kathryn…

email: whiteoakstudio21@gmail.com

Travel & Other Passions: A Room & A Reading Chair

Lucky me! I have a studio room, an atelier, a room of my own. It sits in the front of the house with tall north-facing windows and good light. Once it was the dining room, but rarely used. Now the dining table sits at the rear overlooking the small city backyard. It’s closer to the kitchen with an even better view. Why not?

With the dining table gone – replaced by a smaller more practical one in a place more convenient – the empty space quickly filled with a row of bookcases, a small collection of indigenous baskets, red-tailed hawk feathers (and others) from the fields, favourite photographs and paintings, a drop-leaf worktable, an old secretary topped with a computer (and more bookshelves), and a claw-footed piano stool for the desk. All this came together quite readily as I scrounged through the house and visited Funk & Gruven – all except for an oversize, elusive wing-back chair.

After weeks of peeking into antique and used-furniture stores, I was returning home from a workshop with a fellow writer in a neighbouring town. There, in an old church-cum-shop, stood my chair. It is big; I can curl up in it and be hidden by its high back and broad wings. It is plaid and in my favourite colours – rosy and green hues. It is the perfect chair. In it, I’ve been rereading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, again. Much has changed since c.1928, but travel, life experiences beyond the immediate family and social circle, and a room of one’s own – Woolf’s prerequisites for a literary life – remain paramount. They are more accessible, c.2017, than in Woolf’s day, but still….

I have now spent hours in the chair, lost in virtual travels through distant places and inside others’ lives (hence the book reviews), and I have sketched the chair (but that’s another passion for another day).

Reading Chair Sketch LR-1