A Quarterly of Criticism and Review i^^^^^^^^fcEjfc $15

in Grenfell, Saskatchewan as the daughterof the Anglican rector there and thenmoves with her family to Regina during thedepression, just as the author did. Despitethe formulaic disclaimer that "Names,characters, places and incidents are theproducts of the author's imagination or areused fictitiously" this last word points to acentral theme of this Kunstlerroman: theinteresting relation between fiction andlying, as the narrator realizes as sherecounts her parents' reaction to one of herschoolgirl stories: "Of course we know it'sonly a story, don't we? We know it didn'thappen." She also comes to realize thatthere is power in lying, as she candidlyreveals in several different episodes of hergrowing up.In McQuay's almanac the pieces cover adozen years or more when McQuay and herteacher-husband were living at and lookingafter a wildlife sanctuary near Perth,Ontario, named the Foley MountainProvincial Sanctuary. These newspaperrenderings of the natural world seem toassure a sense of recurrence in a mediumthat thrives on change and innovation: thefalling leaves, the drifting snow, the blossomingtrees. These disparate pieces coherebecause of their evocative sense of placeand a consciousness that responds in variousways to the seasons: wonder, narrativeincident, the urge to share and teach, nostalgiaand anger in the face of change.A regular column in a newspaper demandsa wide variety of discourses. For example,McQuay draws on the anecdote of pathos, astory told by a friend of chance acquaintance,the story of an old widower whocould no longer keep up his farm. She drawson reminiscence of childhood, a centralstrategy for both fiction and autobiography,as for instance in McQuay's Christmasarticle in "Winter" that tells of her artistfather,Ken Phillips, who would begin eachChristmas season by designing a card, linoblock or ink-drawing, which makes for heran enduring family record. Creal's "PrairieWinter," which first appeared in Ladies'Home Journal, reads like a non-fictional, orsemi-fictional evocation of several wintersand several Christmas seasons, a child'sChristmas in Saskatchewan.And central to one kind of nature writingis the journey out and back, with itsvenerable echoes of Romance. McQuayincludes a number of these, like her canoetrip on the Snake River in summer or hertour of winter ponds on skis. Near the endof the final section of the book, the Wintersection, the narrator of this episode, on acircuit of the Reserve on skis, has detectedabundant life even in the middle of winter:"I sat very still, staring at the hard, cloudlessblue sky and the writing a broken reedmade scraping back and forth across thesnow in the wind, and I listened deeply."She hears the sound of a beaver below herunder the ice, and she catches the rustlingof "some dead everlasting flowers from lastsummer rustling in the breeze." But it is notnature, writing this episode with a reed pen,but the author on a typewriter. It is also along tradition of nature writers before her,many of them making similar good use ofthe almanac format, including the CanadiansHarold Harwood in Nova Scotia, F. P.Grove in The Turn of the Year in Manitoba,Marilyn Halvorson in To Everything aSeason in Alberta, Roderick Haig-Brown inThe Measure of the Year in British Columbia,and Margaret Créai in Saskatchewan.Créai is most novelistic in her long finalstory which recounts her narrator's visit,years later when she is herself a grandmother,to the Scottish island where hermother was born. She finds that she cannotreally find her dead mother there and thatthere will always be parts of her motherthat she can never know. At the same timeshe finds that the experiences recounted inthe earlier episodes of the book are thewarp on which her present self has beenwoven.125