Fresh Tracks: Writing the Western Landscape

Banting, Pamela (editor)

ISBN 10: 1896095429 / ISBN 13: 9781896095424

Published by Polestar, Victoria, 1998

About this Item

Minor bumping to top fore corner of cover. Anthology, prose and poetry, with contributions by Rudy Wiebe, Sid Marty, Gregory Scofield, Fred Wah, Fred Stenson, Guy Vanderhaeghe, George Bowering, Lorna Crozier, Di Brandt, Karen Connelly, Thomas Wharton, and others.

Seller Inventory # 12929

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Fresh Tracks: Writing the Western Landscape
• Publisher: Polestar, Victoria
• Publication Date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1896095429
• ISBN 13: 9781896095424
• Binding: Trade Paperback Original
• Edition: First Edition, First Printing.
• Condition: Near Fine Plus.
• Seller catalogs:
  • Canadian Literature

About this title

From the Author

In FRESH TRACKS, the land writes back.
FRESH TRACKS: WRITING THE WESTERN LANDSCAPE, edited by Pamela Banting, is an anthology of the work of fifty contemporary writers living in the West. The content of the book is primarily nonfiction--personal essays, creative nonfiction and memoirs--plus some poetry, some "cowboyography" (cowboy poetry and a postcard story), and a few short stories. The subject matter of the book is diverse, but each of the ten sections (Tracks, Maps and Borders, Weather Signs, Names, Histories, Cowboyography, The Geography of Home, A Sense of Place, Flesh and Bone) deals with how we read and interpret the landscape; how it shapes our thinking, living and writing; and how landscape inscribes itself over our very bodies.

For example, there are pieces about hunting caribou with the Dene in the north, tracking animals, birdwatching at Oak Hammock Marsh, connections between gardening and poetry, Mennonite farming practices, fences and international boundaries imposed upon the land, the subversive use of the dictionary by a Metis grandmother, grass and a controversy between scientists and local people over the "proper" names (Latin versus vernacular) of grasses and wildflowers, sensuality, desire and sense of place, "genetic" memory, ghosts, and erasing graffiti from a canyon wall. There is a personal essay by Thomas Wharton, author of the novel ICEFIELDS, about the time he slipped while hiking on the ice of Maligne Canyon and went shooting off into space and how in that instant he became a writer. There is an excerpt from an historical fiction by Fred Stenson that explores the destructive consequences of the bargain in flesh, both animal and human, which we call the fur trade. And Hilary Peach presents a feminist take on the cowboy ballad in her poem about a woman who was no less wanted than Billy the Kid or Jesse James.

With one or two exceptions, none of the work included has been published elsewhere. The pieces by each of the fifty writers are substantial, not mere excerpts or snippets as in some anthologies. The cover artwork, from a painting of caribou by Judith Currelly, is stunning.