What Can’t Be Undone

My first collection of short fiction, What Can’t Be Undone, will be published by Thistledown Press in 2015.

What Can’t Be Undone does for western Canadian and prairie life what Michael Crummey’s collection Flesh and Blood did for Newfloundland’s outport life, bringing the land, its inhabitants, their lives and their wanderings into sharp, sometimes painful focus. This collection is inspired by Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx, and the location-specific novels of my favourite Canadian novelist, Guy Vanderhaeghe.

 

“dee Hobsbawn-Smith’s stories begin when love and comfort have faded, or the fatal accident has happened, the fire has burned the house, loved ones or brutal ones are already in their graves. What is left to write about? I’d say a whole lot. Hobsbawn-Smith’s characters are not life’s victims but life’s bludgeoned survivors. Like their earthy forebears, these modern descendants learn to live with regret, and they keep on keeping on. This kind of gutting it out is the very definition of Western grit, and these fine stories are parables of resiliency.”

~ David Carpenter, author of Welcome to Canada

 

“With these carefully crafted stories, dee Hobsbawn-Smith reminds us of why we tell stories at all: to entertain, to reflect, and to render our lives and relationships in a way that is simultaneously simpler and more complex.”

~ Johanna Skibsrud, winner of the ScotiaBank Giller Prize for The Sentimentalists