Her name is Vanessa and she’s pissed off with getting old. Forced out of her high fashion job in Toronto, Vanessa freewheels into the rapid destruction of her long and comfortable marriage which in turn sends her on a comical retreat to a holistic campus on a far-flung island. There she grapples with being a single, childless woman closing in on sixty who only now realizes that she never finished breaking up with the wild bass player she met in Victoria decades earlier. Forced to confront her past, we see Vanessa as a twelve-year-old playing with crayfish in the ravine while her parents’ marriage breaks up and she secretly crushes on the only kid of colour at school, and again as a young teacher in training smitten with one of her students. Then, when she’s sixty, Vanessa dates a Black man, but has no clue how to be about it, while her ex, in his stained windbreaker and soiled sneakers, is happy to find his match in a Melissa McCarthy double who wears T-shirts with smutty slogans. And finally we meet Vanessa’s Aunt Marion who, at 103, still has tricks to make her life more interesting. Intelligent and funny, timeless and tragic, See You Later Maybe Never gets to the heart of what it means to be seen as old in a strange new world.

Lenore Rowntree lives beside the heron rookery in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. She is excited Thistledown Press will publish her novel Cluck in 2016. Her short stories and poetry have appeared in several publications including Geist, Room Magazine, The New Quarterly, Other Voices, Exile Quarterly, The Tyee, Poet to Poet Anthology (Guernica Editions 2012), and The Best Canadian Poetry Anthology (Tightrope Books 2010). Her self-illustrated book of children’s poems Love Letters received a gold medal from the Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards in 2007. Her play The Woods at Tender Creek was produced at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre (The Cultch) in 2010. She is a co-editor and contributor to the anthology of life stories Hidden Lives: Coming Out on Mental Illness (Brindle&Glass 2012), and most recently her collection of short stories Dovetail Joint was published in 2015 by Quadra Books.

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