Short stories based in BC’s West Kootenay region from multiple award-winning author and poet Tom Wayman.

Living in the shadow of the Selkirk Mountains in southeastern BC, the inhabitants of the Slocan Valley are tied together by magical and dramatic geography, but also by an intricate web of shared history, common needs and the deep and complex relationships that evolve in isolated locations, where everyone is visible and there is no anonymity. Tom Wayman’s new short story collection, The Shadows We Mistake for Love, brings together loggers and environmentalists, marijuana growers and small-town lawyers, back-country skiers and homesteaders, to overlap and coalesce into a brilliant portrait of rural life and place.

Beneath the valley’s idyllic surface, conflict and tension flourish among its inhabitants, ranging from the intimate to the political. In the title story, the protagonist is drawn into an environmental activist group and a relationship with the group’s charismatic leader, but having a child quickly brings home the painful realities of the new life she’s chosen. Other stories depict the changes that are altering the social landscape of the valley, from the ubiquity of the Internet to an influx of affluent new residents. These developments emphasize the ways in which the sometimes rawer and more visible dramas of rural life reflect similar tensions in communities everywhere.

Tom Wayman was born in Ontario in 1945, but has spent most of his life in British Columbia. He has worked at a number of jobs, both blue and white-collar, across Canada and the U.S., and has helped bring into being a new movement of poetry in these countries--the incorporation of the actual conditions and effects of daily work. His poetry has been awarded the Canadian Authors' Association medal for poetry, the A.J.M. Smith Prize, first prize in the USA Bicentennial Poetry Awards competition, and the Acorn-Plantos Award; in 2003 he was shortlisted for the Governor-General's Literary Award. He has published more than a dozen collections of poems, six poetry anthologies, three collections of essays and three books of prose fiction. He has taught widely at the post-secondary level in Canada and the U.S., most recently (2002-2010) at the University of Calgary. Since 1989 he has been the Squire of "Appledore," his estate in the Selkirk Mountains of southeastern BC.

Tom Wayman's profile page

• Winner, George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award