Water inundates the lives of the characters in these Vancouver Island stories. A tree cutter, from atop a giant fir overlooking a sweeping ocean view, urinates into his wealthy customer's flowerbed. A foster child is haunted by the image of a dying seal. A woman in a kayak, troubled by a falling out she's had with her brother, negotiates ubiquitous rollers off the west coast. In 1923, a woman loses her husband to a coalmine disaster and, a hundred years later, a young mother protests a coalmine just as her estranged husband returns from the oil sands. The ephemeral quality of life, like that of water, is revealed. People die, dreams are shattered, love and redemption are found in letting go.

Judy LeBlanc is a writer from Fanny Bay, BC. Several of her stories and essays have been published in Canadian literary journals; a collection of her short stories, The Promise of Water, was published by Oolichan Books in 2017, and her novel, The Broken Heart of Winter, was published by Caitlin Press in 2023. She won the Sheldon Currie Fiction prize in 2012, the Islands Fiction contest in 2015, and she’s been a runner-up for fiction contests with Room, PRISM international and the CBC. She was born and raised on the west coast, she has Acadian ancestry on her father’s side, and WSANEC ancestry on her mother’s side. She was the founder of the Fat Oyster Reading Series in Fanny Bay and taught creative writing at North Island College for several years.

Judy LeBlanc's profile page