The man is holding up a tiny, delicate glass bottle. It’s shaped like a bottle but it appears to be liquid fire. It is pulsing like it is a heart, and the heart is flushing with blood that is not blood but white, boiling light with a yellow halo.
The man dips the little vessel into a vat and there’s a hiss and a cloud of smoke and he lifts the glass heart out of the vat and it’s a perfect bottle for a love potion. [166-67]
Anne of Green Gables Penguin Black Classics Edition
The question of Canadian identity, so far as it affects the creative imagination, is not a “Canadian” question at all, but a regional question. An environment turned outward towards the sea, like so much of Newfoundland, and one turned towards inland seas, like so much of the Maritimes, are an imaginative contrast: anyone who has been conditioned by one in his early years can hardly be conditioned by the other in the same way. Anyone brought up on the urban plain of Southern Ontario or the gentle pays farmland along the south shore of the St. Lawrence may become fascinated by the great sprawling wilderness of Northern Ontario or Ungava, may move their and live with its people and become accepted as one of them, but if he paints or writes about it he will paint or write as an imaginative foreigner. And what can there be in common between an imagination nurtured on the prairies, where it is a centre of consciousness diffusing itself over a vast flat expanse stretching to a remote horizon, and one nurtured in British Columbia, where it is in the midst of gigantic trees and mountains leaping into the sky all around it, and obliterating the horizon everywhere?
I started collecting the stories in this anthology with the idea of representing all the geographic regions of Canada. I thought that having writers from regions as far apart as British Columbia and Newfoundland would ensure a diversity of voice. I also wanted a good mix of emerging and established writers. I wanted an anthology that would reflect Canadian experience and innovation in form, the way the prism that hangs in my kitchen window refracts light, sending shimmers of unexpected rainbows over the cupboards, walls, and appliances.
I gathered together the best short story collections and literary magazines I'd read over the last twenty years. I thought of the writers I'd heard read at literary festivals across the country, and writers who had come to Newfoundland to read through the Canada Council.
I was looking for the short fiction that had moved swiftly through me, over those twenty years, whipping me up into an altered state, changing me for good. I wanted the new stuff too, the stories that reflected the twenty-first century, the buzzing paranoia of post-9/11 and the white noise of the information age. I sought dislocation, bomb scares, sexual freedom, aberration, fractured identities, nakedness, awakenings of every sort, redemption, and love.
Sometimes I found myself reading the stories here for a second, third, or fifth time, determined to discover how they worked, but at the very last minute, I always fell in. The stories were like swimming pools, and just when I leaned in close enough, I'd lose my balance, be fully submerged.
