Tom Thomson's Shack
- Publisher
- New Star Books
- Initial publish date
- May 2000
- Category
- Canadian
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780921586753
- Publish Date
- May 2000
- List Price
- $20.00
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Where to buy it
Out of print
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Description
City and country are reconciled in this series of short prose pieces encompassing Toronto's vast urban sprawl and British Columbia's Interior. On a visit to Canada's largest metropolis, the author is drawn north to Kleinburg, site of Group of Seven artist Tom Thomson's studio. There, he finds himself immersed in the crucible of "Canada," the cultural construct he recognizes from elementary-school textbooks. And suddenly, it all falls into place: rural, suburban, and urban coalesce in Rhenisch's spare, acutely perceptive words. Rhenisch brilliantly distills the uneasy but indelible connection between the electronic grid that is Toronto and the valley south of his Cariboo home that is — according to Buddhist monks — the Centre of the Universe. Encounters with beekeepers, backwoods ranchers, university students, book publishers, home-brewers, cowboys, horse logger poets, fly fishermen, flora, fauna, and the land itself drive this thought-provoking deconstruction of the urban-rural divide.
About the author
Harold Rhenisch is an award-winning poet, critic, and cultural commentator. His awards include the Confederation Poetry Prize in 1991 and the BC #38: Yukon Community Newspapers Association Award for Best Arts and Culture Writing in 1996. He is a seven-time runner-up for the CBC/Tilden/Saturday Night Literary Contest. In 2005, he won the ARC Magazine Critics Desk Award for best long poetry review and the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize for "Abandon." He won this prize again in 2007 for "The Bone Yard." His non-fiction book Tom Thomson's Shack was short-listed for two BC Book Prizes in 2000. For its sequel, The Wolves at Evelyn, he won the 2007 George Ryga Award for Social Responsibility in Literature. He is the author of 32 books of poetry, fiction, biography and essays and choreographed Richard Rathwell’s Human Nation for the paper stage. Along with the Norwegian Olav Hauge, he is one of the two poets in the world who learned to write and edit poems by pruning fruit trees, an experience documented in his The Tree Whisperer (Gaspereau, 2021). A direct heir of Bertolt Brecht’s theater, through the dissident playwright and novelist Stefan Schütz, whose radio play Peyote he translated and published, he has invented a theatrical set of cross-genre literary interventions. He has secretly edited and mentored over a hundred writers in the hinterlands of Canada unserved by its university and publishing system and is currently writing a transcultural natural history curriculum and a history of British Columbia centred in the Indian Wars of the American West.
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