From a High Thin Wire

In 1982, From a High Thin Wire introduced a powerful new voice into Canadian fiction. Clark's ten frank yet subtle stories, told from the perspective of women at different ages, explore how childhood experiences shape adult choices. In "God's Country," a woman rages against the "eye of God" that has reduced the miner's son she once loved to a mute old man. "Historical Fiction," a comic allegory of university life, imagines first-year virgins guarded in their dorm by a witch with a cat named Freud. In the title story, two sisters come back "from away" to bury their mother, whom they recall as a small bird, "singing from a high, thin wire." JOAN CLARK was born in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, grew up in Cape Breton, and launched her writing career while living in Calgary. Her adult fiction includes The Victory of Geraldine Gull, which won the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award and was a finalist for the Governor General's Award, and Latitudes of Melt, finalist for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book (Canada and Caribbean). Today she lives in St. John's, Newfoundland, where she is working on her new novel.