Being asked to speak on the topic of Canadian short stories made me wonder whether there is such a thing — or if there are only stories written by Canadians. What follows is a wandering through that wondering.

Every week day, I walk on the path around a man-made lake that sits in the centre of my little prairie city. I walk with a friend and we talk about our work and what we’re reading. Marlis Wesseler is a writer who sardonically describes her latest novel as an attempt to wed Barbara Pym to Jack Kerouac. Pym being English and Kerouac American, her description sounds typically Canadian. Marlis Wesseler is a great reader. At the age of fifty, she can still sink into books in the way I used to do when the teacher said, “Now children, put your heads down on your desks and I will read to you from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” One day as we were walking, Marlis described a book flash she’d had. Other people’s book flashes are no more interesting, of course, than other people’s dreams unless they are very good, but this one was good because it was simple. We were both reading Remembrance of Things Past at the time — along with, I believe, half the world’s population. Marlis said she’d opened her car door, the day before, and as she ducked her head before slipping into the driver’s seat, she saw something quite different from the interior of her Saturn; for a moment she thought she was stepping into one of Proust’s carriages.

Isn’t this what we want when we read? To follow a writer into his or her world? I’m not talking about escape. No one enters Proust’s carriage to be lulled to sleep, but to observe and enjoy. To participate in the creation of a fictional world. It is a pure pleasure and it may be why many of us write as well as read.

The shortness of short stories makes them a different discipline from novels, for readers as well as writers, but they must create a world too. I thought, if there is anything that identifies a group of stories as “Canadian,” beyond the fact that they’ve been written by Canadians, I would have to discover it through comparing the fictional worlds they conjure.

One of the first problems I faced when thinking about this subject was the fact that most of the stories I might consider in a group called “Canadian” had been pre-judged. Editors had selected them for publication in small magazines or, at a level higher in the system, had chosen them to be included in anthologies, or I would find them in collections that had been chosen by publishers. In many cases I would not have known about these writers and their work were it not for reviewers and other promoters who belong to our literary establishment. Many writers and books come to my attention only because they are nominated for major prizes. This hierarchy of attention is a necessary part of every literary community, and of our global community, and we do pay attention — I think of all the people reading Proust at the same time or discovering Virginia Woolf or Gabriel Garcia Marquez simultaneously. But good books and good writers can be overlooked. Therefore, for my purposes in thinking about Canadian fiction, I decided to be as subjective as possible. Luckily for me I’d had a short turn at judging. I decided to look at some stories I had selected for publication when for a few years I edited the prose for a small literary magazine called Grain.

My first plan was to talk about Western Canadian writers, then I thought maybe I should talk about newer writers, then I decided to select three or four stories that had left their mark on me, try to determine what it was about them that made them memorable and discuss any features they seemed to have in common. I took my copies of the magazine down from the top shelf and went through the dusty pile. There were many stories I remembered well. I was happy to note how various they are and how some of them released in me an emotion that echoed what I must have felt during the first reading. Several seemed able to hum a few bars of their own peculiar melodies as I reread their opening paragraphs. In fact, too many of them clamored to be included in my discussion — and all in their own right, refusing to be categorized.

How could I possibly leave out Elyse Gasco’s story about a pregnancy that begins: “You meet your man at the outdoor market. He is standing in front of the fruits, feeling the melons and humming jazz. He stands there like the horn of plenty — gathering apples and plums, peaches and grapes, pressing them against his chest, holding them there with the strength of his chin. You pluck an apple from his neck and say: I am with child.”

Or Rangi Jeerakathil’s first published story, about a lonely child in a schoolyard who returns there as a young man and watches girls skipping. “One girl asks if I want to skip. I say yes. I learn how to skip, two ropes at a time, on one leg, back and forth, and double jumps.”

Or Judith Kalman’s haunting story of two sisters caught in rivalry and love and incarcerated in Auschwitz, “Not for Me a Crown of Thorns,” that ends: “She didn’t fault herself anymore than she faulted the rest of her family for not hearing better. You would have needed the ears of an animal or something not merely human, to hear so soon and from such a distance, the black wind in the west.”

Only time and the fear that I would leave out some stories I’d want to mention, and — let me admit — a bit of a prejudice against lists — kept me from listing all the stories that tumbled upward into my memory from the pages of those back issues, and I could see nothing that the stories had in common; voices, visions and styles were individual. Every one of them seemed to me to draw me in to a different world.

Among all the stories, there was one story I remembered best. Although not, as became clear, entirely accurately.

When I began the exercise of perusing the back issues, I knew that a story’s residence in my memory would have depended almost as much on what I brought to it as what it brought to me. It shouldn’t have surprised me to discover that the story I remembered best was written by someone who lives two short blocks from me, and not only because we have a geography and culture in common. Dianne Warren’s work has won several fiction prizes. “Hawk’s Landing,” won the Western Magazine Award for fiction the year it was published. Her work is just beginning to get the recognition it deserves.

I certainly thought I could make a case for the setting of “Hawk’s Landing” being Canadian — that is, I did before I reread the story. I had it set overlooking a river, as it is, but I remembered the river as being situated differently than it is. I thought I’d be able to say this story must have the quintessentially Canadian setting because the characters spend their lives facing the American border. But no. “Hawk’s Landing” is a ferry stop on the Missouri, in Montana. Canada is a place these characters view from the outside. Canada is the place their family members went to when they left home.

Dianne Warren writes a spreading, multi-layered, often funny story. The intriguing setting, a dilapidated, lodge overlooking the river, and the appealing characters soon make you forget you haven’t lived there all your life. Edna Carlberg and her mother linger on in the old lodge that no longer takes in guests. Their neighbors are the ferryman and his wife and their teenaged grandson who’s staying with them for the summer. The story begins when Hildie, the Canadian widow of one of the brothers who’d deserted the family, arrives, stirring up their remembrances of things past. This is a story saturated in time and the idea that time is loss. It is full of the human attempts to outwit that loss.

Here is a glimpse into “Hawk’s Landing.”

Hildie had come with a tape recorder. What she wanted, she explained after supper, was for Mrs. Carlberg to tell stories about the Carlbergs for the Canadian branch of the family. It seemed funny to Edna, the realization that there was a Canadian branch, but she supposed there was. In fact, there were now more Carlbergs in Canada than there were in Montana, thanks to the fact that Edna had never married and had children.

“I don’t know much about Clayton’s family,” Hildie said. “His ancestors. His childhood. Whatever you want to tell me, really.”

Hildie’s mini tape recorder was lying on the table. Mrs. Carlberg was looking at it as though it was something that had got inside by accident and needed killing.

Dianne Warren’s story resonated for me, I think, for two main reasons. First, it made me look and look again. The story did that by reminding me that our need to keep what we have and our need to throw it away are tied to one another. That we are defined by our imagined futures as well as our pasts and by the places we don’t live as well as those we inhabit. Secondly, there was recognition in my seeing. This is the world — from landscape to ethics — much as I see it. There’s lightness in that, an easiness of access. Perhaps, then, there is a case for grouping writers together. Yet I don’t think I can say this recognition happened because she’s a Canadian writer and I’m a Canadian reader. I don’t think I can reason, either, that it happened because she’s a prairie writer and I’m a prairie reader, although her characters are familiar to me. Because of the ending, that momentarily brings into balance the seemingly contradictory desires of freedom and responsibility; I’m inclined to say that the world Dianne Warren and I share is a woman’s world. But I’m not sure. I think of the dozens of other stories from those back issues of Grain and I’m not sure how they connect to me or whether they have anything in common other than their ability to make me remember them. It seems evident that our writing is influenced by our cultural inheritance, by our gender and our place. But the problem of discussing Canadian writing is that we are a population scattered across a huge continent, with landscapes and histories so diverse it sometimes seems the only way we can define ourselves is by who we’re not.

Writers often feel uneasy, anyway, about borders and belonging. How we define ourselves, as for example, having one foot in England and the other in the United States, is not necessarily how we write. Even when our definitions and our theories come from wide reading and knowledge, our writing comes from a deeper place. Marlis Wesseler’s recent novel, although it shares some of both Pym’s and Kerouac’s attributes, is in a tradition that’s worldwide and old: travels in another country. It tells the adventures of two young Canadian women traveling in Mexico. Travels in Another Country could be the title for almost any writing. All the worlds we inhabit can and do surprise us if we aren’t weary to the point of cynicism, and many of us must have the sense, though we may never leave home, that we are strangers.