“Harold Macy’s sharply drawn characters—log graders and wharf rats, chok­er­men and food bank angels—live on out­cast cor­ners of Vancouver Island and the B.C. coast. Despite their hurts and loss­es, despite long hours in des­per­ate beer par­lors and sleazy motels, they achieve under his affec­tion­ate atten­tion a gnarly tran­scen­dence, an unlike­ly but exhil­a­rat­ing tri­umph of spirit.”
~ Des Kennedy, author of Beautiful Communions

 

All the Bears Sing

Stories

_____________
HAROLD MACY

 

Harold Macy’s newest book, a collection of short stories depicting life in British Columbia, resonates with the land and the people who inhabit it.

Whether he’s chron­i­cling the death song of a Douglas fir, the brassy orches­tra of trum­peter swans or the sweet sap sym­pho­ny of a tapped maple, Harold Macy con­tem­plates the beau­ty of all that British Columbia has to offer with grace­ful lyri­cism and appre­ci­a­tion for the
the nat­ur­al world, high­light­ing the par­tic­u­lar mag­ic of the West Coast.

It is the human ties to the land that shine in Macy’s sto­ries:  every­day fish­er­men and log­gers, gar­den­ers and wild­land fire­fight­ers, maple har­vesters, and week­end mis­sion­ar­ies. From the rich boun­ty of the glacial loam to the won­drous stands of Sitka spruce, BC’s nat­ur­al land­scape is as much a char­ac­ter in Macy’s tales as any person.

With a gen­uine appre­ci­a­tion for the nat­ur­al beau­ty of British Columbia, Macy’s col­lec­tion reflects on how we both shape—and are shaped—by the land we inhabit.

 

Harold Macy is the author of The Four Storey Forest (Poplar Publishing, 2011) and San Josef (Tidewater Books, 2020), and has been pub­lished in var­i­ous lit­er­ary jour­nals. He has worked for the BC Forest Service Research Branch, been a sil­vi­cul­ture con­trac­tor for a local forestry com­pa­ny, fought wild­fires, had rain in his lunch pail heli-log­ging up in the mid-coast inlets, and for many years was the forester at the UBC Oyster River Research Farm, where he wrote and deliv­ered online and week­end cours­es in small-scale forestry and agro­forestry. He stud­ied writ­ing with the UBC Mentorship Program, Victoria (BC) School of Writing, Sage Hills (SK), and North Island College.

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All the Bears Sing is pub­lished by Harbour Publishing, Madeira Park, BC