Our December Guest Maritime Christmas Stories
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95In Our December Guest, Wayne Curtis once again draws on his own experiences to craft nineteen stories of autumn and winter life in rural New Brunswick in an age gone by. Authentic and true in every detail, his characters combine the strength and resilience required to eke out a living from the woods and the rivers as well as a sensitivity to the beauty of nature and an appreciation of the arts.
Homecoming The Road Less Travelled
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95In these 13 carefully crafted short stories, Wayne Curtis explores the theme of homecoming, literally, spiritually, and metaphorically, and the many interpretations of the word “home”. The varied characters discover that home can be found in sometimes unlikely places. In “Night Riders” two teenagers find it on the highway in a stolen car, escaping an abusive institution, bonded together through their complicated love for each other. In “The Poet,” a man grasps for familiar old home feelings at a truck stop, where there is country music, drinks, and laughter. In “The Train,” an eleven-year-old boy finds that he longs to return home when his misjudged escape to town teaches him some hard lessons about who can be trusted.
With his characteristic eye for detail and his skillful ability to evoke emotion and atmosphere, Wayne Curtis once again takes readers into a different time, where people long for what makes them feel most anchored, loved, and valued in an ever-changing world.
In the Country
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95In the Country is a collection of Wayne Curtis’s unflinching but lovingly told stories of the hardships of rural life for his generation. Despite an abiding love for the natural settings in which he himself grew up, Wayne describes the restrictions facing young people who yearned for a life beyond the farm. Country life, with its tranquility and beauty, its seasonal rhythms and gifts, also held many boys and girls back from achieving their potential.
The setting is rural New Brunswick in days gone by but not easily forgotten. It is a fictional world where the harsher realities of the time come sharply into focus. The old man in “The Last Hunt,” for example, embodies the dashed dreams and festering frustrations that make this final hunt of his life so charged with emotion. In the title story, a young woman soon realizes the death of her father has put an end to her educational goals as well, for now her duty is to help the family on the farm.
Many young country people wanted to mix easily with their more sophisticated contemporaries, but encountered insurmountable obstacles. Feelings of inferiority and embarrassment were often the result among those who lacked the social skills to navigate town relationships. In “The Falconer Spring,” Wayne captures the palpable longing, excitement but ultimately limitations two cousins experience on a trip to town. The sister in “Of Fall and Winter Rain” pays the ultimate price for her longing and naivété. The stories assembled here are both tragic and tender, told with Wayne’s evocative, precise prose.
Winter Road
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Winter Road is the latest collection of short stories by one of Canada?s most gifted and accomplished storytellers. An award-winning master craftsman of short fiction, Wayne Curtis takes us on a journey from early schooldays to old age, all in a singular rural New Brunswick setting of times gone by.
Here are illuminating stories of love, heartbreak, daydreams, and expectations – fulfilled and unfulfilled. Curtis charts the lives of small-town boys and girls, men and women who struggle with the challenges and limitations of poverty, isolation, and a kind of discrimination rarely documented in fiction.
Each work is marked by the insight of a veteran author whose life has been dedicated to the creation of a singular fictional world unique to the Maritimes but universal in its echoes of the unending longing of the human spirit. It is a world where dreams are born and die and sometimes live on despite the odds.
Sleigh Tracks in New Snow Maritime Christmas Stories
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$18.95“The morning was damp and we were feeling Christmas in the air, seeing and smelling it in the trees, as our feet crunched across new snow to where a wire fence stood between our fields and the railway tracks. It was there we saw a fir tree standing, more beautiful than any I can remember. Its limbs were full, well shaped and scented, and it stood proud and tall as though waiting for us.”
Sleigh Tracks in New Snow is a collection of Christmas stories set mostly in rural New Brunswick – principally the Miramichi Region – in a bygone day and age. The stories range from the early 1950s to the 21st century, as Curtis recounts the sweet old Christmases of his boyhood and more modern incarnations of the holiday. In this entertaining book, Curtis honours the deeply held traditions and rituals that made celebrating Christmas such a special time for his family and community.
During the author’s childhood, Christmas meant sleigh rides with horses and jingling harness bells, fresh cut forest Christmas trees and intense blizzards that blocked all roads for days. Winter in a rural community required hardiness, generosity, and sacrifice, qualities that were intensified during the Christmas season. Curtis tells how a grandmother sacrificed to ensure a happy celebration for her family, about the arrival of his sister while he and his father searched the woods for a beautiful fir tree to be trimmed in their farmhouse parlour, and the efforts of a prodigal son to get home for Christmas after years of absence. The holiday season also included the magic of skating on a frozen river with a bonfire of burning cattails, the excitement of the school concert, and the solemnity of a church service. These stories reflect an innocent time when truth, heart and honesty were always central to the celebration of Christmas.
Wayne Curtis was born in Keenan, New Brunswick, in 1943. He was educated in the local schoolhouse and at St Thomas University. He has won the Richards, the Woodcock and the CBC Drama awards and written for The National Post and The Globe and Mail. In 2005 Wayne received an honorary degree from St Thomas University. He divides his time between his cabin on the Miramichi and Fredericton. This is his sixteenth book.
Long Ago and Far Away
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Wayne Curtis was born and raised in the rural Miramichi community of Keenan. A high school dropout, he has worked at many jobs in the woods and in factories, including six years with General Motors. He has also been a storekeeper and a river guide. Returning to school during his adult years, he took night courses to get his high school diploma, followed by three years of university, eventually earning an honorary doctorate from St. Thomas University. Wayne has written for The Globe and Mail and The National Post and is the author of three novels, four books of short stories and a screenplay for the CBC. Long Ago and Far Away is his thirteenth book.
