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Book: My Country - Essays and Stories from the Edge of Wilderness by Nowick Gray

categories: Book, Essays, Wilderness, Environment, Ecology, British Columbia, Creative Nonfiction, Canada, Literature, Magic Realism, Fantasy, Fairy Tales, Nature

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Nowick Gray

about this book: My Country charts a journey through two decades of life on a "back to the land" homestead in the mountains of interior British Columbia, 1980-2000. The book as a whole could be considered a meditation on the theme of nature and the place of human life in it.

In the first section, "Forest Walks and Other Exercises," I offer the reader reflections on the human/nature connection in that primal forest experience, accounting also for the outside forces of the industrial world encroaching on it.

"Interior Rainforest" expands the narrative scope to dramatize unique events, along with personal relationships as they flourished or decayed with the seasons: a gathering to learn primitive skills, a climb of a 10,000-foot peak, a solo trek into the wilderness, a marriage in a cave, a tragic wildlife encounter.

The final section takes a further step inside the world of mountain and forest, to the imaginary realm where fiction and reality collide, dance, and mirror one another, bringing new forms of life to the ecosystem the narrator calls home. "Mountain Dreams" comprises fictional stories ranging in style from animism and fairy tale, to magical realism, to naturalistic dramas of human connection.