Book description
Joan Skogan's marvelously poetic new novel draws upon her own years
adrift on the sea as a wanderer and wonderer to tell the story of Rose
Bachmann, a woman at mid-tide in a life awash in the debris of a
mysterious marriage, in myths both long known and newly invented and
in the magical coastline of the NOrth Pacific.
Rose finds herself at rest in the rock form of a petroglyph entitled
The One Who Fell From Heaven, near Prince Rupert, B. C. and
there she imagines, in a brilliant song to her past and those she has
loved, voyages both real and surreal and the currents of an existence
that have brought her to this place, this truth.
It is a story winding its way toward the "I", a story which
opens to engulf the Skeena and the St. Lawrence, the Danube and the
Tigris, swallowing the very self Rose has given over to propulsion and
discovery. It is a quest which roams the swelling waves of personal
history and may of the world's unfathomable waterways, at once, as the
title suggests, in motion, yet serenely still.
Joan Skogan has been shortlisted for the Journey Prize, the CBC
Literary Essay Competition and the Western Magazine Award.
She is the author of The Good Companion, Voyages at Sea
with Strangers, The Princess and the Sea Bear and Other
Tsimshian Stories, Grey Cat at Sea and Skeena: A River Remembered.
Her work has been broadcast on the CBC and has appeared in
Saturday Night, The Georgia Straight, Border
Crossings, Brick, Western Living, the forthcoming
Banff fiction anthology, the 1993 Journey Prize Anthology,
Winds Through Time, Canadian Children's Annual,
Share a Tale, The Clayoquot Sound Anthology and other
collections. She lives on Gabriola island, B. C.
