From Devil in the Woods. Published by Brick Books in 2019.
Dear Pierre: We all know that history amounts to the collective will of those with the strength to move waterways and name bits of creation for themselves. From the parking lot, I want you to know that this glorified pair of water buckets, struts as if set down by a typesetter, await clean sheets of paper to rise up from the water below so they can emblazon their own mythology onto water belonging to creation alone. Couldn’t help but think of you when Lester declared that settlers don’t need storytellers when they have engineers to project mythologies, every realized blueprint akin to rutting moose bugling into cloudless Shield nights. We know how you can build every Confederation myth into the stuff a school librarian had to fill those stationary, engineered bookcases with. Every page the kind of work that we expect from decades of recreational sacred herbal expertise and belief that a Injun-hating, fond-of-grain-liquor Scotsman could have founded anything but a divot in a couch. Lester and I agreed that we could do without these rust-bucket portages for houseboat tycoons. But a man who spun a nation from a century of men making bad choices for anyone but them is a man worth knowing, J.W.