5 December 2001

Alistair MacLeod’s first published story, “The Boat,” went on to be included in The Best American Short Stories 1969, and, ever since, he has enjoyed a reputation as a consummate literary craftsman whose stories appeal to critics and general readers alike. Hugh MacLennan once wrote that MacLeod is "One of the finest short story writers now living, or for that matter, who ever lived,” and, more recently, Russell Banks has confirmed that "One can compare [his] stories only to literature. … They are classic, ancient, tribal art, and several of them are masterpieces." Born in Saskatchewan but raised in Nova Scotia from the age of ten, MacLeod’s fiction focuses almost exclusively on the people—mostly fishermen and miners—who inhabited the terrain of his boyhood. His recent novel, No Great Mischief, follows the lives of several generations of a family that emigrates from Scotland to Canada and was nominated for every major Canadian literary award, winning the Trillium Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, among others. A professor at the University of Windsor since 1969, MacLeod still spends his summers in Nova Scotia, “writing in a cliff-top cabin looking west towards Prince Edward Island.”

From “The Boat”

There are times even now when I awake at four o’clock in the morning with the terrible fear that I have overslept, when I imagine that my father is waiting for me in the room below the darkened stairs or that the shorebound men are tossing pebbles against my window while blowing their hands and stomping their feet impatiently on the frozen steadfast earth. There are times when I am half out of bed and fumbling for my socks and mumbling for words before I realize that I am foolishly alone, that no one waits at the base of the stairs and no boat rides restlessly in the waters by the pier.