Gail Anderson-Dargatz on the landscape that inspires her

In 1993, Gail Anderson-Dargatz won the CBC Short Story Prize for a story taken from the first draft of The Cure for Death by Lightning, which would become her breakthrough novel. The Shuswap region of British Columbia has been a source of inspiration for her from her early days as a writer, and that's where her new novel, The Spawning Grounds, is set.

I write about the Shuswap Thompson landscape because I'm absolutely in love with it. I was born into that landscape. For me, it's story, because my parents would take me out as a child and we would drive around the region where they had been ranchers, and they would tell me stories. So I would think about it as a place full of story and a place full of spirit, because often the story would have a kind of spooky element to it. In The Spawning Grounds, I took that a step further — the landscape becomes a character who takes on flesh and walks right into the narrative.

For anyone who lives in B.C., the salmon have a really important cultural aspect. They feed the economy, and they literally feed the landscape — the eagles pick up the salmon and they drop them at the tops of mountains. The ecosystem is tremendously dependent on the salmon.

Gail Anderson-Dargatz's comments have been edited and condensed.