Wigford Rememberies
CBC Books | Posted: July 24, 2018 5:26 PM | Last Updated: July 26, 2018
Kyp Harness
Wigford is a small town in rural Southwestern Ontario, home to a cast of recurring characters: Buzz, a drunk-driving father of two; his wife, who should have married Bert Walmsley instead; Happy Henry, a devout, socially inept apostle who loves to play the organ; Elmer, a stroke survivor.
Wigford Rememberies tells this community's stories through an impressionistic series of vignettes. The language is inventive, innovative and exciting, and whether describing mucking out the pig barn — "there in the dust and the sweet smells of grain and straw and the heavy brown odour of shit so strong it makes you sneeze" — or helping a drunk articulate how to manipulate God's forgiveness — "if I gave my heart to Jesus — right there on my deathbed the minute before I died — he'd forgive everything an I'd go up into Heaven and be saved just as much as the other guy who never did nothin' wrong at all with no difference?" — Harness wields words with an eye for detail, musicality and style. (From Nightwood Editions)
From the book
And no I never will forget — no no — howling winds, flurries of snow through the grey sky down the gravel sideroad down the hill over the creek up the hill to the little farmhouse with the linoleum floors and an old white stove burning a constant fire over which there was a black iron lid over a hole through which he spat his tobacco and a door opening at the top of the stairs. Well! Come in, come in! and You'll be staying for supper won't you? with the thermometer and barometer and the ticking clock and back a while to the house down the old sideroad with the weeds and the ditch and the verdant green forest alongside a creek brown and flowing by the wire fences, oh yes, and foxes and rabbits in the thickets, all very strange.
From Wigford Rememberies by Kyp Harness ©2016. Published by Nightwood Editions.