Introduction by Marilyn Gear Pilling I met the seven poets featured in this book when they were my students in McMaster University's Creative Writing Certificate Program. A couple of years after McMaster discontinued this program, the group approached me to continue to teach them privately from home. So began our Evenings on Paisley Avenue. We have worked together for years now, and in the winter of 2013, a publisher happened to be in the audience when Pauline Hewak read her poetry aloud as an opening reader for the Hamilton Poetry Centre. While the audience mingled after the reading, the publisher approached Pauline and me, and said that he would like to publish Pauline's work as a book, if I would edit it. Pauline had not written enough poems for a book. A couple of weeks later, I let the publisher know that we had a group of seven equally-talented poets, and proposed that he publish a selection of work by all seven. He agreed. To have a book fall into one's lap like this, in these days, is as rare as sighting a three- toed sloth having coffee in Westdale Village. I am delighted to introduce readers to each of these seven talented Hamilton and area writers, all of whom are now being published, poem by poem, in a wide variety of journals. Blurb for back cover: I have told the story of this book's genesis in the Preface. The place of conception was Bryan Prince Bookseller, our much loved, neighbourhood independent bookstore that has long been considered the heart of Hamilton's writing community. Visit www.princebooks.net for online shopping if you are not lucky enough to live near this book h(e)aven! M.G.P. This book is the debut of seven talented writers who are just beginning to be widely published. Anyone who grew up in Hamilton or lives here now will recognize many of the locales of the poems, but there is also universal appeal and a wide range here: work that is by turns lyrical, humourous, quirky, soulful. The local and the personal are interwoven with mythology and history. In the families, the dilemmas and the individual people depicted here, you will recognize your own.
Marilyn Gear Pilling brilliantly displayed her competence in describing women in My Nose is a Gherkin Pickle Gone Wrong (1996). Showing them “in all their nakedness ... the voice is neither sentimental nor fussy, the prose spare and fresh” (Quill & Quire). She continued her explorations of Canadian women in The Roseate Spoonbill of Happiness (2002), a collection of stories shortlisted for the Upper Canada writing award by Leon Rooke, Greg Gatenby and Sandra Martin: “Pilling has a confident, quirky voice and her stories range in tone from the heartwarming to the humorous. The domestic landscape is familiar, but this book unlocks the strangeness beneath the familiar. In every one of these stories, the unusual and the unexpected give a perspective that enlarges the understanding and leaves the reader wanting more.” Since 2002, Pilling has produced five books of poetry, and now, with On Huron’s Shore, she has returned to fiction with a collection of linked stories about mothers, daughters, and sisters, set in the landscape of the Huron County of the mid-fifties juxtaposed with the Huron County of today. Gear Pilling takes a humourous and sensual look at the female members of one family as it was then, as it is now.
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