Available now from Stelliform Press. Available for order here.
These are a few of the stories I’ve published in the last decade, chosen because they create a sense of place. I tried to outline in the introduction, setting out their context and my goals for the collection, and how my writing relates to my sense of place, its history and ecology. There are two new stories in the collection. One, “A Hole Cut in the Wall of the World” takes place in the 1970s. It’s about a poet who might be doing something dangerous and magical on a gulf island. “Wider Than the Sky, Deeper Than the Sea” is about a near-future performance artist whose enhanced senses let her witness the life (and impending death) of a salmon stream.
The cover is a print called “The Death of Ostara” by Kerry Pagdin. She’s a printmaker from BC, whose work reminds me of being a kid in the Cowichan Valley, back when I was an eager little botanist, identifying and drawing the plants I found in the woods, drying leaves and flowers and compounding them into–whatever it is a kid makes. Potions? Spells? Teas? It was important to me as a serious eleven-year-old, and I hope some of that feeling has made its way into the stories.
There are reviews:
Over at The Anciliary Review there’s a wonderful discussion of the fictional weird, with The Other Shore in conversation with John Langan’s Lost in the Dark and B. Catlin’s a Mystery of Remnant.
Over at Calyx, Jan Priddy writes, “Rebecca Campbell […] sometimes leads readers gently into the hearts of troubled and lost souls, sometimes pushes us with ferocious energy into terrifying futures.”
Publisher’s Weekly gave it a star (this is important. we like stars) writing, “[t]his thought-provoking, wide-ranging collection stuns”
Over at Locus, Gabino Iglesias calls the book “the literary version of listening to a concept album.”
In the British Columbia Review, Dana McFarland writes: “Diverse in subject, time, and character, the stories feature places of the Pacific Northwest—as presence or genius loci more than mere setting—and reflect the limits of personal agency to reconcile with landscapes that are altered or altering beyond the capacity of any individual to influence. “
At Rest in Pages, Laura Kemmerer writes that the collection is “dire, compassionate, clear-eyed, and unafraid.”
In another Locus review, Niall Harrison calls it “a poised and powerful collection, that binds us to the world.” He even mentions hyperobjects, which is gratifying (I think a lot about hyperobjects).
Where is Here? 