In this collection of quirky short stories, the reader meets a woman running away from a beer-swilling oaf; a man who believes that God lives behind the counter of the A & W; and a father and daughter isolated in their grief. Some strong language.

Lois Simmie was born in Edam, Saskatchewan in 1932. Filled with awe and wonder at the bountiful and remarkable world unfolding around her Simmie takes us on the journey of her life and the events that shaped her into a writer. She describes her whimsical youth in Saskatchewan in a bygone era of Frank Sinatra on the radio, Amos ‘n’ Andy, the jitterbug, jazz, square dances, and Hollywood movies every Friday night in the town hall. Simmie’s magical delight in all things transports us through the Depression and war years to childhood summer visits to Hopkinsville, Kentucky in her relatives’ Gone With the Wind-style southern mansion, an adventure in the lush beauty of Brazil, and to Scotland while writing her first non-fiction book, The Secret Lives of Sgt. John Wilson, about the murder of a young Scottish woman by her RCMP husband. Simmie fell in love with words at a young age but it isn’t until later in life that she takes up her calling as a writer while living in Saskatoon. She describes the burgeoning Saskatchewan writing scene as “electric” as she enters an exciting community of like-minded writers and poets, a hotbed of creativity and inspiration that is the impetus of her finest writing and the culmination of an astonishing life story.

In Simmie's trademark style, this sweeping new novel is the funny, sad and engaging story of a shattered family's attempt to figure out where exactly each member fits. Matthew's a burned-out, recovering alcoholic ex-newspaperman who finds himself almost nightly roaming the halls of the Victoria apartment building he looks after while fighting to stay on the wagon. Delia's his estranged wife, who still likes him - she left him reluctantly when she didn't know what else to do - but doesn't really trust him. Kate's their daughter, trapped in a loveless marriage with Michael, her religious zealot husband who can't wait for the end of the world. Sam's the grandson, caught in the middle but looking hard for a way out. With this heartbreaking cast of characters, Lois Simmie assembles a true fictional tour de force, a roller coaster of a novel that just won't let up until the final page. As Matthew deals daily with the eccentric tenants of his building and struggles to resist the powerful temptation to hit the bottle again, he's not necessarily in a reflective mood. Lord knows he's got his own troubles. But as sobriety takes a bit more root in him and he begins to look outward, he sees that he's not the only one with problems. In fact, maybe others - people that he loves in his own way and still, in their own ways, love him - have problems bigger than his. But these are people he's let down in the past with his cowardly ways, with his weakness, with his self-absorption. It's going to take every ounce of courage that he's got, all the wisdom he can muster, all the wherewithal he's not sure he possesses, to try to make a difference. It was too late once. But if he fails this time, it really is goodbye.

The more than 175 biographies in this volume together tell the story of writing in Saskatchewan. As David Carpenter notes in his Introduction to the volume: "The writers whose lives are told in these pages are part of an extraordinary cultural community that has touched and been touched by the people and landscape of this province."

Volume 3 shifts its focus to Regina’s literary culture and to the coming generation of younger writers, but it continues to examine the best work from Saskatchewan. The impact, the relevance, the illuminations of our best writers’ work tend to move well beyond the borders of our province. This work transcends the regional sources of its inspiration. Just as Marilynne Robinson has much to say to Canadians about the disruptions and the graces of family life, Dianne Warren has much to say to Americans about the omnipresence of the past, the shadows it casts on people’s lives in the present. Many of our best books are nurtured by the history and the life of this province, but they spring into literature roughly in proportion to their applications and their immemorial responses to the human condition.