"Melissa
Hardy is quietly becoming one of the best writers of short fiction working
today, equally at ease with modern realist fiction, historical fiction,
magical realism, and pure fantasy."
Terry Windling, The Year's Best Fantasy and
Horror, 2003.
Readers interested in mythology will revel in London writer Melissa Hardy’s new novel, Broken Road. Others may find the local author’s litany of lore and legend a trifle exhausting. Her expert prose style, however, will please anyone interested in well-honed writing. more
The London Free Press
Gold,
greed and great writing.
With her latest collection of short stories, The Uncharted Heart,
Melissa Hardy continues her creation of luminous prose. . . .
"Hardy infused the landscape and characters with such life that even
more stories proliferate in readers' minds than we find on the page. The
Uncharted Heart turns out to be a dazzling performance. . . .
"The Uncharted Heart is a remarkable evocation of events and
place in Canadian history, a discerning examination of human motivation
and behavior, and an adroit use of language. Melissa Hardy has an obvious
place in the chart of Canadian writers."
The Globe and Mail
A
superb collection.
"These are
tales meant to enthrall and entertain and they succeed, yes, magnificently.
. . .their effect is haunting. They radiate with the visual splendour
of dreams and the psychic force of poetry. . . . A superb collection."
The National Post
Beautiful snapshots from a different world.
London writer Melissa Hardy is unique in her ability to capture the shifting moods of Ontario's North. To anyone who has lived in the far reaches ofthe province, the details of her observations will seem exact and beautifully caught : snapshots from a different, yet not alien world.
In
eight tightly knit stories centered on themes of survival and endurance,
Hardy brings to life a motley collection of fur traders, trappers, Hudson's
Bay Company clerks and burdened women who flooded into Northern Ontario
during the Porcupine Gold Rush of the early 1900s. Although the tales
are harsh and focus, often on struggle, brutality and greed, they are
viewed through a prism of dreams and unrequited hopes.
Hardy's stories teem with peculiar characters and extraordinary situations.
She writes compellingly of remote locations and of their often doomed
denizens: loggers, natives, trappers, subsistence farmers, unhappy immigrants
and the beleaguered women who share their fates. Her attachment to the
North is evidence throughout the collection as is her familiarity with
it, and her tapestry of tales is the work of an accomplished writer.
The London Free Press
It's fitting that a land so feral on its surface but so rich at its core should provide the setting for stories that are as bleakly realistic as they are fantastic. Stepped in oral narrative traditions, including stories from native sources, Hardy's writing is often peppered with equal parts history and comic relief, suggesting that her work is as suited to campfire circles as it is to the page.
The Uncharted Heart demonstrates Hardy's talent for capturing a vital moment in Ontario's history and influsing it with characters and situations that tantalize the imagination.
Quill & Quire
".
. . a spell of sly, deadpan, darkly funny and skillfully crafted
fiction... Although Hardy's stories brim with smoky, funky colour, she's
no slave to the quaint and folkloric... Many of Hardy's characters are
possessed by spirits who prove tenaciously difficult to exorcise.
Hardy writes so convincingly from the inside of a culture not her own,
it's clear she knows about possession first-hand."
The Globe and Mail
"In Constant Fire, Hardy explores life on the Qualla Boundary
Reserve. The stories are formal expressions of Hardy's regret for
the conduct of her race. She joins a people trapped in epilogue,
in an endless display of mourning and deferred grief. But the stories
can also brilliantly shift shape and honour -- formally and in spirit
-- Cherokee culture. . . Hardy says she "squeezed through an opening
between worlds" when she lived and worked among the Cherokee, that
she needed to tell these stories. On the west coast we might say
she potlatches; Constant Fire is a redistribution
of great wealth."
Books in Review
"
This splendidly lyrical collection of stories is imbued with the author's
desire to repay those people whose stories and culture remained hidden
behind the theatrical makeup... She successfully situates her characters
in a spiritually vulnerable world, a rich mystical landscape hidden
below the façade offered to the outer world..."
Ottawa Citizen
"Constant
Fire is artistically written, with an effective mix of tragic
history and comic tension in the present. Its jokes operate not only
to release nervous tension but also to call attention to the ongoing
rifts between white America and native peoples... Constant Fire is a
learning experience packaged colourfully and conscientiously..."
University of Toronto Quarterly
". . . in her ability to represent rather than colonize voices
of First Nation or Native peoples, Hardy's interwoven mythic, historical
and folkloric intertexts present authentic and often humorous anecdotes
of human endurance. In connected stories split identities, constructed
realities and displace cultural traditions following Andrew Jackson's
forced evacuation of the Cherokee to Oklahome (the Trail of tears),
Hardy explores the role of ritual and magic in healing and regaining
cultural connections. Hardy's fictions use traditional oral stories
to comment on contemporary frame stories, thus bringing Cherokee folklore
and history into current events and helping readers feel the hidden
or subversive, "constant fire," still burning in Cherokee
culture."
Canadian Literature
"The characters' mocking scorn of outsiders partially diffuses their
lingering rage about their historic treatment at white hands, and sets
the tone of stories such as "Blood" and the magnificent "Long
Man the River." Lines of reality shift and shimmer, joining the
dead and the living in a harmonious continuum. Characters appear
and re-appear, age and die, in rhythms that give them depth and richness...
(Hardy's) style and narrative technique, strongly influenced by Native
storytelling, are assured... her imagery is often sublime... Overall,
these stories provide a fascinating journey through the psyches of people
who often find living just barely possible."
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Click here to read Long Man the River, winner of the 1994 Journey Prize and an excerpt from Constant Fire
To order Constant Fire, you can e-mail me... or order directly from Oberon Press
2009/melissahardy.com