Equipoise: Ten Stories [Paperback]

A young woman forms her own idea of feminine sexuality while skinny-dipping with her best friend's mother during a thunderstorm. A naive bride returns to her beloved Ontario farm country and, after an encounter with a young female beekeeper, suddenly sees her husband in a sobering new light. Under pretences, a rural doctor returns for her childhood friend, but finds the women in her new life have only a very specific use for her. A middle-aged woman facing the devastating end of a friendship as well as her last chance at childbirth, flees North only to be confronted with the complexities of life in the Yukon. The women of Equipoise struggle to find their positionality in life in relation to the women around them. They are also contoured by their geographies, caught between North and South, East and West, childhood home and adulthood home. They struggle to maintain a balance within the tension of their opposing female roles, landscapes, friendships, rivalries, victories, and catastrophes, always vigourously seeking equipoise.

“This is the best collection of domestic short fiction, each phrase so aptly tuned to each emotion, that I have read since Alice Munro’sToo Much Happiness.” —Janet Somerville, author ofYours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love and War 1930–1949Katie Zdybel resides in the Blue Mountains region of Ontario. Equipoise is her first collection of stories, and was produced with the assistance of a Canada Council for the Arts grant. Stories have been published in the Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Anthology: Book Nine (CVC9), EXILE Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, Prairie Journal, and The Malahat Review. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC, and is also a graduate of the Humber College Creative Writing by Correspondence program.A contemporary collection of stories about maintaining a balance within the tension of opposing female roles, landscalÄ