Seasons of Ordinary Time

By times compassionate, brave, and humorous, this bright and poetic collection roams from a little country girl to the urban party crowd, from rural teenagers’ drunken exploits to a Trappist monk – culminating in a connected series of longer stories about Beatrix Chambers, a young artist learning about love, aging, and most of all, about the meaning of family. The extended portraits of Bea’s stays at home, and her experiences of parents, grandparents, siblings, and cousins, are as flawless as crystal and as soothing as summer light.
Reviews
“Robyn Marie Butt’s Seasons of Ordinary Time introduces another daring voice… Butt has a gift for replicating the rhythms of speech, whether of drunkenness, the maunderings of an old man, or of a crumbling heart. And her three connected stories about a large and shifting family which makes elegant speeches but resides in innocence are nothing less than brilliant.… The intense perspicacity of these stories is a joy: Robyn Marie Butt’s writing is beautiful, alchemical, transformative.”
- University of Toronto Quarterly (UTQ)
“Lush, complex characters distinguish Robyn Marie Butt’s short fiction. Her ability to compel empathy through pellucid description, dialogue, and incident is disarming in its charm and flow… Short works foreshadow the mastery evident in a series of longer stories that detail the formation of the personality and character of a young artist, Bea Chambers. This is an optimistic and reverent vision of the individual person that is refreshingly sentimental and simply reassuring.”
- Quill & Quire
“… The best work of new fiction I have read in a long time…. Robyn Marie Butt has created a lyrical, poetic collection of stories where our familiarity with her characters and their stories is limited only by the 175 pages in the book. Even flowers, twigs and insects burst free from the pages, more real by her telling than the ones outside my window…. I’d give it a good chance in the Govern General’s lottery.”
- Scene
“.. Stories are life-affirming and pulsate with joy in spite of the tragic circumstances impeding the characters… Butt’s imagery is consistently original, sharp and precise.”
- Edmonton Journal
“Painting powerful images or creating dreaming moods with her prose, Butt writes seamless and entertaining stories. Touching on themes of art, aging and dying, and family relationships, she creates a wide variety of characters… enchanting …. a delight in which Butt illustrates her keen awareness of the rhythms of language. This collection is wonderful, but the most pleasant surprise from Butt’s prose is her ability to put unnameable feelings and experiences into words that give the reader a jolt of recognition. This woman has written highly enjoyable stories that are sure to be re-read and recommended, at least until her next book is published, and probably beyond.”
- Canadian Book Review Annual