The Weight of the Heart

When her brother dies in the turbulent water of B.C.’s Thompson River, Isabel sets out to find traces of him in the places he loved. At the same time, she is seeking locations referenced in important literary works by Sheila Watson and Ethel Wilson for a graduate thesis. Her map becomes a cartography of both feminine and personal engagements with landscape and memory. In locating the sources of rich creative expression and by reaching back to ancient ceremonial rituals for death and the afterlife, she finds a way to reconcile her own grief and the writing of B.C.’s early feminist writers whom she fears risk being forgotten.