Melissa Hardy/Reviews

". . . 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."
Paragraph

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

2008/Melissa Hardy

	"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.
	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." Paragraph 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 2008/Melissa Hardy