A Boat Story

The Boat Stories

Gladys Hindmarch reads from the manuscript of a short story to an audience at Fred Wah and Pauline Butling’s home in South Slocan, British Columbia, May 1969. “The Boat Stories,” as she referred to them, would eventually be published as a linked story collection called The Watery Part of the World by Douglas & McIntyre in 1988. The story Hindmarch reads on this occasion becomes the sixth story called “Nothing is Simple,” but in 1969 it remains unnamed. Hindmarch will read it again on 21 November, 1969 at Sir George Williams University in Montreal, where she tells the audience “it’s still in the first day on the trip but it’s the seventh story. I call it ‘The Salad Story’ in my head but I’ll have to find a title for it.”

In South Slocan, the listeners, including Fred Wah, Pauline Butling, and at least two unidentified male listeners discuss and offer commentary on the story. Wah and Butling’s young daughter can be heard in the room as well — a reminder this reading takes place in more intimate domestic setting amongst friends in the B.C. interior, in contrast to the large public reading of the same story Hindmarch would give just 6 months later in Montreal.