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My Country: Essays and Stories from the Edge of Wilderness
Nowick Gray harks to the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau in portraying his “life in the woods” of interior British Columbia in the last two decades of the twentieth century.
My Country, like Walden, presents a neglected world that appears as through a forgotten memory. The work is a triptych, painting three panels of approach to life in the context of nature.
The narrative essays in “Forest Walks and Other Exercises” track forest paths that skirt our tribal past while offering sheltered glimpses of the encroaching industrialized world. Personal immersion shades to political consciousness, with a view of logging, in particular, from the forest perspective.
“Interior Rainforest” paints a personal journey navigating the landscape of home life and wildlife, love and loss. These excursions and sketches depict the challenges of physical and emotional survival in and beside wilderness.
The final section takes a further step inside the world of mountain and forest, to the imaginary realm where fiction and reality collide, dance, and mirror one another, bringing new forms of life to the ecosystem the narrator calls home. “Mountain Dreams” comprises fictional stories ranging in style from animism and fairy tale, to magical realism, to naturalistic dramas of human connection.
(From the Foreword):
I spent the last two decades of the twentieth century nestled in a mountain valley in southeast British Columbia, sequestered in a home of my own making. I had wished to enjoy the privilege of proximate wilderness, and I was willing to take on the challenge of creating a sustainable livelihood in such a place. With my own efforts and help from my partner, friends and neighbors, I cleared land and carved a homestead out of the bush. So easily said, and a decade of hard work done. ... On the wings of that stage the surrounding mountains offered up their pleasures: hiking and camping, swimming in summer lakes, backcountry skiing in winter....
More often, the outdoors served as backdrop to my internal landscape. Drawn outside in warm sunny weather, I would bring along an intermediating distraction, a different sort of tool— book, notepad, flute—with a headful of questions and new impressions to ponder en route to a random destination.... This, then, is “My Country”—personal explorations of body and spirit, in the time and setting of my BC homestead, community, and surrounding mountain wilderness.
My Country, like Walden, presents a neglected world that appears as through a forgotten memory. The work is a triptych, painting three panels of approach to life in the context of nature.
The narrative essays in “Forest Walks and Other Exercises” track forest paths that skirt our tribal past while offering sheltered glimpses of the encroaching industrialized world. Personal immersion shades to political consciousness, with a view of logging, in particular, from the forest perspective.
“Interior Rainforest” paints a personal journey navigating the landscape of home life and wildlife, love and loss. These excursions and sketches depict the challenges of physical and emotional survival in and beside wilderness.
The final section takes a further step inside the world of mountain and forest, to the imaginary realm where fiction and reality collide, dance, and mirror one another, bringing new forms of life to the ecosystem the narrator calls home. “Mountain Dreams” comprises fictional stories ranging in style from animism and fairy tale, to magical realism, to naturalistic dramas of human connection.
(From the Foreword):
I spent the last two decades of the twentieth century nestled in a mountain valley in southeast British Columbia, sequestered in a home of my own making. I had wished to enjoy the privilege of proximate wilderness, and I was willing to take on the challenge of creating a sustainable livelihood in such a place. With my own efforts and help from my partner, friends and neighbors, I cleared land and carved a homestead out of the bush. So easily said, and a decade of hard work done. ... On the wings of that stage the surrounding mountains offered up their pleasures: hiking and camping, swimming in summer lakes, backcountry skiing in winter....
More often, the outdoors served as backdrop to my internal landscape. Drawn outside in warm sunny weather, I would bring along an intermediating distraction, a different sort of tool— book, notepad, flute—with a headful of questions and new impressions to ponder en route to a random destination.... This, then, is “My Country”—personal explorations of body and spirit, in the time and setting of my BC homestead, community, and surrounding mountain wilderness.
194 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 10, 2014
51 people are currently reading
37 people want to read
About the author
Nowick Gray
48 books21 followersNowick Gray writes in a variety of genres, each work teasing the dynamics of choice among multiple realities: whether romantic relationships, plot endings, murder suspects, virtual worlds, alternate timelines, narrative loops, stylistic colorings.
Nowick works as a freelance copy editor, performs and teaches West African drumming, and enjoys nature photography. Educated at Dartmouth College and the University of Victoria, he taught in Inuit villages in the Arctic before carving out a homestead in the BC mountains. In more recent years he calls Victoria, BC home, while wintering in tropical locations.
Nowick works as a freelance copy editor, performs and teaches West African drumming, and enjoys nature photography. Educated at Dartmouth College and the University of Victoria, he taught in Inuit villages in the Arctic before carving out a homestead in the BC mountains. In more recent years he calls Victoria, BC home, while wintering in tropical locations.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 12, 2025
I wanted to like this book and its stories more, I truly did. I felt like the first half of the book was strongest and the frame just fell apart on the back half. The author’s journey to life in the wilderness was inspiring but I found the late descriptions of his encounters with bears and other animals to be cringeworthy. Those who are especially sensitive to reading about harm to animals do take heed, those moments took me quite by surprise.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 23, 2021
I was immediately blown away by Gray's eloquence! His writing is excellent -- the best I have seen in many years. In this book he shares the refined wisdom he's has gained from living as harmoniously with nature as possible in very remote and beautiful locations. His descriptive power is on full display. His book will strike a resonant chord in everyone who loves the wilderness.
November 8, 2019
The book is a combination of essays and also some short stories in the final part. I
t wasn't really what I expected. I thought it would be more about nature and wilderness but a big part of it had nothing to do with it. Like for example that abortion short story. I am not going to say that I didn't like the book at all. There were some good moments but for me there weren't enough. It started good, I liked his essays the most. But further into the book my interest started fading.
I give at an ok because there were some nature paragraphs that had really beautiful language. But I can't say that most of it affected me. Actually what made me feel the most was the bear and her cubs being killed and this was not a good feeling.
The author definitely is great with language and writing, but this particular book just wasn't for me.
t wasn't really what I expected. I thought it would be more about nature and wilderness but a big part of it had nothing to do with it. Like for example that abortion short story. I am not going to say that I didn't like the book at all. There were some good moments but for me there weren't enough. It started good, I liked his essays the most. But further into the book my interest started fading.
I give at an ok because there were some nature paragraphs that had really beautiful language. But I can't say that most of it affected me. Actually what made me feel the most was the bear and her cubs being killed and this was not a good feeling.
The author definitely is great with language and writing, but this particular book just wasn't for me.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews