Ottawa writer Dorothy Speak was born in Seaforth on Lake Huron. This is her second collection of stories. Perhaps it’s just a dangerous presumption we are inclined to make about provincial towns, since they’ve produced the likes of Alice Munro and Jack Hodgins, but this seems to have been a good beginning for Speak. She comes from one of those small towns you run from and return to, like somebody lost. There’s a directness, a resistance to cant, a shrewdness and compassion in her stories that is seductive.

Her stories are about people as love objects, about how what we call love is often simply using other people as props in our own private dramas. Most of the love scenarios in this collection are about the young female interloper who intrudes upon a marriage, and the plots lead to jealousy, and on one occasion to sado-masochistic murder. The rivalries that develop are usually between women for male affection. As Speak writes: “It’s easier to blame the gender you know.”

The plot may be familiar but Speak’s concern is to rewrite this story. In “Object of Your Love” and “Memorabilia,” Speak leaves her characters wondering how they had given up their lives to such a banal plot. They eventually find comfort in words like “tranquility” and “forgiveness.” The characters in this book learn that the more interesting plot would be to stick it out, to stay around.

But the two stunning stories in this collection are about women who wean themselves of their love addictions. “Eagle’s Bride” finds a young woman in the Arctic living with a white art dealer. There is nothing particularly likable about these characters or their plot – the young woman bent on replacing the wife. It is the wife who fascinates: a woman who has built a greenhouse in the Arctic, which, ironically, serves as a metaphor of the prison she has accepted and which she warns the young girl to avoid. In “A River Landscape,” the subject is a neurotic woman artist whose madness has devastated her family for years. While it looks like they have been caring for her, she discovers everyone needs her neurosis to sustain or justify their own lives.

Of one of her characters, Speak writes: “She is interested in lies and secrets, broken vows, taboos, sins, betrayals, violations, lust, damage, forbidden pleasures: what she sees as the true undercurrent of life, the dark web of desire….” It’s an accurate description of her own imperative as a writer. These are fine stories, confirming yet again that eccentricity of Canadian writing: why does this culture produce so many good short story writers?