On the back cover blurb of The Garden of Earthly Intimacies, Leon Rooke writes: “If you demand that your writer write like no one else then Meeka Walsh is your kind of writer.” Strange praise for the first collection of short stories by this Winnipeg editor and writer, but totally accurate.

It’s uncanny how these stories and their characters sneak up on you, stay with you, haunt you, for these are mostly stories in which nothing happens. A woman stays in a hotel for two weeks and gets small gifts on her dinner service from a chef she never sees; a woman takes a bath in a tub recently vacated by her travelling companion. But there’s magic at work. Walsh has done something to time. She can stretch a description of a man casting a fishing line for a full page, and you are hooked; the tension never lessens.

Perhaps this is because she draws upon all the senses – you can smell her characters. For instance, some writers would tell you that a character walked with a horse. Walsh writes: “The woman moves against the horse, pushing her nose into its belly, pressing until both nostrils are full and she breathes in. She hears the mare’s teeth grinding the clover. She feels the chewing with her face. She smells sweat and heat, she tastes salt and sweet grass. After a while she’s full and they move on.” It’s masterful, that moving on at precisely the right point.

In one of her stories, Walsh writes of how, as children, we are obsessive, passive chroniclers. This is the elusive quality of her rich, deeply seductive narrative voice. The unexpected detail is what delights in these stories – the way a dog holds a frisbee in its mouth or a young girl puts perfume behind her knees to leave a trail of scent, or a woman seems almost to become a horse as she speaks, slipping into metamorphosis as into a comfortable dress.
Walsh can also be amusing in her woman’s world of coats and scents and censures. There is a resilient rebellion, not showy but unyielding, and an optimism, a pleasure in the sheer rich weight of the sensual world. This is a fine debut collection.