Katherine Koller's ​Earthen

Reviewed by Marcie McCauley

(Great Plains Press, 2026)

Soon after my age became a thing with two digits rather than one, I sometimes stayed overnight at my grandmother’s and, in the mornings before she woke up, I sat in her comfy living-room recliner to read. Bored with my own books, I’d choose from three of hers: an old Bible, an old anatomy book with delicate folding pieces for the organs, and that year’s edition of The Friendship Book.

The Frances Gay annual was a Christmas tradition: each date with a couple paragraphs beneath, and a few colour photographs and religious quotations interspersed. Though written for adults, I could read each entry easily, and I loved the feeling that lingered after reading these stories: someone, someplace in the world, was always trying to do the right thing, and their efforts made me feel less small and less alone.

That’s exactly how I felt reading the stories in Katherine Koller’s collection Earthen. Partly because the volume itself is not much bigger than those annuals; partly because some of the stories are very short (one of them won a flash fiction contest); partly because each has an accompanying illustration; and partly because there’s a moral underpinning evident straight from the epigraph “Good is as visible as green” (John Donne).

There are so many good characters in Earthen, starkly visible against a backdrop of green: the current of sincerity is fierce. Of the twenty stories, one ends in “a purgatory of love,” one with “the moon shone eternal,” and one with “wild, flying hope.” Even when there are trials, most of the stories end with a sense of possibility, if not triumph. And an undertone of gentle instruction further strengthens that current, so that even as an antidote to the worst of today’s headlines, these tales sometimes feel more orchestrated than they feel true.

As a counterbalance, there’s often a backdrop of loss, an acknowledgement that things have not always been thus. There’s a particular precarity for some of the women and girls who yearn to make an impact (on their own or others’ well-being) but face certain limitations—someone with more power, literal or figurative. And, although infrequent, there are tragedies (and we can’t always be sure that the happy ending doesn’t exist only in a character’s imagination). The death of a neighbour’s tree in “Tree Day” (an excerpt from Koller’s 2016 novel Art Lessons) perfectly encapsulates the emotions and the yearning for a ritual to mark this kind of loss: a delicate articulation of the anger and despair that often resides in realizing that witnessing is the only option.

Koller’s capacity to create a believable scene is evident throughout this collection. Details are carefully selected, their appearance thoughtfully arranged, for readers. As in, for instance, “You Can Have More,” with not just abundant wildlife in an evening in western Canada, but “a porcupine munching on fallen apples, a skunk weaving through the daylilies, an escaped chinchilla nibbling the sweet peas, a coyote strutting down the lane, and deer grazing in the pocket park across the street.”  But this story actually centres on a widow and a fifteen-year-old boy who has been squatting in a neighbourhood bungalow and raiding the narrator’s garden after dark. It invites the opportunity to exhibit compassion and understanding, but it also raises the spectre of the widow’s grief because the garden was her husband’s and now she alone assesses yard noises at night.

Another crucial element of scene-building is dialogue, and Koller’s experience as a playwright is on full display. From the true-to-life fragments, to reflecting the speakers’ ages, to assessing when to shift to summary, she makes it look easy to sound natural. In other noise, there is a consistent sense of scurrying and enduring: a layer of activity in the background where Koller holds a space for the furred, scaled, feathered and leafy who are often overlooked in fiction.

Because the stories in Earthen were written over time (one was previously published in a collection of dystopian stories, for instance, whereas her retelling of “The Handless Maiden” reflects her work on an opera libretto), the collection’s unity relies on authorial sensibility. There are some linked stories herein, and that structural reflection of Earthen’s key themes was most satisfying.
​
Earthen could fit on a shelf with Margaret Renkl’s writing about nature and grief; Sharon Butala’s linked novels set in Saskatchewan and focusing on the lives of girls and women; and collections like Rachel Rose’s The Octopus Has Three Hearts (also set on the western side of Canada), and Carol Bruneau’s Threshold and Susie Taylor’s Vigil (set on the eastern side), and Leona Theis’ The Nine Lives of Sylvie (in the middle). These stories also left me feeling less small and less alone. And, now that I’m about halfway to writing my age with three digits instead of two, I still appreciate stories that highlight empathy, with a thin thread of inspiration, to keep me company in a cosy seat while waiting for the rest of the world to awaken. 

---

​Marcie McCauley's work has appeared in Room, Other Voices, Mslexia, Tears in the Fence and Orbis, and has been anthologized by Sumac Press. She writes about writing at marciemccauley.com and about reading at buriedinprint.com. A descendant of Irish and English settlers, she lives in the city currently called Toronto, which was built on the homelands of Indigenous peoples—Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg, Huron-Wendat and Mississaugas of New Credit—land still inhabited by their descendants.