Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter I
2. Table of Contents VII
3. Acknowledgements IX
4. Introduction 1
5. To the Light House 5
6. Art Is Making: Carol Shields in Conversation and Correspondence 9
7. All That “Below-the-Surface Stuff”: Carol Shields’s Conversational Modes 35
8. Guilt, Guile, and Ginger in Small Ceremonies 53
9. Revisiting the Sequel: Carol Shields’s Companion Novels 63
10. Bio-Critical Afterlives: Sarah Binks, Pat Lowther, and the Satirical Gothic Turn in Carol Shields’s Swann 81
11. Assembling Identity: Late-Life Agency in The Stone Angel and The Stone Diaries 93
12. Male-Pattern Bewilderment in Larry’s Party 113
13. Departures, Arrivals: Canada/United States Migrations and the Trope of Travel in the Fiction of Carol Shields 129
14. “To Be Faithful to the Idea of Being Good”: The Expansion to Goodness in Carol Shields’s Unless 143
15. Narrative Pragmatism: Goodness in Carol Shields’s Unless 161
16. Shields’s Guerrilla Gardeners: Sowing Seeds of Defiance and Care 177
17. Cool Empathy in the Short Fiction of Carol Shields 197
18. The “Perfect Gift” and the “True Gift”: Empathetic Dialogue in Carol Shields’s “A Scarf” and Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Scarf” 223
19. Prepositional Domesticity 249
20. “Grand Slam”: Birthing Women and Bridging Generations in Carol Shields’s Play Thirteen Hands 263
21. Archives as Traces of Life Process and Engagement: The Late Years of the Carol Shields Fonds 277
22. The Voices of Carol Shields 293
23. The Clarity of Her Anger 295
24. My Seen-Sang, Carol Shields: A Memoir of a Master Teacher 299
25. Carol Shields 305
26. Contributors 313