Listener in the Snow

Listener abounds with Native stories, Algonquin legend, Indian characters, and heartrending strife set against the Northern Minnesota snowscape. Native mojo and a windigo vision stir up a storm in this adventure. The struggle between domestic commitment and deceit plays out through Tatty Langille, the Mi'kmaq storyteller. His path to save his marriage is anything but typical-events explode in surreal settings, through winter storms, and during tavern brawls in rural Minnesota, weaving Native culture with odd Scandinavian characters. Tatty believes his Mary goes north to midwife a cousin's twins, but her sudden renewed contact with those far off stinks with suspicion. When family secrets, Ojibwe myth, and murder fuel surprises and twists in Tatty's search, he is left only with questions. Is Mary the wife he believed her to be? Had her wild rages pointed to a hidden past? Has Tatty lived a lie? Should he run? Can he out-distance his denial and his own buried past? After uncovering Mary's identity, what will he do? Author's bio: Tim Jollymore grew up among swamps, forests, and Indian reservations of northern Minnesota, the setting of his first novel. He worked as a tree planter, pulp peeler, local historian, traveling salesman, architectural designer, a contractor, and teacher. Jollymore writes and lives near his family in Northern California, returning to Minnesota in summer. He earned a master's degree in literature from the University of Minnesota.

Tim Jollymore grew up next to the swamps, forests, and Indian reservations of northern Minnesota, the setting of his first novel. He spent his working life as a tree planter, pulp peeler, local historian, traveling salesman, corporate manager, architectural designer, a contractor, and teacher. Since leaving teaching in 2011, he has devoted his time to fiction. During summer he visits extended family in northern Minnesota. Otherwise, he writes in Oakland, California. Jollymore earned his master's degree in literature at the University of Minnesota. He has studied in architecture and education. Jollymore's fiction explores struggles of identity in American society from the viewpoint of the under and working classes. The contests play out in spare, natural settings and every day, domestic life. In LISTENER IN THE SNOW those settings become anything but natural, and the domestic life anything but tranquil or domesticated. The story-teller and main character, Tatty Langille (POV), breaks from his busy storm-shutter business in Florida to follow his estranged Ojibwa wife to her northern Minnesota birthplace along a trail strewn with haunting memories, uprooting visions, and characters as odd and mystical as those from stories told by his Mi'kmaq grandmother. Tatty pits his practical Scandinavian senses culled from his life with his Finnish mother against dark fears embodied in the Ojibwa windigo and in flesh and blood survivors of harsh Minnesota winters that he meets on his journey north. If he is to stay with or leave his wife of fifteen years is hardly the question he must answer. First he must answer, "Who is she?" and, ultimately, "Who am I?" Both questions are tied tightly to the surprising story and mythical fate of a local "bear-man," Roscoe, who befriends him during the snowstorm-of-the-century at Tillie's an outpost-tavern. The philosophical underpinnings from Carlos Santayana's and Wallace Stevens's metaphysical naturalism magnify the images Tatty Langille sees in LISTENER. Whether they are "real" or projected on the scene by Tatty's imagination, they shape his response to his dilemma in the same way the stories and lore of Mi'kmaq and Ojibwa