Not of Reason: A Recipe for Outrunning Sadness

Rita Moir's mother and sister underwent heart surgery in the same week; a year later her sister was dead and her elderly mother lived many more years. Not of Reason: A Recipe for Outrunning Sadness is a family memoir centred on the deaths of the author's sister and mother and the final restoration of what is considered "the natural order."

Encouraged by her mother to "opt for joy," Moir remained grounded within her rural BC community in the Slocan Valley, becoming deeply involved in everything from her local community hall to seniors housing and her local burial society, while continuing to travel to Minnesota to help her sister and mother. Moir's journalist's eye for detail brings sharp clarity to this beautiful and contemplative work, from the almost unbearable story of her sister's difficult death, to digging in her garden, learning to dance and training her dog, to a day of glory and majesty near her brother's home on the Bay of Fundy. The movement between urban and rural life creates what award-winning memoirist Patricia Hampl describes as "a kind of musical movement, allegro/andante...beautiful, hard won, finely achieved...it took my breath away."

In Not of Reason, award-winning writer Rita Moir explores her intense love for her sister with unwavering honesty, and wrestles with the alluring solace of religion when the natural order is knocked out of alignment. As Moir grows stronger, finding her own kind of peace and joy, the natural order, as always, restores itself.

Rita Moir lives in the Slocan Valley of BC where she worked for decades as a freelance journalist for the Globe and Mail, CBC Radio and regional publications. CBC also produced and broadcast several of her plays for a national audience. She is the award-winning author of the short story Leave Taking, about preparing a body for burial (event non-fiction winner, Norton Reader, Best Canadians Essays); Survival Gear (Polestar, 1994), shortlisted for the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction; Buffalo Jump: A Woman’s Travels (Coteau, 1999, Winner of the Hubert Evans Award for Non-Fiction and the VanCity Book Prize); The Windshift Line (Greystone, 2005, shortlisted for the Hubert Evans Award); and The Third Crop: A personal and historical journey into the photo albums and shoe boxes of the Slocan Valley, 1800s to early 1940s (Sono Nis, 2011, Honourable Mention in the Lieutenant-Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing). Her work appears in anthologies such as Nobody’s Mother (TouchWood); Going Some Place (Coteau); Sleds, Sleighs and Snow (Whitecap); 75 Readings Plus (McGraw-Hill Ryerson), Genius of Place (Polestar), and magazines such as Borealis. She has served as juror for numerous literary competitions, and recently edited several books, including Lee Reid’s Growing Home: the Legacy of Kootenay Elders and Growing Together: Conversations with Seniors and Youth.