Heather Ramsay, A Room in the Forest

A young woman graduates from the University of Calgary with a forestry degree; returns to her small hometown of Frontier, Alberta, for just long enough to get caught up in some family drama; and heads west for her very first forestry job -- on Haida Gwaii, in 1999, where she'll encounter the long-ago origins of family drama beyond what she could've imagined.

That's the setup for Heather Ramsay's 2025 novel A Room in the Forest, from Caitlin Press. The novel goes in some unexpected directions, and Candace Fertile remarks in the BC Review that "this novel has so much going on that it can be hard to follow." That's not quite my experience, in that I found it hard to follow at times simply because I wasn't able to see good reasons to pay close attention during some sections; that's on me, to some extent, whereas I think Fertile is blaming the novel more than I am, but I don't think it's entirely on me.

I've said awfully frequently, both on this blog and in my academic life as a teacher and researcher, that we need to tell all our stories. In a global context, BC is a large-ish place with relatively few people, so it makes sense that the stories coming from this place are going to seem uneven in their approaches and their quality.

In A Room in the Forest, Heather Ramsay gives us a story about settler perspectives around the years before and after Y2K on Haida Gwaii. This was the time of a naming transition from the Queen Charlotte Islands (not to deadname the place, but) to Haida Gwaii; it was a time of transitions toward increased Indigenous ownership and participation in the logging industry; it was a time of increasing rhetoric about reconciliation. As such, it's valuable even as fiction in its status as testimony to those years.

I'm not going to pretend I didn't struggle with elements, though: the dialect representation of the Quebecois character Renée; the elements from within the Haida community of Skidegate (which she comments on, to her great credit, in the acknowledgements section); the hippies whose presence feels to me basically irrelevant, though I continue to ponder just what they're doing in these pages; the minor characters at the logging camp who feel to me both functional and inconsistent. In other words, I don't agree with the unqualified praise that Deborah Vail gives the novel in the Fiddlehead.

As much as I love and will continue always to read small-press fiction, taking them on their own terms without worrying unduly about literary conventions, I do struggle with some such work, and that's the case with A Room in the Forest. I'm glad that Heather Ramsay wrote the novel, and I'm glad that Caitlin Press published it; among other things, people will see themselves and their places and their lives in these pages, and that's valuable. For me, it's not something I'll be recommending broadly, but for the right person at the right time, this will be the right novel. Maybe Deborah Vail was this novel's right person, who knows, but I wasn't.