All the Bears Sing: Stories

Harold Macy’s story collection highlights the particular magic of the West Coast, reflecting on how we both shape—and are shaped by—the land we inhabit.

Whether he’s chronicling fallen old-growth monarchs sprawled on a steep slope up-coast, the brassy orchestra of trumpeter swans, or the ecstasy of a smokejumper’s fall from the sky, Harold Macy contemplates the beauty of all that British Columbia has to offer with graceful lyricism and appreciation for the natural world.

It is the human ties to the land that shine in Macy’s stories: everyday fishermen and loggers, gardeners and wildland firefighters, rock blasters and island homesteaders. From the rich bounty of the glacial loam to the wondrous stands of Sitka spruce, BC’s natural landscape is as much a character in Macy’s tales as any person.

“Beyond Yuquot, in deep woods where small trailers huddle against the weather, in battered trucks patrolling for fire, above the winter estuaries where swans fly low, these stories take the reader into lives and dramas rich with meaning. Harold Macy’s eye is true and clear. The stories in All the Bears Sing are beautifully attentive and original, surprisingly tender. This is a book to keep close, to read with care.”

“All the Bears Sing is a straight-out terrific collection of short fictions. Harold Macy’s sharply drawn characters—log graders and wharf rats, chokermen and food bank angels—live on outcast corners of Vancouver Island and the B.C. coast. Despite their hurts and losses, despite long hours in desperate beer parlors and sleazy motels, they achieve under his affectionate attention a gnarly transcendence, an unlikely but exhilarating triumph of spirit.”

“Harold Macy is a campfire at a wilderness hideout with a neat stack of cordwood nearby above a creek where the bears sing. These are stories worth gathering to hear told by a storyteller whose heart is as big, wild, and mysterious as the world he tells about. Macy bullshits with the best. What a joy.”

“...An extraordinary and vibrant display of Canada’s West Coast, All the Bears Sing will have you yearning for an excursion outdoors.”