Moving Water

Joan Skogan’s marvelously poetic new novel draws upon her own years adrift on the sea as a wanderer and wonderer to tell the story of Rose Bachmann, a woman at mid-tide in a life awash in the debris of a mysterious marriage, in myths both long known and newly invented and in the magical coastline of the NOrth Pacific. Rose finds herself at rest in the rock form of a petroglyph entitled The One Who Fell From Heaven, near Prince Rupert, B.C. and there she imagines, in a brilliant song to her past and those she has loved, voyages both real and surreal and the currents of an existence that have brought her to this place, this truth. It is a story winding its way toward the I , a story which opens to engulf the Skeena and the St. Lawrence, the Danube and the Tigris, swallowing the very self Rose has given over to propulsion and discovery. It is a quest which roams the swelling waves of personal history and may of the world’s unfathomable waterways, at once, as the title suggests, in motion, yet serenely still.