What Had Become of Us

By Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer's haunting "What Had Become of Us," is from her 2003 debut book of short fiction, Way Up. Published on the occasion of Goose Lane Editions's 60th anniversary, it is also part of the six@sixty collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
• Release date: Oct 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9780864927361

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

Critics described the stories in Way Up, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer's first book of fiction, as "some of the most impressive examples of new Canadian fiction in recent memory." Published in 2003, Way Up received a Danuta Gleed Award and was a finalist for the Relit Award. The Nettle Spinner, her first novel, was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award and was also named a best of 2005 by January magazine. Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer is the former fiction editor of the Literary Review of Canada and has also worked as a tree-planter, a lumberjack, and a baker. Her reviews have appeared in the Globe and Mail, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Toronto Star, and the National Post. She teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto and is the magazine editor for Bookninja.com.

Book preview

What Had Become of Us

For Goose Lane’s diamond anniversary — an array of six scintillating stories, gems mined from sixty years of Canada’s finest publishing and polished to the brightest hues. This multi-volume collection includes the following:

Famed poet Alden Nowlan’s A Boy’s Life of Napoleon, adapted from his first novel, The Wanton Troopers, posthumously published by Goose Lane in 1988

Douglas Glover’s strange and affecting

Woman Gored by Bison Lives

The Three Marys, a Christmas story with a bite, adapted by Lynn Coady from her debut novel, Strange Heaven

Simran, a twisting tour-de-force by

Shauna Singh Baldwin

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s stunning

What Had Become of Us

Knife Party, a wild tale of an Italian vacation gone off the rails, from Mark Anthony Jarman’s highly anticipated new collection, forthcoming in 2015

Fiction by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

All the Broken Things (2014)

Perfecting (2009)

The Nettle Spinner (2005)

Way Up (2003)

What Had Become of Us previously appeared in Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s 2003 story collection, Way Up.

Pieter Van Dongen and I were in another forest completely, and not surprisingly, my life had changed irrevocably and in subtle ways that I did not necessarily wish to examine. The acknowledging of change in any way brought with it a tenderness, a weepiness, a general atmosphere of misery that I would sooner deny. The forest in which we stood had been ravaged by a hurricane. Very few trees had survived the winds. It was a year to the day since Erwin’s death.

What are we supposed to do here? I asked.

Cleaning up, Pieter said.

I had come to Belgium in order to leave Canada. It was as simple and as complicated as that could be. I wanted to leave home, family — a family I suspected of subversive politeness and congeniality, which was okay if you liked that sort of thing, but I