Stories That Heal

In his Harvey Southam lecture at the University of Victoria in 2011, Richard Wagamese made a statement that applies to all of his considerable oeuvre (13 books to date): “Stories are the very foundation of our business here. At the bottom of all human interaction is that one subtextual phrase: tell me a story.”

But storytelling is not all there is to literary fiction, which Medicine Walk most certainly is. Embedded in this journey of a boy and his dying father is the author’s philosophy of story, with an emphasis on the power of expression. Medicine Walk is his most poetic novel.

As an author, Wagamese is a late bloomer. A literary career was hardly indicated in the childhood and adolescence of an Ojibwa boy who grew up in a broken community on the Winnipeg River in northwestern Ontario. In February 1958...