Wigford Rememberies

"a great writer" -Daniel Lanois



"one of the finest songwriters on the planet... his lyrics are] every bit as powerful as the best Dylan, Cohen and Lennon combined." -Ron Sexsmith



"a national treasure" -Michael Barclay, Exclaim



"he's a stone genius" -CBC



"Kyp Harness scrapes at the backdrop of reality to reveal the tired, the broken, the lost and desolate, imbuing their agony with a fine and desperate dignity and allowing the reader to be swept along as well."

-Mike Blouin, award-winning author of Chase and Haven



"Kyp Harness' prose has a unique flow: word and action, thought and thing are all contiguous and combined in lovely braided sentences. There's some Joyce splashed around Wigford, a satisfying read. This is a fantastic book, please just read it." -Tony Burgess, author of Idaho Winter, finalist for the Trillium Award and author of Pontypool Changes Everything



Wigford is a small town in rural Southwestern Ontario, home to a cast of recurring characters: Buzz, a drunk-driving father of two; his wife, who should have married Bert Walmsley instead; Happy Henry, a devout, socially inept apostle who loves to play the organ; Elmer, a stroke survivor.

Wigford Rememberies tells this community's stories through an impressionistic series of vignettes. The language is inventive, innovative and exciting, and whether describing mucking out the pig barn--"there in the dust and the sweet smells of grain and straw and the heavy brown odour of shit so strong it makes you sneeze"--or helping a drunk articulate how to manipulate God's forgiveness--"'if I gave my heart to Jesus--right there on my deathbed the minute before I died--he'd forgive everything an I'd go up into Heaven and be saved just as much as the other guy who never did nothin' wrong at all with no difference?'"--Harness wields words with an eye for detail, musicality and style.

Visceral, reflective and lyrical, Wigford Rememberies is a poetic evocation of mood and epiphanic realizations, and will resonate with anyone who has ever confronted suffering, love or the unknowable.