Two Cultures Press :: Bushed (1979)

Bushed
Ken Stange
Published by York Publishing (1979)

A “multi-genre novel” that confronts the awesome—and magnificently indifferent—power of The North. Using everything from lists through poetry to conventional narrative, by what a Windsor Star reviewer called an “elaborate co‑mingling of forms,” it delves into one man’s mental and emotional life living alone in the boreal wilderness for a year. The Globe & Mail reviewer remarked that "Bushed is to the mentality of the urban sprawl what James Dickey's Deliverance was to the Boy Scouts of America...an atavistic tour de force...a work of startling power and insight". While even used as a text in Canadian Studies at several universities, Bushed is now out of print. Only a very limited number of copies (signed by the author) are still available for sale.

York Publishing (1979)
ISBN: 0-920424-19-8
Softcover (5x8 inches) 222 pages
Rare collectors’ edition
Signed by author: $50

Downloadable PDF Book
(245 pages plus original cover): $3

Bushed (1979)

Excerpt (from Introduction)

Introduction.

The following is a record of one man's winter spent alone in the bush of Northern Ontario. Each chapter is a daily entry into this record: the first chapter being the entry for December 1st, and the last chapter being the entry for May 1st. Some of these entries were written on the day they represent; some were written before that date (either by the author or by his Dopplegänger or by someone else) and only put in place on the entry date. Any eccentricities in this record can be attributed to eccentricities in the author. This is a book about a space: an attempt to capture one space within another. However, because space remains as ill-defined as time it is inevitable that my drawing of boundaries will fall far short of precision. Still, what this book attempts to encompass is the vast expanse of Northern Ontario . . . including the constricted time of my mind.
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December 1

(Alone. I am alone here in late autumn, the first snow already securing the land for winter.a All alone with my relics and totems and memories. I am alone, physically alone here in this cabin, beginning to piece together the mosaic that I hope will clarify for me a few people, a few deaths, and a vast space.

Alone, spiritually alone here, as are most of us wherever we are; and I have very little time, as little as most of us have whenever we are. But I have with me my short list of names, my garbled notes, Frederick's journal, and some books. It is from these traces of brief contact and from the long winter that I will extract the pieces for my mosaic, although right now as I sit here with the first page unrolling on the carriage of this old typewriter, I have no idea where this is going ... or where I am going. Closing my eyes I see concentric circles, starting to turn, beginning to whirl into spirals.)
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