Every pilot knows the shock of waking from some private reverie part way through a
cross-country flight to the unsettling realization that he no longer knows where he is.
Even over the most familiar terrain, if he has not been diligent in his navigation,
straying just a few miles off course can lead to complete disorientation. Nothing below
him makes sense, standard landmarks: lakes, rivers, hills, towns, highways, no longer
correspond to anything on the chart he is now frantically fingering on his lap. While
he was not looking, the world beneath him shifted into the strange.
Such is the plight of the characters in this collection of stories: people who
find, in one way or another, unexpectantly, their realities have shifted and they are
'flying by the seat of their pants.'
A fishing guide discovers the roles have been reversed on him when a customer
leads him into a familiar world turned inside out; the mundane routine of a
neighbourhood coffee shop takes on new dimensions of time and space; the long nights of
a northern winter are the backdrop for redefining the meaning of 'alien' to a young
airport worker; these stories and others seek to reveal how easily, and without
warning, we can lose our way.
Garry McKevitt lives in Brentwood Bay on Canada's west coast. He graduated with a B.A.
in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria in 1978 where he stayed on for ten
years directing and editing educational television programs for Continuing Education and
the University of Victoria Television Productions. Previous to that he edited, for four
years, Nesika, a monthly newspaper published by the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs.
McKevitt has published both short stories and poems in various publications, including The Malahat
Review and Illusion, an anthology of fiction published by Aya Press in Toronto. At
present, when he is not idling away time in coffee shops, playing bass guitar in the
basement band, L.S. Crude, golfing, or, when it can no longer be avoided, writing, he
can be found drifting over the constantly surprising and perpetually strange terrain of
British Columbia in his Cessna 172, "HJM".