As the story of a young woman's struggle to remain in a dying Vancouver Island logging town, Quaife's first novel Bone Bird (Turnstone $10.95) gained favourable reviews and an endorsement from Jane Rule. The protagonist's grandmother, Teodora, is a Indian medicine woman who passes on her teachings of the Woman's Clan. "Death is the most powerful teacher. You can ask anyone...if they have come close to Death, they are changed." Quaife's next book was Days & Nights on the Amazon, followed by deathwrites: a curious notebook (Arsenal, 1997, $11.95). She was born in 1948.

[BCBW 2004] "Fiction"