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Books by Trevor Klassen Interview with Sharon Butala Things are not what they seem. So goes the lesson offered by best-selling author Sharon Butala. Her latest book, a companion piece to the prize-winning The Perfection of the Morning, is Wild Stone Heart, an account of her personal, mystical experiences in a field she owned with her husband. The 100-acre landscape near the Cyrpress hills of southwest Saskatchewan is rife with, as Butala puts it, layers of presence, layers that deceive until noted – sagebrush and crocuses, wildgrass and buffalo grass, antelope, snakes, coyotes. She walked the field for 20 years, and for two-thirds of that time it was undisturbed by cattle. So as it transformed to something more wild, so did Butala see Nature in its truer guise. She spent her days then, as she sometimes does now, walking– and when she felt the need, when she was troubled, she went out to be in the field. Butala is not one for cityscapes and concrete. She prefers the silence and solitude of the field to the distracting quick pace of urban living. To her the field was Spirit, was land sacred to First Nations people. In it she found burial grounds, a connection to history and prehistory, and being relatively undisturbed, it was the place she had many visions. It was her link to the mythical. "Land uncentres oneself, and you can concentrate on listening, rather than worrying about the mundane. The land gave me a subject I wouldn't have found on my own – the greater reality of myth," she muses. Butala does not seem to fret that her spirituality may be denounced – for her it is true, and she is, for instance, absolutely sincere when she speaks of her vision of a unicorn. "I cannot explain with great specificity of my visions. I can't tell you exactly what they mean," she says, her soft, hoarse voice quivering. "But I know what I saw, and I continue to work out its meaning." Because Butala depends upon land to free herself to the mystical, she often speaks of Nature in reverent tones, and like the natives before her, she regards the earth as the source of life. She is something of a conservationist – she does not ascribe to the European view of land as a commodity, but rather to the Amerindian feeling of land as being sacred in itself. Butala and her husband made legal history in Saskatchewan by arranging to have their land held by the Nature Conservatory of Canada. This was not without controversy because it gave the government land ownership. Butala truly loves the land, and writes out of the solitude and psychological space it affords. When she walks on Nature undisturbed, for her it is another dimension because she is walking on history, on people, and the spirit that is available to everything wild. She believes Thoreau that in wildness is the preservation of the world, and to her the subtleties of the land that lie beneath its dry shortgrass are everything – a lesson in life and mortality. The land itself, to this woman of 60, makes her an apprentice, and sensitive to things she would not otherwise know. Butala is now working on her third collection of short stories, and is preparing for several upcoming literary events. She is busy these days, and goes to the field less often than she once did, but it still fulfills her needs. "My experiences are no less profound. The land still heals me, still gives me strength."

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