Thank you to Sue Goyette for quiet acts of kindness through many years. Thanks to Gwenyth Dwyn for all. Thanks to Lynn Coady and Rob Appleford for everything and especially acting out the various titles considered for the collection. Thank you to the band Nutsak. Thanks to Edible Art Café for the delicious food, to Jenny Osburn for mountain spirit and nutritional kindness. Thank you to my Women of Wolfville sisters: Wendy Eliott, Linda Wheeldon, Wendy LaPierre, Sandra Fyfe, Vida Mae Lantz, Sara Pound, and the powerful river of women in the WOW community. Thanks to Box of Delights Bookshop, the Annapolis Valley Regional Library, and wonder librarian Angela Reynolds.

Thank you to, and in memoriam: Terri Luanna Mountain Borne Robinson da Silva (1974–2015), Helen Marie Veino Peill (1966–2016), Rhetta Dawn Morse (1969–2002), Jeannie Robinson (1948–2010), Sheila Diakiw (1933–2016), Murdy Daniel Conlin (my dad, 1930–2017), Teva Harrison (1976–2019).

Thanks to Mary Louise (my lovely mum), Orangie-Orange the literary cat, Patricia Acheson, Caroline Adderson, Nell den Heyer, Julia Baum, Dan Kehler, Millie LaPorte, Sara White, Robert and Jane Woodworth, Rebecca Silver Slayter, Kim Kierans, Keith Maillard, Linda Svendsen, Peggy Thompson, Judge Chris Manning, Kent Hoffman, Mary Lynk, Noah Richler, Sara Selecky and her spectacular story course, Alexander MacLeod, Lisa Moore, Gary Craig Powell, Dr. Erika Dreifus, Genevieve Allen Hearn, Scott Campbell, Hardware Gallery, and Peter and Catherine Nathanson.

Some of these stories appeared in different forms in the following journals and anthologies: Best Canadian Stories, Room Magazine, Fireweed, Numéro Cinq, The Coast, Victory Meat, and Review: Literature and Art of the Americas. Earlier versions of “Occlusion” and “Desire Lines” were semi-finalists for the American Short Fiction Prize. A different form of “The Flying Squirrel Sermon” was long listed for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. “Dead Time” was also published in a different form by Annick Press as part of a flip book shared with the multitalented Jen Sookfong Lee. A different form of “Beyond All Things Is the Sea” won the blood + aphorisms prize. A different version became the epilogue for my novel, Heave.

Thank you to Barbara Lipp and Armgard Lipp for language consultation. Thank you to Dr. Beverly Cassidy for research on depression, anxiety, memory, and sleep disorders, plus her overall medical brilliance. Thanks to Dr. Christopher Childs at the Sleep Disorders Clinic in Halifax for insight on insomnia and the elusive quest for sleep. Thanks to Bria Stokesbury and Kate MacInnes-Adams at the Kings County Museum; Dan Conlin, historian at the National Museum of Immigration at Pier 21; Burlington community historians Pat Kemp and Anna Osburn of Burlington, North Mountain, Nova Scotia, for historical background about the horrific murder of Theresa Balsor McAuley Robinson 115 years ago. “The Flying Squirrel Sermon” is in her memory.

Research books consulted include: Scenarios: Of Walking in Ice by Werner Herzog; Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed (Conversations with Paul Cronin); Every Night the Trees Disappear: Werner Herzog and the Making of Heart of Glass by Alan Greenberg; Scenarios by Werner Herzog; Letters from a Stoic, Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium by Seneca, selected and translated by Robin Alexander Campbell; Ad Lucilium espistulae morales by Seneca; Lusicus Annaeus, ca. 4 B.C. – 65 A.D., translated by Richard M. Gummere; In Northern Mists: Arctic Exploration in Early Times (Volume 1 of 2) by Fridtjof Nansen, translated by Arthur G. Chater, 1911; Suasoriarum, collected in L. Annaei Senecae (1557), Vol. 4, 620; The Suasoriae of Seneca the Elder introductory essay, text, translation and explanatory notes; Being the ‘Liber suasoriarum’ of the work entitled L. Annaei Senecae Oratorum et rhetorum sententiae, divisiones, colores, translated by W.A. Edward, 1928; Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum, 1900; The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, 1970; And the Sea Will Tell by Vincent Bugliosi and Bruce Henderson; Desire Lines, The shortest way from A to B by Jan Dirk van der Berg; Undine by Friedrich Heinrich Karl de la Motte, Baron Fouqué; Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton; and the work of Paracelsus, German Swiss physician and alchemist, who was active during the German Renaissance.