Braiding together personal, collective, and historical explorations of what it means to “go west,” Amy Kaler offers deep reflections on the meaning of life, middle age, and climate catastrophe. She explores “ruins” of the human history of the North American settler west—faded hamlets, bunkers, fields of cars, bends in the river—that serve as emblems of hope, generational commitment abandoned by contemporary heirs, faith, hubris, even carelessness. These stops are intertwined with reflections on aging, temporality, and change, making the book feel like a deeply satisfying road trip with a thoughtful friend. Moving from meditative to ardent to sobering in compelling and measured ways, Half-Light shimmers with urgency and suggestion.
Table of Contents:
- Prologue
- Central Alberta, Somewhere Near Rumsey
- Westbound
- Retlaw
- On Fire for the Rest of My Life
- Rossdale Flats and the Bomb Shelter
- The West and Its Ruins
- Swan Hills
- Westbound All Along
- Campus Saint-Jean
- The End of the World and the Ends of the Earth
- Dalum
- Orphans
- St. Paul
- My Seventies
- Strathcona Science Park
- The Years Before Me, the Years Behind
- Newbrook
- Ancestors and Descendants
- Wostok and Spaca Moskalyk
- Home for the Time Being
- Packingtown
- The Most Important Things Have Already Happened
- Holy Transfiguration
- Standing Pose
- Rowley
- “Your Cell Will Teach You”
- Newcastle Mine
- Time Management
- Abbotsford
- Keeping Time
- Rochfort Bridge
- Pigeons
- Palliser Triangle
- Who Is That?
- Bunchberry Meadows
- Top Ten Crises
- Beaverhill Lake
- Epilogue: Eastbound
- Acknowledgements
- References
About the Author :
Amy Kaler is an Edmonton-based writer and Professor of Sociology at the University of Alberta. She has lived in Edmonton, Treaty 6 territory since 2000. She is the author of Until Further Notice: A Year in Pandemic Time, a collection of essays published in 2022. She is also the author of three previous books. Kaler won the Cecile E. Mactaggart Travel Prize for Narrative Writing in 2019 and was shortlisted for the Edna Staebler Award for Personal Essays in 2021 and longlisted in 2022. Her nonacademic work appears in The New Quarterly, Queens Quarterly, and Spadina Literary Review.
Review :
"Amy Kaler is smart and thoughtful and well read, all of which make her a wonderful conversationalist. Above all, Half-Light feels like a deeply satisfying conversation. And great company for the end of the world." Angie Abdou, author of This One Wild Life
"Amy Kaler invites the reader to join her on an exploration of aging in a landscape dense with history of occupation and use. She asks us to pay attention to what has already happened to small communities, to dreams and hopes, in order to prepare ourselves for an uncertain future." Theresa Kishkan, author of Blue Portugal and Other Essays
"Kaler doesn’t flinch in her approach to difficult subjects.... Half-Light: Westbound on a Hot Planet is full of astute sit-a-while-and-think-about-it observations, many of which I’ll want to come back to and reread or quote in my own writing. At her best, Kaler offers us new ways of seeing and grasping both the mundane and the terrifying." Roberta Laurie, Alberta Views, January 1, 2025
