Tim JollymoreTim Jollymore grew up next to the swamps, forests, and Indian reservations of northern Minnesota, the setting of his first novel. He spent his working life as a tree planter, pulp peeler, local historian, traveling salesman, corporate manager, architctural designer, a contractor, and teacher. Since leaving teaching in 2011, he has devoted his time to fiction. During summer he visits extended family in northern Minnesota. Otherwise, he writes in Oakland, California. Jollymore earned his master's degree in literature at the University of Minnesota. He has studied in architecture and education. Jollymore's fiction explores struggles of identity in American society from the viewpoint of the under and working classes. The contests play out in spare, natural settings and every day, domestic life. In LISTENER IN THE SNOW those settings become anything but natural, and the domestic life anything but tranquil or domesticated. The story-teller and main character, Tatty Langille (POV), breaks from his busy storm-shutter business in Florida to follow his estranged Ojibwa wife to her northern Minnesota birthplace along a trail strewn with haunting memories, uprooting visions, and characters as odd and mystical as those from stories told by his Mi'kmaq grandmother. Tatty pits his practical Scandinavian senses culled from his life with his Finnish mother against dark fears embodied in the Ojibwa windigo and in flesh and blood survivors of harsh Minnesota winters that he meets on his journey north. If he is to stay with or leave his wife of fifteen years is hardly the question he must answer. First he must answer, "Who is she?" and, ultimately, "Who am I?" Both questions are tied tightly to the surprising story and mythical fate of a local "bear-man," Roscoe, who befriends him during the snowstorm-of-the-century at Tillie's an outpost-tavern. The philosophical underpinnings from Carlos Santayana's and Wallace Stevens's metaphysical naturalism magnify the images Tatty Langille sees in LISTENER. Whether they are "real" or projected on the scene by Tatty's imagination, they shape his response to his dilemma in the same way the stories and lore of Mi'kmaq and Ojibwa Read More Read Less