Introduction

skatingLesson Two - The Skating Party
Duration - 3 blocks (3 x 80 min + homework)

"What you don't know can hurt you, especially what you don't know about yourself." -  Uncle Nathan, in "The Skating Party"

Merna Summers was raised on a farm in northeastern Alberta. She worked as a reporter and freelance writer before turning to fiction. She has written three collections of short stories: The Skating Party (1974), Calling Home (1982), and North of the Battle (1988). Her clear and insightful writing delves into the everyday lives of ordinary people in small farming communities, and unearths the obsessions and deceptions that lie beneath the calm surface of their existence. The stories in The Skating Party, set in the fictional but highly realistic Willow Bunch, describe the old- fashioned views which govern the lives of its inhabitants and the grittier, more human qualities like passion and deceit that the small-town morality serves to mask. Summers brings her stories and characters to life with humour, tenderness, and irony.