Coming Home: Saskatchewan Remembered
Book review by Kurt Leavins

Coming Home: Saskatchewan Remembered is the first published effort by Ron Evans (BA'58), a retired United Church minister and former director of Pastoral Services at Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon. The book is a collection of short stories that draws from the broad scope of the author's 66 years of experience. His rural settings and rustic characters will sound familiar to you. The first entry, "At My Father's Table" could be set around the kitchen table of your own family. It is reflections of places we all grew up, with people we all knew.

In "The Night God Played at Danceland" and "They Come in Threes", the author invites the reader into his own past with stories that seem familiar. They could be mistaken for your own history. In fact, you'll likely see a bit of yourself in almost every page. "It's history rewritten, history created," says Evans. While very familiar, it's not predictable at all. The transition from story to story will catch you by surprise. One page may cause strong feelings to flood back with another causing you to retrieve things you would have preferred to remain buried somewhere out of sight. Evans leads his readers through his own hardships and vulnerabilities.

Brutally honest works like "Every so often I Need Reminding" and "A Kind of Hope", tell stories of Saskatchewan rarely spoken in public. There are stories of death, of drink, of desperation. There are stories gritty in their realism and naked in their honesty. "What I would like to be able to do," says Evans, "is say something that somebody else would like to say, but hasn't said."
While much of the book is influenced by Evans' life on the prairie, the author does not limit himself. He takes the reader on a virtual trip around the world to Berkeley, California, a little town in Minnesota and to Turkey for a bowl of Mutton soup. But there is a common thread that runs through his travels - Saskatchewan. Evans will make you laugh. He takes subjects that once made us blush with guilt or laugh nervously, and makes them approachable and acceptable by using his humor to gently sand away the rough edges. "I have a belief that if you pursue something to it's darkest," quips Evans, "There will be something bearable about it."

By the time you reach the back cover you will have read a book that was entertaining, substantial, and familiar...all in one package. Just like the people he writes about. "I have a story to tell you as well, and I can tell it", says Evans, thoughtfully. "I've got creation right here in my hands. That's what I'm called to do."

Coming Home; Saskatchewan Remembered, by Ron Evans, is published by Dundurn Press, Toronto.

Coming Home: Saskatchewan Remembered

Publisher Comments: The stories in Coming Home are as surprising as the landscape of Saskatchewan itself and as varied as its weather. Through the author's reminiscences, we experience prairie life as it was more than sixty years ago, and as it is today. A rich cast of characters appears - neighbours, drunks, misfits - all with a place in the story. These are the tales of a father who lived hard, failed often, and was loved much, of a mother who was an artist at heart but became a teacher and farmer's wife through circumstance. We visit a prairie dance hall with a floor that rests on horsehair, encounter death, baptize a child, participate in a nude massage. We view sex from a farm boy's perspective, learn of home brew and cabbage rolls, eat breakfast with friends, and meet the author's favourite waitress. A sense of awe and wonder emerges through encounters with the land and the unfolding of the changing seasons.


Ron Evans was born in Saskatchewan in 1936. With the exception of four years in a parish, his working life was spent as a chaplain and teacher in psychiatric and general hospitals in Houston, California, and Saskatchewan. In another life, he would ask to have the courage to be an actor or join the circus; as it was he got only as far as the church. He and his wife Norma live at Shields, a village south of Saskatoon on the edge of Blackstrap Lake in Saskatchewan.