Eldrich sets her time and place and prepares the reader for an internal view: "We conceive our children in deepest night, in blazing sun, outdoors, in barns and alleys and minivans." (3)
Later, she defines the physical location: "The small gray house where I work was build in the hope of feeding snowmobilers. Twenty years ago, a rough trial was carved out of New Hampshire timberland a hundred yards from the door." (6).
Rhenisch uses a similar approach: "I live two hours north of Spences Bridge on the Cariboo Plateau, an old volcanic plain in the centre of British Columbia, a land of pine forest, lakes, and rolling hills, rimmed by tall white-and-blue mountains of glaciers and wolves." (8)
Erdrich tells her story in poetic voice – lyrical, visual, soothing - a mother’s lullaby; Rhenisch describes the landscape in visual language that is also lyrical.
Rhenisch, too, draws details into the text to give the reader a full view, using humour:
"Almost everyone in Toronto wore a leather jacket. Out on the farm, no one wears a leather jacket. It was quite a shock. In the Cariboo, I’m used to seeing my cows alive, walking in long columns through the first driving snow, back to the rank yards as the crows huddle in the leafless aspens and big trucks spit up huge, white clouds on the roads, or in the spring, as eagles swoop low over the herds in the last gritty, melted and refrozen snow, then take off low over the cars and semi-trailers on the highway." (120)
Both writers are travelling – one is physically changing locations, while the other remains in the same location, but travels through seasons with the growth. So, both narratives give the reader a sense of moving forward.
These writers keep the reader involved using connected stories, each section of text carries its own story, and in the case of Erdrich, it strongly resembles a mother’s small chunks of time for herself and/or the inability to remain with one thought for a length of time. Erdrich’s conflict is internal – her writer’s need to get back to work and her maternal need to be with her child – her writer self versus her self as an extension of child.
"We spend hours staring into each other’s eyes. Sometimes our exchange is so intense that my own face loses its habitual composure and I experience an uncanny body confusion – I feel my expression continually slipping into our baby’s." (135)
Daily events are counterbalanced by Erdrich’s ability to describe, in beautiful detail, the life and action of the animals outside her window. She shares few past memories which are interspersed with events, making them reads as if they are happening in the present.
She hates the playpen and prefers to be in the thick of things, not apart from us, even with the cleverest toys. She hates her car seat. She tolerates her baby carrier only in short bursts." (132)
Her writing provides insight into the challenges of balancing motherhood and artistic life. Motherhood and writing are themes in The Blue Jay’s Dance.
To keep the story moving forward and reader involved, Rhenisch weaves past with present: memories of home – people and landscape and events, then returns to the road. There’s conflict caused by consistent mechanical failure of his host’s car (making the reader wonder if he’ll ever get to Kleinburg to see Thomson’s art studio, or his poetry readings for that matter), and conflict as the writer tries to reconcile urban centre with rural home. The book’s theme is of identity of writer and home. 
Both in the city and in myself I liked and did not like what I saw. I was swept up by the energy of the city, its vision, and its ability to grant that vision a concrete shape, but its negative shadow, that followed it everywhere, scared me, for although the city had intensified the act of creation, it had intensified its corollary destruction as well." (139)
An example, as well, of the writer challenging this reader’s intellect.
The turning point for Erdrich occurs when the child goes to a babysitter and the acceptance of the author "…I am torn between wanting to be with her always and needing to be – through writing and through concentration – who I am."
The book concludes with the child walking – illustrating her independence by the movement away from her mother.
For Rhenisch, the turning point "this big concrete city made me happy." (237) occurs close to the conclusion when back at home, he laments about business changing a way of life that takes he and us "further and further from the earth." (243)
I have read other works by Harold Rhenisch – his poetry, in part because of his description of, and reverence for, land and landscape. I would recommend The Blue Jays Dance, especially to anyone who has read Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
Bibliography
Rhenisch, Harold. Tom Thomson’s Shack. Vancouver: New Star Books Ltd., 2000.
Erdrich, Louise. The Blue Jays Dance. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995.
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