....Another focal point of Mel Dagg’s writing remains Vancouver Island where he was raised. Many of the stories in Four Wheel Drift depict the painful transition of communities and individuals caught between a rich traditional past based on natural resource economies, and a present that holds little promise except as a tourist trap. The story “Journey Inland”, which was broadcast on the CBC, is set in Coal Harbour during the time when the whaling station was still in operation.
.... Four Wheel Drift is Mel Dagg’s third collection of short stories. A feature review in the VANCOUVER SUN described Four Wheel Drift as this “major short story collection...rare brilliant short stories” (July 26, 2003).
....Mel Dagg was born in Vancouver and raised in logging and fishing communities on Vancouver Island. He lives with his wife, visual artist Lynne Ellen Dagg, in a house they built together on Malcolm Island, near the Finnish community of Sointula. Dagg has worked as a deckhand on ocean-going tow-boats, as a journalist, and as a technical writer. He has a doctorate in Canadian Literature and has taught at universities and colleges both in Canada and the United States.
....His short story, “The Museum of Man “ was cited in The Yearbook of the American Short Story, Distinctive Short Stories, and is currently in use in a textbook anthology in Denmark entitled Linking Levels. His historical fiction, The Women on the Bridge, depicts the Frog Lake Massacre through the unique viewpoint of a woman survivor who was taken prisoner and lived in Big Bear’s camp during the 1885 rebellion. A feature review in the Vancouver Sun stated “he brings a significant moment of our collective past immediately and intensely to life... ... Dagg invests a small bloody incident in the middle of nowhere with both the epic drama of a continental clash of cultures and the painful moral ambivalence of great tragedy.” (VANCOUVER SUN, May 29, 1993.)
Writer (4-Wheel Drift)
Short Stories
