A Song for Wildcats
I wish that I could study Caitlin Galway’s collection of five long-form stories titled, “A Song for Wildcats,” in a literary seminar setting. With many dog-eared pages and underlined passages, Galway’s lyrical writing style inspired me, first and foremost, to want to expand my vocabulary and secondly, the subtle nuances of the true atrocity that plays out in the lives of her richly-formed characters makes me feel that I have not fully taken away the true potential of knowing the lives these characters endured from the crafting of these stories. From detailed historical settings and profundity of characterization, I fully recommend Galway’s collection to the Canlit community.
From postwar Australia, to late 1960s France, the Troubles in Ireland, 1930s New York and to 1980s Nevada, “A Song for Wildcats” presents rising expertise of writing and storytelling to the Canlit community in transporting the reader across the globe and drastically close to fictional characters who feel real. Galway’s settings are leavened with authentic details, I especially connected with the seamless penetration of the natural world that vines up and through the character’s worlds that opened fictive portals for me of entrance into how the characters orient through these divergent sceneries.
Light refracts and enters into these worlds illuminating the psychological and emotional fabric of characters quietly suffering, enduring, and foremost, characters seeking connection. “Whatever my ghost was, she saw, and in each other's company, we could be bodiless and free. Water trickled from a fountain, somewhere behind the tall spires of cypress pines, into a small green pond. Annabelle hummed a funny tune, pausing now and then to correct the melody. She continued stirring, and I leaned my head on her shoulder. We held each other's hands, squeezing like we meant to braid our palm lines, sew them together like thread.” I am left stained from the knowing of two female adolescents in “The Lyrebird’s Bell,” pivoting around each other and their young tragedies, reduced to the elements of their disturbing lives in the wilderness of Australia, wishing that the story would continue on and I could know more of what would become of them.
A collection of literary weight, the reader is pulled through heavy human relationships and character orientations to the people around them. I further was inspired by and found myself magnetized by characters ungrounded, those phantom-like souls existing between waking and dreaming, between the physical and ethereal. Threaded through in some projections of folklore and the creeping in of the spiritual, I wanted more, more backstory, more action beyond the resolution, and yet, I respect the cliffs of these stories that do not reveal all, but forces the reader to connect-the-dots off the words on the page.
Caitlin Galway’s debut 2019 novel, “Bonavere Howl,” with Guernica Editions Inc. was a spring pick by the Globe and Mail. She has also appeared in Best Canadian Stories 2025, EVENI, Gloria Vanderbilt’s Cart V. Cooper Short Fiction Anthology, House of Anansi's The Broken Social Scene Story Project, The Ex- Puritan as the 2020 Thomas Morton Prize winner, and Riddle Fence as the 2011 Short Fiction Contest winner. She has also appeared on CBC Books as the Stranger than Fiction Prize winner. Galway has been referred to as a quickly rising Canadian writer. The five long-form stories in “A Song for Wildcats,” is a Rare Machines Book, an imprint of Dundurn Press, published on June 3, 2025, the collection is fiction, short stories, LGTBQ* and Canadian. “A Song for Wildcats” is already an Indigo Best Book of the year.
Of the five stories, two became enthralling for me, “The Islanders” and “The Lyrebird’s Bell.” Set in the late 1960s in Ireland threading in the riots on Belfast, “The Islanders” planted me in a pained world of a boy who had lost his mother and aunt, a woman who had lost a sister. A severe push-and-pull between boy and aunt, as much as she tries to love him, he pulls away. The boy, instead, is drawn to the ethereal and supernatural folklore texture of the island, and the blending of ghost story and magic realism is what made this story a place of connection for me. Grief is explored through character orientation and action, folding in disquietly with a command of suspense that kept me turning pages to find out more.
“The Lyrebird’s Bell” is a gothic story vining up through the gripping relationship between two young troubled girls left to their own devices in the Australian outback. The girls find companionship in each other’s childhood curiosities amidst the adult atrocities that their tiny lives are thrown into. Girls that could sew the lines on their hands together transgress what children do, to what young women do to protect something of themselves in the world. I was mesmerized by what would become of these girls but also how Galway tangles in the bedrock of the backdrop of their lives with gothic scenery and domestic decay that would make this story interesting to study and discuss with others, in contrast to other gothic narratives. A story of thorns with profound human experiences, the historical residue of each story felt authentic and accentuated Galway’s writing talents.
A description alone of the houses that these two girls resided in made me feel that I was there with these girls, moving through these rooms, absorbing the texture of their drastic gothic lives. Decay has set in, unease, the touch of a past aristocratic civilization slowly being taken over by the unceasing persistence of the Australian outback.
“Our houses were the bones of Regency decadence, stout villas grown ashy with age. They had originally been built for two sisters exiled by scandal, long dead and buried under the red flowering gum. Annabelle had not lived here long - she and her mother had arrived a couple of years earlier, shortly after the war, in early '46, while I had never been outside Victoria. During the warmer months, I had an instructor who drove in from one of the little towns in the Shire of Macedon Ranges. Most recently, an uncompromising young woman of whom I drew, and burned, many lurid portraits. But I had not seen her in some time. In the colder months, I had grown accustomed to seeing no one. I played alone on mossy stones and tangles of woody vines, and stared into the towering rock formations, which rose like a gravestone cavalcade along the Hanging Rock volcano.”
Isolation of setting, separation of two young girls from the adult world around them, yet, like the nature creeping in and threatening to take over, so is their knowledge of the tragedy the adults around them fluctuate from. In the crux of unreliable narration, these characters and much like the other characters in these stories, isolation and separation is a void they plunder through.
Similar to the settings sculpted out in these stories, Galway’s gentle command of the variant natural plant and animal species throughout the narration captivated me as well, inspiring me to become a better writer. I will never forget this descriptive language, for instance:
“Sunlight glowed through the wildfowers beside us, blazing-blue petals like bioluminescence, the light of creatures guided by their own internal ignition. I thumbed a satiny petal and felt the thrill of its frail solidity. The rocks along the shoreline and the brush over the hills felt momentarily real - breakable and flittering, as though I were sitting in a paper diorama being teased and torn apart by the wind.”
Language is presented in new ways, yet palpable in the extension of the emotional make-up of the characters to the world around them.
I was left haunted by sad characters in beautifully overripe settings. I saw their grief in new ways that will make this collection a text I will come back to for study.
“It was only me out here once more, and I saw no cause to speak, now or ever. A sound only floats away, as all things do. It seemed obvious to me now that no attempt to tether oneself to anything could last. One is always cut loose again by some stronger force and pulled into a more defeated isolation. A place where memories flash like mirrors and you are the only thing that will not leave you.”
Elemental life teachings are braided into character trajectories and train-of-thought. Deeply eloquent and a mastery of language, I am happy to have come across this collection for reviewing.
Thank you to Caitlin Galway, Rare Machines and River Street Writing for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!
