Survey of Authors & Secondary Sources

1. Author: Anne Michaels      Title: Fugitive Pieces

2. Before this book, I had never heard of Anne Michaels. It was only in Grade 11 English that I heard of her, and it was then that we read the excerpt of "Fugitive Pieces". Reading that excerpt made me want more, as it "left me hanging", and the opportunity to read it for this ISU was perfect.

3. Anne Michaels is the author of three highly acclaimed poetry collections: The Weight of Oranges (1986),  Miner's Pond (1991), Skin Divers (1999), her first novel, Fugitive Pieces (1996), and her latest novel, The Winter Vault (2009). She was born in Toronto, Canada in 1958. She attended Vaughan Road Academy, then later attended the University of Toronto, where she earned a B.A. degree in English. She has won many awards due to her literature in both poetry writing, and novel writing. Michaels currently resides in Toronto, working on her next novel.

4. As previously stated before, Anne Michaels is the author of several pieces of literature; her highly acclaimed poetry collections: The Weight of Oranges (1986),  Miner's Pond (1991), and  Skin Divers (1999), as well as her only two novels Fugitive Pieces (1996), and, The Winter Vault (2009).

5. Anne Michaels writes very in depth, and adds a human element to her literature. She always adds elements that the reader can connect to, and makes her novels come to life with realistic settings and plots. She spent 9 years developing Fugitive Pieces into the multi-award winning novel it is, by incorporating real life stories.

6. Themes that Anne Michaels visits in the novel are grief, finding strength in tough situations, and remembering better times. Throughout the novel, Jakob and characters he meets all deal with grief differently. In Jakob's case, the theme of grief and how he deals with it also includes the other two themes listed. He deals with his grief by remembering the better times when he was with his family, and carries the happy memories of his sister to get him through daily life. He finds strength in small things, such as listening to Athos tell stories. This gives him the strength he needs to continue to try to live the best life possible in the circumstances that surround him.

7. Anne Michaels writes with a very poetic, narrative style. Authors that come to mind that she reminds me of are of course Shakespeare, for his poetic style of writing, and J.R.R. Tolkien. She reminds me of J.R.R. Tolkien simply because he used a very different style of writing from other authors, where his novels were more of a very long, descriptive poem. All three authors use imagery as well, to help give the readers a vivid image of the stories in their heads.