Strange Harvest
This was an early sale of mine, appearing in 1988 in an unlikely market: Western People, the magazine supplement of the Western Producer agricultural newspaper. On Spec magazine reprinted “Strange Harvest” in 1998, and in 2005 it was recorded for CBC Radio, broadcast nationally as part of “Six Impossible Things,” a two-week tour of Canadian speculative fiction hosted by Nalo Hopkinson for CBC’s Between the Covers. The inspiration came from my years as a reporter, and then news editor, of the weekly Weyburn Review. Every spring, people would bring in funny vegetables: tomatoes with noses, potatoes that looked like John G. Diefenbaker, embarrassingly shaped cucumbers. We’d photograph them and run them as a photo feature which, one year, I titled “Strange Harvest”—a headlin
