SOURCE: Ricci, Nino. “A Tribute to Carol Shields.” Brick, no. 69 (spring 2002): 170-73.

In the following essay, Ricci offers a personal account of her encounters with Shields as a fellow novelist. Ricci praises Shields's experimental narrative structure and shifting points of view in The Stone Diaries.

I first met Carol Shields in the fall of 1990. That was the year my own first novel came out, and as part of the promotional activities for the book my publisher had arranged for me to do a reading at a small bookstore in Winnipeg.

Now it just so happened—and it has since been my experience that there are many things of this sort that just so happen in that gauntlet of humiliation known as the Book Tour—that another reading had been scheduled in the city on the same evenings as my own, featuring a writer much more famous than I...