Rudy Wiebe's national and international reputation is largely based on his novels, but short stories have formed a substantial part of his literary production from the very beginning. Although he often used them as an experimental ground for his longer narratives — those “great black steel lines of fiction” required “to touch this land with words” (Wiebe 1995, 4) — he also “touched” his country's history and physical enormity in the shorter genre. As the Canadian short story boomed in the 1960s and afterwards, Wiebe came to represent a distinctly regional voice (that of Alberta and its northern frontier) within a national literary tradition that has characteristically defined itself in regional terms. Wiebe's stories — like those of Frederick Philip Grove, one of his acknowledged influences — deal with the immensity of the western prairies, but also with the sublime vastness of the Arctic North, whose forbidding grandeur of ice, snow, and solitude has been a constant object of fascination for Wiebe.

Born to Mennonite immigrants in Northern Saskatchewan in 1934, Wiebe's mother tongue was Low German, and a religiously anchored social consciousness became a crucial part of his cultural heritage. The family had left the Soviet Union in the early 1930s in order to find a safer home in Canada. In his early novels Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962), First and Vital Candle (1966), and The Blue Mountains of China (1970) as well as in his first short stories, Wiebe dealt critically with the life of his brethren in faith and with their diasporic communities in Canada and South America.

His early story “Where Is the Voice Coming from?,” first published in 1971, may usefully be considered alongside his two novels,The Temptations of Big Bear (1974) and The Scorched-Wood People (1978), that went beyond the experiential horizon of the author's Mennonite upbringing and, during the 1970s, brought him the reputation of a regional writer of national importance. In these novels as well as in the story, he deals with the life and beliefs of other marginalized groups — the repressed or forgotten history and culture of the Prairie Cree and the Métis — whose mythological bond to nature and to the land as “a gift from God” may have seemed familiar to him from the cultural tradition of his own religious community (Wiebe in Keith 1981, 207).