Tim Jollymore’s fiction explores struggles of identity in American society from the viewpoint of the under and working classes. These contests — sometimes mysterious and often fierce — play out in spare, natural settings and every day, domestic life.   In Listener in the Snow, those settings become anything but natural, and the domestic life anything but tranquil or domesticated. The storyteller and main character Tatty Langille (P.O.V.) breaks from his busy storm-shutter business in Florida to follow his estranged Ojibwa wife to her northern Minnesota birthplace. He fights a blizzard along a trail strewn with haunting memories, uprooting visions and characters as odd and colorful as those from stories told him by his Mi’kmaq grandmother. Tatty pits his practical Scandinavian senses — culled from life with his Finnish mother — against dark fears embodied in the Ojibwa windigo. He enlists aid from flesh and blood storm survivors whom he meets along his way north. If he is to stay with or leave his wife of 15 years is hardly the question he must answer. Tatty discovers he must first ask, “Who is she?,” and, ultimately, “Who am I?” Both questions are tied tightly to the surprising story and mythical fate of a local “bear-man,” Roscoe, who befriends Tatty at an outpost-tavern amidst the snowstorm-of-the-century. The philosophical underpinnings from Carlos Santayana’s and Wallace Stevens’s metaphysical naturalism magnify the images Tatty Langille sees in Listener. Whether they are “real” or projected on the scene by Tatty’s imagination, they shape his response to the human dilemma: “What shall we believe?” As the stories and lore of Algonquin culture fill his mind, Tatty demonstrates Stevens’s idea that the natural world would be a barren place were it not for the world within us.