 The fictional kingdom of Artana is the setting for several of O'Callahan's tales of childhood adventure and heroism in a magical world set somewhere between Narnia and the island of Shakespeare's "The Tempest".O'Callahan's major breakthrough as an adult storyteller was "The Herring Shed", which depicts the World War II homefront through the perceptions of a young woman working at a fish packing plant in the Canadian Maritimes.Using the verbal singsong rhythm of the work of stringing herring on rods for the smokehouse, the story creates a momentum of a girl finding her social place and sense of self-esteem in this small monotonous work shed, seemly utterly remote from a world at war.