What fools men are, with their logic and their techniques, what arrogance, what presumption.  And doctors…

The towels lay warm and golden upon their rack above the radiator.  One she wrapped about her head, a larger one she held to her body, patting the water away.

Doctors are the worst.  A small growth perhaps, madame, but I know he meant cancer.

Rubbing, buffing to bring the red life to her skin (avoiding the long mirror), massaging, slapping the oils in, oils from the tropics, from the sea, one for her body, one for her hands and arms, one for her face and throat.

‘We must leave by seven-thirty, Gwen.’

‘What is it now?’

‘Seven-oh-five.’

‘Don’t worry.’

They worry about the wrong things, pay no attention to the right ones.  They think time builds like bricks, but a woman knows it ebbs and flows like the sea.

‘Your hair is wet, dear.  You’ll catch your death.’

She stepped from the bathroom and picked the blow-dryer from her suitcase.

‘Miracle of modern technology,’ with a smile.

‘Well…Venice at this time of year…’

‘Don’t worry.’

He sits there reading a report which no doubt predicts a better world through technology, yet doesn’t trust it to dry my hair.  He thinks it a god, not a convenience.

A quick once-through got out most of the moisture and the rest would come when she styled it.  She reached into the suitcase for a packet of evening sheer tights and the slippery lingerie in midnight blue, all new this morning from her favourite boutique in the Rue du Rhône before they left Geneva.

No, he has never been cheap about clothes or anything else.  He hardly thinks of money.  And with the children out in the world he has more than ever, so I can spend as much as I like… a rampage!  A credit card rampage along the Rue du Marché and the Rue du Stand… and surely there must be wonderful things here in Venice… tomorrow… why not?

As she bent to pull the black shimmer onto her legs, she felt the pain again, brief, sharp, flickering beneath her ribs.

A small growth, madame.

Meaning cancer.

But I know it is not cancer, but something worse, worse.

***The ten-minute walk from their hotel to the one in which the reception was being held took them along several narrow lanes, under arches, over arched bridges, across squares, through more lanes, some bright with shops, some dim, mysterious, then into the great square, the Piazza San Marco, where they walked under a colonnade, then through an archway…

‘It leaves one… speechless… breathless.’

‘Yes, Venice is remarkable, especially in spring or fall, I hear.  Why these fools decided to hold their conference here in January is beyond me.  We can thank heaven it’s not pouring rain.’

Tomorrow she would explore, do some shopping, look for an art gallery perhaps.

Tonight the reception.

And dinner.

No dance, that was a relief.

‘Most of the financing for the project is American, of course, that’s Belmer, you’ve met them.

‘The wife is… Linda.  Three children in their twenties, at least two on drugs, and the other daughter attending university in Paris the last I heard.’

‘Gone revolutionary, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh dear, no mention of the Belmer kiddies.’

‘The Dutch are also in on it.’

‘Let me guess, Kees Rietsma?’

‘Yes, and wife Tieneke.’

A routine briefing, the small change of the semi-diplomatic world of international agencies.  After nearly thirty years of this life, they went through it effortlessly.

‘Oh… and Jean-Claude Thévenaz, you must remember him?’

To her left ran a narrow lane twinkling with lights from shops and cafés, lights glowing on the faces of shoppers, blue, gold, and red, a warm, vivacious scene, and in the distance the golden dome of a church.

‘Yes…’

Thank heaven for the scarf at her throat and shoulder, her own fashion accent lately, for the flounce of the skirt which would show off her legs in their sheer black, for the slingbacks, only three months old, for the new lingerie, slippery underneath.

‘Yes, of course.’

The glimpse along the lane was gone, but thinking about it, forcing herself to think about it, she realized there had been a great darkness between the shoppers and the distant church.  Water?  Some canal or harbour or lagoon?  Some water to throw herself into.

She stopped abruptly to look into a shop window.  Purses.  Rather nice ones.  Very nice ones.  Tomorrow.

‘Gwen?  Aren’t you feeling well?’

‘A little stich in my side.’

‘Then you should see Dr. Wenger as soon as we get back to Geneva.’

‘It’s nothing, really, a little nothing,’

‘We’re not getting any younger, old girl.’

‘I know.’

‘Come along then, the hotel’s just around the corner.’

***The reception room had as its proudest feature a triple-casement gothic window with a view of the water and the golden dome she had glimpsed earlier.

‘The Grand Canal and Santa Maria della Salute,’ intoned one of the hosts, and Gwen tried to be impressed, tried to ignore the couple framed by the centre window, Jean-Claude slim, handsome, impeccably dressed, glancing from under his dark lashes, turning to his companion, murmuring to her, a blonde in a bit of a red dress, much of her cow-like front hanging out, her head tilted up in a chuckle, lips open, wet red lips, a beauty, the slut.

As they did the diplomatic quadrille toward one another (the blonde went a different route) twenty minutes of chat, joke, sip, turn, slip on to the next group, their eyes met occasionally, noncommitally.  She thought him rather harder, but gradually resolved the discrepancy with the reflection that he was older, his jaw darker despite the recent shave (he always shaved before appearing in public, sometimes three times a day) and his eyes more webbed round with lines.  His eyes… and gradually she was lost in his eyes again, as he had been those… years ago, lost in their dark, limpid depths, drowning in his eyes.

‘Jean-Claude!  What a pleasant surprise.  When Bill told me…’

‘I was too… you can well imagine…’

I certainly can, you bastard.  Thought you’d skip in for the conference, then back to New York or wherever you’re posted these days.

‘Washington, actually, but it doesn’t matter where one lives in America, the streets are a jungle, one is always under siege, locked in.’

‘Perhaps you should request a transfer home to Geneva.’

‘Budget, my dear, budget,’ said her husband.  ‘I’m afraid extended postings are the rule rather than the exception these days, so that…’

Another figure in the quadrille and everyone moved on.  Presently their progress brought Gwen and Bill to the windows so that she was able to turn with some relief to the night, the golden dome, the fairy lights in the palazzi across the Grand Canal, the dancing lights upon the water.  But when she looked instead at the reflection of the room she saw Jean-Claude in huddled conference with the blonde.  The blonde was nodding.

No, you shameless bitch, don’t nod that you understand, you understand nothing, you think because you are young and beautiful that truth is as obvious as those tits slopping out of your frock, and because I am small and flat and buttoned up in this long-sleeved thing that I know nothing.  Well, we shall see, my dear, we shall just see.

The dinner was over, the speeches done, and the first people leaving when she got her opportunity.  At that, she had to stalk him through a maze of halls, the prey elusive and much practiced as hunter and hunted both, one then the other now striding boldly, now creeping, now slipping through a door (and all the time the red-clad blonde sat upon a bar stool, swingling the long leg, smiling, smiling, then smiling rather less) until Gwen, in a slightly sarcastic mood, ran him to the ground.

‘There is a little picture of a man on the door, here.  Was he meant to be you, my dear, my darling Jean-Claude?’

‘Gwen, I beg of you, don’t make a scene.’

‘But we are in Venice, a city of spectacle, of drama, of emotion.  Surely a scene is exactly what I should make, something to warm that cold Genevois heart of yours.’

‘Really, this is impossible.  It has been fifteen years…’

‘But isn’t our love forever?  That’s what you used to say.’

‘Can we not put aside the past?  You must leave at once.  Can you not see…’

‘That you want to poke that scarlet woman of yours?  Oh yes, but I want you first, I deserve you, I deserve something in return for all the lessons I gave you, for the misery you put me through when you left me.’

‘This is neither the time nor the place to open old wounds.’

‘When is the time… to open old wounds?’

‘Really, I must get back.  People will notice.’

‘When is the time?  Later tonight?  Tomorrow?  You look desperate.’

‘I am desperate.  I had no idea…’

‘That I would be here?  I’m sure you didn’t.  When?  Tomorrow?’

‘All right.  In the afternoon, after the shops have re-opened.  I’ll be free for an hour or so.’

‘Five?  Here, write down your room number… thank you.  And now…’

‘No, not now, tomorrow.’

‘But you always said that I was a genius, the most talented, the most inventive, the most daring.  Did you not say those things?’

‘You know I did.’

‘Then… take these.’

‘Nail scissors?  What am I to do with these?’

‘I certainly don’t have time to undress, so must cut your way to me.’

‘This is absurd.’

‘The sooner you begin, the sooner you end.’

‘But I may hurt you.’

‘It would not be the first time.’

‘But…’

‘Pretend I’m a virgin.  Cut.’

He bent, cut.

Snip, snip, snip.

***She locked the door behind him when he left.  Her brutal exercise of power had left her drained, brought tears.  She stemmed the tears with a concentrated concern for her make-up and its repair, she stemmed the welling humiliation with a totemic reversion to thought of her mother, losing herself in a contemplation which had for years been her dearest secret and, however distressing, a solace.  For her mother had died when Gwen was not yet two and a half, and she barely remembered her, might not really remember her, she had long had to admit, confusing memory with photographs and the tart remarks of her Aunt Prudence.

‘A flapper?  Wherever did you hear such a word?’  (Gwen perhaps seven.)  ‘But it is apt.  Constance was indeed a flapper, Gwendolyn.  That is perhaps the politest word one could use to describe her.’

Other terms which Aunt Pru used from time to time Gwendolyn collected and locked away in that room in her soul where the ghost of her mother lived, a room of hidden lights, heavy perfumes, jungles of hanging, flowing silks.  Bohemian clearly meant artistic, and minx and vixen were still perhaps kind words, carrying with them the possible sense of a titian-haired beauty with a sly or shrewd sense of humour and a quick tongue, while fast and loose, and a bit free and easy might just barely betoken a lively party-girl of generous nature, but of the words which became more frequent as Gwen got closer to maturity there could be no doubt.  Harlot, strumpet slattern, slut, and trollop, although largely archaic are brutally direct.  Then, when Gwen was sixteen, Aunt Pru had said,

‘There is no point in our being polite about it: your mother was a whore.  Perhaps if she had stayed here in Hampshire, but, no, she had to go up to London to flitter about.  I can hardly think of a less appropriate name for my sister than Constance.  She should have been called Inconstance.’

Gwen rather liked the idea of flittering about London… or even Winchester… Basingstoke would do for a start.

‘For what it is worth, and that is nothing at all, I’m afraid, she claimed your father was a rich American.  But how could she know?  She was as promiscuous as a barn cat.’

But Gwen knew, was sure she knew the truth.  What others called promiscuity was in fact love, a fullness of love spilling out of her.

And men too stupid, too narrow to absorb it all.  Light and bright and sparkling.  She was lucky to have died in her twenties, still sought after, a beauty, fresh and laughing.

And floating in this dream, the smiles and whispers, the floating silks of reverie drifting about her like perfume, a haze of golden light, she returned, serene, to her husband, and they strolled away through the glowing night of Venice, itself a reverie, most serene.

***Bright sun of morning, bright chill which bothered her not in her Swiss winter clothes, and she strolled out, comfortable, receptive, bemused, wandering at will, by chance, directionless by calle and campo, ponte and sottoportego through Venice, Venedig, Venezia, Bride of the Sea, exquisite, preposterous, beguiling, most feminine of cities, oh! greatly loved, a soul upon the waters, amazing, a maze, reticulated, decorated, Gwen drifted, orphaned waif, wanderer of continents, adventurer, Englishwoman, woman, homeless, home at last.

At first she found herself in abrupt dead ends, rounding corners to find her walkway ending at water, perhaps a bridge to the door of a home (why can’t I live there?) but she gradually saw that by walking in the light stream of people (that peculiar, forward-tilted quickstep of Venetians) she got along further, nowhere, but somewhere she had not been, a little marble church by the water, a grand, stark church on a square with a statue of a serious old man on a horse, the man having the face and neck of a turtle, and little streets of small shopping where she bought, desultorily, as if in practice, a few souvenirs, and stopped for coffee and smiles, per favore, grazie, prego.

By and by, however, she found herself distracted by that bar of blue above the narrow lanes, corners of her vision tweaked, her body drawn by the promise of sun, and she went seeking the open light.  Shadowed lane, archway, small square, lane, and turn, abruptly, there, ten paces before her in a frame, sea and sky with horizon lost in haze of pearl.  She stepped slowly through the frame, into the light, a soul in Paradise, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

The great dome of blue, clear blue as the eye of a young winter’s nun, the sea below flashing blue spangles of giggles, blue ripples of laughter, horizon the luminous flesh of cut lemon, sunward was richer, pale golden of peach, while just there in the distance, domes, towers of churches, domes golden and glinting across the bright water, and off to her right the great curve of the quayside, the Riva, the sea-face of Venice, Venezia, Bride of the Sea.

Gwen spun, stunned, buffeted by beauty.

Caught her balance, turned seaward again.

Oh, Exultation!

(A quick catch of pain.)

This, this is why we live, and all of me, this beauty, here, now, alive!

***‘Yes indeed,’ said the red-nosed Englishman seated across from her at the lunch table, ‘Venice is a remarkably beautiful city.  I first saw her when I was with the occupying forces in the spring of ‘45, and I can tell you it was love at first sight.’

‘Ahh, springtime, certainly,’ said the long-nosed Frenchman, ‘but in winter she is not at her best.  The snow on the domes of San Marco looked, last night, like the powder on the cheeks of an aging actress.’

‘A bit tawdry, agreed, but at least the canals don’t reek.  And if we had had the luck to have been here next month we could have seen her all tarted up for Carnival.’

‘Of course, the sewage problem has been with the city since the beginning,’ said Gwen’s husband.  ‘It’s in the nature of the place.  The Venetians seem incapable of organizing a solution.’

The three nodded sagely.

‘Yet the Venetians have always been supremely efficient at what they have considered important, haven’t they,’ said the Englishman.

The Frenchman supplied the answer by rubbing his thumb and forefinger together.

‘Exactly.’

‘But only when they had a monopoly,’ Gwen’s husband remarked.  ‘Any fool can make money that way.  Once Vasco da Gama got around the Cape…’

‘They have also been efficient thieves,’ added the Frenchman.  ‘The body of St. Mark they stole from Alexandria, the body of St. Roch from Montpellier, the famous bronze horses from Constantinople…’

‘Didn’t they steal the winged lion on the Molo?’

‘Doubtless.  And, do you know, I believe they also stole the columns on which the lion and St. Theodore stand…’

‘Heavens, I don’t suppose a stone or bronze lion anywhere in the Mediterranean was safe from the covetous agents of La Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia.’

Gwen coughed.

‘But surely they were just stealing to show how much they loved their beloved?’

The three stared at her, open-mouthed.

Her husband recovered first.

‘It is still theft, my dear.’

‘Looting,’ said the Frenchman.

‘In any case,’ said the Englishman, ‘the Venetians seem to have thought of Venice as masculine.  In the Marriage of the Sea, the Adriatic was the wife, the doge threw her a wedding ring and declared Venice had dominion.’

‘Then the doge was wrong.  The sea was masculine and Venice was the bride.  You yourselves were saying she.’

‘She has a point,’ said the Frenchman.  ‘Certainly there is something feminine about Venice, although bride carries the wrong sense.  There is something… louche about her, something suspicious, false, not quite…’

The Englishman held up his hand, nodded to the Frenchman.

‘I see what you’re getting at.’

He turned to Gwen.

‘When the princes of Europe were trying to organize one of the crusades, they sent emissaries to the Venetians, asking for help.  ‘You have the greatest fleet of ships in the world,’ they said.  ‘The Sacred Shrines of the Holy Land are being defiled by the infidels.  We are willing to spill our blood to avenge these insults to our Lord Jesus Christ, but we can only get there with your help.  Will you transport these soldiers of Christ to the Holy Land?  And the doge replied…’

Again the Frenchman supplied the answer.

‘On what terms?’

‘You see,’ began her husband, ‘If Venice really is feminine…’

‘Then,’ continued the Frenchman, ‘ the Venetians have never been better than pimps…’

The Englishman concluded softly:

‘And Venice is their whore.’

***

At mid-afternoon, as the shops began to open again, she wandered about, following the people, her sense of place, doing her serious shopping, earring of silver filagree, shamefully frivolous shoes in black patent leather (how vain she was of her feet and legs!)  at a price so much better than in Geneva that she bought another pair in beige, and matching purses, and several blouses in limpid silk, and as a replacement for what had been damaged the night before a set of lingerie, black with écru lace.  This she changed into when she took her purchases back to her hotel.

‘Gone shopping, back at seven,’ she noted for her husband, then left for her rendezvous.  She was rather early, but her sense of direction had never been good and she wanted to give herself ample time.  If she arrived much too soon, she could step into a bar, for it was the cocktail hour, she was feeling none too calm, and the pain jabbed at her side as she walked.

Then, as she approached his hotel, she saw the blonde bounce of Jean-Claude’s cow arriving from the opposite direction, laden down with parcels.  In quick panic, Gwen slipped into the first turning, tripping along until she was safely, more than safely, away.

Wait now, girl, why run?  You’re twenty minutes early, he said five, she’ll be going out again soon, the spendthrift bitch, so everything is all right, have a drink, calm down, phone him at five.  Yes.  All right.  Now.  Slow and steady, over this bridge, bear left, I think…

She was in an obscure campiello, a tiny square, off the beaten track, one of the modest, unexpected delights of Venice.  Here fruits and vegetables in neat piles of green, orange, white, and red, here the minuscule tobacconist’s with magazines hanging around the window, here meat, here fish, and opposite, stationery, shoes, prints and maps, and, when she stepped toward the prints, a small dusty display window through which was visible a mask, a lady’s mask, a beautiful mask of a beautiful face in black with lips of gold and, reaching down over the temples, two golden hands in black net gloves, the hands making, between thumb and forefinger, ovals for the eyes.  A hand-lettered card pointed to a rough door next along.  She had seen masks in a number of shops, but no mask quite so elegant, quite so alluring, quite so mysterious as this one.  She pushed open the door, stepped through an archway into a courtyard, and there through a large window she saw the shop, a jumble of materials and masks in various state of completion.  Through the dusty glass a young woman smiled and beckoned.  Gwen opened the door and stepped inside.

‘Buon giorno, signora.’

‘Buon giorno, signorina.’

Gwen had little Italian, so after a few tries they settled on French as the most convenient.

‘The masks are for carnival next month.  A year of work for a few weeks of business.  Silly, isn’t it?’

‘I noticed others in the shops, but none so beautiful as the one in your window.’

‘Thank you.  The form of the mask is common enough, but the combination of black face and gold features is new.  I think it a little interesting, no?’

‘Indeed, yes.’

The girl continued with her work, explaining the process, the layers of plaster, the sanding, varnishing, painting, all the while lightly sanding a succession of masks, seemingly in no hurry to make a sale.

‘Most do not go through each step, but I believe it must be done right.’

‘Yes.’

‘I would not sit if I were you, the dust gets on everything.  But if you wipe that stool…’

The girl was blonde, with heavy-lidded brown eyes, full lips, and high cheekbones in a rather flat, almost Slavic face.  Under the smock she seemed to have a generous figure.  Sensing the frank appraisal, she glanced up with a smile and the shadow of a shrug which Gwen read as saying, ‘Yes, many people think me beautiful, and that makes things go more smoothly sometimes, but there are other things in life as well.’  Immediately Gwen fell in love with her and, for the two dozenth time that weekend, with Venice.

‘Those are made from ancient designs from the commedia dell’arte…’

She pointed out great-beaked Pulchinella, the black half-mask of Arlecchino, Pedrolino with the tear falling from his eye, angry Pantalone, the cuckolded merchant.

‘He is truly Venetian, Pantalone.  But there are not really any proper ladies’ masks from the commedia.  A lady’s face is beautiful enough as it is.  Make-up was enough, even when the female parts were taken by travesties…  But for the Carnival there must be masks for the ladies, so we make them.  Mostly they are as you see there.  They are the most comfortable to wear.’

On the wall hung a variety of cloth half-masks with riots of beads, sequins, plumes.  As she imagined a costume ball, Gwen found herself becoming dizzy with the exoticism of anonymity, of the elaboration and exposure of the gown one could wear, of the danger.

‘And the one in your display window, is it for Carnival?  Do women wear it?’

‘Well, it is made with strings so it can be worn, and some do wear it, I know.  But it has no mouth, so after a while the breath may soften the plaster, and perhaps she will put it aside.  Also, it is rather expensive.  I think most people just put it on the wall.’

‘Yes, it is certainly decorative.’

It could be had in variations of white, black, and gold, the face one colour, the hands and lips a second, with mesh gloves usually the first colour.  The white face Gwen found too bland, the gold face too garish, so she settled on the version with black face, gold hands and lips, and black mesh gloves like the one in the window.

‘The gold is put on with leaf,’ explained the girl as she offered half a dozen, each slightly different.  ‘Though it is not, of course, real gold.’

She wrapped the chosen one in tissue paper and warned about packing it too tightly in a suitcase.  Gwen paid but lingered yet.  The girl stood still, smiling, seeming content whether Gwen should stay or should go.

‘I have enjoyed this so much… you have made something beautiful…’

Impulsively, she kissed the girl on both cheeks.

‘So feminine,’ she added.

‘Yes.’

***

When she called from the house phone in the lobby, he seemed a long time answering and was cold when he spoke.  Yet he told her to come up and opened the door readily enough when she knocked.

Mellowed by her encounter with the girl of the masks, she smiled with genuine warmth which he could not help but feel.  He returned the smile and the embrace, if a trifle reluctantly.

‘Oh, Jean-Claude, don’t be frightened of me, I’ll not make a scene.  Let us have a nostalgic hour and then I’ll be gone.  Copains?’

‘Certainly, Gwen.  Copains.’

‘A large room… and a view,’ trying to ignore the stack of fresh shopping bags in the corner, ‘much more grand than ours.  We overlook a tiny courtyard with cooking smells.’

‘Everyone knows Bill hates to waste agency money on frills.  Is the room really that bad?’

‘No, of course not.  And the smell was a peppery shrimp last evening.  It was mouth-watering.’

‘Well then…’

‘Oh yes, he’s a wonderful man, his virtues are manifold, and he’s very dear to me… if only he had been a little bad from time to time, just a bit naughty.  But at least he brought me here.  I have something to show you… first the lights down low… yes, you get that one… and get into bed, I’m just going in here… I’ll be quick… a surprise.’

She stepped back into the bedroom a few moments later wearing the teddy from today’s lingerie, the black lingerie with the écru lace, with stockings rather than tights, an archaic notion, a fantasy, a scarf about her neck and over one shoulder, and the mask of black and gold.  Silently, arms held behind her, she paced slowly forward.

‘Beautiful… truly…’

She sat beside him on the edge of the bed, crossing her legs, sitting tall, turning her torso, posing, a seductress.

‘As beautiful,’ she asked in a whisper, ‘as the nymph of Carouge?’

‘As beautiful, take off your clothes.’

‘As alluring?’

‘As alluring. Take off your clothes.’

‘Tell me of this nymph of Carouge, tell me of your love for her, your passion for her.’

He fell into the game reluctantly, but he did play, telling how he, a shy university student, had fallen in love with the young wife (well, not so young perhaps, for she had been in her mid-thirties, but he did not mention this) and of their meetings in that little bar in the slightly naughty Geneva suburb of Carouge, of oysters and chanterelles and wild strawberries, of borrowed flats and rooms, of cruises on the lake steamer to Thonon, to Evian, of their day trips to Annency and Aix-les-Bains, of the great and massively sinful long weekend in Paris after his graduation, of the education he got from her.

‘And did your nymph teach you to slough off the cares of the day?’

‘Yes.  Take off your clothes.’

‘Did she teach you to float in your sensations as an island floats between sea and sky?’

‘Yes.  Take off your clothes.’

‘And was that an enchanted island?’

‘Yes.  Take off your clothes.’

‘Yes, the isle was full of noises, sweet sounds and airs that gave delight and hurt not.  Was it not so?’

‘Yes, Gwen…’

‘Hush, Gwen is not here.  And was that island like an enchanted dream, so that when you woke, you cried to dream again?’

‘Yes. Gwen, we must hurry.  We don’t have all night.’

‘And did you desert the island?  Did you sail away, leaving the nymph to weep alone?’

Dead silence.

The mask stared, mute.

‘I doubt she was alone.’

Serenity faltering.

‘The nymph was busier than she pretended.  Or pretends today, it seems.’

The mask turned toward the window.

‘Your mistake was getting your husband to find me that job with the Agency.  Everyone knew, of course, everyone except Bill.  A good man.  Generous, intelligent, conscientious, and without suspicion.  But not passionate enough, so you betrayed him.’

The golden lips were sealed, the eye sockets blank.

‘But I wasn’t the only one.  Not even one of the few.  Everyone had sailed across to the little island, hadn’t they?  The entire Agency staff as far as I could tell.  The poor, the maimed, the halt, and the blind.  Not, perhaps, the senile.  And, of course, the Agency’s clients, let us not forget them.  The imperialist conquest of Africa in the last century had nothing on your campaigns.  Do know the name they had for you around the Agency in your African years?’

Did the mask waver?

‘The Black Man’s Burden.’

The mask slumped, the torso bowed forward.

‘How many have there been over the years?  Hundreds?  Thousands, more likely.  You have shown the discrimination of a public urinal.’

Hand slipped inside the mask, covering the face, the sobs.

‘How many, Gwen?  I suppose you have no idea how many?’

How masculine of him to demand numbers when what mattered was amount.

‘How many?’

She slipped the mask up to the top of her head, wiped her eyes, sat straight, head high.  She directed all her will to the words of her answer, to their soft dignity.

‘I have been greatly loved.’

She turned her eyes to his.

‘Greatly… loved.’

The silence which floated about them was so thick the air might have been water and they at the bottom of a lagoon.

***

The rattle of the key in the door was abrupt, noisy, violent, terrifying, as was the entry of the blonde, as was the demolition which followed.

‘Bloody hell, if it isn’t the office bike!’

An Australian accent, unexpected, harsh.  Its metallic edge was a particular pain to Gwen’s ears.  She had lived with some equanimity among the various drawls and rasps of American, had learned to bear her husband’s dreary, nasal Canadian, but she had never been able to abide Australian, and now she tried to block it from her ears, to concentrate instead on the pain in her side, for the voice went on and on in a refrain of questions and answers, asides, tried to ignore the pain of the sounds, the pain of the meanings.  She also tried to hide her body, pulling the sheets to herself, curling up, but the woman was having none of it.

‘Get up you bitch, get off my bloody bed and let go my bloody sheets.’

Gwen started to make a rush for the washroom, but the woman caught her arm and slapped her head, sending the mask bouncing, skittering into the corner.

‘Bloody tart.  Christ, Jean-Claude, I don’t know how you ever managed.  I mean look at her, wearing stockings like a five-dollar whore trying to attract dirty old men.  And do you know why she’s wearing them?  Because her legs are all soft.  Look…’

‘Leave it, Coreen.’

‘And look at the scarf, she was wearing one last night too, as if no one knew why.  But look at her neck, get your hands down, you old hag, there, see?  Turkey neck.  And how many kids has she spawned?  Two, wasn’t it?  And both out and gone years ago.  So let’s see your body, dearie, get that thing off, come along then, let’s have it off.’

The woman was so much bigger, younger, stronger.  Gwen stopped struggling.  She stood in the middle of the floor as the Australian grabbed the bodice of the wispy teddy and ripped it from her body.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it? Look at the stretch marks, you’d think she had ten brats.  And what about your norks, darling?’

‘Coreen, enough.’

‘Enough, hell, did I ask her to start taking off her clothes?  Here, let’s have a look.’

The long red fingernails cut a gash over Gwen’s breastbone as the hand snaked out and ripped away the bra.

‘Christ, they look like a pair of flounders lying there, I think I’m going to puke.  I mean, how did you think you were going to get it up for her?  My God, I leave you alone for two hours and you drag this up to our room.  It’s degrading, disgusting, look at her, the pathetic slut.’

‘Coreen, leave her alone.’

‘Scrawny wrinkled thing.  Get her out of here before I tear her apart.’

Not sure that it was really over, Gwen stood still with head bowed and arms at her sides, that pain again, wearing only the absurd suspender belt and stockings, waiting for the blows, cringing, shrunken.

‘Go dress yourself,’ said Jean-Claude softly.  ‘It’s all over now.  She won’t hurt you.’

‘I bloody will if she’s not out of here in two minutes.  I have to get ready for that banquet.’

‘Coreen, stop, now.’

And indeed the cutting whine was not audible through the closed door as Gwen pulled the dress on over her nakedness, and when she returned to the bedroom the Australian was staring out the window, a cigarette in her cocked hand.  Jean-Claude arose from the chair and stood near the door, holding out her handbag and the shopping bag, his head bowed with, just possibly, a touch of apology.

‘I wrapped the mask in your other things.  That will protect it.  I didn’t see any scratches.’

She took the bags and stood waiting like a convict for the door to be opened for her.

‘It’s a beautiful mask.’

‘Don’t fawn over her, it’s disgusting.’

‘Coreen, have pity on her…’

He pulled the door open and stood aside:

‘She’s just an old woman.’

***

She found the restaurant by instinct and luck, by avoiding San Marco and the Rialto, by walking away from the crowd.  A few local youths around the pinball machine in the outer bar room and six tables of dinners in the restaurant.  She allowed herself to be led to a table by the window overlooking the glimmering little canyon of canal.  In summer the view would be prized, but now, she knew, it would mean sitting in a chilly draught.  It was, however, the only small table left and she could leave her coat draped over her chair.

‘Grazie.  Cinzano rosso, per favore.’

‘Prego, signora.’

And she would have her left cheek away from the other dinners.

‘Cinzano… and the menu, signora.’

The slight astringency amid the fullness of the drink was pleasant on the roof of her mouth.  She had brushed her teeth in the washroom of a bar, but the drink renewed it somehow, masked the lingering taste of blood.

From behind on the right, German was being spoken by a family of five, and another northern language from the young couple near the door.  Everyone else seemed to be Italian.  No one was paying her any attention.  She might just make it through.

She ordered by pointing at items on the little menu card, not quite sure what she was getting or how it would be prepared, not much caring.  In the event, the first course was a plate of cold seafood antipasto, tasty and mysterious, the bodies of tiny shellfish, curled up, little bunched tentacles.  It renewed her vigour somewhat, reminded her that she hadn’t eaten for six hours.

The waiter took away her plate, filled her glass with white wine.

Her husband had been understanding when she explained over the telephone.

‘Not at all, my dear, I know you loathe banquets.  I’m afraid I may be back late tonight.  I have to talk to Belmer about the Mombasa job and he’s going to insist on a visit to the Casino.  Ridiculous.  If you would care to join us, go to the Rialto vaporetto…’ and the useless directions.

‘Thank you, Bill, I understand exactly.’

‘I’m told Venice is not a violent city,’ he assured her, ‘and that it is safe for a woman to walk about at night.’

How many similar conversations had they had over the years?  The telephone in the bar, the restaurant, the strange apartment, the backstreet hotel, and the apology, a headache, shopping not done, an old friend, the Bill’s assurance, he understood, had a meeting, a report to finish.  Had he really believed, all these years?  Well, the pain reminded her, it wouldn’t matter much longer.

Not cancer, never mind their modern science, this was something out of Africa, something mysterious, dark, contracted during her adventures, sweat on hot afternoons, rumbles of deep voices, like distant thunder, black skin like velvet over hunched muscles, gods from the secret dark of the soul, gods alive, above her, she had been greatly loved, but now she was being punished, and her mother’s name was not Constance, there was a secret name, she whispered it in my ear when Aunt Pru took me to see her that last time, in the white room, she whispered her name in my ear, but I forgot it, forgive me, Mother, I forgot your real name.

‘Scusi, signora, is…’ and in a jumble of language she heard ‘terminate’ or something like it.

‘Yes, it was very nice, but…’ and gestured about her narrow waist.  Relieved, he took away the plate of gnocchi, barely touched.  They had been light and fluffy enough, but not tonight.  She looked at her reflection in the window: a tiny bird-like thing she was.

The little sparrow, Jean-Claude used to call me, meaning I was like Piaf, which was no compliment as far as looks go, poor tiny wreck Piaf was those last years, but meaning character, meaning passion, courage.

La vie en rose.

Poor tiny wreck of a thing.

A sip of wine.

Pity all the wrecks of little old women, cast off, no one needs them any more.

A toast to them, every one.

Colette, there was another one, all crabbed up with arthritis those last years, her face devastated, like an African village after the passage of an incomprehensible gang of men in uniform.

Despoiled.

No, not despoiled, Piaf and Colette had triumphant faces, had grown the faces of women who had lived.  Lived greatly, loved greatly.

So they were made to pay?

As am I?

‘Grazie.’

‘Prego.’

Cuttlefish in its own ink, dark, daunting, an adventure.

Like Africa, like the mask.

Thank heavens it had not been scratched.

In that earlier bar, in the washroom for repairs.  Pull on the cheap new undies bought in the first shop she had come to, do her make-up again, careful, not too much, then take the mask carefully from the bag, throw out the torn things, Venice, it seems, is hell on lingerie, but the mask is unharmed.  Truth to tell, she wants to put it over her face for the rest of the evening, the rest of her life.  Hastily she wraps it in paper towels.

Now it is safely hidden in its bag on the other chair.

The taste of the cuttlefish, rich, heavy, dark brown like the ink sauce.

As she chewed it, a soreness in her jaw, reminder of the big horrible woman, cow.  More than cow.  Dairy.

And he lay there in bed like a sultan, letting her hit me, letting her tear the clothes from my body, my pretty things.  How much had he planned?  ‘I leave you alone for two hours,’ she said.  But she was only gone twenty minutes, half an hour.  She had shopping bags when I saw her in the street and they were in the room when I arrived, so she only went out long enough for him to get my clothes off…

And that’s why he kept asking me…

To undress more…

And when I kept my pretty things on…

She tore them from me…

‘No, grazie, but I’ll have a cappuccino in there.’

She pulled her coat over her shoulders, shook out another cigarette, took a table in the bright bar, set the bag with the mask carefully on the floor against the wall.

‘Your coffee, signora.’

Two boys remained, standing at the end of the bar talking, sneaking a brief look at her, turning in upon themselves again.

‘And I’ll have a grappa, per favore.’

‘Prego.’

‘And…’

She nodded at the two boys, questioned the waiter with her eyebrow.

‘Why not, signora.’

‘And have one yourself.’

He was amused, they were surprised, confused briefly.  The waiter lined up the four glasses, poured the yellow liquor, they all raised their glasses. What did one say in Italian?  Yes,

‘Salute.’

‘Cheers, madame.’  And awkwardly, formally, from the older of the two boys, ‘Thank you very much.’

‘Cheers.  Where did you study English?’

The ancient game, the rules, the moves repetitive as ritual, variations on a theme, plus ça change, more drinks as the boys strut and display, dancing forward like painted warriors, tribe of the lion, Viva San Marco! retreating, giggling, unsure, untested, not blooded in battle…

‘See what I bought today.  Mask of Venice.’

The mask, more serene, pure ritual, play, their courage could handle.

The mask selected, beckoned.

In the dim toilet, light from the canal, soft light of Venice.

‘Signora?’

‘There, how does that feel?’

‘Signora, I am a poor boy.’

‘And I am a poor woman…’

‘Signora…’

‘But I have been greatly loved.’

‘You understand…’

‘Yet this evening my soul was harrowed.’

‘No work, signora, so…’

‘So here,’ gaily, the mask hiding her tears, a bunch of bills into his pocket, the pain again,  ‘After what that creature did to me, it’s nothing, my pleasure, a gift.’

‘Thank you, signora.’

‘For I have been greatly loved.’

The Mask, and the Woman, and Venice.

Greatly loved.

Most Serene.

Serenissima.

This may strike the wrong note (or the right one, prematurely.) After all, what this Salon is about above all else is the celebration of 20 of the best short story writers in the country, a celebration of the richness of a form many who read both journals have grown to love. As Jane Urquhart rightly points out, the past forty years “have witnessed the publication of a staggering amount of fine literary work,” especially in the realm of the short story. It is also true that some of these did find their way into Urquhart’s selection: after all, the book is more than 700 pages and 69 entries (though not necessarily stories: more on this later). But it is also true that many of the most talented, most celebrated, most technically virtuosic, most wildly inventive, have not made the Penguin cut. Had they, there would not have been a need for this Salon des Refuses. Which means that this is, in the first instance, at least, a reactionary gesture.

When I first saw Penguin’s new anthology, a quick glance at the writers included on the back seemed promising. Leon Rooke? Present. Caroline Adderson (unjustly left out of The Penguin Book of Contemporary Canadian Women’s Short Stories)? Check. Timothy Taylor? Michael Winter? Accounted for. But then, almost as quickly, I began to notice who was missing. Terry Griggs. John Metcalf. Elizabeth Harvor. Douglas Glover. Mark Anthony Jarman. Diane Schoemperlen. Clark Blaise. Steven Heighton. Sharon English. Norman Levine. Cynthia Flood. Ray Smith. Patricia Robertson. Libby Creelman. Mike Barnes. Susan Kerslake. Hugh Hood. The list goes on. And on.

I could understand, of course, some of these writers not making the anthology. A few are not immediately obvious choices, belong to that realm of either/or, and not even a book as big as Penguin’s can include them all. Some are only really known to aficionados and students of the story-form (though one would hope that the editor of a canon-making anthology such as the Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories would be both, if not a highly-skilled practitioner in her own right); and there’s room in all of these negotiations to agree to disagree. But all of them? It was this I could not, still cannot, fathom.

Other difficulties began to present themselves when I looked at who was included. Who, exactly, is this Adrienne Poy? I love Charles Ritchie, but as a short story writer? I did not know Claire Messud was Canadian. And Michael Ondaatje? Even Michael Winter, on closer examination, was not included as a short story writer. Memoir excerpts? Bits from novels? What, exactly, is going on here?

What is going on here, Urquhart explains, is that she wanted to “open up and make more interesting the definition of the short story.” Though she claims that as she continued to read this impulse left her – she writes: “I came to understand that the Canadian short story is more than sufficiently interesting on its own” – it seems to me that this remains the best explanation for the shape that this collection has taken. Either this, or less charitably, not fully understanding what a short story is. (Claiming that it defies “all efforts to define it” is yawn-inducing claptrap. As is relying on the old editorial standby that time is the great anthologist. Not in this collection it wasn’t, as I am sure Penguin Inc.’s cheques attest. ) And, indeed, Urquhart’s is a novelist’s sensibility, right down to the narrative nature of the stories’ organization. It also explains her sense of these stories as belonging to “the pre-novel fictional worlds” of many of her inclusions, when these writers were “at the beginning of their careers singing in a pure voice simply because they feel the need for music, the need for a song.” When I am feeling less generous this sounds a lot like Urquhart painting the story as a lesser form, the novel’s backward and rather weak-minded country cousin, the domain of younger writers before they move on to the more serious work of novel-writing, and if this is so, one must ask if she was a fitting choice as editor. At the very least it is evidence of one of her own editorial biases. Few of her writers are known primarily as short story writers. Most, whether for aesthetic or commercial reasons, have moved on to the novel, and among many of the younger writers gathered here it is apparent that the novel and not the story will be the domain of their lasting contribution. And this may provide part of the reason why, even at more than 700 pages, this anthology has proved so insufficient at showing the breadth, stylistic innovation, and richness of the short story in Canada.

More than anything else, now, what I have are questions. Here are a few of them. Did Jane Urquhart read the stories of Blaise, Griggs, Heighton, Metcalf, Mukherjee, the Smith(s) and find them wanting? Did she read them at all? Did she think that the stories of Virgil Burnett, Eric McCormack, Adrienne Poy (Clarkson), Sam Selvon and W.D. Valgardson were better? Do the Ondaatje and Ritchie memoir excerpts really add more to an understanding of the short story in Canada than would the inclusion of a story by, say, Norman Levine? By Diane Schoemperlen? Is it not the job of an anthologist and editor, in some measure, to preserve what needs preserving, to remember what is in danger of being forgotten? How did Urquhart select or discover the authors she included? (She mentions reading dozens of anthologies over the last two years: how many of her selections were first discovered in other anthologies? Is this a problem? Does it run the risk of sustaining institutional biases?)

Are there other considerations than the stories themselves at play here? Is this really just a question of subjective differences – you have your taste and I have mine – or is something else, at least in part, going on?

More generally, why do we preserve what we preserve, value what we value? Celebrate what we celebrate? How does a canon get formed? Why and how do editors get selected? (Was Jane Urquhart your first choice, Mr. Davidar, or did Alice Munro, Alistair MacLeod or Margaret Atwood turn you down first? How different, better, would this anthology have been if it had been handed to an editor who came to the task with a better understanding of the story?) Does any of this matter?

This Salon double feature allows us to answer, in part at least, some of these questions. To the latter question, does this matter, I would say that it most certainly does. Witness, for perhaps the first time in Canada, that two literary magazines have put aside their temperamental differences (the C of CNQ, Kim Jernigan said to me over coffee one morning in Guelph, meaning contrarian and curmudgeonly; the N of TNQ, I countered with a curmudgeonly harrumph, nurturing) and coordinated their editorial to celebrate and promote writers we both admire, in response, in reaction to another publication. That we have decided to playfully (and not so playfully, as the essayist preferred) tweak the beak of that most flightless of all birds, the Canadian Penguin. It allows us to collectively make the case for the short story as the pinnacle of Canadian literary achievement, as so much more than Urquhart’s “pre-novel fictional worlds,” the novel’s slim, only seemingly demure and wickedly intelligent cousin.

CNQ’s half of the Salon gathers stories by Terry Griggs, Cynthia Flood, Douglas Glover, Mark Anthony Jarman, Patricia Robertson, Clark Blaise, Bharati Mukherjee, Ray Smith, Hugh Hood and Diane Schoemperlen. Each story is framed by an appreciation and author commentary. Add to this John Metcalf’s Thinking About Penguins, Michael Darling’s review of Urquhart’s anthology, and Adrian Michael Kelly’s notes on reclaiming an anthology of the heart, and what you have is another rather explosive acronym: TNT. TNQ brings together Mike Barnes, Patricia Young, Elizabeth Harvor, Russell Smith, Steven Heighton, Norman Levine, Heather Birrell, Sharon English, John Metcalf and Keath Fraser in similar fashion, alongside an interview with Jane Urquhart concerning her editing of the Penguin anthology. Then there’s the reviews, appreciations, virtual anthologies, and in both issues, an introduction to the work of a brilliant new short story writer, destined to be included in many future anthologies of Canadian short fiction – or, perhaps, future editions of the Salon Des Refuses – last year’s Metcalf-Rooke Award winner, Rebecca Rosenblum.

To borrow from Adrian Michael Kelly, what this Salon is, in the end, is a first attempt to reclaim an anthology of the heart. This is not your usual helping of Can(ned)Lit; rather, this is FreshLit, a smorgasbord of almost apocalyptic richness and talent, with not an overly starched helping to be found. Though it might be interesting to try the usual thematic editorializing, what links these writers together – in both the CNQ and TNQ half of the Salon – is their playfulness, disregard for the rules, devotion to language, their collective challenge to the reader: KEEP UP. Whether it be Cynthia Flood’s shaping of a story through a school marm’s journal entries, as constrained in its fashion as any Oulipo shenanigan (and certainly all these stories, as are all worthwhile stories, should be considered graduates of the workshop of potential literature) or Douglas Glover’s, Terry Griggs’s or Mark Anthony Jarman’s headlong rushes of fantastic (and fatalistic) anarchy, each writer here is pushing and shaping the form to his or her own ends, sticking a sock in the blowing end of those trumpeting the death of the short story. The death of the short story? Not in these pages, and not in many others either, should you only care to look. And if after reading the stories in this Salon Des Refuses you are not compelled to go searching for more of the same, digging up copies of Terry Griggs’s Quickening or Ray Smith’s Century or Mike Barnes’s Contrary Angel, well, then, I’m afraid that your case is hopeless: there’s nothing else we can do for you.

What else? In keeping with the one thing Jane Urquhart notes all short fiction anthologies have in common: mea culpa. Even with 272 pages between us, Kim and I could not included everyone we would have liked to. I feel very bad about not including the work of Susan Kerslake, whose collection The Book of Fears is a knockout. Mary Borsky, K.D. Miller and Libby Creelman could have also replaced almost any other writer in CNQ’s half of the Salon without any sense of loss. The same could be said of Mary Swan, the author of a gorgeous novella and collection of stories. And how is it that I could have overlooked something from Mordecai Richler’s The Street? Lorna Jackson and Kathleen Winter were excluded, in part, because they were Biblioasis’s own. Then there are those story writers I have been meaning to read and have not yet, or at least not enough: Robyn Sarah, Steven Henighan, Linda Svendson, Zuszi Gartner. My intention, when we first conceived this Salon, was to read these writers and others, but the few months we had to assemble this issue proved insufficient. The twenty between the two journals, however, can act as stand-ins, as evidence of the richness of the short story in Canada, both inside and (in particular) outside Penguin’s anthology.

In my dream, the devil is showing me around the library in hell.

“And this,” he says, grinning proudly, “is the Patricia Cornwell Wing.”

He gestures toward thousands of paperbacks.

“All of them,” he says ominously, “will have to be read.”

“But aren’t they paper . . . ?”

“Asbestos covers.”

“Oh.”

The tour continues.

“The Dean Koontz Room.”

The books extend downward, shelf after shelf.

“Round that corner is the Danielle Steel Wing. A lovely spot in which to spend eternity.”

I hear a low moaning emanating from a room down the hall. As we approach the room, the moaning intensifies until it becomes a thrumming drone, punctuated by the sort of plaintive bleatings a herd of sheep might make while being devoured by wolves who had been taught by their mothers to eat slowly and savour their meals.

In the darkness of an enormous room filled with thousands of volumes, I can discern many pairs of eyes, hollow and rheumy, peering in my direction, all hope clearly abandoned.

“What is this place?” I ask, turning to the devil in horror.

“Ahhh!” he says, favouring me with a practised leer. “This is where we keep the Canadian Short Story Anthologies.”

I wake up screaming.

My wife says, “The Canadian Short Story Anthology nightmare again?”

Alas, yes. So many Canadian stories, so much pain, loss, unrealized ambition, unrequited love, the tragic deaths of beloved pets . . . . After wallowing in The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, edited by Jane Urquhart, I want to go upstairs to my room with a length of rope, a revolver, and a bottle of sleeping pills, hoping one of the three will do the trick. Quoting Frank O’Connor in her introduction, Urquhart suggests that a characteristic of the short story is its “‘intense awareness of human loneliness.’” To be sure, loneliness has been a staple of short fiction from Chekhov to Cheever, but, not satisfied with mere loneliness, Canadian authors prefer a good heartrending sob. Consider the conclusions of a representative sampling of Urquhart’s selections:

I stared, frightened by my child. All I could do was hug him and cry. (Joseph Boyden)

His eyelids twitched, his lips moved, he winced as if the pain had returned, and out of the corners of his eyes, a few tears came and crept slowly down his temples to disappear in his hair. (Sharon Butala)

There’s a burning sensation in his chest, it hurts simply to breathe. He buries his face in Georgie’s chest and holds onto the warmth of her body. Prays he will never wake up. (Michael Crummey)

Finally he comes again into the circle of her arms and they weep. (Caroline Adderson)

No doubt she died of illness, but, as so many people do fundamentally, of grief too, a little. (Gabrielle Roy)

So much grief, so little time. Reading this anthology, I felt that I was letting the side down if I didn’t wring out a hanky or two every 50 pages. Russell Brown and Donna Bennett, editors of Canadian Short Stories (Penguin Academics, 2005), suggest that “emotional desolation” is a common theme in our short fiction, but, they add cheerfully, “Canadian short stories are rarely grim.” Teaching at the University of Toronto for so long, Brown and Bennett have undoubtedly come to see a silvery sheen to every dark cloud, much as Toronto Maple Leaf fans view a two-game winning streak as a prelude to the Stanley Cup.

Let us accept misery as a defining characteristic of the Canadian short story, then. What’s different about Urquhart’s volume? For one thing, it’s enormous: sixty-nine stories by sixty-six writers (Munro, Ondaatje, and Ethel Wilson have 2 selections each). 696 pages, nearly 400,000 words. Very small print. Added to my usual load of assignments to be marked, the book set off the alarm in the passenger seat of my Toyota; convinced that I was transporting a small child, the car demanded that I fasten its seatbelt. A weighty tome, indeed.

As for contents, the usual suspects are here: Callaghan, Ross, Buckler, Leacock, Valgardson, Findley, Vanderhaeghe, Wiebe, Shields, Atwood, Matt Cohen. There are some welcome new faces: Annabel Lyon, Timothy Taylor, Joseph Boyden, Lynn Coady, Caroline Adderson, Michael Redhill, Lisa Moore, Michael Winter, David Bezmozgis. And some odd choices: Sam Selvon and Claire Messud—two writers not usually considered part of the Canadian canon, although both lived in Canada for a while; Lucy Maud Montgomery—represented by a tearjerker about a faithful dog, which might have found its true audience in a Grade 6 reader, and Adrienne Clarkson (listed here under her maiden name of Poy)—with a story originally published in Maclean’s in 1961.The story itself has no merit; its inclusion cannot be justified on any aesthetic grounds.

Then there are the glaring omissions: Mordecai Richler, Norman Levine, John Metcalf, Hugh Hood, Clark Blaise, Jack Hodgins. Evidently, Urquhart’s is no country for old men. A previous incarnation of this anthology, The Penguin Book of Modern Canadian Short Stories, edited by Wayne Grady (1982), found room for Hood, Hodgins, and two stories by Levine. Brown and Bennett’s Canadian Short Stories includes Richler and Hodgins. Robert Lecker’s new anthology, Open Country (Thomson, 2008), aimed at the university CanLit market, has Hood, Metcalf, and Blaise, as well as most of Urquhart’s younger writers, plus Bill Gaston, Mark Anthony Jarman, Elise Levine, Douglas Coupland, and Alissa York, all of whom will be known to dedicated readers of Canadian fiction. Urquhart’s omission of five of the best short fiction writers in the Canadian canon (I’ll reluctantly omit Richler from the group, as he was never dedicated to the short story format), while including Montgomery, Selvon, Messud, Charles Ritchie, Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, and the former Governor-General, seems, to put it mildly, bizarre.

From the selection of writers we move on to a consideration of the arrangement of stories in the volume—an equally curious piece of editing, in my view. The book is divided into 5 thematically distinct sections, and each section leads off with a memoir rather than a short story. Part 1 is about immigrants to Canada, and begins with Alice Munro’s “The View from Castle Rock,” which Urquhart terms “fictional family history.” In this section are stories by Alistair MacLeod, Sam Selvon, Claire Messud, Dennis Bock, M.G. Vassanji, Madeleine Thien, Austin Clarke, W.D. Valgardson, David Bezmozgis, Vincent Lam, Janice Kulyk Keefer, and Rohinton Mistry. If Urquhart could have found a Portuguese or a Colombian Canadian, she would have squeezed them in for sure. The problem with this arrangement, as any university teacher or student could testify, is that while a grouping of thematically-related stories encourages fruitful comparison/contrast discussions, the inclusion of too many pieces on the same theme leads ultimately to boredom and the lessening of each individual story’s impact. “Canada,” Urquhart claims, “is an unusual country in that almost everyone who lives here carries in their psyche a personal attachment to an actual place and the emotional tug of an altered, abandoned, or stolen terrain.” Well, it would be an unusual country indeed in which this was not the case. Everyone everywhere has “a personal attachment to an actual place” and most people have left one place to go to another. This is the norm, not the exception. In every major city in the world, not just in Toronto, writers are busy telling stories of racism, broken dreams, cultural conflict, assimilation, the struggle to “make it.” Immigration—its trials and tribulations—is not a peculiarly Canadian theme, despite what Canadian academics like to tell us. And, even if we granted the theme of displacement as of paramount importance, we ought to admit that no-one has explored it with greater insight than Mavis Gallant. Of course, her setting was Europe, not Canada, and that appears to make all the difference for an anthology of Canadian fiction.

The second section of the anthology is entitled “This All Happened,” from Michael Winter’s book of the same name. Jane Urquhart argues that what the stories in this section have in common is that readers are likely to believe them to be true, which she seems to regard as a positive attribute. Surely, however, the worth of a piece of fiction ought not to rest on whether the reader believes it to be historically true or not. Are there readers who might value, let’s say, Pride and Prejudice more highly if it could be proved that it were true, that “this all happened” in the way Jane Austen described it? I don’t know any such readers, but if I did I would not wish to join their book club. Not content to let this theory rest, Urquhart must further embellish it:

The news these writers bring is not only that, at least narratively, these events did take place, but that something else, equally arresting and believable, is more than likely going to happen very soon.

A sequel then? “From the pen that brought you ‘The Dead’: ‘Meet the Conroys’”? The short story, pace Urquhart, is not a piece carved out of the reality show of a life, past or present. As readers, we are, of course, free to fantasize about fictional characters, but they won’t be moving to a neighbourhood near us any time soon. If Urquhart simply means “realism” or “verisimilitude,” or the willing suspension of disbelief, she might have mentioned that, but there’s nothing necessarily more realistic about the stories in this section than the stories by Laurence or Munro or Atwood or Shields that appear elsewhere in the volume. There doesn’t seem to be any reason for this artificial division that insists on the truth of some stories and not others. That said, there are three excellent stories in this section: Lisa Moore’s “The Lonely Goatherd,” Michael Redhill’s “The Flesh Collectors,” and Caroline Adderson’s “And the Children Shall Rise.” My appreciation does not depend in any way on whether their stories actually happened. (But I rather hope they didn’t.)

The next section is titled “Lunch Conversation.” As near as I can determine, this is supposed to showcase fiction in which the writer shows how “the smallest object can resonate with significance.” Since this is pretty much the rule with all good short stories, I can’t see how these can be cordoned off from the rest and celebrated for a virtue neither particularly rare in good writers nor abundantly evident in this group. Michael Ondaatje is represented by two brief excerpts from Running in the Family, neither of which can be read as a short story. These are followed by two excerpts from Ethel Wilson’s The Innocent Traveller, which was never intended to be a short story collection. Timothy Findley’s “Real Life Writes Real Bad” is not much better than its title. But Lynn Coady’s “Jesus Christ, Murdeena” is the real thing. I don’t know that any small objects “resonate with significance” in this story, but it features a generally well-judged blend of faux-naif narration and hilarious dialogue. Murdeena is a small-town girl who comes to believe she is the second coming of the Messiah, and the story derives its humour and pathos from the conflict between Murdeena’s desire to heal and the townspeople’s wish to be left alone. There’s the odd clunky sentence in the story (Coady isn’t as skilled as, say, Leon Rooke in maintaining a consistent narrative voice) but this is a story that will make you want to read more of Coady’s work. (If you’re interested, “Jesus Christ, Murdeena” can be read online at http://www.barcelonareview.com/19/e_lc.htm.)

If there had to be a section that insisted on the historical reality of its selections, you could bet your bottom dollar there’d be another in which the opposite were true: stories that couldn’t possibly be true, stories rooted in myth and fantasy. Jane Urquhart calls this section “Paper Shadows,” after Wayson Choy’s memoir. As Urquhart puts it:

Imagination is the key word here: children float, lovers meet in dark and unusual places, time collapses, historical figures are reimagined. And almost everyone, one way or another, runs away with the gypsies.

The thought of a hundred pages of gypsy legends—worse still, Canadian gypsy legends—filled me with foreboding, but it turned out to be an allusion to Leon Rooke’s “Gypsy Art,” which is one of the better stories in the book. This and Thomas King’s “The Baby in the Airmail Box” and Annabel Lyon’s “Joe in the Afterlife” are the highlights of the section, which concludes with the final chapter of Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches. I suppose there must always be Leacock, and at least there are no floating children in Mariposa.

The anthology concludes with a section titled “My Grandfather’s House,” containing stories that “all deal in one way or another with this country’s past.” This is where all the old warhorses are stabled (those whom Urquhart chooses to call “our literary mothers and fathers”): Charles G. D. Roberts, Sinclair Ross, Margaret Laurence, Morley Callaghan, Gabrielle Roy, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Hugh Garner, Sheila Watson, Ernest Buckler. Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant are thrown in for good measure, standing out like pearls in a bucket of chickpeas. Munro’s artistry is best seen in juxtaposition with Callaghan’s lack of it, as their selections are printed back to back. In “Let Me Promise You,” Callaghan wants to show us the fluctuating emotions of a pair of ill-matched lovers, the woman emotionally needy, the man embarrassed by her outbursts. But lacking the ability to subtly reveal character, Callaghan must continually inform the reader about the emotional states of his characters. Here’s a fair sampling of the story’s phrasing:

. . . her heart began to thump . . . she felt too shy. . . animated by a warm secret delight . . . he became embarrassed and almost too upset to speak . . feeling contentment . . . his embarrassment increased . . .he was so pleased now that he smiled serenely . . . He was ashamed to be going . . . almost blinded by his disappointment . . . His blue eyes were innocent with the sincerity of his full disappointment [this sounds like a sentence invented by a Callaghan parodist but I swear it isn’t] . . .such abject despair . . . they began to share a common, bitter disappointment. . his sudden tenderness for her was making him uneasy . . .Touched by happiness, she smiled . . .

That’s pretty much the whole story: you can fill in the action and dialogue with ease, but they don’t really matter. What is painfully apparent is the constant emotional sandbagging of the reader, the author always telling, never showing.

In contrast, Alice Munro allows her characters to act without authorial commentary (that is, without the direct intervention into the narrative of “Alice Munro”). By careful selection of detail, incident, and symbolic action, Munro creates, in “Meneseteung,” a devastatingly incisive portrayal of emotional repression in nineteenth-century small-town Ontario. What the story establishes is both the placid surface of small-town respectability and the violent undercurrent of passion and violation that wells up naturally in the “underclass” but is kept appropriately repressed by the genteel Almeda Roth and her potential suitor Jarvis Poulter. Only when Almeda loses control can Jarvis feel any sort of sexual attraction to her:

What Jarvis Poulter feels for Almeda Roth at this moment is just what he has not felt during all those circumspect walks and all his own solitary calculations of her probable worth, undoubted respectability, adequate comeliness. He has not been able to imagine her as a wife. Now that is possible. He is sufficiently stirred by her loosened hair—prematurely grey but thick and soft—her flushed face, her light clothing, which nobody but a husband should see. And by her indiscretion, her agitation, her foolishness, her need? “I will call on you later,” he says to her. “I will walk with you to church.”

What the choice of words conveys, of course, is that men are likely to be attracted only to vulnerable women—those who are capable of weakness and silliness and therefore able to make their husbands feel manly and powerful. When Almeda goes back in her house and locks the door, leaving Jarvis a note that says she is too unwell to see him, she, as it turns out, negates forever the possibility of their union. This can be interpreted—and no doubt has been—as a devastating portrait of the life-denying force of Victorian respectability. But the story gives us another view of Almeda after she locks herself in her house. Our attention is drawn to the inside of her house, its patterned decorations “charged with life, ready to move and flow and alter. Or possibly to explode.” Images of swelling and flowing predominate: the juice that Almeda intends to make into grape jelly overflows onto the floor, she feels her period coming on and her body is bloated, and of course, as a poet she is bursting with themes and images that she wishes to record:

Almeda is a long way now from human sympathies or fears or  cozy household considerations. She doesn’t think about what could be done for that woman or about keeping Jarvis Poulter’s dinner warm and hanging his long underwear on the line. The basin of grape juice has overflowed and is running over her kitchen floor, staining the boards of the floor, and the stain will never come out.

She has to think of so many things at once—Champlain and the naked Indians and the salt deep in the earth, but as well as the salt the money, the money-making intent brewing forever in heads like Jarvis Poulter’s. Also the brutal storms of winter and the clumsy and benighted deeds on Pearl Street. The changes of climate are often violent, and if you think about it there is no peace even in the stars. All this can be borne only if it is channelled into a poem, and the word “channelled” is appropriate, because the name of the poem will be—it is—“The Meneseteung.”

The Meneseteung River “with its deep holes and rapids and blissful pools” is the subject of the poem she will write, but it’s analogous also to Munro’s story of the same title, with its own deep psychological holes and rapids, which in focusing so intently on this burst of creativity in Almeda actually subverts the theme of repression and life-denial that the external events of her life have illustrated. Subtle readers might well be suspicious of this almost-too-obvious celebration of art and life; Munro is seldom so profligate with her symbols. And it must be remembered that the story is framed by the self-confessedly awkward attempts of its narrator to understand Almeda’s life and art; we are not obliged to identify that narrator with Alice Munro. The ambiguity of the ending (“I may have got it wrong”) underlines the difficulty of knowing precisely what Munro’s own attitude is towards Almeda. However, we can say with certainty that this is a story that, in the sophistication of its technical accomplishment and structural complexity, casts so much else in Urquhart’s anthology into the shadows.

In “The Problem with Alice Munro” (CNQ 72), Philip Marchand has likened her fiction to “a ballad with minor chords.” That’s a phrase that I can see applicable to a good deal of the work on display in The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories: grim and formulaic. But I would expect Munro herself from the charge; whether composed in major or minor chords, her fiction suggests not so much a ballad as a symphony.

Weekly essays were required of English majors, and writing them, Hughes found, reduced almost to nil his writing of poetry. Since the age of fifteen, by which time he had memorized stretches of Shakespeare, Blake, Yeats and Lawrence, Hughes had known that he would devote his life to verse. He was utterly committed to it as a singular mode of perception. But at Cambridge, as he says in a letter to the critic Keith Sagar:

It became impossible for me to write a sentence, except in lucky moments.  (It varied with the author in question—I remember writing fluently about Blake).  The difficulties became chronic towards the end of my second year.  One night I sat up late writing & rewriting 3 or 4 lines I had managed to compose. . . .  I left the page on my table & went to bed. Then I dreamed I was still sitting at my essay, in my usual agonising frame of mind, trying to get one word to follow another.  The door opened & a creature came in, with a fox’s head, & a long skinny fox’s body—but erect, & with human hands.  He had escaped from a fire—the smell of burning hair was strong, & his skin was charred & in places cracking, bleeding freshly through the splits. He came across, & set his hand on the page & said “Stop this.  You are destroying us.”²

Hughes stopped reading EngLit in favour of Anthropology, and by the age of twenty-five had published The Hawk in the Rain, as accomplished a debut, and as elemental a collection of verse, as any in English letters.  In 1984 he became Poet Laureate of Great Britain, a position he held and ennobled until his death in 1998.  His massive Collected Poems was published in 2003, and Letters of Ted Hughes, a selection edited by Christopher Reid, was released in 2007.  Some of those letters will surely rank with the letters of Keats as important poetic documents.  They offer an aesthetic education, and are, as Seamus Heaney said, “rammed with life in every line”.³

They were with me, those letters, as I entered for the last time in the spring of 2008 a spiritless classroom and gave to forty sophomores a final exam in Canadian literature.  Even on nights when I was lecturing to the same class I often had a volume of Hughes or Heaney with me in my briefcase.  The books were talismanic, a private bit of voodoo designed to guard my foxes, to bolster me against the torpor—my students’ and my own—as I led them through another barren of anthologized CanLit.  There were delights as well: “The Progress of Love,” by Alice Munro, “Varieties of Exile,” by Mavis Gallant, and, beyond the anthology, “Single Gents Only,” by John Metcalf—he visited the class—and selections from his memoir, An Aesthetic Underground.

When I mention Metcalf I imagine eyeballs lifting from this page and rolling in their sockets: the old Brit-curmudgeon is still making rounds?  Say what you will about his howlings and growlings: Metcalf’s efforts as a writer and editor have been admirably devoted to the cultivation in Canada of talent and excellence.  Students of literature ought to be in their company always.  Surveys of CanLit ensure that they are not.  Surveys of CanLit, and the anthologies which serve them, begin to get interesting around about the 1950 mark (ecce Irving Layton).   At that point you emerge from a fusty museum featuring mummies and fossils and fragments and shards.  This museum, built with public funds, is administered by bureaucrats and academics. The museum’s only visitors are herded undergrads.  Dutifully they scribble in their anthologies’ margins—E. Pauline Johnson might be on the midterm—but look as they do so at the declensions of their eyelids and at the leveraging of facial muscles against gaping feline yawns.

How is talent served by this?  Or a living relationship with literature?

As I sat there on exam night, watching my students identify passages of poems and novels and plays and stories they are not likely to read again, it seemed to me that the institutional study of literature has probably entrained a holocaust of foxes. In spiritless classrooms the carcasses heap.  You cannot identify or critically discuss a poem by E.J. Pratt?  Perhaps the poem didn’t lodge in your heart—as it didn’t lodge in mine. No matter.  I shall penalize you—and rethink belatedly and apologetically the goals of my profession.

Writing to Derwent May in April of 1992, Ted Hughes said this of EngLit and academics:

Trouble with the dominant Gauleiters in that world is they don’t know a thing outside their handful of disciplinary texts and nothing has ever happened to them.  Those who know more and have learned otherwise keep their mouths shut and creep about, like estate workers among the gentry. The whole outfit stinks of pusillanimity and intellectual disgrace.  They exactly correspond to those brave souls who ran Stalin’s Writer’s Union, and no doubt would have rushed to the same securitate jobs if ever that illusion had got here.  They know this too and smile weakly at each other. . . .

When you hear the English Faculty and these Guardians of the Humanities praised remember this: for the last thirty years, each year I’ve seen the work [in a national poetry contest] of selected geniuses among 10 to 17 ten year olds from the whole UK—in fact I’ve helped select it.  More natural talent than you could believe could exist in one country. Every year I watch the march past of these little stars, all bursting with hope—hurrying excitedly off to read English according to their natural bent and their utter ignorance of what is waiting for them in those abattoirs. . . . In 30 years not a single one has survived to reappear the other side of University as something unusual. . . . The whole lot are annihilated. . . . I know how it happens because I know what I went through scrambling through the barbed wire and the camp searchlights.  Regularly I receive letters from students in their second or third year—in absolute despair, sending me their poems, begging for some direction. . . .  Brian Cox, at Manchester, a few years ago, said he couldn’t bear to go on doing it.  Every year they come rushing over no-man’s-land towards us (these are his words) faces shining with youth—and we just mow them down.⁴

I would like to say that the occasion of Hughes’s letter—professorial reviews of his book on Shakespeare—is leading him to overstate the case.  But I am a survivor of the dismal Culture Wars.  There are hopeful signs now that the worst of their pogroms and scorchings are coming to an end, but there is still sufficient reason for students and teachers to reclaim literature from its academic bindings.

Even those professors who abjure sloganeering and inculpation in favour of close reading or some variant thereof still tend, as I once tended, to use a novel or poem or story or play as a springboard into lazy metaphysics or Soc without the stats or Psych without the science.  It sounds like education—it can even sound like wisdom—and it fills up the fifty to seventy-five minutes a lot faster than teaching tone-deaf students to hear the heart of a poem or a story.  Take a random sampling of Canadian students from a senior seminar in Romantic or Modern poetry: they may be able to parrot what they’ve been told about the male gaze in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, or about Pragmatism in the poems of Wallace Stevens, but few if any could explain the difference between an iamb and a trochee, never mind scan a phrase such as “rammed with life in every line.”  Asked to read a poem aloud, many would pause at the end of an enjambed line, and pronounce each word like a disconnected unit. In their mouths the poem is a bolus—chewed over for its “symbols.”

Alarm over this is not the stuff of a talcumed marms with their thwacking pointers and wrinkly knee-highs.  I am not saying that teachers should loom over students as they sweat their way through memorized Virgil.  I am saying, however, that few students can hold a poem—or the best prose—in their hearts.  They cannot do so because they are deaf to its cadences and rhythms and euphonies. And in poetry that is not visual or cartoonish—so called language poetry, or latter day echoes of nonsense and Dada—rhythm and cadence and euphony are all.  Style is not ornamentation.  It is the carrier of perception.  A poem’s sexual politics—or its nationality—will not lodge it in our hearts.  The eros of its style—its aesthetic power—will.

W.H. Auden, who could never stand accused of easy mysticism, once said that the poet must preserve above all else “the sacredness of language.”⁵ Had he ever been required to teach poetry (he was asked to repeatedly but always declined) he would have focused exclusively, he said, on “prosody, rhetoric, philology and learning poems by heart.”⁶  Clive James hinges “the future of the humanities as a common possession” on the same lovely skill: the knowing of poems not by rote, but by heart.⁷ And here is part of another letter by Hughes that I read on examination night.  It was addressed to Kenneth Baker, who in 1988, the year that the letter was written, was Great Britain’s Secretary of State for Education:

In English, students are at sea—awash in the rubbish incoherence of the jabber in the sound waves—unless they have some internal sort of anchor of standards.  Classroom grammar kits & teacher’s prayers can’t conjure the guardian angel/duenna of English, for kids who have no other access to it but T.V., their pals, & their parents who had only T.V. & their pals & some mysterious gulf where the natural eloquence of the illiterate age was lost. What kids need, say I, is a headfull of songs that are not songs but blocks of achieved and exemplary language. When they know by heart fifteen pages of Robert Frost, a page of Swift’s Modest Proposal, Animula, etc etc, they have the guardian angel installed behind the tongue.  They have reefs, for the life of language to build and breed around.

In addition to his stretches of Yeats and Blake and Lawrence and Shakespeare, Hughes had by fifteen years of age the first book of the Aeneid by heart.  In Latin.  It gave him, he said, the key to Latin grammar.  What French he knew he got mainly from memorizing Baudelaire and Ronsard, and he taught himself passable Spanish in six weeks by memorizing the poetry of Lorca and then adapting its syntax.⁸

When I was fifteen I had never heard of the Aeneid and what I had by heart was most of David Bowie.  I also had Shelley’s “Ozymandias” because I loved it and because an admired teacher had recited it beautifully before my Grade 11 English class.  That teacher—Tom Sherry—began every class with a poem.  Without his efforts and infectious delight I would have had no poetry at all in high-school. None.  Or none but Shakespeare, whose plays describe the limit of poetry. From the four that we were required to read in high-school I did have “To be or not to be” and “Hath not a Jew” thanks to a wonderment-murdering bully (Grades 9 and 12) who liked to fire chalk at the heads of wayward students.  As for Canadian poetry, I had no idea that any existed beyond Earle Birney’s “David”, and I entered university having read three Canadian novels: The Stone Angel, Who Has Seen the Wind? and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.

My undergraduate years did nothing to increase this meagre Canadian storing.  Poetry in general was something I avoided—the curriculum allowed me to—until appetite and inclination led me to begin on my own the long and delightful apprenticeship of expanding language-and-perception.  That apprenticeship could have begun in grade school.  Or certainly by high-school—when I fiddled instead with trignometrical formulae and with BASIC, a dead computer language.

The twenty-two years since my high-school graduation have seen little to no improvement in aesthetic education.  At the beginning of every course I give in CanLit I ask my students playfully if they can name five Canadian poems.  No? Five Canadian poets?  No?  Five Canadian novels then.  Hands raise: The Stone Angel, Who Has Seen the Wind? and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.  Yes. Two more?  The Catcher in the Rye?  Fraid not. The English Patient sometimes comes up, and, more and more, another post-CanLit international property, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.

Looking up on exam night from Hughes’s letter to Baker and thinking about the slivers of CanLit with which I and most of my students entered university, I tried to imagine a major Canadian poet actually writing a letter to our current PM and suggesting that every Canadian high-school student get by heart ten or twenty Canadian poems. Let’s imagine the letter making it (maybe it was written by Atwood or Ondaatje) through the echelons and the buffers to Mr. Harper’s desk.  Would he even read it?  Have it summarized for him?  Imagine in either case the nullity, the androidal gaze, with which the letter’s suggestion would likely be received.

Nevertheless—there have I’m sure been stranger reforms in government-sponsored culture-building and public education—let’s imagine that ole Stevie assents and gets all the provinces (Quebec excepted) on nationalist board.  How many months—how many years—of hearings and subcommittees?  There would be debates, certainly: pedagogies, psychometrics, and above all politics.  Schoolboards from Victoria to St. John’s would have to agree on region-specific variables in the chosen catalogue of poems.  Care would be taken to sanctify our nominal multi-culturalism and our unforgotten Indigenous Peoples.

Amidst the bureaucratic wrangling I wonder if anyone would ask whether or not the poems being chosen were actually any good. Thorny issue that.  Especially in CanLit.  Here for instance is Robert Lecker in his introduction to the anthology Open Country, one of two new CanLit-bloatings released in 2008 alone:  “[A]ny editor of a national anthology who attempts to collect ‘the best’ or what is ‘representative’ or ‘original’ is self-deceived.  Such terms, being relative, are largely irrelevant. . . .  Every national literary anthology is nothing more or less than the anxious attempt to create a selective narrative of nation, against all odds.”  One has to wonder how Professor Lecker would feel about compiling “the worst” or the most “unoriginal” of our literature.  Surely these terms are not “relative.”

But Lecker of course is right in a way: Canadian anthologies are not collocations of the nation’s best.  They are yokings of our disparate and mostly minor literature to the un-gore-able ox of nation-building.

England may be unimaginable without Shakespeare, but contemporary Canada is not born of Susanna Moodie or Duncan Campbell Scott. The erasure of CanLit surveys—and the resulting closure of the market for major anthologies—would effect little to no change in Canada for the same reason that our hypothetical scheme involving the getting of poems by heart would fail: there are not ten Canadian poems, there are not five Canadian novels, there are not three Canadian plays that inhabit the Canadian heart.  Twenty thousand classrooms will not improve this.

A national literature cannot be administered and is no longer germane to the fiction that we call Canada.  A national literature, or an aggregate of works that emerge from the very marrow of a language and culture, depends for its vitality upon sociological and mythological homogeneity.  The Celtic Renaissance which the younger Yeats wanted could not have taken root in a polyglot and ethnically diverse Ireland. Whatever else Canada may be, it is certainly polyglot and multi-form, an agglutination (“mosaic” implies pattern and harmony) of ethnic constituencies few of which maintain organic connections with the others.  Why should the poetry of Bliss Carmen (or Dionne Brand or Michael Crummey for that matter) lodge in the heart of a Serbo-Canadian in Vancouver or a German-speaking Mennonite in southern Manitoba?  Should it find a sounding in “common Canadian values?”  What are they exactly?  Those sanctified by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms?  (Who among us can recite a line of that?)

The best literature in any case is concerned less with values than it is with aesthetic magnitude.  The first-rate work that Canada has enjoyed increasingly since the late nineteen-sixties may have ridden a crest of nationalism but has little to do with conscious footings in a Canadian tradition.  In his new collection of essays, Join the Revolution, Comrade, Charles Foran writes of Noah Richler’s hopeless (if informative and entertaining) attempt to find in radio interviews with major Canadian writers a defining national myth.  Says Wayne Johnston to the non-plussed Richler: “I have basically no interest at all in the question of where my books fit into a way of interpreting Canada. . . It is extremely difficult and probably pointless to find a unifying idea or concept or even tradition.”  Rohinton Mistry says much the same, as Foran points out, when Richler’s question about Canada’s influence on his fiction is answered after ten long seconds of telling dead air.⁹

This is not to say that homegrown influence hasn’t been exerted and felt by Canadian writers.  Aritha van Herk, for instance, pays homage to the work of Robert Kroetsch, and suggests correctly, it seems to me, that Kroetsch’s aesthetic homesteadings have influenced and will continue to influence a generation of writers across the prairies if not across the country.  Michael Winter and Lisa Moore have acknowledged the (routinely unanthologized) work of Norman Levine.  John Metcalf’s efforts as a short story writer and editor have inflected the work of younger writers from Stephen Heighton to Sharon English.  The experiments of bpNichol and of the TISH circle have influenced significant numbers of contemporary poets.  Traces of Margaret Atwood can be seen in Diane Schoemperlen, and Alice Munro has been and will no doubt continue to be an incalculable influence on writers here and around the world.

I know I’m overlooking other examples of influence at work in Canada but I’ve cited enough for the straightforward point: I don’t know of any living writers who acknowledge nineteenth or early twentieth century Canadian writing as an influence on their work.  Margaret Atwood was, we could say, sufficiently haunted by Susanna Moodie, and found in her a kind of spiritual precursorship—of her own early work, and of an English-Canadian disposition—but her literary influences properly speaking are international, as they must be with every Canadian writer.

Transplantation, importation and adaptation to local circumstance define Canadian writing.  Consider the work of Robert Kroetsch.  Professor Linda Hutcheon once referred to him as “Mr. Canadian Postmodern.”¹⁰  He would never have garnered the label had he not lived and worked during the late sixties at SUNY Buffalo.  The postmodernist poetics that he absorbed there lent to him a means by which to articulate—in works such as Seed Catalogue and A Likely Story—the growth of a poet on the Canadian prairies.

Canadian landscapes—material and psychological—are not so unique as to reject the importation of foreign influences.  A Canadian writer’s field of influence is language itself: English-language literature worldwide, and worldwide literature in translation or in those languages with which the writer is conversant. Nor can we ignore the languages provided by the other arts and by the mass-media.  Into these fields the contemporary writer steals in the manner of a fox.  He hunts.  He scavenges when he has to.  And from time to time he raids other people’s pens.  In other words, he builds himself and his talent by compiling an anthology—the one to which he will eventually contribute—on his own terms.

We are our own anthologies.  In every writer’s and every common reader’s heart a collocation of writers and works which have found a welcome place there. Literature written in Canada should be taught in the way that it is commonly read: alongside other literatures. Instead we ghettoize the subject and oblige our students to study the second-rate.  When was the last time you saw anyone except a teacher or student reading a work of Canadian literature published prior to 1950?  Duncan Campbell Scott and Sir Charles G.D. Roberts, Frederick Philip Grove and even E.J. Pratt: through bush such as this most students rough and snooze.

It could be said that what the students are resisting is simply the age of the literature, the unfamiliarity of its idiom. They need, it’s often said, to be lured away from their Facebook and their i-Tunes and their manifold versions of me-Porn into the disciplined pleasures of historical awareness and literary language. The notion is more or less true when it comes to the common run of undergrad.  Many of them would rough and snooze through almost anything in class except for the next text-message.  But there is no need to consider the common run of undergrad.  Complaints about self-cretinizing students are Common Room argot and I can enjoy them—but they are as old as Aristotle and ultimately useless.

The disinterest, on the other hand, of promising or exceptional students can be hard to face but indicative as to course content—I mean to the life of that which is being taught.  You can light up a lecture-hall or at least a few pairs of eyes with Milton and with the Romantics, but try lighting up a room with Towards the Last Spike.  It is ostensibly our national epic—the Canadian Aeneid, as it were:

As grim an enemy as rock was time.

The little men from five-to-six feet high,
From three-to-four score years in lease of breath,
Were flung in double-front against them both
In years a billion strong; so long was it
Since brachiopods in mollusc habitats
Were clamping shells on weed in ocean mud.
Now only yesterday had Fleming’s men,
Searching for toeholds on the sides of cliffs,
Five thousand feet above sea-level, set
A tripod’s leg upon a trilobite.¹¹

Right.  I will say this about Pratt’s monster: it took my measure as a teacher.  I mean that it made me admit how much of the fifty minute hour I was prepared to merely fill.  To me the one-thousand, six-hundred and twenty-nine demi-Tennysonian lines of Toward the Last Spike are an aesthetic boondoggle, as though Pratt wanted his readers to feel something of the tedium with which the CPR was built.  But twice in the last five years I prodded this behemoth from its slumber and whipped it into class because it allows for professorial prattle about big themes.  Epic-parody. Landscape-and-nation.  And so the lecture crawls glacially on.

Never again. Never again will I encumber myself and my students with Pratt’s bombast and his self-conscious mythopoeia.  The latter qualifies him in Northrop Frye’s eyes as a major Canadian writer.  Because I don’t want to spend any more time in cavils over his merits—that dead horse is best left to specialists—I will say this and be done with it: Pratt has occasionally impressive technical command, he is not without wit and vision, and he is certainly mythopoeic, but in the end his verse lacks that almost-ineffable, almost-unknowable quality—talent—that would place his poetry in the shadow of Tennyson.

The competent students feel that lack.  They feel it too in the Confederation Poets and in almost every anthology-staple up to A.M. Klein.  To him, or to Layton, or even more so to Don McKay, Michael Ondaatje, or the prose-poetry of Alice Munro or Alistair MacLeod, the response is widely positive or at the least interested, and I am convinced that the contemporaneity of the material is not the only reason.  CanLit anthologies are stuffed with contemporary writers as barely-read and as classroom-silencing as their ostensible forebears.  No doubt the likes of bill bisset, Di Brandt, Marlene NourbeSe Philip or Steve McCaffery have a place in the hearts of coterie-huddlings.  Their place in a CanLit anthology seems to me secured by the easy translation of their work into professorial homilies on race and class and gender.  Thus the enshrinement of stuff such as this:

yaji yaji yaji yu kaneee anjaneeee yakoooo yangee eee

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee ooooooooooooooooon yaaaaaa

eeeoooookaa

aaaaaaaaaaaneeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee uskooooo   eeeaanji

anji

yaji yaji yaji yaji yananji [. . . .]

Or this:

ever since                                       T

land                                                 H

.                                                       .

this power                                       E

.                                                      .

relation                                           H

to                                                    I

an is                                                S

.                                                      .

th’ is                                               ‘T

book is                                            O

.                                                      .

“this” “is”                                       “R”

.                                                      .

(closes):                                          (Y): [. . . .¹²

Instead of this:

Their names clanging in the air like school bells, that’s what most of the Island children heard when they were called into supper.  They heard their names ringing and they raced each other like dogs down the street, home to hot kitchens, steaming bowls of mashed potatoes, and platters of burnt-black meat.  When Michael Gabriel’s mother called her in, a dark deck of ancestors standing beside her on the porch, the name travelled like a charm through the mute evening air. Michael Gabriel, playing alone by the dock or in the woods, picked up the lilting thread and followed it, a long poem winding through the dusk.

Or this:

“To make the ear
of the khinzîr
(that grotty pig!)
lustrous
as the Pleiades. . .”

Jaham pondered this and said:
Rather, to make the ears
of the Pleiades
pig-like, that is, porous, gristle-
webbed, conical, tendril-
attuned to the earth¹³

Of course, even the best and most original work becomes in our universities fuel for homilies.  And the homilies do win converts.  Our graduate schools, seminaries of the future professoriate, are full of them.  But fundamentalisms do not adhere long in any but cowed dependent hearts, and talent is resilient.  On desks across the country: abandoned essay pages, awaiting the print of foxes.

1. See Letters of Ted Hughes.  Selected and Edited by Christopher Reid.  (London, Faber and Faber, 2007.)  603.
2. Letters, 422.
3. Times Online, November 28, 2007: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article2960466.ece
4. Letters, 603-04.  Christopher Reid notes that “Brian Cox is C.B. Cox, formerly John Edward Taylor Professor of English at Manchester University.  His book The Great Betrayal: Memoirs of a Life in Education was published in 1992.”  Cox was also a poet.
5. Interview.  Paris Review.  Available online at: www.theparisreview.com/media/3970_AUDEN.pdf. 11.
6. Interview, 7.
7. See his Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts.  (New York: Norton, 2007.)141.
8. See the Introduction to Hughes’s anthology By Heart: 101 Poems to Remember. (London: Faber and Faber, 1997.) The book can slide in a pocket—and enrich a lifetime.
9. See “Everyone Knows This is Everywhere: Noah Richler’s Literary Atlas of Canada” in Join the Revolution, Comrade.  (Emeryville, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2008.)  165-173.
10. See her The Canadian Postmodern (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1988).
11. This excerpt taken from Donna Bennet and Russell Brown, eds. A New Anthology of Canadian Literature in English.  (Toronto: Oxford UP, 2002.)  309.
12. Citations of, respectively, “yaji yani yaji” by bill bisset, and “Gnotes” by Steve McCaffery, in Robert Lecker, ed. Open Country: Canadian Literature in English. (Toronto: Thomson-Nelson, 2008.) 732 and 834.
13. The first quotation is from Terry Griggs’s short story, “India” in John Metcalf and Leon Rooke, eds. The New Press Anthology: Best Canadian Short Fiction #1 (Toronto: General Publishing, 1984) and the second is Eric Ormsby’s poem “Jaham’s Poetic Manifesto” in his Time’s Covenant: Selected Poems (Emoryville, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2007.) Neither Griggs nor Ormsby has ever appeared, as far as I know, in a major anthology of Canadian literature. (Ditto, incidentally, for Richard Outram, David Soloway, and Richard Harrison, poets who inhabit my own anthology.)

My mother was born on Staten Island and grew up in Brooklyn; my father was born in Brooklyn and grew up in East Los Angeles. They are both sociologists. When my father was offered a good job at McMaster University, they immigrated, three days after their wedding. My mother taught in the States, but in Canada she did research, mainly for Health and Welfare Canada.

My brother, Ben, is two years younger than I am. When I was very small, I was lonely for other kids and would kiss them in grocery stores, so I was sent to pre-school at age two. I loved having different games to play, faces to look at, books to read—the eternal goals, really. When my brother got old enough to be entertaining, we became very close, in that default way that kids from the country usually are (otherwise, you’re playing with the cat). We bickered about everything, of course, but we could entertain each other pretty well: word games, swing-set games, television games, spring run-off games, video games, sumac grove games, dog games. When I got into my teens and didn’t have to hang out with Ben anymore, it was almost startling to discover him to be brilliant and funny, someone I admire. We remain close, and write collaboratively sometimes.

My parents didn’t really get the game-playing, make-believing, covered-in-muck part of childhood, although they indulged it plenty. They also let us watch terrible educational television, and later, wonderful non-educational television. What my folks really wanted was for us to read, or at least be read to. Thus, from birth, we were given books: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s children’s work, the Madeline books, Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales, and lots of unfortunate Golden Books in which animals talk. My early favourites were mainly what my mother had saved from herLittle Women and the less-good sequels; Johanna’ Spryi’s Heidi; Dorothy Canfield’s Old-Fashioned Girl; Anne of Green Gables (my first CanLit! Imported from Brooklyn!) and all the less-good sequels, and so on. I learned to read independently on the Little House books. I was very big on plucky, self-sufficient little girls. childhood:

For grades 1-5, I went to a tiny country school. There were only 7 kids in my grade, and the place was always under threat of being closed. I didn’t fit in terribly well, but with so few kids, no one could be too choosy. I was a clumsy, slow athlete, but if people wanted to play a team sport, they needed any moving body, so my fear of having to play with the cat (yes, there was a cat at the school) was generally averted.

Besides being clumsy, there were other things that set me apart. My parents were new arrivals and very quiet socially, so no one knew who we were. I was always the only Jew in the class, and often in the school, depending on the year. There was almost no anti-Semitic feeling, but it wasn’t like nobody noticed—every Christmas I had to tell the class the meaning of Hanukkah, a chore that delighted and horrified me, depending on how self-conscious I was feeling that year. Also, I didn’t have much to say about Hanukkah (“You get chocolate Maccabees. Your father lights the candles and looks nervous until you get away from them.”) I think I would’ve had an easier time in that devoutly Christian area if we’d been devoutly Jewish. It would’ve been easier telling kids, “Synagogue is just like church, the Torah is just the Old Testament, and our messiah just hasn’t come yet.” Often, I just did tell them that, rather than, “My family is heavily influenced by Marxist ideology and though we respect spirituality, it’s been a hundred years since we felt comfortable with organized religion.” That’s never been an easy thing to explain, to kids or adults, come to think of it.

In the fourth grade, I was given a special reading comprehension test. If you’ve never taken one, they are like this: we read several paragraphs, about, say, the Jones’ Calgary vacation, or steam shovels. Then we answered a few questions like “1) Who went on vacation? 2) Where did they go?” Since 30 seconds had elapsed since I’d read the story, and since they did not take the story away while you answered the questions, I assumed there was something wrong with the test, and thus did not believe the report that I had a university-level reading comprehension. This was impossible not only because I still wore snowpants to walk to the end of the driveway, but also because there was nothing university-level on the test.

Nevertheless, from then on I was allowed to read whatever I liked. I liked pretty much everything, from school, public libraries, from the school book-club, my parents’ shelves: if it had an ISBN and was written in English, it was good enough for me. A partial list, from ages 10 to 15, say:

More than 100 Sweet Valley books; nearly as many Choose-Your-Own-Adventures; everything by Judy Blume; everything by Gordon Korman, S.E. Hinton, J.D. Salinger, and Colette; all of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories, plus A Moveable Feast, but none of the novels (still); The Bell Jar; I Never Promised You a Rose Garden; The Edible Woman and then most of Margaret Atwood; Lives of Girls and Women and then most of Alice Munro; King Lear for some reason; a book each by Kinky Friedman and Spider Robinson, because they had funny names; Our Town; Six Characters in Search of an Author (because it was in the same anthology as Our Town); everything by Margaret Laurence; everything by Douglas Adams; everything by Douglas Coupland; 66 issues of Sassy magazine; Here Come the Maples by John Updike; A Wrinkle in Time; the Adrian Mole books; Grimm’s fairy tales; A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman; the Weetzie Bat books by Francesca Lia Block; the Griffin and Sabine books by Nicholas Bantock; Down and Out in Paris and London; Bridge to Teribithia The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie; The Diary of Anne Frank; most of The Joy of Cooking; Oliver Twist; the book of Genesis.

I was omnivorous, but not astute. Often I loved a book without knowing why, and equally often I had little idea what was even going on. I doubt all my reading at random did me much harm—if I didn’t understand, I usually just picked up the next book. I wasn’t in the habit of getting people to explain things to me, both because I wanted to seem smart and because stories had a joy stronger than logic for me.

Occasionally, I overdid it. I read Alice Munro’s stories about young girls the same way I did Judy Blume’s for young girls, as useful parables about kids just like me. When I read Who Do You Think You Are?, I was around the age Rose is in “Royal Beatings” and the image of those open-handed blows is bright and terrifying to me still. A couple years later, I was inspired by Anne Frank’s diary to go in search of Holocaust books. By the time my folks realized exactly what I was reading, I was confused and devastated. My mother took the books away, but I had a year of nightmares. I was a sheltered kid, and books were my main clue that the world was much scarier than it looked from the foot of our driveway.

I was put in the gifted program in grade seven. I had really wanted that recognition for my brightness, but if I’d been a little brighter, I would have realized that a) I was to be the only girl and b) the boys were going to make me quite sorry for disrupting the fraternity. We didn’t even seem to learn much in the program—all I remember now is mean boys and making paper mache relief maps of Russia.

In high school (in another town, since ours didn’t have one), my alleged gifts mattered a bit. Those were the years of hyper-streaming, so I got to take the toughest classes. I had to scramble, which was good for me, and in general I was content with high school. I had fun, funny friends and we dyed each other’s hair primary colours, wrote horoscopes, played badminton, spent hours in people’s basements talking about nothing. I also played the piano and the flute semi-seriously, wrote and edited for the school yearbook and newspaper, spent a lot of time trying to get a ride to the mall. The usual.

High school English classes forced me to read in a more organized way. Gone were the reading comprehension questions about characters’ names and ages. Now if I didn’t know what the book meant, I wasn’t simply congratulated for reading it and told to pick another; now I had to figure it out. We were taught to read critically and write incisively, in ways that are still useful to me every day. I am a weak debater but when I can put together a coherent argument, it is with the golden structure of a five-paragraph essay as it was taught to me in high school.

My English teachers were interested in my writing, which was new and very nice. I had started writing stories and poems in pretty notebooks around sixth grade, more because people gave me notebooks rather than being inspired. In high school, I wrote goofy set pieces for the newspaper, yearbook, anything going. Of course I took the creative writing class. There are many jokes about such classes, but ours was outstanding. Our teacher, Pam North, emphasized the difference between first drafts and polished work, brought real writers to class, and read every blessed word we produced. I was so proud of the stories I wrote at the end of high school. When I read them now, though they are pretty lame, I still see sparks of what I’m always trying to do, themes I’m still struggling with.

Occasionally I entered writing contests, and met with some success. Once I confused a literary journal’s call for submission with another kids’ contest (it is also possible that I didn’t know what a literary journal was) and sent them a story. It was accepted on the condition of considerable edits. I didn’t know if or how I could negotiate the editor’s rewrites and wound up agreeing to most everything. I found the experience was very upsetting, though I was much congratulated. (Grown-up Rebecca says: both versions of the story were terrible; it concerned someone getting eaten by an alligator.) I wasn’t very sure about the world of publishing anymore.

I had long been aware that a private citizen could write and publish—my parents did so with academic work throughout my childhood. I thought these were immense accomplishments, and didn’t know why we didn’t talk about them every night at dinner. But despite my “university level” reading, I couldn’t actually understand what they wrote. More accessible was a step-uncle, a sheep farmer who had published several books of pastoral memoir—things about the land and animals, stuff I knew about. For me, the best thing in his writing was a description of flock of starlings rising over his back field, and my father standing watching them fly as I had seen him do many times. A real person in a book, and just as real as life. Astounding.

I wasn’t quite sure how anyone wrote a book, and it didn’t seem quite a relevant question to me. Though I was certainly eager for my writing to be good, and even to be read, I didn’t think that I was going to do anything about it. If I reflected on the situation (and I really didn’t, much), I think I thought that school was an indulged time, when it was appropriate and interesting to have a slightly off-kilter fixation. If I’d been another sort of girl, I might’ve played sports intensely, had obsessive crushes, taken drugs. Even while I was living it, I thought of high school as not necessarily having much to do with how the rest of your life was going to turn out.

At that stage of my life, I was unable to tell the difference between what came naturally to me, and things that, through sublime effort, I could manage. I did well in calculus, geography, French, and thought I might like to be a doctor, or an urban planner, or a librarian. Adults were encouraging but vague—I was supposed to be old enough, and smart enough to find an appropriate direction. I flirted briefly, humourously, with the idea of taking a year off to work between high school and university, which met with hostility from my folks. With good reason: I had worked at a variety of minimum-wage jobs, and was known for the clumsy slowness that had dogged me since grade school. I wrestled hard with hospital corners as a chambermaid, and when I waitressed, patrons flinched at my approach.

University was clearly the only safe place for me. When I was about 7, the family had taken a vacation to Montreal. Walking through McGill’s stunningly, perfectly collegiate campus, I announced I would go there when I grew up. My head was briefly turned by a couple Ontario schools, but McGill and Montreal seemed sexier, more exotic. Plus, just a little farther away. It is to my parents’ credit that they encouraged me to go out of province, when I could’ve just hopped in the car with my father and gone to McMaster. That would’ve been fine but hardly the best thing for a girl like me. Despite my love of novelty and new people, I am a bit…timid, and probably would not have pushed myself if I could have stayed in my safe little rut at home.

And I really did want to do something new.

I loved Montreal. I loved being in a city, being able to walk out the door and already be somewhere. I loved $2 movies, skinny bagels, speaking French without a Bescherelle. After Mount Hope, Montreal should have been a big adjustment, but my folks had talked so much about city life that I acclimated relatively easily. Relatively: my first morning, I ate my bagel walking home from the café, too nervous to sit alone. I got over this pretty fast. I liked to read and write outside, on campus and in parks all over the city. When I got tired or bored, I would lie down on the grass and go to sleep, and no one but squirrels ever bothered me. I was so naïve, but I had such a nice time with it.

I was embarrassingly serious about school. I felt it was somehow my duty to study the hardest things I could manage—a double major in English literature and math, with a minor in geography. A lunatic plan: By midway through second year, I was where I should’ve been all along, in Honours English. I took very few classes I regretted, though. I enjoyed mapping neighbourhoods in urban geography, sketching out stock fluctuations in chaos theory, hiking through bogs in intro to fieldwork. Still, really.

Literature classes were what I loved best, but I was alarmed by the heavy requirements at McGill. In retrospect, I’m grateful someone forced me to read Chaucer, Kant, Milton. I doubt would have gotten through Paradise Lost unsupervised, though I loved it once I’d survived. I could’ve done without Britomart and the Red Cross Knight, but other than that, it was all illuminating.

Even more than the school and the city, I think the friends I made there expanded my view. They are from all over Canada and the world, had gone to boarding schools and religious schools, been homeschooled, and traveled everywhere. I went from being the most foreign body in the room to being provincial. What a relief.

Leisure activities in Mount Hope didn’t offer much variation: movies, parties, the mall…car rallies… So new looked like good to me, and I was mainly content to do whatever anyone else wanted. We went dancing in a lot of hilarious grotty clubs, and sat around a lot of hilarious grotty bars. I saw plays if my friends were in them, ditto team sports. I heard a fair bit of music: jazz, because I knew aficionados, classical because I lived near the music school and there were always free concerts going on, Ani Difranco because it was the late 1990s and I was a girl.

When I’d started being more realistic about my schoolwork, my friends who’d taken English electives for pleasure said I ought to take 20th century Canadian literature. I did, and was thrilled. We read Purdy and Crozier, and Turner and Ondaatje, and I didn’t know who anyone was, but I enjoyed it to a degree that I didn’t even feel supervised.

I was supposed to be a Victorianist (no one is a Victorianist at 20, I know now), due principally to my love of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, but the Victorian profs kept going on leave or off on weird tangents. So I read about Tess on my own and kept taking CanLit. There was a lot more, it turned out, than Atwood, Laurence, Munro and the awful anthologies of high school. And it was still going on, which was a strange thought. While we were reading American Whiskey Bar, Michael Turner published a new book, and came to town to promote it. I went and saw him read, something I probably could have done with dozens of authors I admired, but it never occurred to me that they were, you know, around. In Robert Lecker’s contemporary Canadian fiction course, he mentioned the editor of some of the books we were reading, a man named John Metcalf, and what his vision of and for Canadian literature might be—another very simple surprise to me that you could write towards what you wanted. It was starting to dawn on me that stories, books, literature were made things, not miraculous visions. If I was going to write seriously—and I was still constantly writing, but quite unseriously—I would have to think about the why and the how of it.

I knew I had to read to be able to write well, but I didn’t really know what or how to learn from what I read. I kept trying to make everything up out of the whole cloth. When I was studying chaos theory, I wrote a stochastic story; when I fell in love with the Brandenburg concertos, I wrote a fugal story. Everyone was always tremendously impressed, and seemingly embarrassed to ask what the stories meant. Even at that tender age, I knew this was not the readers’ fault.

I started taking writing classes—first a non-credit one at McGill, then a transfer credit at Concordia. I found it all fascinating and intimidating. Everyone was post-modern or Oolipean, Hemingway-esque or Joycian. That sounds derisive, but by and large, the student writers I encountered were good (rare, I know) and often very generous. I tried to read and criticize seriously whatever anyone else put forward, and they tried to do the same for me. I think my real reputation was for being nice, but some people thought I was talented, and started pushing harder when I didn’t make sense, prodding me for endings to “unfinished” stories that were really just long rambles. I know there’s been a lot said about how you can’t teach anyone to write, but for me, help helps. I got better.

I wrote a novella while at McGill, or rather, I wrote a strange fragmented story about 50 pages long. It was called The World of Missing Persons. I believe my writing teacher at the time, Robert Majzels, said of it, “There are many good things here,” which was carefully, gently true—the characters were, I think, alive and painful and funny, but the story was impossible to follow. I think Robert was the only person who ever read it from beginning to end. I had the thing bound for some reason, and due to an error at the printer’s, it ended up with every second page upside down, a fairly fitting metaphor. I put it on a shelf and didn’t look at it again.

I certainly look at that project now as a failure, and even at the time knew it had problems, but simply having done it boosted my confidence tremendously. I started writing much more seriously. I also started editing for the arts magazine on campus and hanging around with a different sort of writer: macho boys (and girls) who wrote about sex and booze, who wanted to be Charles Bukowski. They were pretty far from what I was doing, but the way they did it was inspiring—they poured their lives right onto the page. I wasn’t ready for that, but I edged a little closer.

Right about this point, though, I spun out on schoolwork. My thesis project on Tess, much as I adored it, had been in trouble for some time—one rejected proposal, one personality “disjunct” with supervisor, ongoing lack of background classes—all created a state of panic in my final semester. In reaction, I spent far too much time alone at the library or at home, reading, writing, annotating, and fretting. Eating and sleeping somehow disappeared from my schedule. I still went out if someone asked, but I made a strange date, able to talk only of Victorian dystopias and the strange informercials that local television played after three am.

I think I wrote some good fiction during that period, made some good friends and had some bizarre conversations, and certainly my thesis got all the accolades, to no one’s surprise but my own. I felt that the central lesson of my thesis was that I was not cut out for life as a scholar. After my last class in university, someone asked me if I would do my masters at McGill or elsewhere, and I said I was done with school. My friend, trying to be encouraging, said I’d come to it eventually. “You’re too smart not to go to grad school.”

I stormed home, fuming, “There’s lots of things smart people do besides study.” At that point, however, , I didn’t know what any of those things were. By the end of undergrad, I had had six jobs, two of which I’d been fired from and all of which I’d been bad at. I was 23, and starting to worry I was unemployable. Sounds funny; wasn’t. I had decided against grad school in spite of good grades because of how hard I’d had to work to get those grades. I had loved most of my undergrad classes and the books I read for them. I even liked some of the critical perspectives we looked at, but I couldn’t easily articulate any of my own. Every paper involved considerable blood, and when I had to extemporize in classes, it was even harder. Other students seemed to have access into ideas that I didn’t, be able to say exactly why and how things worked with ease and confidence. I did it—participated in class discussions and wrote essays and was a good student—but I thought that, if I were a natural student, something at some point would be easy. I did not even consider graduate work, which seemed to me only years of anxious toil in pursuit of a career that would amount to more of the same.

What I did instead was work in a bookstore and write bits of a very confusing novel. Mainly, I was just bereft of other ideas and very very tired from the end of my degree. And the bookstore wasn’t bad—a giant Chapters on the edge of the highway is no one’s idea of a great time, but the staff was nice and mainly so were the customers. And I was rather thrilled to be exposed to books beyond academia, beyond “literature.” I really didn’t harbour any ill-will towards academia, but I’d been living it for 4 years, and was now working on a novel about an academic having a hard time distinguishing between fictional and real violence. And the novel wasn’t even going that well. I needed a break.

I started reading anything shiny that caught my eye: celebrity biographies, diet books, travel guides, chick-lit capers, financial advice books, manuals on how to write a good novel. I had never read these sorts of things before, and beyond learning about building beautiful biceps, HTML 4, and what’s wrong with Anne Heche, I really enjoyed the privilege of a private citizen to read without much an opinion. Sometimes a colleague would nod at whatever I was involved in and say, “Any good?” and “Yeah, I love it!” or “Sorta boring,” was all that was required.

I was also learning a little about how the publishing world worked. I was responsible for “scanning,” shooting book barcodes with a little gun that would process some algorithm of sales history to decree whether the book was to be sent back to the publisher. I was stunned—I hadn’t known that could happen. For a while I tried hiding the books I liked, but no one was going to buy a novel if it was stuck in Travel. A manager, noticed this trick, pointed out I had some discretion; if a book was that important to me, I didn’t have to return it. For a while…

That wasn’t enough agency for me. Somewhat cured of my academic exhaustion, I decided to move to Toronto and take publishing classes, do an internship, work in a different bookstore. The courses I took were radically new to me in that they taught practical skills about how to make a book rather than theoretical ones about how to read one. The editing courses I took were also a gift to my writing—learning how to fix broken prose is not exactly a surefire skill, but putting in the time on other people’s work gave me more stamina to pick apart my own.

I put my grim academic novel on hold. I wanted to write my way into Toronto, so I set the new story there, filled with people my own age who were navigating the same space as me. I interned full-time, and worked evenings at the Indigo flagship, except for the two or three nights a week I attended school. So I wasn’t writing all that much, but I was much happier. And then, a year out of undergrad, I was well-qualified for a position as a proofreader of Harlequin romance novels.

So. I dined out on that job for a long time, and still do—people are fascinated. What can I say? In a small room, there were 13 pink cubicles containing girls and a few guys of about my age and education, carefully eradicating comma splices from various degrees of romantic or sexual fantasy. Most of us, I think, liked the job well enough and cared about it. Even though the books weren’t serious, the quality control was: I was thrown into a panic by British punctuation in an American line; several of us once sprawled out on the floor to see if a particularly awkward description was actually possible (it was). Some of the books were of the hand-holding and cheek-bussing type, but most involved at least one or two graphic descriptions of penetrative acts, often more. The word “nipple” was on the first page of the first book I worked on.

After all that “unemployability” thinking, I was thrilled to find a job I actually liked and was good at. I made many wonderful friends at Harlequin, and learned a lot. At lunch hour, we’d do Pilates, or hike across the train tracks to buy candy, or discuss what we read on our own time: Haruki Murakami, J.M. Coetzee, Marian Keyes, John Cheever.

I was still slowly working on my Toronto story, which was assuming a stranger and stranger structure, influenced both by writers I had known at McGill and work I was reading—poetry collages, graphic novels. I started reading Broken Pencil and got inspired by the DIY scene. I interviewed No Media King Jim Monroe for a school project, and although we were ostensibly talking about publishing, Jim’s sublime self-confidence did inspire me to get on with the writing, and to feel that it mattered.

As soon as I finished at my publishing certificate, I enrolled in Michael Winter’s writing workshop. It had been a very long time since a stranger had read my work, but I thought it would probably help. Michael pushed for writing that was specific, precise, real. Not necessarily realistic; I worked a good deal on semi-magical stories in that class. He just wanted to get enough real details that a world could stand behind them. I found this when I read his own books, too: a precision and a confidence in each hair and wire, each smell and taste. I saw something I could aspire to.

Since it was a “fiction workshop,” we didn’t have to finish things, which has ever been my Waterloo. As long as I was free to claim anything I wrote was actually a part of something larger, I would. Scattered in my wake are dozens of stories that start promisingly, and go on for a story-length of time, and then…stop.

I started trying to be more disciplined; I wrote a perfectly tight outline of the novel I wanted and was completely paralyzed by the scope of the thing. Writing was consuming more and more of my time and thoughts. I couldn’t write a good novel, and at work I was surrounded by novels that often weren’t very good, or at least weren’t what I wanted to write. I admired romance writers for their ability to take a constrictive form and (sometimes) make something new and engaging out of it. Like the “Oulipo” poets who imposed arbitrary rules on the work in order to trigger inspiration, clever romance authors can make a wonderful book by engaging their constraints. But that’s not my thing—I have enough trouble with the non-arbitrary constraint of beginning-middle-end—and despite the many aspects of the job I liked, I realized that I should leave.

Much as I had been surprised by how violently I didn’t want to go to grad school, I startled myself a few years later by applying. The University of Toronto program was in its first year, and it sounded nice. It took me most of the fall to muster the courage to approach referees, request transcripts, write a personal statement and collect writing samples. I told no one, in case I didn’t get in, or in case I did and then didn’t want to go. After I’d enrolled, someone asked me where else I’d applied, and I was genuinely startled; more than one of those applications would’ve destroyed me.

In the spring, I took a short fiction workshop with Andrew Pyper and, very slowly and painfully, wrote a story from beginning to end. Andrew wanted us to think about the reader when we wrote: what they wanted to know, what they wanted to read. I had long admired his short fiction, and though I couldn’t exactly write like him, I could learn to think about affect instead of intention. This helped with my completion-phobia.

I was working overtime against the looming possibility of tuition fees. Also foreseeing a rigourous grad school schedule, I also did way more work for Andrew’s class than was truly necessary. I’m sure I was not a lot of fun during that period of waiting. When I actually got into the program I was horrified.

I went over to Goldberry Long’s house. She was acting head of the program, and she wanted to encourage me to come to UofT. I don’t remember whether she physically held my hand (but Goldberry’s the sort who would) but she did figuratively. I had worn a linen dress to go to a professor’s house, and then an enormous greyhound attempted to crawl into my lap. The baby cried and Goldberry went to tend her. I lay sprawled under the dog, thinking, “So this is how writers are.” I decided to get a masters degree in creative writing.

The UofT creative writing MA was new and small, and even in the English department , a few people didn’t know it existed. We were a class of 8 in my year. It was—and is—a great group, but for the first long while, everyone was dreadfully tense and self-conscious. At last, my people!

I took a limited courseload the first term, in deference to my freelance work and my extreme lack of confidence: a class on Virginia Woolf’s shorter works, a required class on book history and how to use the library, and the writing workshop, led in the first term by Goldberry and the second by Andre Alexis. I was intrigued by Woolf’s criticism, her precise ways of seeing, her desire to show the reading process on the page. I already knew how to use the library. Mainly, I wrote. My first grad school story was about a man attempting to teach his fiancée to fly by encouraging her to jump off the roof of their apartment building. I still think it was good, but it had a lot of problems. So impressed was I by my colleagues’ brilliance, that I tried to use every scrap of workshop advice, so the story wound up being enormous, confusing and very intense. Perhaps I’ll rewrite it again sometime.

I really liked the constant stimulus of grad school. My classmates were inspiring, everyone wrote something wildly different from what I did, and the stuff the workshop leaders brought to the table was different again. None of us wrote like Carver, or Proust, or Raymond Queneau, but that there were things we could learn from these strangers, relationships between us, was an addictive thought.

By summertime, I had a group of classmates to sit with in the pub and compare stories. I wrote notes for them, manuscript evaluations for my freelance job, critical essays for classes: I was an insightful-reading machine. Now I had to write a book.

I was assigned Leon Rooke as a mentor in the spring. I knew well his reputation as a writer, but tried to tell myself I’d be a suitable mentee by the time we were to meet, in July. I read his stories carefully, trying to pin down what I admired, what I wanted to learn (lots, both). The other thing I did that summer was start sending my stories to journals. I thought it was embarrassing that I’d never been published, and worse that I hadn’t tried since high school. I thought that rejection letters would be like war wounds, signifying to real writers that I was fighting the good fight. I sent out everything I had that didn’t suck.

In early summer, I was sent a phone number and told to call my mentor. I was alarmed to be calling a serious person at home in hot weather to ask him to read my little stories. He was nice, looking forward to working with me, but hadn’t received my portfolio from the school. Was it lost? Should we enquire of the department? I knew that way lay madness, and chose two stories to send myself.

Leon surprised me by calling only a couple of days later. “Are you writing?” he crowed (I was making egg curry). He raved about one of the stories, suggesting small changes and also where I might submit it for publication. We planned a meeting, and I promised to bring the revisions, other work, etc. As we were signing off, Leon remarked again how delighted he was with this one story. “Of course, the other one’s a mess,” he added equitably.

We set to work.

Leon was brilliantly supportive, insightful, and honest. Although he did not have much patience with a tedious story (“Well, you’ve got to love your failures”) he had a lot of patience with me, slouched at his kitchen counter, bemoaning my lack of genius. He pushed me to write faster, to write more first drafts and fewer twitchy revisions. Stories had to earn my time by being worth revising. Or at least, that’s how I interpreted his “write 20 opening paragraphs” or “write three stories in three days” cues. I worked hard; I had a lot of fun.

The day before I had to hand in my thesis, we put all the stories on the Rookes’ big glass dining table and prowled around looking at them. There was a definite sense of occasion, and I was madly in love with everything I had written (Leon was perhaps a touch more reserved on a few pieces). I had written a book! And now I had to send it away to my defense committee, and elsewhere.

The previous fall, Leon had encouraged me to enter a manuscript for the Metcalf/Rooke award at Biblioasis. Though Kathleen Winter’s gorgeous collection bOYs deservedly won, John Metcalf wrote me a warm letter, urging me to send him something else (and, I assumed, better) in the spring. I considered this a tremendous, if terrifying, compliment, and did my best to put it out of my mind. But I did send him the thesis, once it was “finished” and then skipped off to enjoy having only 2 jobs, no school, and a new novella to write. Mainly, I was just a sleepy library clerk or a harried ESL teacher, but enough writing stuff—readings, publications, making the Journey Prize long-list, grants—happened to make me feel somewhat like a writer.

John wrote me a critique of the stories I’d sent. Though he liked several things and all his feedback was with an eye towards improvement, he didn’t love everything; the word awful was used. I told myself firmly that no one would waste three pages critiquing someone they think can’t do better. I’d received my share of badge-of-honour rejections by then, and they are mainly two lines long and perky (“We found your work lovely and profound, but due to space constraints…”) Also, he was right about where my work wasn’t working, and seemed like he might know why. I thought I could improve with this sort of feedback, and said so, and tried.

John’s letter suggested strongly that my realistic, grimmer stories were much stronger than the fantastic ones, which also were (mainly) lighter. I think I can sometimes use magic well—it’s a relief from constraint, it’s a game, it’s a puzzle, but it’s also a way to give new light on relationships and emotions without leaning on metaphor. Nevertheless, it can get tempting to go to magic as wish-fulfillment, or adventure, or simply “neat tricks.” I want magic to be something I can use effectively to show characters, but it’s the characters themselves— characters that you could see and touch and would want to—that it’s really about. If magic was distracting from the heart of matters—people—I could leave it aside until I had the skill to handle it better.

The manuscript that wound up winning the Metcalf/Rooke award was quite different—darker, and more realistic—than my thesis project, and the book that will be published in September 2008, is different again. Right up until I turned the thing over to Dan Wells at Biblioasis in March 2008, I was writing new work. Straight along, John was eager to see what I could do, happy to read whatever I sent him, and generous with feedback. And with support, and encouragement. And with suggestions of what it might help to read—sometimes he just sent the books. When I had graduated from my MA, I felt very uncomfortable that my education was over. I joked that I felt like running up to strangers in the street and demanding that they teach me something. I felt very lucky to be taught by John’s editing of my work. I worked constantly, but as I felt with Leon, less would have seemed disrespectful of the enormous opportunity I’d been given.

Once, as it turned out and as I always wanted it, is a book of people. By the time I come to writing a story, realistic or magical, I’ve probably spent months or years thinking about the characters in it: working out how they move through the world, writing endless scenes that I can’t use, but inform whatever I do end up writing as “story.” I think this process—which I do occasionally diverge from, but not much—makes it hard for me to shape stories. Life is long, and 15 pages out of anyone’s life rarely can contain any kind of beginning-middle-end line. At my most frustrated, I think the only honest ending of a story is, “Then the next morning…” The longer I’ve worked with characters, the more I know about what they’re doing tomorrow, and the harder it is to find a place to stop.

I don’t take characters from life, exactly—I can’t quite render real humans on the page. Mainly, I get interested in someone from afar—an acquaintance, a colleague, a seatmate on the bus—and in failing to imagine that person, I create someone new. Of course, there is some of myself in anything I write—Isobel, in “ContEd,” works in a Greek restaurant; mine were other sorts of restaurants, but some things still work:

Eva slams a brick of ground beef onto the counter. “Yeah, Iz, you checking up on our honesty?” She and Mara start plucking wads of meat from the brick and weighing them on the little scale. Three ounces, roll twice in your hands, put it between two sheets of waxed paper and press it flat: tomorrow’s hamburgers.

The earliest drafts of “ContEd” contain a lot of slack-paced talk with patrons at the restaurant and in class, a lot of talk about food and shoes. I rarely write with story in mind, or themes, or structure, which is another reason it takes me so long to get from first draft to final. And yet, after I finish something—often long after—I can see that I go back to the same stuff over and over.

I’m interested in people who, for whatever reason, feel caught out. They’re more vulnerable than they should be. Places of loss or lack are where you can see more, say more about people. Love unrequited or lost, romantic or Platonic or familial, that’s always rich ground, but I’m interested in other missing pieces too: money, security, respect—those are huge for any human in society, of any class, and I wonder why they aren’t written about more as emotional issues.

It is through a lens of vulnerability and emotion that I come at the issue of class. This being Canada in 2008, class isn’t easy to get a bead on: it’s a certain amount of money per year, but it’s also how long you think that will last, or what you might need it for, or what you feel entitled to. Teyla in “Massacre Day” supports herself as a high school teacher, yet because of the end of her marriage, her life is consumed by poverty. She feels she lives in a dangerous neighbourhood, has cheap appliances, can’t afford nice clothes. It’s hard to tell exactly what’s true and what’s her invention, because she feels it all as true:

Toaster waffles. In the public-school price-bracket, syrup bottles were all shaped like log cabins or slave women.

Teyla’s students see themselves as outside society, without any status, and I sort of agree with them. Even though only Hart and Samir have left home, none of the teenagers feel they are offered whatever their parents have. Earlier drafts of the story had more about the narrator’s home and how she lives, but I wound up removing that material because how she feels—effaced—is much more important than how her life is. None of the kids in the story perceive themselves as being part of anything larger than each other and school; what their parents do or have is irrelevant. When they go to Sears, there is a moment of derision of the consumer world,

There was this silent moment as we all walked towards the flicker of TVs in the back. All the makeup ladies in their white jackets, purple and silver eyelids, were leaning over the counters and glaring at us.

But they only resent the store because the clerks resent them, and that’s not about class but age—no mall employee likes a pack of teenagers, no matter what their spending power. Kids are an underclass, or feel that way, anyway. I remember feeling that way as a teenager. I am willing to make some imaginative leaps about circumstances, experiences, events—“Massacre Day” was unique in that I even did research about the events—but I try to stay close to what I know in terms of feeling.

Everything is defined by how we feel about it, anyway. Isobel worries about the cost of her school textbook, and eats whatever she’s given or can get cheaply, but people keep pointing out other things she doesn’t have—a boyfriend, a ride home. Mara and Eva make about the same money as Iz, but they feel sorry for her because she is a single woman. The lifts home are perceived very differently by Barton and Isobel—she’s tired and appreciates the time and energy she saves; Barton feels sorry for her because she’s a single woman trying to walk to Parkdale.

It’s something of an awkward question to examine the distance between myself and my characters. I feel like it’s a short one, maybe too short; I feel trapped by my own experiences sometimes, longing to write about 1920s farmhands or Italian pornstars, or aliens. I have hope for progress, though. For a long time, I felt I couldn’t write in a man’s voice, and now I think I can, that those stories ring true. I think what happened was a growth in empathy. The more I learn to listen to other people, put myself in their places, not judge, not wait for my turn to talk, the better I can write.

Listening to characters, characters listening to each other (or not) is a huge part of how I work. I often focus on dialogue because the rhythm of character’s speech and what they choose to say is an easy way to show readers who we’re dealing with, without having to resort to, “He was six-three, an imposing man but with a West-Coast-er’s laid-back charm.” Learning to write good dialogue was one of the first things I tried to do as a writer. In high school (and now), I adored J.D. Salinger, and I read somewhere that his talky style was in part because his publishers judged a book’s appeal by the percentage of dialogue. They told him that if a book could be 100% dialogue, everyone would love it.

I wasn’t sure that was true—even as an impatient kid, I was ok with a little narrative—but I tried hard to render as much in speech as I could. Even then I liked to get close to characters—play out a scene beat by beat. I’m interested in how people talk—what they say, too, of course, but that’s easier to make up. I love to listen to people talk, and to read scripts and watch plays: talk in a concentrated form. At some early age, I either read or watched Waiting for Godot, but I was too young to really get the clipped, hilariously dysphoric dialogue. Besides, the abuse of Lucky upset me enough that I approached nothing else of Beckett’s until university. Then I was thrilled by both him and Harold Pinter, how they play with the line between banal and surreal, which is surprisingly thin. It’s shocking what you can get away with in dialogue.

Another in this line, but more accessible, was Tom Stoppard. I didn’t read Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead until university, but at 11 or 12, I saw Stoppard’s own film adaptation and that quickness, that wit, I got, especially the game of questions on the tennis court, which my brother and I tried valiantly to recreate. Here was another set of rhythms that I could—somehow—distill into realistic dialogue.

In one of his short stories, Andrew Pyper described a well-written page as filled with “tightly packed paragraphs cut by intermittent columns of dialogue,” and that image is one of my ideals when I write dialogue. When I’m stuck, it helps to unfocus my eyes and look for the widest swath of black on the page, then cut it. Rhythm and quickness is known to be important in funny writing, but I think it always is; the most serious conversations rarely take place in fat paragraphs. My favourite dialogue clings fairly tightly to the left-hand margin.

To learn to create this stuff, I actually stole lessons I learned in a method acting class I was taking in my midteens. I didn’t consciously decide to use them, but Sanford Meisner’s repetition exercises became an integral part of the way I drafted dialogue. In these exercises, two actors face each other and work a single line back and forth between them, with tiny variations of tone and breath, and perhaps a single word change, until it becomes a conversation. It’s an effective way of producing something that I think is very realistic—it’s how we speak, just not why—and I know I still do it, still unconsciously. In general, I weed out the most obvious evidence—“You think so?” “I think so?” “You’d think so”—but I can still hear that cadence. Writing in this way forces minute attention to word choice and punctuation, which is both a lesson I was lucky to learn early, and one I’m still learning. Much later, John Metcalf’s essay, “Punctuation as Score,” pushed this education forward immensely.

I love anything crafted to perfectly fit one voice over another: prose, plays, movies, TV shows, music. In an abstract way, I think fast-paced dialogues is a lot like Baroque counterpoint. That is something of a reach, but I studied classical piano somewhat seriously from ages 5 through 19, and since I was a shockingly ungifted performer, but loved the music, I tried to import it to something I was better at. When I said I tried to write a prose fugue in university, I wasn’t kidding—I still think I’ll work out how to do it eventually. Without taking it too literally, the concept of counterpoint of voices is an interesting way to “create realism,” that confusing contradiction.

In my family we have a phrase for when a group dissolves into chaos—“It’s gone all Altman-y,” referring to the great Robert Altman layered dialogue in films, crowd scenes where multiple strands of conversation weave in and out of the audio, seemingly at random. His is structured chaos—there’s enough overlap that it feels like a real mess, but not so much mess you can’t hear what you need to hear.

My high school writing teacher asked us to write a paragraph on the difference between fictional and actual dialogue. I said that in real life people um and uh, repeat themselves, lie for no reason, don’t finish sentences, sneeze and cough and burp, stammer, get distracted; in fiction that stuff doesn’t happen. Then the assignment never got collected, and I was left wondering whether we were meant to learn to observe that divide, or challenge it. Insofar as I can, without making the reader crazy, I do want to challenge it. I love phonetic speech, ums and ahs, slang and smalltalk. But I want to get it to that Altman-y level of orchestrated chaos—like boiling down a mass of ingredients until they meld and intensify in soup. Usually I have boil down a first draft by close to half before it’s a story, often mainly the talking. I have to get it all down before I can play with it.

I think in the end, most of my dialogue is lean enough to give information, idiosyncratic enough to show character:

“You live far, Isobel?”

“No, a bit west.”

“I’ll drive you. My car’s just over… I mean, if you want?”

I think that’s what I want.

Colleen shuffled the God pamphlets in her lap while Mr. Andrews chalked square yellow letters on the board.  Boring. The white-paper one was cheaply printed: the yellows did not line up with the reds or blues, so Jesus was all halo, no body. Inside was just a boring list of Sunday school and Bible-study classes. The glossier one had pictures of candles and sheet music, a paragraph about the joy of faith, a couple things that sounded like cheers. Even better, no church address where her father could go and ask questions. Not that he would.

“Ok, people,  focused attention…” Mr. Andrews dropped the chalk into his sleeve. In her notebook Colleen wrote, Bible study group. Leader: Drew. Then she crossed out group and wrote cell, like terrorists. Scarier.

Mr. Andrews was saying, “I hope you’ll really get involved with this project, come to see poetry not as words on the page, but reality interpreted in words.”

Colleen wrote: The leader will interpret the reality of God’s words.

“Well, that’s the hour. Thanks, guys.”

Colleen stayed in her seat, waiting for Andrews to skedaddle out. She stared at her blue-ink, red-underline title: Mindfuck. Date in the upper righthand corner.

She flicked through the Bible she’d got out of the library. She was worried, a little, about accidentally brainwashing herself. Not very worried, but she’d watched talk shows. She knew about Mormon harems and Catholic perverts, kids going naked on compounds in Arizona, parents selling their houses to pay for deprogrammers.

Her mother would have had something to say about that. But her mother’s car had gone spinning off black ice seven months ago, and Joe was always at work or partying when anything good was on TV.

Joe

“No, I want the gig, but I can’t rehearse tomorrow. I’ve—I’ve got something else.” He dragged deep, held it in. Something else was recruiting focus groups of people who bought than a litre of cough medicine a year, but that didn’t sound how he wanted to sound. He exhaled into the exhaust fan. “I know the set, I could jump in after the opener.”

Joe was on the kitchen phone, watching the window for Colleen on the basement steps.  He’d have time to pinch the joint and shove it in a pocket and before she got to the bottom and opened the door.  Ever since her silent rage at the tinfoiled ball of hash beside the bathroom sink, he was trying, but the exhaust fan wasn’t that strong. When she lived across the country and they were together only two weeks a year, she’d been a little more forgiving. The turnips boiled over as he hung up, and he slammed the phone down. Joe knew seven recipes; tonight was root vegetable casserole.

He was pretty sure the drugs were part of that silent rage, but not all. She didn’t say what made her unhappy, or even that she was. But no one moved that fast, turned that sharply, with any joy. There was so much shit, it was hard to guess: dead mother, strange father, new school and apartment, plus nobody liked root vegetable casserole, it was just all he knew how to do. That was a problem with a lot of what he did.

Other girls her age talked more, he thought. Marcy had…probably. He’d only been with her three weeks and he hadn’t been sober all the time then, either. But it seemed that Marcy had bitched about homework, cried about dead birds, yelled when he stepped on her toes. Colleen never said a word.

Then again, neither did he. There was a cushion missing from the back of the couch where he slept. In the night, his right foot slipped through the gap and the ripped upholstery to the cold springs, the jagged edge of the broken one. He didn’t have the money for a new couch, nor the time to find a new cushion the right size. He just tried to keep his feet still at night, thought about sleeping in shoes, bandaged his right foot in the mornings. Maybe they weren’t the sort who talked about troubles, Joe and Colleen.

But Joe’s last relationship, and several others, had ended with normal people talk things over. But Colleen had left “The Lessons of Deuteronomy” mixed in with his dead mail and sheet music. But he didn’t mind talking, really. So he scraped the serving spoon through the casserole, sat down across from her and asked, “So, you’ve been thinking about religion?” Then he took a bite. The rice was mushy.

“Yep.” Colleen was picking out all the carrot medallions and lining them up around the rim of her plate.

“That’s cool. I went to church when I was your age. Sometimes.” A long pause, for chewing. He hadn’t cooked the turnips enough tonight. “You like Deuteronomy?”

“Yep.” Colleen was eating everything except for the necklace of carrots, even the tough turnips. “You know about that one?”

“Not really, much. But I care about whatever you care about. Tell me.”

Colleen chewed hard, blankfaced. Then she stood and left the room. He listened to the kitchen door’s creaking swing, put some salt on the rice, took a sip of water. He had no idea if she’d gone to get ketchup, to vomit, to Paris, reacting to something he’d said or the voices in her head. When she swung back in and snapped some pamphlets down on the table, he was relieved to see her again, relieved that the church stuff was pretty low-level. He was relieved to put down his fork to read. Nothing about hell, or door-to-dooring, not much even about God. Kids could go to YouthZone and learn Christian alt rock on Tuesdays. He wondered about that sound; probably lots of acoustic guitar, handslaps against the wood. He wondered if he had the cash for pizza.

“This sounds cool.” He set the papers down and picked up the knife again. “Fine.”

She shrugged and dug the tines of her fork into the twelve o’clock carrot. “I’m trying for more than fine.”

“Trying?”

“To know God.” She brought the carrot to her mouth and bit it in half. “To understand the universe.” Her rage was radiant and he couldn’t guess why. He couldn’t guess anything about her, not even whether she liked carrots most or least.

Colleen

The Bay jewellery was expensive, and Claire’s at the mall was just embarrassing. Besides, she wanted something over-the-top, a printed shopping bag that would make even live-and-let-live Joe squirm. She wanted Family Christian Bookshop.

It was so far east there were no sidewalks. Every asshole driver who saw her had to honk—to tell her she was in the way, that she was hot, that she wasn’t, who knew? There an even better-sounding store across town, but she couldn’t have walked that far, not even for Loaves and Fishes.

Family Christian Bookshop was pretty good—sky-blue carpeting and glass-fronted cases with wet streaks of Windex. Everything—t-shirts, aprons, stuffed dogs—was printed with Bible verses, or numbers and dots that maybe meant verse numbers. Clocks and bike helmets with prayers, t-shirts about chastity. Two mud-haired toddlers running around, jangly guitar music on the speakers. It sounded a little like tunes she heard through her bedroom wall when her father rehearsed. Other than that, pretty good.

When she asked the wall-eyed clerk where to find the “talismans of faith,” she sort of got told off. “I don’t think talisman is the right word to use. A talisman is supposed to bring you, like, luck and power. Talismans do stuff. A cross represents something, but it doesn’t do anything. You should read—”

Afterwards, she went down a new path in the slanting sunlight, trying to cut home through the ravine. She had her library Bible in her bag, thunking heavy against her thigh.

As she walked, she dangled the silver in front of her face like a hypnotist, poked at the cross with her fingertip. Her fingertip was bigger. The thing was actually from the baby jewelry section. It wasn’t likely Joe would notice more than a glint at her throat. She trickled the chain back into the bag, and uncrumpled the receipt.

FAMILY CHRISTIAN BOOKSHOP

Silver cross/chain — $4.95.

She would leave that somewhere prominent, maybe.

Four-ninety-five could’ve bought what she’d meant to buy, a rhinestone WWJD, but with the one eye watching her, the too-familiar guitar, those kids with their clean soft faces, Colleen couldn’t think.

The receipt wasn’t going to be much good soon, she was rolling it ragged, fretting the edges. Soon it would look like garbage and Friday 6am, when Joe ran around throwing things into grocery sacks, it would be gone. She carefully tucked the receipt back into her pocket.

Colleen wasn’t sure where she was—the path seemed to have zagged away from the underpass, and she couldn’t hear traffic anymore. She still didn’t know this stupid town very well. She tipped her head down against the laser sun, now almost parallel with her face. The clerk’s weird gaze had felt like a laser, too, an x-ray of her brain to see she wasn’t one of them, a different sort entirely, a liar, not very nice.

Marcy had always said her father was a nice person, just not ready to be a dad when Colleen was born. And when he’d finally turned up, when she was four and she’d visited him those summers he wasn’t tree-planting, she didn’t think he’d gotten any readier, though he was nice. He was always trying to give her stuff she didn’t want or like: a hat made of straw, candles stuck in winebottles, once a puppy that got sick. Nice didn’t mean anything. Nice was just how you looked at it. If red was blue, it wouldn’t make a difference, really, in what you saw. Seeing your father as God on a cottonball cloud or a guy in Toronto who never called you—just a perspective thing. You didn’t get to have dinner with either of them.

Except now she did, when they both were home. She was hungry, and the sun was giving her a headache. It was possible that someone—a teacher, not Joe—had said not to go to the ravine, or maybe just not alone. She wanted spaghetti, the best of Joe’s suppers.

Different ways of looking—he tried so hard to be nice to Colleen, but he’d ditched her mom when she was pregnant. Not so nice, not so…Christian. He said, “I care about what you care about, Collie.”

Colleen shut her eyes. “I’ve been born for a long time. You only now care.” She was talking to no one. By the pink slant of the sun, she knew it was nearly night.

Marcy had been right. Joe wasn’t ready for anything, not even trash day. He’d met Colleen at the bus station the first day with a milkshake, tried to hug her and got milkshake all down her back. Her father was a very nice person, but that didn’t mean much. It was just a way of seeing the world.

She heard the shush of the highway at last.

Joe

“Collie, hey, leave your shoes on. I dropped a glass. I—”

“Colleen.” She stood on her right foot, her left foot braced against the wall, the laces on the green suede sneaker half undone.

“Colleen, please leave your shoes on.” Joe was crouching by the piano, a wet paper towel shredding in his fingers. He had liked that glass. “And why’dja miss dinner?”

“What do you have against my name?”

Joe sighed, put the grey wet lump on the parquet. “The N just slips away when I’m talking fast. You missed ratatouille.” He swabbed at the floor, wet mixing with the shards. This didn’t work too well, but he couldn’t find the dustpan.

Colleen thwacked her unlaced shoe onto the floor. “You don’t like my name.”

“I like your name. It’s yours, it’s you.” He pressed drown on the paper towels, wringing a puddle onto the parquet. “Listen, I’m playing tonight, I’ve got to get going.”

“It’s because my mother gave it to me.”

Joe pitched onto his knees. He had meant to reach for the glass glints near the wall, but she startled him and he toppled to fast, hard. “Why would you say that?”

“Because you didn’t like her either.” Colleen stepped on the heel of her untied shoe to get it off; then the other with her bare toes. She didn’t have socks on. “Right?”

“Colleen, where are you getting this?” Joe looked at the sharp spots of light, at Colleen’s naked feet, at her pinched mouth. “I never said a word against your mother.”

“Yeah, you’ve never said a word.”

His knees popped as he rocked back on his heels. “What do you want me to say?”

Her eyes glinted like glass. “Drew says to honour our mother and father—”

“Drew?” Joe wasn’t really listening, fretting the paper to mush, pricking his fingers. He tried to remember the exact definition in 1001 Beautiful Babies at Chapters.

“Drew says to honour is to know. She gave me my name.”

“I’ll honour it, I’ll remember.” He wanted to say that he would honour Marcy’s memory, too, but that would sound too much like a lie. His memory of Marcy was thin as a summer dress, Baby Duck wine, vending machine condoms. “Who is Drew?”

Colleen tossed her hair down her left shoulder, smiling with only the left corner of her mouth. “Don’t worry, he’s someone nice.” She started towards her bedroom.

“Just, I want you to…be careful.” Once she had crossed the floor unflinching, slammed her door, he relaxed, until he saw the smudged blood on the wood.

They were the same blood type. He had a whole box of words and letters to clarify who he was dealing with. Late at night, when he didn’t know what the fuck to do, he went page by page: birthweight, grades in kindergarten, eye test, bloodtype. No baptismal certificate, he was nearly positive. But it didn’t matter, he couldn’t imagine her from the documentation, could barely imagine her when she was in front of him. Maybe imagination was the problem.

He hadn’t been able to imagine why independent Marcy was trailing him along the library shelves, the autoshop hallway, the soccer field. He hadn’t noticed her puffy face, her refusal of a smoke. She was a party girlfriend and he wanted them to be party broken up. So he told her his band, no name yet, just three guys and a drum kit, was going to Montreal in his uncle’s old van. They had a gig, sort of.

She’d nodded, sniffled, said, Call me when you get back. We need to talk. But it had been so much easier to forget about flunking trig tests, fighting with his dad, returning the van, calling Marcy. So he didn’t go back, not for a long time. Even when she got his number, even when he sent her money, even when he was visiting and sitting with Marcy and four-year-old Colleen in the sweltering ball-room at McDonald’s, they’d never really talked. He’d always been sorry, and he’d never imagined. He didn’t think that made him any less of a douchebag, really.

Colleen

Little known fact: Colleen hated falling asleep when her father wasn’t home. Of course he didn’t tuck her in, or necessarily even notice that she was going to bed to say goodnight, but she liked him there at night. His breath, rustling pages, voice.

Colleen listened to her father. In one sense, he knew: she obeyed, mainly. The other sense of listen—that she heard his voice—she was happy to keep to herself.

Good nights, she lay awake after homework and teethbrushing and laying out school clothes, and listened to Joe was rehearsing in the living room. Through thin walls, his voice was light but not soft, smooth as a muddy path. He took hours to perfect a song, a verse, a bar.

When she was only visiting, when she didn’t have time to get used to things, his tenor would get into her head and vibrate there. Now she didn’t mind. Through the plywood and drywall, she couldn’t make out the words, but the sound was edgier than anything he ever said, and stuck in her head in a way their conversations never did. Sometimes, she heard something wistful, a dreamy minor key. Those times, she could treat his voice as a lullaby, or at least it lulled her, and she fell asleep more or less peaceful, more than she might have been otherwise.

The nights he wasn’t home, falling asleep took hours.

Joe

People used the words holy fool if you were 32 and still messing around with your guitar. If you wore stretched-out t-shirts with band names on them and played for free at parties while the only perk at your real job was a headset phone. If you couldn’t afford cable or brand-name cheese, but you thought you were a musician. Joe accepted that, mainly. When he was on break from querying strangers about laxatives, and someone said, “How’s the music?” he said, “Ah, you know how it is,” which meant anything, so was safe. He’d looked up holy fool on Wikipedia and knew it didn’t seem to mean what everyone seemed to think, sort of heroic, really. Probably Colleen knew what a holy fool was, or at least would’ve understood the Wikipedia page. She knew a lot, his daughter.

The bands he was in always broke up, or something less something less violent than breaking, maybe fell apart. But there was always a friend’s band that needed a second guitar, a wedding, a fundraiser, something in a bar with no cover—always a stage somewhere where he was welcome. Not his melodies, not his count-ins, but all right. If the lights were bright enough, he couldn’t see the audience. He could pretend to be just fooling around in the living room, the same chords again and again, until they were perfect. If that was all, it was enough.

But there was more, after: beer and hugs and kisses. Of course there were reasons to go home: the 8-to-4 shift tomorrow, the shoes he’d spilled soup on, the cheap silver cross that he had found tangled in the shower drain, and what could he say to her? He kept listening to the chords in his head, kept drinking and feeling good and liked and talented. He didn’t go home until drunk verged on hungover, and when he crash-landed on the couch, he left his feet on the floor.

The clatter of pans woke him, too early, in time for work. Colleen was at the stove when he swung through the kitchen door. She kept her back to him, pretending she hadn’t heard the creak. His head felt inflated and rubbery, aching as if slammed against the floor. Finally, to her flagpole spine, he said, “There’s this movie.”

She turned, what he’d wanted, but then she winced. Joe could imagine his face ridged with pillow creases, too-long red hair standing sideways, bruisy bags under his eyes. The room spun. He wanted to sit, but felt the advantage of height.

“I was thinking you’d like it.”

She shook her head fast and her braid almost flipped into the eggs. She looked tired, too. He knew it was exhausting to sleep unhappy. “I have things to study, I haven’t time for entertainment.” She reached to spatula the eggs onto plates.

He collapsed heavily into a kitchen chair, skidding it loud across the floor. He’d heard about the movie at work, or the bar, or something. He mainly remembered. “It’s about—um, it’s, like, the life of this saint, this woman in…like, the 1500s. I think.”

“So, it’s a choice between thoughtful Bible study with my cell, and two hours of Hollywood faux-spirituality?” She thrust a plate at his chest, two lonely eyes of eggs.

He set down the plate of black-edged whites. “But you can have both, can’t you?”

“Drew says…”

He waited out the pause, staring at the gritty floor: bits of onion peel, a grey spider web, a flake of stale cereal.

“Drew says to avoid distractions.”

“Drew is— This is…” He abandoned that comment, slouched lower and cut a yolk to watch it bleed yellow across white and black.  “I don’t know who Drew is.”

“I’m learning from him about the…powers in my life.” She was scraping up burnt shards of egg.

Joe had to be at work in 48 minutes. He couldn’t do more than eat his breakfast and hold his head steady. He wondered if she felt happy about what she said. She didn’t look happy. She picked up her plate, char and little else. Moving towards the hall, she paused and rested her oily fingers on the bone of his narrow shoulder. The touch was so sharp and fast that it was almost a pinch, but it seemed to zero in on the tense spot there, and her gaze was softer than her grip.

All she said was, “I will honour your request as a dutiful daughter. I will check the listings for an early show.”  She took her plate to her room. It was something.

Colleen

By the time they hit the Mariah-Carey Muzak at the movie theatre, it had occurred to Colleen that she was being stupid, stupid in a very tiring way. The cuts on her feet hurt and before she lost it, the fake silver off the little cross had itched a crucifix rash into her throat. Joe was confused by the parking meter for five minutes before they could go inside. She was too tired to think of another plan.

They walked across the lobby, and Colleen thought: Do I do it now? Toss myself to the carpet before the snack-girl smiles at him. What will he think? The thing about tongues is how does anyone know it’s tongues? What if he thought I was having a seizure? Well, so, fine: hospitalized for glory, holy in a paper dress.

How long can I writhe on the floor? How long could God speak through a girl? I don’t know if I can lie any more. Lies are sins, too. My mother would hate this. How did I fuck this up? Why’s he buying popcorn? We’ll never eat it. If I don’t fall now he’ll get close enough to see the lie in my face. What do tongues say? Did Marcy ever believe in God? She didn’t teach me enough words. What words did she love? Did she love my father, let him leave her? Why didn’t she say something?

I wish I had a script. The words of God should be perfect. I don’t want to shriek and thrash. I want to say beautiful things, just this once.

Her father walked fast, spilling popcorn, looking worried. Colleen spun away as he approached. “I’m going to the bathroom.”

The bathroom was cold and smelled of cinnamon disinfectant. Colleen stood in the third stall. Her feet hurt and her throat hurt and she was so tired. This would be the last scene of this performance, and even now she needed a script. Colleen felt very young. Just a few years older, Marcy had had the world in her belly.

I want to say, I want to say…

Colleen pressed her forehead against the metal door. She could hear the perfect words in her mind, like the classroom words she was supposed to look up but never did—they were perfect as they were: lambent, id, fulcrum, mercury, palatial. Colleen fumbled in her purse for a pencil, couldn’t find any paper. She was imagining how she wanted to sound. Smooth, elegant—like a melody. She did not want to mutter, twisting facedown on the popcorn-scented carpet. She raised the pencil to the wall and began to write all the good words she knew, or sort of knew—aerial, liar, Perspex, munitions, Galapagos, countess, illustrious, wire. Stopped, thought for a moment, wrote more over the toilet paper—taint, Toledo, dwarf, darn, coffee—the feminine product disposal—clavicles, lackadaisical, tree, direction—the slide lock—arboretum. She wrote, milk, calico, fury, endive, halo, zip, emery, lithe. Crouching, around the hem of the door she wrote, tinsel, bruise, munificent, remunerate, suicide, Maybelleine, fortunate, dial. She wrote until her brain spun, the pencil smudged, and shoes hammered heavy across the tile floor. She saw them stop under her wall of words, but she kept writing—cascade, gelato, mirth, plebiscite, ennui, night—until a thick, tired voice said, “You wanna come on out of there, ok? I wanna have a word with you about what it means to deface property, ok? Now.”

Crouching surrounded by her script, Colleen surrendered to whatever surveillance cameras or omniscient God told security when kids wrote on the walls. She surrendered that scripting tongues wouldn’t work. She stopped writing.

Without standing, without putting away her pencil, she reached up to slide the bolt, tipped sideways to open the door. Colleen looked up at a thick young woman in a blue security uniform, sky-blue blouse half untucked from navy slacks. She had nothing but a walkie-talkie on her belt.

When the woman didn’t lunge for her, Colleen asked, “How did you know?”

The guard shrugged, tugging more shirt from her waistband. “Sometimes I just get a bolt, you know? A bolt from God.”

“These are His words.” Colleen jerked a thumb at the wall. The words went all the way up, from hinge to bolt. Calliope, sugar, tandem, gloss, mistral, concubine, zeal. Colleen didn’t know how long she’d been writing.

“God writes on the bathroom walls? Huh. Could you stand up, please? Grafitti’s a call-the-parents one.” Colleen didn’t want to stand. She put her cheek down on her knee. She could feel the pricks on her soles, painful, for such shallow cuts.

The guard was not small, so it surprised Colleen when she crouched to meet her gaze. Her eyes were very light brown, like beer or shadows on sand. Her light eyes traveled over the walls, over the beautiful words. “Congruent,” she said softly. “Mica, Marlboro, toreador. Cardiac.” On cardiac, she leaned closer, looked harder. Then she licked a finger, and smudged it through the r, the d, up into the x of excelsior.

“Pencil?”

Colleen shrugged. She was getting a cramp in her left thigh.

“Well. Well.” She stared at the dirty wet floor. “Still vandalism. But…” she gazed up “…but who hath heard such a thing? Who hath seen such things? … We gotta go call your mom and dad.”

Colleen propped her chin up on her right knee, watched a pair of red boots stride by, then pink sneakers, plain black loafers. “My mom’s dead,” she said, “but my dad’s out by the popcorn stand.”

Joe

Nobody loves a lone man staring at a ladies room door. Joe stood well back, but he was too scared to move out of view. The snackbar clock said 24 minutes. Could she have collapsed? Escaped through a window? Ascended radiant and immaterial into heaven? Other parents twitched their daughters closer, seeing him staring ravenous at the little lady symbol, clutching an untouched jumbo popcorn.

Joe knew God in the grace of his daughter striding across a crowded lobby. A miracle of a daughter, a sin by some standards, but a win somehow, anyway. A provisional victory: a woman in blue followed her.

When Colleen stood in front of him he had nothing to say. All questions, accusations, pleas dissolved before her sword-straight body. Her gaze was barely on him. She was looking at the point you punch for, that spot on the back of the skull.

“Who is Drew?” he asked finally.

“Drew is my study advisor.” She was motionless. So was the woman behind her.

“I… Collie— You and…Drew study the Bible?”

“The world. The world is confusing and complex, and Drew—”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Yes, the world is complex and confusing. I was just agreeing with you.”

‘Oh. Ok.” She shifted her weight, then again. “Wait. No. It is only confusing if we let extraneous matters distract us.”

The guard cleared her throat. When they turned, she said slowly, “They that forsake the law praise the wicked: but such as keep the law contend with them. So I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me. I’ve got to write this up.”

She started towards the guest services desk without checking to see if they followed. Joe did. After a few paces, he looked back, eyebrows raised. Colleen caught up, light on her sore feet, and they went on together to the long blue desk.

“What did you do?”

“I wrote on the bathroom wall.”

“What did you write?”

She slumped, almost leaning into his shoulder. Almost. “The words of God.”

“Yeah, ok.” Joe felt the burn of fear returning to his belly. He wished he had anything Colleen needed: strength, insight, advice, wit, anything but the stupid crinkling sack of popcorn still bundled in his arms like an infant. He couldn’t even think of an appropriate question to keep her talking instead of staring at Ticketholder Privileges. The guard rummaged for a form. He whispered, “What words does God use?”

Colleen finally met his eyes, green to green. “The best words.”

Joe inclined his head.

“I—I didn’t know what words God would use. I don’t know God. I just tried to guess, words that, words that sound good.”

There was a crash of thunder through the theatre wall and Joe realized that the movie had started.  It didn’t matter; the posters in the lobby all looked holy-war bloody, and here, now, while the guard peered at her papers, there was a moment’s peace.

Joe thought about God and had no answers, and his daughter was praying with a man who wasn’t real to a God he doubted she believed in. Colleen didn’t seem to believe in anything at all. Stop. He didn’t know what she believed. Stop. He had never asked her. She was sad and Joe wanted her to have what made her happy, even if it was false gods or complicated mindfucks or imaginary friends. Stop. He had to ask her to know what she wanted. She probably wouldn’t say, but that would be an admission, too.

He asked her, “Did you write your name?”

[T]he short story is a prose piece that is not a mere concatenation of events, as in a news account or an anecdote, but an intensification of meaning by way of events. Its “plot” may be wholly interior, seemingly static, a matter of the progression of a character’s thought. Its resolution need not be a formally articulated statement … but it signals a tangible change of some sort; a distinct shift of consciousness; a deepening of insight.

– Joyce Carol Oates

The modern short story is in retreat. The form that once flourished in monthly general-interest magazines such as The Atlantic and Saturday Evening Post now finds itself relegated to limited-circulation literary journals, usually affiliated with a particular university, and with a readership that is confined largely to academics and other writers. With notable exceptions (Alice Munro being the most obvious one in this country, with Vincent Lam the new kid on the bestseller block), short story collections can be expected to sell slightly better than poetry to the mass audience of book buyers.

In one respect this is understandable. As a form, the short story more closely resembles poetry than it does its more distant cousin, the novel. Like poetry, stories rely on a concentration of language to achieve their effects. Whereas the novel is free to be expansive, to meander and digress, stories depend upon a ruthless paring down, a stripping away of everything that is inessential or extraneous. A reader might allow her attention to wander from a novel and still expect to pick up the thread of the narrative over the long haul; in a well-constructed story every word, every pause and ellipsis is significant. Stories demand strict and constant attention and an active engagement on the part of the reader.

Simply, stories require work.

This might serve as an explanation for a phenomenon that is in at least one respect counterintuitive. In our attention-deficit age, the principle defining characteristic of the short story – that it is short – would appear to be an asset. But the brevity of short stories comes with a trade-off: namely, the added interpretive requirement necessitated by the tautness of the prose. A story by Raymond Carver or Ernest Hemingway can potentially be consumed in a matter of minutes; it is by no means as clear that these stories can be understood anywhere near that quickly, or that neatly. This is what Mavis Gallant meant when, in the preface to her Collected Stories, she wrote: “Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.” Gallant rightly recognized the need for stories to percolate, to work themselves out in a reader’s mind.

Two recent collections of Canadian short fiction – J.M. Villaverde’s Dance of the Suitors, released in 2006, and Pasha Malla’s newly released book, The Withdrawal Method – illustrate the precept that Gallant was elucidating. Both writers employ a variety of stylistic devices, points of view, and narrative voices in their stories, and while Malla displays a broader range in both subject and approach, each writer’s work exemplifies the intensification of meaning and deepening of insight that Oates felt was central to the short-story form.

Of the two, Villaverde’s collection appears at first glance more suited to the accepted mode of fiction in Canada, with its historical setting and soft-focus presentation. However, this has more to do with the unfortunate choice of cover art – the kind of sepia-toned portrait of two lovers embracing that would perforce adorn the work of Jane Urquhart or Michael Ondaatje – than with anything between the covers. The collection boasts one historical piece – “Voglio vivere una favola,” which deals imaginatively with some of Henry James’s early travels through Europe – but the other six stories feature contemporary settings and a relatively frank approach to their subject matter.

Villaverde’s stories all deal in one way or another with the vicissitudes of love and the frailty of the human heart. A typical Villaverde protagonist is just on the cusp of 40 (again, with the exception of the fictional James, who is “[t]wo months shy of his twenty-sixth birthday”), and is trying to achieve some measure of human connection in a world that seems stubbornly resistant to such efforts.

The characters in these stories do not understand their own hearts in the manner that the reader is allowed to; this offers Villaverde the opportunity to inject a bitter ironic distance into the work. In the title story, brother and sister twins maintain an unacknowledged erotic attachment to one another, which manifests itself in sublimated jealousy when each member of the pair is the object of others’ attention at a party. The result is a story of sublime creepiness, which feels all the more creepy for the normalcy with which it is described.

The story is narrated in the first person by the male twin, who engages in the postmodern conceit of highlighting the written nature of the story: he dismisses talk about their parents by saying, “this paragraph was all it was getting.” But this awareness of writerly technique is at odds with the author’s occasional lapse into clichéd language, as when the narrator describes his sister as “the apple of our parents’ eye,” or when he says that he “paused to darken her door.” Caught in the grip of a migraine, the fictional Henry James in the later story lies “as still as death” as though “to demonstrate that he isn’t above making the obvious comparison,” but this recognition of the pallid nature of shopworn language is not sufficient to excuse its careless deployment elsewhere.

Similarly, arbitrary or jarring shifts in the psychic distance of a given narrative – in some cases within a single paragraph –occasionally impede the momentum of these stories. This is particularly true in “Suits of Woe,” about a struggling writer who is hired on as a script doctor for an egotistical director’s new movie. The story is told for the most part in a third-person-limited perspective from the point of view of Dyer, the screenwriter. But this narrative perspective frequently bounces around – now to the screenwriter’s wife, now to the director, now to a female production assistant – evincing a lack of authorial control over his material.

Such cavils may appear churlish given the overall strength of the collection’s thematic cohesion and patterns of metaphor. Silence and absence are recurring motifs throughout the book, as is appropriate for stories that deal with the elusiveness of human love. Time and again characters are described as being absent or as having pieces missing. In “All of a Piece” – one of the most technically adept stories in the collection – the title is at once an explanation of the story’s fragmented structure and an ironic commentary on the lives of its characters. The opening section is written as a letter from an anonymous man to a woman named Gabi. The unnamed correspondent spies a woman in a café and imagines her name to be Caroline. The woman, who turns out not to be named Caroline (in yet another level of absence, her actual name is withheld), wants to be a writer because she views narrative “as a gift,” and a puzzle, “pieces of which she suspected were missing.” In the course of the story she gets picked up by a man in a bar who takes her home and has perfunctory sex with her, following which she experiences “a phantom orgasm.” This phantom orgasm is a mirror of the physical pain that the male letter-writer suffers, a pain for which his doctor can find no cause.

The pattern of absence that runs through these stories extends to their resolutions, which frequently open outwards beyond the point at which the story stops, or else are vested with the reader. This may indeed signal another reason for the short story’s declining fortunes in recent years: audiences weaned on the quick-fix of televised self-help shows or sitcoms in which difficult or intransigent problems are neatly solved within a prescribed span of 22 minutes may find the disinclination to provide compact or tidy resolutions that is one of the hallmarks of the modern short story to be troublesome or discomfiting.

According to Oates, one of the properties of a short story is that “it achieves closure – meaning that, when it ends, the attentive reader understands why.” Villaverde’s stories offer closure, but little solace: his characters rarely find what they are looking for, nor do they experience the kind of epiphanic moments that would allow for them to recognize their own fractured conditions. Villaverde’s characters are psychically wounded, and the human connections that they attempt to make as a balm to these wounds often serve only to reinforce their general loneliness and sadness.

Pasha Malla also writes about wounded characters: men and women wounded in their spirits and, often, in their bodies. Cancer is a recurring motif in The Withdrawal Method, making its first appearance in the opening story, “The Slough,” which begins with a woman telling her boyfriend that for the seven years they’ve been together she has been using a topical cream that will allow her to shed her skin like a snake. This admittedly rather bizarre set-up becomes a metaphor for the cancer that ravages one of the story’s characters.

“The Slough” is a flawed story – its emotional resonance is ultimately diluted by a structural bait-and-switch that resembles Philip Roth’s tactic in My Life as a Man and The Counterlife. But, by choosing to open his collection with this story, Malla is signalling the reader to be on the alert: these stories are not straightforward linear narratives, or not always. Malla plays with the form of the short story in a way that Villaverde does not. Malla’s stories variously eschew traditional notions of character development (“The Film We Made about Dads”); track their events over the course of an entire century (“The Love-Life of the Automaton Turk”); or engage in postmodern games by imagining incidents from the lives of historical figures (“When Jacques Cousteau Gave Pablo Picasso a Piece of Black Coral,” which bears a certain affinity with Villaverde’s fictionalized tale of Henry James, although Malla’s story more closely resembles an existential vignette).

Not all of Malla’s technical experiments pay off to the same degree. “Pushing Oceans In and Pulling Oceans Out,” one of the strongest stories in the collection, is told in the voice of a nine-year-old girl who appears to suffer from a kind of autism. She goes to bed at exactly 9:00 p.m. and will not get out of bed until exactly 8:00 a.m. When counting sheep does not work to put her to sleep, she calculates how many seconds there are in a week and a year. Her mother has died from breast cancer and she lives with her father (whom she always refers to as “my dad Greg”) and her younger brother, Brian. The story is virtuosic: it begins with an image of April and springtime, the world “green and muddy and fresh and dripping wet with rain,” and ends with a tableau of father and daughter in the mud at dawn. The voice is flawless and the story’s technique complements its subject matter nicely.

By contrast, the structure of “Dizzy When You Look Down In” feels heavy-handed and overly mechanical. The story of a basketball prodigy’s brother who meets an old high school buddy in the hospital while waiting for his brother to come out of surgery, it is structured as a series of contrasting scenes that take place in the present at the hospital and in the past during the two brothers’ days in high school. This counterpointing of past and present detracts from the immediacy of the hospital scenes and feels too neat, too calculated to be completely effective.

Two of the best stories in the collection – “Long Short Short Long,” about a young boy who exacts revenge on his classmates for teasing him and their music teacher, and “Being Like Bulls,” about a young man in Niagara Falls who has inherited his dead parents’ souvenir store – dispense with structural pyrotechnics and proceed in a relatively traditional manner, unfolding chronologically and involving recognizable characters.

However, although the characters may be immediately recognizable – the bullied kid in school, the listless young man in a small town yearning to get out – what happens to them isn’t. One of Malla’s great strengths is his ability to carry his reader along through a story, quietly building tension through an accumulation of almost picayune incidents, until finally releasing the tension in a fury at the end. The finales of these two stories are simultaneously surprising and inevitable, which is a combination that many writers of much more advanced years than Malla strive for and yet fail to achieve.

Malla is an ambitious writer, and if some of his technical experiments fall short of the mark, it’s nonetheless impossible to fault him for the attempt. Like Villaverde, he offers little solace, but at their best, his stories provide a rewarding emotional experience together with a technically adept presentation.

Both of these collections – at their best – testify to the protean nature of the short story form and exemplify the kind of heightened emotional experience that can be wrought from a carefully considered concatenation of language. Oates’s “intensification of meaning” is on full display here and, although most of these stories are short on comfort and solicitude, they are long on emotional resonance and an artistically rendered depiction of honest human experience.

However, for this very reason, they may prove unpalatable to the mass audience that made Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures such a runaway bestseller. Whatever their technical flaws – and there are many – Lam’s stories fall within a comfortably recognizable template: they unfold in a traditional, chronological manner, and they don’t take readers (at least those with a passing familiarity with ER or House) anywhere they haven’t already gone before. Lam reassures readers, if not through the content of his stories, then through their execution.

Villaverde and Malla, on the other hand, appear conscious of Kafka’s dictum that a book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea inside us. These writers are not concerned with easy answers or pat resolutions, often preferring to leave their readers with a feeling of creeping unease or sadness. That this is done, in many cases, with a fidelity to the exigencies of technique and language only serves to make the best of these stories even stronger. Ironically, this is also what may prevent them from discovering the mass audience that they deserve.

This would be a shame. Canada – the country that produced Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant and Leon Rooke and Bill Gaston – has always excelled at the short story. Along with comedy, it may be one of our most successful cultural exports. It is the area in which our writers seem to feel most free to express themselves imaginatively, and to engage in interesting experiments in form, technique, and subject matter. Anyone who doubts this need only take a look at Austin Clarke’s masterpiece “When He was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks,” or Rooke’s “A Bolt of White Cloth,” or Barbara Gowdy’s “We So Seldom Look on Love,” to name just a few. That this tradition seems to be atrophying is distressing, that interesting new writers like Villaverde and Malla must struggle mightily to find an audience is one of the cultural watermarks that we should do everything in our power to change, before people stop reading short stories altogether.

Penguin and Viking Penguin entrusted comparable huge anthologies of short American fiction and short British fiction to the highly respected novelist and short story writer Richard Ford and to Malcolm Bradbury whose glittering career opened in 1959 with Eating People Is Wrong and continued through subsequent novels and with the founding of the celebrated Creative Writing workshop at the University of East Anglia which produced such writers as Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Had Penguin Group entrusted The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction to a popular practitioner such as, say, Maeve Binchy, there would have been a storm of protest and derision in the literary world. In Colm Toíbín they chose soberly and well.

Penguin Canada, with sad inevitability, chose to do a Binchy. They chose the path of touting “celebrity” and put this significant book into the popular hands of Jane Urquhart, a writer of whom Books in Canada said, kindly, “…known for her plushly lyrical novels.”

I use the world “significant” simply because the book is published by Penguin. Because of the history and widespread influence of the Penguin imprint all books bearing the Penguin colophon have undeniable cachet. The book will have national and international reach. It will represent to the world – simply because it is a Penguin book – Canadian achievement in story writing. This is a matter of concern and regret because the book flatly does not represent the best in Canadian short fiction. It seems to turn its back on language at high voltage. Litter glitter, little glam. A meat-and-potatoes version of our achievement.

In her Introduction, Urquhart confesses to uncertainty about being the person best suited to the task of selection simply because “…when it came to the younger and newer writers in Canada, it was most often their novels I turned to…”

Quite.

She trills on: “Perhaps the greatest gift given to me in my role as an anthologist was my discovery of these voices. To walk into the pre-novel fictional worlds of Dennis Bock, or Joseph Boyden, or Madelaine Thien is to find them at the beginning of their careers singing in a pure voice simply because they feel there is a need for music, a need for song.”

I would be hard put to it to paraphrase this uplifting drivel but it is not hard to hear behind it the old cliché about stories being the preparatory work before the summons to the serious, adult labour of novel writing.

Later in the Introduction she writes: “Originally, in an attempt to open up and make more interesting the definition of the short story, I wanted to include memoirs in this collection. In the end, however, I realized that unless I was able to put together a volume of encyclopedic length, this was not going to be achievable. Besides, as I continued to read I came to understand that the Canadian short story is more than sufficiently interesting all on its own…”

What appalling arrogance in Urquhart (and ignorance) that she desired to “open up” and “make more interesting the definition of the short story.” What naiveté, what groping dimness about short story history and development. How revealing that she would combine stories with memoirs – not an aesthetic idea in her head! Not a clue that short stories are the pinnacle of artistic form.

Here, in Canada, Jane Urquhart extols sweet singers “at the beginning of their careers” and slowly comes to realize – if, indeed, she really does – that “the Canadian short story is more than sufficiently interesting all on its own.” (italics added.)

In England, Malcolm Bradbury writing an introduction to The Penguin Book of Modern British Stories, displays more knowledge and understanding of the genre, displays more intellectual rigour.

“The short story has become one of the major forms of modern literary expression – in some ways the most modern of them all… The modern short story has therefore been distinguished by its break away from anecdote, tale-telling and simple narrative, and for its linguistic and stylistic concentration, its imagistic methods, its symbolic potential. In it some of our greatest modern writers, from Hemingway to Mann to Beckett, have found their finest exactitude and most finished stylistic practice.”

Perhaps Jane Urquhart hadn’t known this?

In his Introduction to The Granta Book of the American Short Story published by Viking Penguin, Richard Ford wrote:

“‘Some people… run to conceits or wisdom…,’ Barthelme’s oracular Miss R. states in ‘The Indian Uprising’, ‘but I hold to the hard, brown nutlike word. I might point out that there is enough aesthetic excitement here to satisfy anyone but a damned fool.’

“And I might point out that there’s giddy pleasure, illumination and solace too, not only in the word but in its dynamic relations to the ones all around it. As we read, we can sense the precarious nature of any literary construction, its barely containable excitation of words which mimics our own suffusion in experience, and whose eventual style, like a ballerina’s line, is an expression of the manner by which chaos is conditionally and beautifully held at bay.”

But I suspect, given the dry crackers of many of Urquhart’s selections, that “the hard, brown, nutlike word” is not where her fancy lingers.

The anthology is structured into five groups of stories, “…works brought together by thematic or, perhaps more accurately, atmospheric connections.” The stories in Group One are concerned with “the act of immigration.” Group Two contains stories where “the awareness of shared rather than told experience is vibrantly alive.” Group Three “includes stories in which family, tribal, or social anecdotes and situations… play a role.” The stories in Group Four belong in the “realm of fantasy and illusion.” Group Five features “authors looking back towards our past.”

Urquhart clings to her confusion of “story” and “memoir” by prefacing each Group with an extract from a memoir.

“I would need something, I realized, to establish an atmosphere or tone for each of the five sections that were beginning to take shape, and I knew from my reading that there were five excerpts from memoirs that would beautifully communicate the atmosphere of the stories that might follow them…”

The “memoirs” are by Alice Munro, Michael Winter, Michael Ondaatje, Wayson Choy, and Charles Ritchie.

Two of the “memoirs” aren’t.

“The View from Castle Rock,” set in 1818, if a memoir, would make Alice Munro about two hundred years old. Urquhart describes the story as “semi-fictional family memoir”; have those words any meaning?

Alice Munro herself was perfectly clear about The View from Castle Rock. In her Foreword she wrote:

“During these years I was also writing a special set of stories. These stories were not included in the books of fiction I put together, at regular intervals. Why not? I felt they didn’t belong. They were not memoirs but they were closer to my own life than the other stories I had written, even in the first person. In other first-person stories I had drawn on personal material, but then I did anything I wanted to with this material. Because the chief thing I was doing was making a story. In the stories I hadn’t collected I was not doing exactly that. I was doing something closer to what a memoir does – exploring a life, my own life, but not in an austere or rigorously. I put myself in the center and wrote about that self, as searchingly as I could. But the figures around this self took on their own life and color and did things they had not done in reality. They joined the Salvation Army, they revealed that they had once lived in Chicago. One of them got himself electrocuted and another fired off a gun in a barn full of horses. In fact, some of these characters have moved so far from their beginnings that I cannot remember who they were to start with.

“These are stories.”

Michael Winters’ “semi-fictional, diary-like observations of the daily life of a writer living in St. John’s (an extract from This All Happened) is, in fact, a chapter from a novel which was nominated for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

How anyone could mistake Winters’ burnished fiction for “memoir” is disturbing.

Ondaatje’s two autobiographical fragments, while highly polished and intricate and teased, are autobiography. Urquhart refers to them as “fictional autobiography.”

The two “stories” by Ethel Wilson that follow the Ondaatje pieces are not stories; both are extracts from The Innocent Traveller, a novel about Topaz Edgeworth.

Of the Michael Winter section from This All Happened she wrote: “The sharpness of observation in this piece seemed to me to be echoed not only by the realism of each of the stories that would follow it but also the sense I got from their skilful rendering that this really had happened, that in some way or another these stories are emotionally and physically true… The awareness of shared rather than told experience is vibrantly alive in this section’s stories…”

I’m not sure what all this means. Urquhart seems profoundly confused about fiction and non-fiction. I draw back from the naiveté of “shared rather than told”; it is difficult to pierce the mental fog. I’d always rather thought of “skilful rendering” leading to a conviction of verisimilitude as “art.”

The thematic groupings absolve her from any chronological or historical concerns. She says, correctly, “as the last couple of decades in Canada have witnessed the publication of a staggering amount of fine literary work, stories from these decades have taken precedence in terms of numbers over those from the past.”

Good.

But I wish she had taken the a-historic opportunity to have tossed out the deadwood. I would have got rid of M.G. Vassanji, W.D. Valgardson, Vincent Lam, Adrienne Clarkson, Timothy Findley, Stephen Leacock, Charles G.D. Roberts, Sinclair Ross, Morley Callaghan, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Hugh Garner, Ernest Bucklet, and Virgil Burnett.

Who is Virgil Burnett and what has he written? His written work includes Towers at the Edge of a World: Tales of a Medieval Town (1983) and A Comedy of Eros (1984).

What sort of stuff is it?

Awful.

No, I mean subject matter.

Second-hand Gothic Gormenghast fantasy.

“She was a fair woman, very pale, since she never left the palace, never exposed herself to the sun or open air. She had a strong waist, stately hips that sloped to full flanks, and neat breasts that rose from her fine torso like twin domes of blue-veined marble. Her head might have been a model for a cathedral sculptor, and her hair was as remarkable for its mass as for its colour, a blend of amber and topaz. It hung down her back to her thighs, like a voluptuous, silky garden of Babylon.”

Give me, as they say, a break!

Burnett is better known as an artist and illustrator. (Not surprisingly.) He is a Professor Emeritus of Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo and lives in Stratford, Ontario. As does Jane Urquhart with her artist husband Tony Urquhart. Who also taught in Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo.

I had a presentiment I was not going to sympathize much with The Penguin Book of Canadian Stories when I noticed that Urquhart had included Hugh Garner.

“…I decided to begin my collection with stories that were impossible for me to forget, stories that haunted me.” One of these was Hugh Garner’s “One Mile of Ice.”

In Malcolm Bradbury’s introduction to The Penguin Book of Modern British Stories, as quoted earlier, he writes: “The modern short story has… been distinguished by its break away from anecdote, tale-telling, and simple narrative.” “On Mile of Ice” is nothing but simple tale-telling.

Garner wrote one halfway decent story, “The Yellow Sweater,” but by no stretch could he be described as an artist. He was a pleasant enough man when sober.

Well, that’s just your subjective opinion.

True.

Others think differently.

True.

Hugh Garner won the Governal General’s Award for Fiction.

So did Igor Gouzenko.

My central objection to Urquhart’s editing is that she seems to have little idea of comparative weight. To represent Virgil Burnett but to exclude Norman Levine. To represent Adrienne Clarkson but to exclude Clark Blaise. To represent Lucy Maud Montgomery but to exclude Hugh Hood.

As a large generality, I’d say that the difference in aesthetic, and therefore in editing practice, between Jane Urquhart and myself is that she hankers after what the oracular Miss R. in Barthelme’s “The Indian Uprising” calls “conceits of wisdom” and I favour rather the “hard, brown, nutlike word.”

But any aesthetic surely should have included – at a minimum – Mike Barnes, Clark Blaise, Mary Borsky, Libby Creelman, Cynthia Flood, Keath Fraser, Douglas Glover, Terry Griggs, Steven Heighton, Hugh Hood, Mark Jarman, Norman Levine, K.D. Miller, Bharati Mukherjee, Patricia Robertson, Robyn Sarah, Diane Schoemperlen, Ray Smith, Russell Smith and Linda Svendsen.

Are there sour grapes in this?

You bet!

But more importantly a feeling of looming despair. I started these thoughts by saying that had Penguin Group entrusted the Penguin Book of Irish Fiction to Maeve Binchy rather than Colm Toíbín there would have been a storm of protest and derision in the literary world. The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories is something of a travesty of Canadian achievement. It was edited by a popular entertainer largely innocent of the field. The anthology’s omissions include some of the country’s best-known story writers.

“… a storm of protest and derision in the literary world.”

What I despair of is the vast Canadian silence.

and

Room Tone
Gale ZoëGarnett
Quattro Books
84 pages, $16.95

“Size matters.” —Anonymous

The Porcupine’s Quill and Toronto’s fledgling Quattro Books have both recently released books that brazenly proclaim their status as ‘novella,’ a form of fiction that John Metcalf describes in An Aesthetic Underground as “dense and rich as Christmas puddings.” If lasting satisfaction is in the meat, not the fat, then a novella with substance will outweigh the perversely emaciated offerings of a blockbuster behemoth. However, the willingness of readers to eat Mrs. Sprat’s portion illustrates what Patrick Crean of Thomas Allen Publishers observed in a recent interview: “[T]he corporatist ethos [ ] is to essentially ‘farm’ humans in order to make as much money as possible.” This bottom-line attitude—where size is deemed a valid measure and bigger is better reigns the ledger—has further relegated books to the status of mere ‘product,’ or perhaps more accurately, fodder. And if it weren’t for a handful of determined presses, the novella form could well be non-existent in this country, leaving readers with an even more limited literary menu.

Smuggling Donkeys is the fifth novella from prolific writer David Helwig, and readers who have enjoyed Blueberry Cliffs, Close to the Fire, The Stand-In, and Duet will find familiarity in its fate-battered narrator, as well as in Helwig’s admirable skill with the form, his sensibilities, and the engaging ‘theatre’ of his prose.

A question—“Who do you talk to when you’re alone?”—launches the story of Warren Thouless, a retired teacher who once aspired to a life of acting, and who now confronts desolation and uncertainty in the wake of abrupt change. His wife has left him, to seek spiritual enlightenment in India: “It started with yoga…I’d find [Laura] on the floor of our little apartment knotted into the lotus position, breathing. She was always keen on the breathing…She said she’s not coming back, but maybe she’ll get bored with Truth. She gets bored with things.” And Warren goes on to recount the days since her departure. He talks to himself, to the gods, to an invisible audience, once in a while to a friend or a new ally. His son thinks he’s losing it, becoming “eccentric”. The local librarian feels pity as he proffers a “god’s-eye view of Warren’s smallness and irrelevance and at the same time his afflicting recognition of absence, his wife lost in some spiritual community…”

Comforted by the works of Shakespeare, Chekov, and other playwrights, Warren identifies with Hamlet’s need to “break my heart, for I must hold my tongue,” while fully realizing “of course, he doesn’t hold his tongue but talks and talks and talks….” At night, in the nude, he recites Hamlet’s speeches in the empty sanctuary of the deconsecrated church he now inhabits. His life unfolds through inner monologue, which becomes, in part, a series of soliloquies: “Awake in the night, my not uncommon state, and more so lately, one of the tricks of body chemistry, a greed for consciousness, now when the existence of consciousness may any day be threatened”…“I talk because I can’t figure out what to say.” He’s a man grappling with his own ‘to be, or not to be,’ on a quest for truth, purpose and renewal. And he comes to understand how engaging an audience, any audience, “is helpful, [their] listening altering my sense of the words.” Acting and action allow him to work his way out of bewilderment and to release the encumbrances of the past, one revelation at a time.

Warren’s ruminations resonate with the dramatic ‘speakability’ of Helwig’s prose. From the start, it’s difficult not to want to read the pages aloud, in character, in order to impart our own nuances to Warren’s voice. It is as if our own speaking and “listening alter[s] [our] sense of the words.” A prime example is the question “Who do you talk to when you’re alone?” which recurs throughout the book, each time with the potential for a different intonation, thus interpretation. And each time, it becomes clear that, as Warren’s life changes, the tone and significance of the question has changed too. The prospect of discovery and the layers of meaning found in the subtleties are some of this novella’s pleasures, and of Helwig’s writing overall.

Familiar themes are revisited in Smuggling Donkeys: failure, loss, abandonment, suffering, alienation and, paramount, reinvention. Of his early defeat in the world of acting, Warren says, “I suppose my will was broken, but as a compensation, I had Laura, our endless and inventive appetites.” Now, he understands that he’s welcoming direction from Tessa, a young, beautiful and talented former student. “Buy the old church and make me a theatre, she said…Yes, I said, yes. I wanted a cliff to jump off and here was my chance…How to start a new world. Wanted to be used. My own kind of asceticism and renunciation, to abandon myself to the whims of a clever woman.” After all, “[w]ho was ever sure if the truth was to be found by a cool detachment or a foolhardy leap?” and later, he acknowledges, “Why did anyone give themselves to such futility? Because it used them more fully than anything else in the world. Had anyone ever explained to him the meaning of his story, of all stories, that we want to be used, used up, consumed, our sexual disasters not accidents but a search for oblivion by fire? Your business is with action alone, not by any means with the fruit of your action.”

Smuggling Donkeys lacks nothing in largeness of thought or spirit. Helwig’s sense of life’s unpredictability/possibility grows more acute with each new book, and perhaps his novellas demonstrate this best. They are finely tuned explorations of flawed but redeemable human existence, intense and tender, buoyed by gentle humour and hope. And as the storyteller, he is a little like the “comedian from silent film making you laugh and breaking your heart”. As Warren says of his new role in Tessa’s play, “Every single thing he tells the audience leaves out something else that there’s no time to tell them or maybe no way to tell them,” and yet we get it all: “God’s in his heaven, noticing things.” And Helwig, for whom it’s about more than searching, continues to peel back the curtains, so that we too are noticing and truly seeing what’s right under our noses.

Gale Zoë Garnett, author of the novels Visible Amazement and Transient Dancing, is no newcomer to writing or to acting. She has drawn on that latter world for her latest work, Room Tone, which, while exhibiting some similarities to Helwig’s book, proves to be a very different creature.

Where Smuggling Donkeys opens with a question that elicits pause, Room Tone leaps with both feet into the life of Nica Lind, the daughter of a Swedish cinematographer and a French actress: “I fell in love with film because my mother was sleeping with the ugliest man in Paris.” From there, Nica describes how “[m]y father loved making films; my mother loved being desired. They both loved me…” and how she grows up to become a successful actor. But this is where the book doesn’t, and can’t—pardon the yardstick—measure up. Garnett wants to relay Nica’s story from girlhood to about age 38 and is unable to cram it all in without leaving a lot out. And here, less is not more. Our first view of Nica is intriguing, focused and engaging; we want more of it, yet less than thirty pages in, the story jumps forward in time. “As a graduation present, Maman had bought me a contract for a French film in which we would play together”…“The film, Les Deux Médicins Roberge, was a popular success in France, garnering César film awards for both Maman and me”…“the success of Les Deux Médecins Roberge and the twin César awards led to a spate of other French films…I also made films, in solid roles, two of them leads, in Italy and in what used to be the Soviet Union.” This all takes place in the course of the first half of page twenty-eight, and at the top of the next page, we find “My twenties were a good period for me, and for my parents….” One of the distinctions of the novella form is its focus of action, which, according to George Fetherling’s article “Briefly, the Case for the Novella,” “turns on a very tight temporal axis.” The combination of Room Tone’s summaries and unexpected leaps in time makes it difficult to maintain your bearings and easy to feel shortchanged.

It almost seems the original intent may not have been a book, but rather a treatment for a screenplay. Milestones pass in an almost point-form fashion: Nica grows up, survives bullying, finishes school, has lovers, becomes an actor, weathers her parents’ divorce and maintains a loving relationship with each, and earns celebrity in an American television series. A formidable dramatis personae is built from those who walk on and off the stage of Nica’s young life. Much effort goes into naming movies, characters, etc., and providing details of plots and people, most of which don’t seem to lead anywhere. Aside from a lover who marries someone else, and an orgy she reluctantly attends as a favour to a colleague, life for Nica is good, lacking some intense conflict to overcome. Are we missing something, or simply too used to expecting the other shoe to drop?

The passage “Papa says it is important to know what makes you happy. If you know the things that make you happy, you will, even when you cannot have those things, know where to point yourself; when to open out and say, ‘It’s me. I’m here. I’m here to give and to receive and to make use of the things that make me happy’” echoes Warren Thouless’ thoughts on being used fully. In Nica’s hands, an interesting creed comes across as superficial. Another example of this surface-skimming appears after Nica leaves America. She achieves wealth there (an interlude in which old-world snobbery succumbs to its new-world envy) then returns to the familiar comforts of Paris. Garnett captures the atmosphere well—palpable and soothing, though oddly reminiscent of the ‘classic’ girl-survives-hard-knocks-to-find-belonging tale. It hints at a larger idea, but doesn’t quite reach beyond perfect sheets in a perfect bed in a perfect room.

During a visit to the cinema, a young Nica describes “the sound of people in a room, breathing together, safe inside a cloak of both darkness and magical flickering light: an enormous palette made entirely of the colour range between deepest black and brightest white. This light would play on our faces but we did not usually see one another’s faces because we were all looking at the huge wondrous faces on the screen. Alone and together.” Such moments are perhaps the best-written passages of the book, moments where something deeper flickers in Garnett’s writing—quiet; thoughtful; small reprieves from the surface banalities. It’s almost as if it’s finally found its own “room tone.”

As a title, Room Tone is an intriguing entry point, referring to the moment on the last day of filming when the sound director demands silence on the set. Then “the sound of the room, the room’s tone” is recorded, for later use, if needed. Of this, Nica says, “Room Tone is, for a moment or two humans at our best. Quiet. Listening together to the sound of the room—a sound of which each of us is a breathing part. Room Tone is perfect.” But is it? Behind the mask of silence, calm, and belonging, human emotion and grievance still rage. Nevertheless, in these moments of staged communion, when the players become the audience, we again hear echoes of Smuggling Donkeys—we are the actors in the room tone, we are Warren Thouless’ audience of listeners, hovering in the wings of his deconsecrated church-theatre. We are all ears, seeking sanctuary, breathing.