"Refugees" in Southern Humanities Review

I was delighted yesterday when I got my contributor's copy of Southern Humanities Review in the mail in which my story "Refugees" is included. Although the story was accepted two years ago and is included in my collection Interpreters, it's still nice to see it come out in print form again. In a nutshell, the story is about a family of North Korean refugees who come to Canada and the veracity of the story they tell to the narrator. What was a surprise to me when I was going over the proofs a few months ago was that the opening scene is quite a bit different from the one in the book. I forgot all about that earlier version, and now I'm not sure why I ever changed it in the first place. Anyway, I'm excited to see it out there in the bigger world. To order your copy, click here. And below is a cute promotional video for the newest issue.

Best Gay Stories 2015

I was pleasantly surprised this morning when I got my contributor's copy of Best Gay Stories 2015 in the mail. My story "Lovely Company," which was first published in the Fall 2014 issue of Plenitude Magazine (#5), is included among the stories. So it goes without saying that I was thrilled back in January when Steve Berman, editor of the series, contacted me asking to include the story in the annual anthology. Naturally, I said yes. So now it's here, it's in print, and I'm totally looking forward to cozying up with this book and getting to know the stories inside. To order your own copy, which is put out by Lethe Press in the US, click here.

Young Skins by Colin Barrett

Every once in a while there comes along a collection of stories that, from cover to cover, inspires, surprises, delights, and astounds me with what the short story is capable of doing.  All too often, many collections have only one or two such memorable stories, while the rest invariably disappoint.  I last felt that cover-to-cover wow factor last summer when I read Nancy Lee's Dead Girls. Before that it was Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, preceded by Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, Nam Le's The Boat, Michael Christie's The Beggar's Garden, and Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. Those were books that even after I had finished reading them continued to sit beside me on my desk and to which I frequently turned while working on my own stories in an attempt to determine the how of what they did. Recently I was floored again when I read Colin Barrett's Young Skins.

The six stories and one novella that make up the collection are set in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. Prior to my reading of this book, I'd always imagined Ireland to be a green, picturesque, yet slightly melancholic island, full of quaint little pub-filled towns and villages, green fields, and cows. There was always the invariable priest and the overarching influence of the church, and its citizens seemed to be a predominantly elderly and respectably poor lot: a notion influenced by all the Irish short fiction (especially William Trevor's) I've read over the years. Barrett, however, flips that idea on its head. Yes, there are tiny pub-filled villages and green fields, but this is a much more gritty Ireland (or, more specifically, a small town near the west coast) consisting of the seriously down and out, people living on "estates" and where those pubs are less charming than they are indicative of the poverty in which these people live and the boredom of their lives. Barrett's Ireland is an ugly place, full of midges that feed on people's heads and contain all the usual and recognizable things that make up an increasingly globalized world. It's also a place in which the young, as the narrator states in the opening story "The Clancy Kid," have the run of the place (1)--these "young skins" with their tattoos and earlobe-stretched earrings, their drugs that they shoot, snort or smoke, their ADHD and autism. And instead of that pernicious and ever-present choke-hold of Roman Catholicism, both priest and church are conspicuously absent, replaced instead by a menacing and anarchic violence. Interesting, too, to note are the unusual couplings that also seem emblematic of the topsy-turvy state of things: Fannigan, a 50-year-old unmarried man who lives with his mother and attempts to rape a 14-year-old girl; Marlene, a single-mom who lives with her "consenting, pragmatic" (4) mother, the latter thinking nothing of her daughter bringing men home; Hector and Paudie, two unmarried brothers who live together (and happen to run a grow-op out of their farm); and Dympna, simultaneously adored by his "coven" (86) of sisters yet tainted by the "persistent low rumours that suggested he fucked [them]" (105).  And like the priests, fathers are also missing here. Nearly everyone's "da" has long been in the ground, or just not there.

But what captures and inspires me most about these stories is the language. Barrett has a unique and inimitable style that mixes the arcane with the vulgar, the formal with the crass, blended too with the many colloquialisms unique to Ireland. I turn to a page at random, and here is what I find. From the story "Bait", listen to this:

Music chugged from the open door of a parked car and there were tinnies and smokes as those to shift were determined and paired off. Shifting was a curiously bloodless, routinised ritual, involving lengthy arbitration by the friends of the prospective pairings, who, as in arranged marriages, did not so much as get to say hello until they were shoved into each other's arms and exhorted to take the dark walk into the maw of the woods. There, with that hello barely exchanged, each couple would find a sheltering bole to lean against or beneath, and commence their bodily negotiations. (20)

As the above illustrates, there's no pared-down minimalist prose here; rather Barrett is unafraid to do the opposite, to write in what he called in a recent Paris Review interview a "maximalistic" style. It's refreshingly unique and exciting.

In addition, Barrett seldom employs boring linking verbs like "was," "seem," or "got". Nearly every Barrett sentence cracks, pops, and sizzles--not to mention surprises--with an energy that I've only ever seen before in someone like Denis Johnson. Again, listen to this passage, and notice how every verb (and adjective too) is a vibrant and animated thing:

Fandango's was a hot box. Neon strobed and pulsed, dry ice fumed in the air. Libidinal bass juddered the windowless walls. I was sinking shots at the bar with Dessie Roberts when she crackled in my periphery. She'd already seen me and was swanning over. We exchanged bashful smiles, smiles that knew exactly what was coming. (4)

The stories that make up Young Skins are generally linear in structure with little back story, focusing on the here-and-now of these characters' lives and the situations they find themselves in. In my own stories I have a tendency for resolution, a need to tie all the knots, as it were (which is probably why I tend to write such lengthy stories); but Barrett demonstrates that that is not always necessary. "The Clancy Kid," for example, at first seems to meander aimlessly, going from the bar in which the narrator and his friend Tug drink and theorize about the missing Clancy kid, to tipping over Marlene's fiance's car, to crossing an unrepaired footbridge "guarded" by a trio of children. What is this story about? I began to wonder at some point. But it's in the sudden ending in which the narrator, once safely across the bridge, turns around and sees that "the children are gone" (18), that the story unexpectedly and poignantly (and somewhat ineffably) answers that question and what the Clancy kid represents, sadly foretelling too how little will change in the lives of these characters. Young Skins is a powerful and inspiring collection, one that will sit next to me at my desk as I continue to work on my own stories for some time to come. If you have a collection of stories that similarly blew you away from cover to cover, I'd love to hear of it.

Reading Proust II

I thought I was going to set aside Proust for a little while. And I did. I got caught up on my magazines, read Edna O'Brien's lovely collection of stories Mrs. Reinhardt, and I had planned on rereading The Tin Drum, another big book; but just as I was about to plunge into Grass's novel, I felt Proust's magnetic pull. And so I started Volume II, the 700-plus pages that make up Within a Budding Grove.

The first half, entitled Madame Swann at Home, resumes the young narrator's fascination with the Swann family and, in particular, his obsession with Gilberte, Mme Swann's daughter. As we left off in Volume I, he still meets her every afternoon in the Champs-Elysee to play. Eventually he overcomes both her and her family's initial resistance, gets invited to their home, and becomes something of a regular fixture there, seeming at times to be more attracted to Mme Swann than to her daughter. Then (for the rest of Volume II at any rate) the narrator falls out irreparably with Gilberte: boy gets girl; boy loses girl.

The "at home" part of the title refers to Mme Swann's "at homes," a weekly Wednesday afternoon gathering of society women; it's also the day on which Gilberte hosts her own tea parties to which the narrator is among the invited guests. Here's a favourite moment describing this time in the narrator's life:

...I would arrive in the zone in which the scent of Mme Swann greeted my nostrils. I could already visualize the majesty of the chocolate cake, encircled by plates heaped with biscuits, and by tiny napkins of patterned grey damask, as required by convention but peculiar to the Swanns.... And [Gilberte] would usher us into the dining-room, as sombre as the interior of an Asiatic temple painted by Rembrandt, in which an architectural cake, as urbane and familiar as it was imposing seemed to be enthroned there on the off-chance as on any other day, in case the fancy seized Gilberte to discrown it of its chocolate battlements and to hew down the steep brown slopes of its ramparts, baked in the oven like the bastions of the palace of Darius. (107)

In the second half of the book, Place Names / The Place, the narrator--older now, early twenties I'm guessing--and his grandmother travel to the coastal town of Balbec where they spend the summer in the Grand Hotel. It's here that he meets the aristocratic Robert de Saint-Loup. After some initial awkwardness, the two men become the best of friends, but when Saint-Loup returns to the barracks, from which he has been on leave, the narrator makes the acquaintance of what he often refers to as that "little band" of girls and, in particular, Albertine, another girl he falls in love with.

Not surprisingly, class is an important theme throughout the novel and in Volume II in particular. Friendship often seems like a disingenuous thing in the society to which we are privy, and we frequently see characters clamoring to get an introduction to so-and-so, not out of any genuine interest but as a means of elevating themselves socially. Snobbery is prevalent. In spite of having brought their servant Francoise, the narrator and his grandmother are not on the same social scale as some of the hotel's other guests and are initially isolated until the grandmother's friend, Mme de Villeparisis, arrives. Being seen with such a distinguished guest (Villeparisis turns out to be a marquise of the Guermantes family) does much to alleviate the narrator's own sense of isolation by opening up social possibilities. But in a world apparently full of masqueraders, not not everyone is convinced the marquise is who she says she is. In one particularly funny scene, the judge's wife, "who scented irregularities everywhere" (383), suspects Mme Villeparisis might not be as much of a marquise as "an adventuress" (383).   She says:

"I always begin by believing the worst. I will never admit that a woman is properly married until she has shown me her birth certificate and marriage lines. But never fear--just wait till I've finished my little investigation." (383)

Later, when the Princesse de Luxembourg arrives to pay a social call on Mme Villeparisis, the judge's wife reports to her friends, "I've discovered something" (383):

"Just listen to this. A woman with yellow hair and six inches of paint on her face and a carriage which reeked of harlot a mile away ... came here today to call on the so-called Marquise! ... I picked up her card. She trades under the name of the 'Princesse de Luxembourg'! Wasn't I right to have my doubts about her?" (384)

Although the judge's wife is hugely erroneous in her conclusion, the idea that things are never quite what they seem is another important facet of the book. The narrator's aristocratic friend St-Loup, for instance, who at first appears to be utterly snobbish, not only turns out to be extraordinarily warm and gentle (at least to the narrator) but also claims to be a Republican. In contrast, Francoise, who one would expect to be a Republican, turns out to be a Royalist. The narrator's dubious friend Bloch, who at one point voices antisemitic epithets turns out to be of Jewish background himself. The artist Elstir turns out to be the much-maligned M. Biche of the Verderin set from Volume I; and the artist's portrait of the actress he calls Miss Sacripant turns out in fact to be a portrait of the young Mme Swann, Odette de Crecy. Albertine, too, who the narrator supposes to a cyclist's mistress turns out to be a penniless orphan.

The world of appearances--the world of smoke and mirrors--extends also to the Swanns: Mme Swann gives off the air of someone of much higher class and education than she really is, while M. Swann takes something of an opposite approach in his attempt to hide the true extent of his affluent social connections (mostly seen in Volume I). And of course both put on the mask of faithfulness to the other.

And then there's that strange matter of the names Proust has given all the girls the narrator is attracted to, feminine derivatives of otherwise masculine names: Gilberte, Albertine, Andree. Given that we know that the autobiographical Proust was gay, is another mask, another illusion, at work here too? (Maybe we'll find out in Volume IV, Sodom and Gomorrah.) 

Even the narrator's beloved Bergotte, the writer who's had a profound influence on the narrator and who he assumes would be of similarly grand and imposing stature in real life, turns out to be a "youngish, uncouth, thickset and myopic little man, with a red nose curled like a snail-shell and a goatee beard. I was cruelly disappointed" (165).

Again and again we encounter the narrator's disappointment in all he has high expectations of, a disappointment that is often later turned on its head by someone or something else. His initial disappointment, for example, after he has at last seen the famous singer Berma perform onstage is completely reversed when he reads a review in the newspaper in which he concludes (after one of the longest sentences I've so far encountered in Proust): "What a great artist!" (72). In another example, Elstir opens the narrator's eyes regarding the "Persian church" at Balbec in which the narrator also felt deep disappointment about, teaching him to see the "celestial vision ... inscribed there in stone" (575). These ever-changing visions, coupled with the inability to really know, understand, grasp, or see something as it really is is central to the whole book and the narrator's perpetual "search for lost time." When the narrator is away from Gilberte, for instance, he finds he can't remember what she looks like (although all the other ordinary cast of characters in his life readily appear in his mind's eye). Albertine's birthmark, too, sometimes appears to be in one place, then another when he conjures her up in his imagination. And of Albertine's character, he says "[she] struck me as somewhat shy instead of implacable; she seemed to me more proper than ill-bred.... But this was merely a second impression and there were doubtless others through which I would successively pass" (619)--impressions as ever-changing as the view of the sea outside the narrator's belvedere window in the Grand Hotel.

We often hear novels and even short stories described as opening up whole worlds; but Search, I've discovered, is a totally different kind of beast. Instead of a world, Proust has created an entire universe, one that is uniquely situated between old and modern worlds, between the 19th and 20th centuries, an era where horse-driven carriages and oil-lit lamps meet motor-cars, aeroplanes, and telephones.  Like Volume I, Within a Budding Grove is often filled with rapturous prose and Proust's hallmark long and winding sentences. But I have to admit that his endless and sometimes obfuscating philosophizing on just about everything drew me out of the story at times. But I've discovered that to read Proust--I mean really read Proust--and to deftly crest those enormous waves of philosophizing one needs time; not just an hour here, an hour there, but the dedication of long stretches of solid, back-to-back hours on a daily basis in order for Proust to dangle his hypnotist's pocket-watch and for one to fall, headlong and spellbound, into this vast and complicated landscape.

Review of Interpreters in the Spring 2015 issue of The Fiddlehead

Rebecca Geleyn's review of my collection of stories Interpreters is now out in the Spring 2015 issue (no. 263) of The Fiddlehead. I was a bit nervous when I picked it up in the bookstore (it's the first review of the book I'd come across) and the sense of foreboding I had as I hurriedly thumbed through the pages to find it reminded of those times in high school when you discover people have been talking about you behind your back, a feeling that was emphasized by the equally strange sight of my own words being quoted back at me. I was afraid I was going to find something horribly soul crushing, but, mercifully, it's a generally positive review, at times opening up interpretations (pun intended!) that I hadn't entirely thought of myself. "This collection of stories," Geleyn writes, "shows the most poignancy when zeroing in on nuggets of problematic or untranslatable language. Interpreters moves towards the hermeneutic gap between words of two different languages, incommunicable because of their intrinsic link to lived experience and culture." Hermeneutic! Now that's a word I haven't used since my grad school days.

She does say, however, that at times "some stories ... resort too quickly to summarization, taking readers out of the immediate action," but that overall the book is "a promising first collection." She also adds that "Schafrick's stories are strikingly contemporary, dealing with online dating culture, individuals trying to keep up with an increasingly globalized world, acquaintances that travel and reappear in unexpected places, and challenging job markets."  Phew! Not bad. Thank you! Pick it up at a bookstore near you.

Reading Proust

For a long time, I used to stare up at those thick volumes of Proust's famous Remembrance of Things Past with awe whenever I wandered into a second-hand bookshop.  Sometimes I would see single volumes from a 1970's edition in which the 4000-page novel is broken into many small, bite-size chunks--volume VII, say--orphaned from its siblings, as if that particular book was the very one someone would need to complete his or her collection.  More often, though, I would come across the novel broken into those three encyclopedic volumes with the art nouveau design on its covers. 

What dedication it would take to read that massive novel in its entirety, I would often think.  And what was it about anyway?  I shied away from the novel, too intimidated by it, until recently when I decided to tackle it, at least the first volume, Swann's Way, in its most recent 1992 rendering by DJ Enright, the novel now generally referred to as In Search of Lost Time.

All I knew of Search was that it's one of the longest novels in English, but what I didn't know was that it was also a challenging read, particularly because of those long, winding sentences and their numerous subjunctive clauses, page after page of solid, unbroken paragraphs, that it's easy to stumble and lose sight of what Proust is talking about, often emerging from such paragraphs disoriented and confused.  The novel is very much a meditation on memory, especially memory that comes unbidden or is lodged in taste (the famous madeleine cake episode in which the unnamed narrator dips his cake into a cup of tea and the taste of these combined elements usher back memories of his childhood in Combray) or in objects, smells or even music (Swann's entire relationship with Odette is contained within "the phrase" of a certain sonata) because, like meditation, at least mindfulness meditation, one is required to concentrate solely on one's breath without creating mental to-do lists or following other similar day dreams.  And so Proust, too, is equally demanding and challenging of the reader that, at times, I found myself only grasping snatches of meaning (was it better to back up and constantly reread those long passages, or to read quickly, picking up whatever I could? I was never sure) sometimes finding myself going from one scene to another without entirely knowing how I got there.  Early on in the novel Proust playfully foreshadows this when he describes how he used to read in his childhood and as "the plot began to unfold ... it seemed all the more obscure because in those days ... I used to often to daydream about something quite different for page after page," a passage which made me laugh because that is, at times, the challenge of Proust.  Later on, he ironically (and beautifully) sums up what his own writing is like when he describes the writing style of Bergotte, his favourite author:

What my mother's friend and, it would seem, Dr du Boulbon liked above all in the writings of Bergotte was just what I liked, the same melodic flow, the old-fashioned phrases, and certain others, quite simple and familiar, but so placed by him, so highlighted, as to hint at a particular quality of taste on his part; and also, in the sad parts of his books, a sort of roughness, a tone that was almost harsh.  And he himself, no doubt, realized that these were his principal attractions.  For in his later books, if he had hit upon some great truth, or upon the name of an historic cathedral, he would break off his narrative, and in an invocation, an apostrophe, a long prayer, would give free rein to those exhalations which, in the earlier volumes, had been immanent in his prose, discernible only in a rippling of its surface, and perhaps even more delightful, more harmonious when they were thus veiled, when the reader could give no precise indication of where their murmuring began or where it died away.  These passages in which he delighted were our favourites also.

But when Proust has hooked you in, when he's beguiled you, as the above passage attests, the pay-off is worth it.  Along a similar vein, here is another stunning passage from the end of Swann in Love:

The pianist having finished the Liszt intermezzo and begun a prelude by Chopin, Mme de Cambremer turned to Mme de Franquetot with a fond smile of knowing satisfaction and allusion to the past.  She had learned in her girlhood to fondle and cherish those long sinuous phrases of Chopin, so free, so flexible, so tactile, which begin by reaching out and exploring far outside and away from the direction in which they started, far beyond the point which one might have expected their notes to read, and which divert themselves in those byways of fantasy only to return more deliberately--with a more premeditated reprise, with more precision, as on a crystal bowl that reverberates to the point of making you cry out--to strike at your heart.

Jaw-dropping, isn't it?  In his blurb at the top of my Modern Library Classics edition, David Denby says, "Reading Swann's Way was a rapturous experience," and he's right: that's exactly the word the comes to mind.  At times rapturous and mellifluous, at times, I admit, frustrating and boring (I adored Combray; was not as invested in Swann in Love until the end, regained my love in Place Names / The Name), yet, for me, Proust always seemed elusively just outside  one's grasp, and slippery like water.

As I said in an earlier blog post, when I read, I like to underline passages I like.  Not only was I doing this as I was reading Proust, but also making note of words whose meaning I was unfamiliar with (this happens to me a lot when I read Nabokov), like abjuration, inure, perorate, perspicacious, fulminate, confabulate; and words that I simply like and have found their way (or will find their way) into my own stories, like: mendacious, perfidious, carnal, beholden, ineluctable, and so on.  (Even his style, as you can see here in my parody, has infected my writing.)  But I've only scratched the surface of the novel that is In Search of Lost Time.  Having completed Swann's Way, there are five more 600-plus-page volumes yet to read: an intimidating task, and not one I intend to do back-to-back, yet fearing if I took a few years to read the whole thing I would begin to forget and therefore lose the overall thread of the story, just as we do in life with our own memories, making Proust even more ungraspable.  But I suppose that is the point with Proust.  As he says early on:

And so it is with our own past.  It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile.  The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling.  And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.

Queer Confessions Reading Series

This Thursday, April 2nd, I'll be reading at the Queer Confessions reading series at the 519 (519 Church Street) at 8 pm alongside Peter Knegt, Marcy Rogers, and Jean-Claude Paquette.  You can find more information here .  Hope to see you there!

Denton Welch (March 29, 1915 - December 30, 1948)

Like a lot of people who might be familiar with the work of Denton Welch, my first "encounter" with him was his oft-anthologized story "When I Was Thirteen."  I came across the story in Alberto Manguel and Craig Stephenson's anthology Meanwhile, in Another Part of the Forest: Gay Stories from Alice Munro to Yukio Mishima.  The story is about a thirteen-year-old boy (probably some time in the 1920s) on vacation in a ski resort in Switzerland.  While his older brother goes out to spend the day on the slopes with friends, the narrator is left behind at the hotel and develops something of a hero-worship fantasy for a university student who also happens to be staying at the resort.  I loved the story for evoking such vivid details--the taste of hot chocolate after a day out in the cold, the French pastries, the warmth of a feather bed, getting into the same bath water the university student had just sat in.  I remember thinking how accurately Welch could capture certain images and sensations of early adolescence that I realized I had forgotten, and I loved how homosexual desire is never explicitly stated, but is an undercurrent throughout the story (as it is in much of his fiction).  I made a mental note to further explore his work one day.

A few years passed, and I can't remember what I was working on, but last summer I decided to read what Manguel describes as "one of his best works," In Youth Is Pleasure, and again I was charmed and fascinated by this little-known British writer.  I went on to read I Left My Grandfather's House and The Stories of Denton Welch, a collection of twenty-six of his stories and, more recently, his incomplete (but definitely best) novel, A Voice through a Cloud. 

When I read, I tend to underline passages I like, but with Welch I find it hard to know when to put the pencil down.  Listen to this, for example:

Since his last visit to me, I saw him always as a lost dog, forlorn, harassed, with an unenticing hint of danger that made one wish to get away from him.  What warned one against him before he had opened his mouth?  Was it the eyes staring, then circling?  The badly related hand and leg movements?  The scheming that was so obvious that one had a fancy of steaming, churning thoughts bubbling up against the walls of a glass skull?

Or this:

Soon afterwards Mrs. Talbot struggled up from her low deck chair to say good-bye.  Standing on those fragile black-silk legs she looked very tottery and ancient; but there was a great lump of pride and malevolence behind her pale little eyes, and I thought that it was this lump which was her driving force.  Insolent pride and ill-will carried her through the day, kept her from dying, from melting into nothing.  I thought that each year to come would make the little beady eyes clearer and paler, until they were nothing but two sucked acid drops.  All colour would drain out of her, leaving only the pure venom. 

Wow!  These two passages come from "Brave and Cruel," a story I ironically felt was not among his best (in fact, many of his stories don't always entirely work as stories), yet for me it almost doesn't matter because with Welch the prose is so stellar--and fresh, too, not at all sounding like they were written more than seventy years ago. 

When I was reading A Voice through a Cloud, again and again I kept underlining short passages and phrases, and surprising word choices, so much so that much of my copy is dirtied with pencil markings.  But here's a passage that has long stayed with me for its haunting beauty:

There were some birds at night beyond the garden.  Behind their hard cymbal clashes or sad flute sounds I used to hear the far-away moping of the sea and then the fitful barking of a dog.  I would imagine his cry coming across the fields, the brimming icy ditches and the bare hedges glittering with black drops of water.  Perhaps it came from some lonely farm where he was chained up in a cobbled yard.  The chain would grate and clink like a ghost's as he ran from side to side, barking and waiting for the answer which never came.  At last his tail would curve down through his legs and he would huddle back into the dank straw of his barrel. 
     I wrote about the night bird cries, the sea sounds and the lonely barking, and I liked what I wrote in flashes; but something was wrong with it.  There is always something wrong with writing.  So I tore the paper up at last, liking the untouched memory so much better, not wanting it forced into the insincerity of words.

It really is stunning: the dog's chain clinking like a ghost's, and then the ironic, "There's always something wrong with writing."  The phrase comes to me often as I sit at my desk frustrated.

I can't find the passage right now, but I remember being struck by a simple sentence that went something like this, "I turned away, shirking the difficult task of having to say something about the painting"; and I thought that had I written that I would have said something much more dull, like, "I turned away, not wanting to say anything about the painting."  It's little things like this that make his prose so memorable and beguiling, and layered, containing in that seldom-used word "shirk" a hint of judgment.   

Welch's fiction is very autobiographical, and so as I read through his work, I couldn't help feeling like I got to know someone very closely, not just his thoughts and idiosyncratic worldview, but also his neuroses and obsessions, his desires, his history: there's his childhood in China, his art school years in London, his later years in the British countryside.  In a weird way (and I'm not sure what this says about me) but never have I read a writer with whom I felt such kinship.  Before Welch ventured into fiction writing, he originally wanted to become a painter (his work, which often adorns the covers of his books, is somewhat mediocre), but at the age of twenty, while riding his bike one day in south London, he was struck by a car and spent the rest of his life--the next thirteen years--convalescing.  Unable to paint, he turned to writing and in the remainder of his life produced an amazing volume of work.  The nearly complete A Voice through a Cloud was written at the very end of his life when he was in a great deal of pain and could often work on it for no more than a few minutes at a time.  Welch died in 1948 at the age of 33, a shame that someone with such obvious talent should pass away so early and in such obscurity.  This Sunday, March 29th, marks one hundred years since Welch's birth, and I wonder: will Denton Welch societies (if there is such a thing; there's a Denton Welch website, but it's been under construction for years) commemorate the anniversary with readings and speeches?  Will there be radio documentaries on Welch the way there were for Barbara Pym in 2013 on the 100th anniversary of her birth? Or will I alone sit at my kitchen table with a cupcake and a lit candle stuck in it, reflecting on the work of this most remarkable writer?

March 4 - Words at the Wise Reading Series

I'll be reading at the Words at the Wise reading series with Andrew Simpson and Kerry Cathers.  The event takes place at Wise Bar, which is located at 1007 Bloor St. West.  Event starts at 8 p.m.  You can find more information here.

February 22nd - Junction Reads Reading Series

This Sunday, February 22nd at 4 p.m., I'll be reading at the Junction Reads reading series alongside the very impressive Michael Winter, Aggrey Sambay, Peter Norman, and Nancy Jo Cullen.  The event takes place at 3030 Dundas St. West.  Should be a fun afternoon.  Hope to see you there.  You can find out more here.