FICTION

In 2006, I studied short fiction with Elisabeth Harvor through the post-graduate diploma program offered by the Humber College School for Writers. I’m currently pursuing the Optional Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at UBC, where I’m studying short fiction with Zsuzsi Gartner. Short fiction is an obsession with me at the moment. My first published story will appear in the Fall 2008 issue of The New Quarterly (www.tnq.ca).

I’ve also been studying the novel with Gail Anderson-Dargatz and am working on a novel based on my great-grandfather’s (imagined) life as a foreign-going schooner skipper in early twentieth century Newfoundland.

In Ottawa, I am blessed to belong to a fiction writing group with some very talented women. We meet monthly to share our work and keep one another’s spirits in good order.

Here’s an excerpt from the story “Still Life with Book” appearing in TNQ this fall, in which a boy and his psychiatrist are seduced by The Complete Poems of John Donne:

"At school, Nick is nothing—not a jock certainly. He is tall and ungainly, given to sprained ankles. And he is not a brain, either, having limited facility for math, chemistry, physics—the required brainiac subjects. Biology makes him ill. When they dissected the baby pig in Grade Eight, Nick was sick to his stomach for two days. The one exception in biology was the chapter on human anatomy, genes, DNA, cellular structures. Nick examined his own skin under a microscope and found it enchanting, a microscopic fairy-world living inside him without his knowledge.

He is vegetarian and this keeps him thin, his body a bamboo reed. Every second morning, he does a one-hour circuit-training routine: quads, hamstrings, glutes, abs, biceps, traps and delts. He is nearly hairless and finely toned, has brought out the muscular structure beneath the cellular coat he wears. He lopes through the halls with a sloping gait, as if he is fragile and being careful not to fall, always with his head in a book."

You can get a copy of The New Quarterly on newsstands or by subscribing at www.tnq.ca.