Lost Gospels (Brick Books, 2010)
Poetry
by Lorri Neilsen Glenn

A truly moving collection of poetry that dwells in profoundly personal yet and universal subject matter. A book a blaze so you feel it. Outspoken and insightful, there is a way she conducts her language so you hear all the right nuances. So the sharp lines sink in. Deeply.

She is exorcising moments of sorrow in many of these poems, and in the rest she is asking the questions we all do. Yet what she is ringing out of these questions is the beauty of life, hammering home a paradox: The things that make a person forlorn are the very things we live and breathe for while they’re here.

Her diction is elegant, exact, and evocative. If every collection of poetry has a poem that never leaves you, that’s what makes Lost Gospels stand out: the abundance of poems that spoke to me, rattled me, so I wouldn’t forget this collection the minute I start reading another one. I think we’re all in this book: We’ve seen many of the scenes Lorri pontificates upon, but she captures it and serves it up in a way only a poet laureate like her can.

In other poems, reflections from a place of sorrow and deep introspection, surprisingly, reflect the hidden beauty of everyday life. When a poet cracks themself open like this, they open their poetry up to a broader and more compelled audience. This book is a valley and I fell right in. Universal and opened-ended observations said, asked, or thought about with such crystalline phrasing that at times a reader might just understand the world a little more. The seeming ease with which she wraps words around the core of what’s being said is what stood out to me. Genuinely moving subject matter, language, and clenching one-liners, tied up into a neat package of poetic radiance.

Some highlights, in my opinion: “Legs,” “Winter Kill,” “Wild,” and “Hemlock Ravine.”

 Lorri Neilsen Glenn was Halifax’s poet laureate from 2005-2009. Click here to read an interview with Lorri at Speaking of Poems’ website. Also, catch her at the 2010 Shelburne Writers’ Festival, where she is conducting a workshop in addition to reading.

2010 Re-release Reader’s Guide Edition of Lynn Coady’s Strange Heaven

- A GG finalist and Winner of the Atlantic Bookseller’s Chocie Award; a winner of the Dartmouth Book Award and a finalist for the Thomas Head Raddall Award.

- Special features include an afterword by Marina Endicott, a great interview with Lynn Coady, and more.

A work of rare vivacity. Strange Heaven is bursting with dark humour and its well-placed opposite. This re-release of Lynn Coady’s critically acclaimed debut novel is proof positive she is a genuine, assured, compelling voice, and has been from the start. It has been said, written, taught, and seldom denied that to capture a reader requires making them buy and care for your characters, and Coady is particularly gifted in this regard. If characters could get any more real or fun to read about, then Lynn Coady would make all the real-life  people you know seem dull and unconvincing. This book is funny, sad, compassionate, ridiculous, believable, authentic, brash, mature, gripping, immature: and a dozen other adjectives to assure you it is worth a read. If you missed Coady’s lively debut the first time, don’t make the same mistake twice.

Click here to read more about this book at Goose Lane’s website.

 ……   

On Larry and his latest novel

Larry Mathews is credited as the founding member of the Burning Rock Fiction Collective. A writer’s group that includes names like Lisa Moore, Michael Winter, and Jessica Grant. Credited perhaps because in his inaugural year of teaching creative writing at Memorial University, him, Michael Winter, Lisa Moore, and some others, didn’t want to stop meeting and swapping writing once the class had finished, and from there began Canada’s most legendary writer’s group.

Mathews is, as described by Mark Anthony Jarman, “A Searing and silver-tongued wit.” His latest novel came out a few months ago, The Artificial Newfoundlander, and Salty Ink made it May’s Book of the Month. Read that article here. It’s a gut-busting, fast-paced, pleasure-to-read story, in which an amusingly introspective and disgruntled professor is surrounded by absurd characters as far-fetched as life itself, as his role as  a father, lover, and academic is put to the test.

On his pleasure-to-read The Sandblasting Hall of Fame.

The Artificial Newfoundlander left me needing a little more Larry Mathews. For years now, I’ve been wanting to read his debut collection of shorts, The Sandblasting Hall of Fame, but we all know how that goes: 20 new books hit the shelves each month, burying the old ones deeper down in the to-read pile. Bookstores are frustratingly quick to send anything a year or two old out the door, so you have to order online, etc.

Don’t be lazy like me about this book. GO. Get it.

Few books have the abundance out laugh-out-loud moments, the sheer, glistening wit of it. The sheer “joy of reading.” Oh, and from a writer’s viewpoint: the clever narrative construction and the lack of throwaway sentences: his style is punchy and gripping: a great combo when you throw his wit in the mix. Mathews plain has fun with language here, in the way Jessica Grant does in her heralded (exquisite!) writing. If people are going to be consistently comparing Burning Rockers Michael Winter and Lisa Moore’s attention to detail, they ought also to be comparing Grant and Mathews’ clever wordsmithery and pleasure-to-readedness.

What he does with his endearing misfit characters acts as a way to do with fiction all the things I like seeing done with fiction. A distinctive voice, engaging from start to finish, that hauls you into a story, keeps you there, clipping along at a good pace, and you hit the ending like a brick wall. (Because that’s how accidents happen: you forget about your surroundings, absorbed in something else, like, say a Larry Mathews’ story.)

His characters might be oddballs or they might not be. They’re certainly great to spend time with. Larry is masterful, yes, masterful, at what the old books call character development. In an opening paragraph: you know the characters, right away, just like that. They’re off-kilter, yet fully realized and convincing, and plain fun. They’re also unabashedly human.

Mathews, on his characters, “My guys are clowns in the sense that they see the Fall of Man whenever they slip on a banana peel. Then they take you backstage and you can see that, without makeup and costume props, they’re not much different from you and me.”

The Sandblasting Hall of Fame was longlisted for the 2003 ReLit Award, and features stories that have appeared in various esteemed literary journals, including Prairie Fire, Grain, and Fiddlehead. “Hanrahan Agnoistes” was anthologized in Coming Attractions 02′.

Annabel, by Kathleen Winter (Anansi, 2010)

* Note: A slightly different form of this review appeared in The Telegram

Kathleen Winter is no stranger to writing, in any form. She has written for television — from Sesame Street to CBC documentaries — and for newspapers, including her former weekly column, Naturally, in The Telegram. Her last book, boYs, a vibrant collection of short stories, won the prestigious Winterset Award and the Metcalfe-Rooke Award. Annabel is her debut novel.

Annabel tells the story of a child who is born both male and female, in the hyper-male hunting culture of 1960’s Labrador. Surgically altered at birth and given the name Wayne, only three people know of his secret: his parents and a trusted neighbour. But as Wayne approaches adulthood, as his identity strives to lay a foundation, the woman literally buried inside of him, Annabel, refuses to be forgotten. It is the story of a “son” who wants to swim in an orange bathing suit, not trunks. It is the story of a mother who has to deny her son, who could have been her daughter, that one, simple wish, and live with that denial. It is the story of a wife who loves her husband, but not wholly enough to stop longing for her life back in St. John’s, and who she could be. It is the story of a Labrador man whose ability to connect with the natural world exceeds his ability to connect with his family, yet he is there, faithfully, when needed, and out of love, not fatherly or marital duty, genuinely doing what he thinks is right by them: providing for his wife and forcing a maleness on Wayne, but never without empathy, admitted hypocrisy, or guilt.

“Treadway loved his wife because he had promised he would. But the centre of the wilderness called him, and he loved that centre more than any promise.”

It is just as much a novel about the characters as it is about their predicament, and Winter can channel her varied characters masterfully, switching points of view between her five characters as they encase themselves in private worlds. In showing us all angles of her five main characters, from inside and out, whether it was her intention or just gifted writing, she’s showing us the humanity that overrides gender and age, and the basic human traits and desires that unite us all.

Annabel is also an evocative portraiture of ethereal Labrador. Winter’s writing reaches a hand out of those pages and hauls her reader down into an authentic Labrador you’ll feel like you know by sight, smell, sound, and experience. It is convincing, right down to the plants, the smells, or how a blind man can navigate a canoe and hunt ducks. You’ll see its desolation and its draw, depending on the character she channeling. “The village of Croydon Harbour, on the southeast Labrador coast, has that magnetic earth all Labrador shares. You sense a striation, a pulse, as the land drinks light and emits vibration … the visitor has to be an open circuit, available to the power coming off the land.” Her skill in this regard is crucial, because setting plays a big role in how these characters are shaped or misshapen, isolated or liberated, together or alone.

Her writing is a mesmerizing combination of crisp language, deep empathy for her well-wrought characters, and a world-savvy wisdom. There is an unobtrusively aphoristic quality to the writing that will at times stir your mind. This aspect of the novel comes through particularly well in the world-travelling, tender-hearted, deeply intelligent character, Thomasina. “To Thomasina people were rivers, always ready to move from one state of being into another. It was not fair, she felt, to treat people as if they were finished beings. Everyone was always becoming and unbecoming.”

She delivers her story with a gracefulness that matches the mystique of Labrador and the tenderness required to carry this story. Annabel is an unforgettable novel of struggles, personal and inter-personal, and Kathleen’s empathetic voice does them justice in a way that connects reader to story. Destined to be one of the biggest novels out of Newfoundland this year, this is a story of isolation and a communication breakdown that breaks a family down, and breaks the reader down along with them.

What Boys Like by AmyJones
Biblioasis (2009)

Winner of the hip-assuring Metcalf-Rooke award! (Previous winners: Rebecca Rosenblum & Kathleen Winter)

This is fresh, new, fearlessly vibrant writing. Amy inhabits moments, she potently exorcises memories from her characters and you experience their longing or panic or exultation. The innovative structure in many of these stories should be celebrated, read, and emulated. It gets to a point where, What new can happen in writing, really? Every story has been told. A hundred times. That’s where Amy Jones comes in: every story might have been told one hundred times, but not the way she delivers them. This is where she excels: what Amy Jones does with narrative structure and point of view in some of these stories is innovative, epic, and unforgettable. In “How to Survive a Summer in the City” she uses ten tips, like Seek out free air condition, as pagebreaks. Pagebreaks that tie in to the story in clever ways as shifting points in the story. Amy’s radical switch in POV in the heart-wrenching “One Last Thing,” a story of a sister whose sister has run away, took the story to a level of potency no other technique could have. And after being floored a few times by her narrative wizardry, you think, What else does she have up her sleeve, and story after story she’s hauling out some new literary stunt, some new way to make her story enthrall you. I read “An Army of One” and I forgot to breathe. Read this full collection and you’ll never forget her, you might even consider her 2009’s big discovery in CanLit short fiction. I do. I’m really quite jealous I haven’t written some of these stories myself. My only complaint about this collection is that the opening story, a fine and solid story in isolation, doesn’t showcase Jones’s greatest talent. (Granted, “her greatest talent” is a relative claim, so I am being bias, a critical faux pas.)

Jones’s stories are as vibrant as the book’s cover. This is lively writing, punchy diction, and critically acclaimed dialogue, with closing lines that are occasionally a whole lot more for the deeper reader. They are character-forward stories featuring memorable characters — like the longing, list-writing Miriam Beachwalker — and if the title gives the illusion it is a sexually charged book: at times it is. The writing in stories “An Army of One” and “All We Will Ever be” censor nothing about the line between lust and longing, and properly captures the potency of unrequited love or, forgive me here, “the power of love.” The writing is tender in places and explicit in others, so that the vivacity of memories, passion, emotion, and desire punch through more than effectively.

Also commendable: she tells her stories in a way that is all Amy Jones. She tells them in a way that alternates between a wind-stealing punch in the guts and a playful punch on the shoulder. These stories, at times, fierce, powerful, and sexually charged, come from a tender, honest, and at-times vulnerable place, not an obnoxious, boisterous one. It is a deeply human collection, as vibrant as the front cover image. 

What Boys Like is on my top ten best collections of short stories. It’s her understanding of how to best tell a story, her explorations with narrative structure and POV are cutting and effective, and never gimmicky or repetitious. See “How to Survive a Summer in the City,” “One Last Thing,” An Army of One, “Twelve Weeks,” or “All We Will Ever be,” for a lesson in What Salty Ink Likes about Amy Jones.

Making Light of Tragedy (2004, Porcupine’s Quill)
by Jessica Grant
203 pages

Short fiction from the author of the multi-award-winning novel, Come, Thou Tortoise!

The qualities of Jessica Grant’s writing are beyond words, and not having the words makes you feel like an inadequate writer or critic. She’s stumped me, and others, and for that reason, Jessica Grant’s Making Light of Tragedy might be the best collection of short fiction printed this decade. Every story has been told, writers are getting sharper and more talented … but no one except Jessica Grant is writing so fresh and so clean in a way that is accessible to a broad audience.

Sometimes a book is so good you rip through it, pull an all-nighter, and you’re tired at work the next day. Other times, you buy a book everyone is talking about, and can’t get past the first dull chapter.

Less common: you come across a book you like so much you savour it, you refuse to waste it, you read it slowly, afraid it will end. I have yet to read the last 3 stories in this collection.

I’ll reel it in, but I’m blowing nothing out of proportion: these stories have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, and the opening story alone won the country’s top short fiction award, The Journey Prize, in addition to the heavy-hitting Western Magazine Award.

This is an astonishingly original piece of work, perhaps most notable for its off-kilter, endearing, and often over-contemplative characters: “It’s the kind of ceiling that bursts helium balloons … what if sometime I need to bring helium balloons in here?” I fell in love a few characters. Well, every one. Whether you want to read something for its creative merit, its originality, or because it’s Goddamn funny, read this book and meet these characters: “I learned there is nothing sexier than damaged fingers. But I was a soak-in-Palmolive kind of girl. I didn’t have the balls to let loose on my own hands with a hammer and achieve an authentic damaged finger of my own. So I opted for painting my nails blue.”

Every story is delectably unpredictable, delivered in a distinctive way, and she plain has fun with language, and this combo makes her the most readably original voice in Canada. Over the course of my reading this collection, I witnessed Canada slowly realizing that, as her novel Come, Thou Tortoise was nominate for award after award. She’s unique, fresh, fun, at times sad-sans-pathos, vibrant, distinctive, engrossing, and endearing. “I jogged down the walk from my building, hopscotching over the ice patches.” Hopscotching as a verb. She experiments with structure, has fun with language, makes her own vivid descriptions, and her characters are all experiencing some facet of life too few of us can tune into.

In the opening story, the journey prize winning “My Husband’s Jump,” you get the play off the title (and the bookcover). A woman has just lost her husband, but the story is somewhat hilarious, somewhat implausible, but portrayed in a way that’s believable. It’s about an Olympic ski jumper who hit a big jump and still hasn’t landed. “I pitied the Swiss ski jumper. I pitied them all. For any jump to follow my husband’s, any jump with a landing, was now pointless … I had heard the IOC was planning to scrap ski jumping from the  next Olympics. How could they hold a new event when the last one had never officially ended.”

You never know where Grant is taking you, and that’s one of her great attributes as a writer: to tell stories in a truly new way, to offer believably off-kilter characters, to extrapolate some quirky, fleeting thought into an engaging story. To make that story shine. To do all that, as a rule, in just a few pages. These are short, short stories, and a book you should buy.

Directions for an Opened Body
Kenneth J. Harvey
Mercury Press (1990)
121 pages
Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize!

These stories slice because they’re pared down to a point. There’s nothing here that doesn’t need to be. Every sentence counts in a Harvey book or story, and that’s something I’ve really taken away from his writing when I self-edit. That and the power of a tight POV and the architecture of a sentence. Also: A grittiness shot through with compassion is not an oxymoronic style.

Kenneth J. Harvey’s rise to international stardom started with this collection of short stories. Appropriately so. Directions for an Opened Body highlights all of his qualities. A clear strength in Harvey’s writing is his ability to put a reader in the shoes of someone they are not. With his remarkable knack for a tight, engrossing POV, he takes his readers deep into a character’s psyche, and they therefore experience the story more potently. Right away in Directions for an Opened Body, in the opening story, “Open House,” a man has just snapped, after a final yelling match with his partner, and in a burst of madness, he trashes his house moments before an open house . There’s an eerie edge you feel from his writing, at times, that vibrates through you as a reader. It’s a rare thing I only encounter from a Harvey book — see, in particular, Harvey’s multi-award-winning The Town That Forgot to Breathe – and this book is full of them: a punch that can take your breath away and leave you The Reader Who Forgot to Breathe. There’s an apt Timothy Findley quote on the frontcover of the Minerva edition of the book, “Harvey has created a stunning world of hidden ferocity.”

Also, there is another budding trademark of Harvey’s here: his writing isn’t overly adorned or flashy; it’s calculated and features an interesting way of wording things. Like in “The Profound Liberation of Roy Purdie,” when he describes the sensation of a pair of sunglasses in the inside pocket of his suit jacket as “a giant, brittle bug, sleeping in a pouch.”

Perhaps most impressive: The stylistic range of these stories and their content is astounding. It is a book pulsating with equal parts savagery and sympathy. A collection with lust and violence in equal doses. Stories like “Ballerina” about a woman trying to turn a man’s daughter on him, exemplify that signature synergy of harshness and tenderness that characterizes, for me, Kenneth J. Harvey. That graceful grittiness or compassionate rawness. That and his versatility in style and subject matter. “Open House” drags you into the madness of a domestic dispute gone off the rails, “Orange Shadows and a Sound That Is the Two of Us” is a poetic, intimate, stylistically interesting erotic piece (“Everything that means anything is there in how her face changes when I move inside of her, drawing forth the sound that is the two of us”), “The Passing of Time” is a four-page, subtle-enough elegy to the death of Newfoundland culture, there a parable feel to “The Profound Liberation of Roy Purdie,” and the envelope-pushing tale of bike-gang initiation and other taboo, “My Sister’s Husband,” will plain make you uncomfortable, because it happens, and Harvey never shied away from delivering the story in (relatively tasteful) detail. It’s because of this versatility and sense of what’s next that this remains the only book I’ve read in one sitting.

This book, Harvey’s first, highlights everything about him I admire, namely: 1.) His versatility in style and story content. 2.) The power of a tight point of view: Harvey reaches a hand out of his stories and hauls you in. 3.) That signature graceful grittiness that unites his diverse body of work. 4.) He stands apart. I cannot lump him into categories with other writers like I can and do with others.

Kathleen Winter
boYs
Biblioasis (2007)
189 pages

Her vibrant use of language raised a bar for me, as a writer.

Kathleen Winter’s vibrant collection of short stories, boYs, has won the hip-assuring Metcalf-Rooke Award and the prestigious Winterset award. If you haven’t read it yet, what more encouragement do you need?

This book is alive, sentences pop like firecrackers, you expect nothing and love everything. This is ultra-modern, punchy, lucid diction. What I enjoyed the most were her consistently jagged, unexpected, and yet remarkably apt descriptions, some of which catch you offguard, like, “Sponge flan soaked in red sauce that tasted like bandages,” and “[The wind] smelled like wildflowers and clouds and lakes with trout in them.” As I read the pages I saw images, not words. It is one of few books I’ve read that appeals to all of the senses: even the sounds blare off the pages, and then there are the smells, like “…sweet to breathe the mysterious scent of someone else’s blankets.” We all know that smell, right? This is a catchy, diction-driven book well-deserving of all of its attention.

While her lively diction is at the forefront in terms of this book’s literary merit, the book is also laced with the occasional, perfectly placed aphorism, and many of these stories and characters capture actualities about our world in a very nice, uncontrived manner. The toad-rearing, kaleidoscope-making father in “You Can Keep One Thing”, to me, embodies the mystical, unknowable nature of most of our fathers.

I didn’t want to compare her to her brother, Michael Winter, so I won’t, but it is evident that these two inherited something that enables them to articulate character-defining features like no one but … each other: “When he chewed his sandwich she could see how the teeth were not part of him and had no sensitivity.” Every paragraph is blocked full with such microscopic attention to detail.

And I loved the characters too, she brings each one to life as well as any writer I’ve read. She whips out the most unexpected and spot-on sentences to illustrate them, and uses dialogue quite skillfully to further enliven them.  In my mind, there really is a handsy, juice-loving, and often incoherent Sandy Milandy out there, who “kept a perpetual glass of juice going. He drank so much of it Marianne was worried about the chemicals.”  And I’ll never forget the toothless, bun-loving Ms. Snellen.

Lastly, hats off to her publisher, Biblioasis, and their wonderful Metcalf-Rooke Award. Read the last two winners of this award too: Amy Jones’s What Boys Like (Salty Ink is about to say more there), and Rebecca Rosemblum’s Once (Rebecca isn’t an Atlantic Canadian, but damn she’s good.).

Keep Your Eyes Open For Kathleen’s Upcoming Novel, Annabel, This June, from Anansi.

The Artificial Newfoundlander is a fast-paced ride, a vibrant story, crackling with wit and adorned with an off kilter yet entirely realistic cast of characters. This is a great, gut-busting summer read, with a rare abundance of laugh-out-loud moments, thanks to the book’s likeably cheeky, amusingly over-contemplative protagonist.

Hugh Norman is a semi-disgruntled professor of English. Suddenly, and unannounced, his daughter barges in on him one day, her children in tow, fleeing her home in Vancouver, telling him she’s leaving her husband. It quickly becomes apparent that there’s more to her sudden, unexpected arrival than a dissolving marriage, and this subplot provides an engaging, humourous mystery angle to this novel, as Hugh tries to piece together why she’s just run across the country to his doorstep. There are calls to his house from “the incredibly rude woman.” He eaves drops when she calls and has “been able to rule out the following: a collections agency, an aggrieved wife, drug dealers, political parties, and angry landlady, a cult.”

Not long after his daughter arrives, his son-in-law — who happens to be a former student and drinking buddy of Hugh’s –  shows up just as confused as Hugh. This man, Foley, a well-meaning womanizer and somehow endearing halfwit, is one of the best likeable-fool characters you’ll come across. I found myself waiting for Foley moments as I read the book. Mathews is a masterful crafter of characters, each one of his many characters are alive and real and convincing and flawed and human. Foley showing up puts Hugh in an awkward place: though he’s never agreed with his daughter’s choice of a husband, he quite likes Foley. In fact, there was a mild jealousy when Emily took a romantic interest in Foley, and a suspicion her interest in Foley was out of spite (long story).

This engaging family dynamic and comic-mystery plotline is only one of many plotlines woven seamlessly together in this great novel. This is what makes the book shine. There’s an obvious benefit to a writer having a book with 4 or 5 plotlines: the reader doesn’t tire from a “slow” or linear plot. But not every writer can weave plotlines like Mathews has here. Jagged and jarring shifts can knock a reader out of the story, but that’s never the case with Mathews: his transitions are not only seamless, his storylines all play off each other. The other plotines include Hugh’s dealing with the at-times indignant, almost schoolyardish politics of the race for the head of the department (the players involved here provide yet another round of entertaining character squabbles). Hugh is a prof who doesn’t quite condone or fit in with academic hoopla, and is himself intrigued by and writing about an obscure novelist and embittered priest named Cleary, “ I am in a fanclub with one member.” Hugh’s research on and portrayal of Cleary, an enigmatic man presumed dead under suspicious circumstances (though his body was never found) – is yet another engrossing subplot, as is his rekindling of a relationship with Maureen Finnerty, another storyline that fleshes out the novel and Hugh’s character, and gives the book one of the funniest, most original gender-role dilemmas I’ve read. I won’t spoil it here.

While it is called the Artificial Newfoundlander, it succeeds — perhaps better than any other Newfoundland-set novel — in capturing contemporary St. John’s in terms of its vibrant, diverse arts scene, and that scene’s range of players: from eccentric social butterflies to its enigmatic reclusive artists. Who better to portray modern-day St. John’s than a transplant “come from away” teacher of creative writing like Hugh Norman (or Larry Mathews) with a fresh set of eyes? Whether it is the promising young filmmaker, Raissa McClouskey, who is too quick to flash her engagement ring and announce she is taken to all the men she assumes want her, or the Salingeresque writer-priest Cleary, Mathews serves up a cast as vibrant as modern day St. John’s.

I haven’t been this gut-busted by a novel since Ed Riche’s Rare Birds back in 2001. I enjoyed Hugh’s candid honesty and cerebral musings: it helps that the writing is witty and distinctive, and a pleasure to read. It’s the kind of book you lay down, and halfway through another task, find yourself wanting to pick back up, just to hear that Hugh guy again. That kind of narrative hook is invaluable, as are this novel’s pace and narrative construction. Mathews’ clever witty diction deserves applause, and so does his smooth, edgeless transition from one storyline to another. Each one is grounds for a novel in itself, but instead, each subplot is pared down, sharpened to a point and stitched into the other, and as a result, there is far less filler in this novel than most, and thus far more punch. Mathews’ constant wit, his unforgettable characters and his multi-layered plot prevent the story from growing stale and linear, as even the best of novels often do. It’ s a fun book and a quick read from a “searing and silver-tongued wit.” (That quote is from Mark Anthony Jarman’s backcover endorsement.)

- Named a Top Five Debut Novel of 2009 by The Globe & Mail!

-Listed in the Quill & Quire’s Best Books of 2009 edition!

- included in the National Post’s Best Books of the Year list!

- Shortlisted for the prestigious Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canada and Caribbean region)!

- Features the best precocial kid narrator of all time?

Amphibian has been out a year today: if you haven’t read it yet I sort of feel bad for you, or is it jealous of you? In any case, if you’ve missed out, Amphibian it is a perfect spring read: it is a sit and read in one sitting kind of book. Like many, I was a fan of the precocial-kid narrators in many huge books like Franky McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes but I am going to go right ahead and say that Carla Gunn’s lead role, Phin Walsh, is my favourite precocial child narrator of all time.

Phin Walsh is an ahead-of-his-years-and-peers Green Channel addict: a deeper thinker than his psychiatrist, with more fluid intelligence than his teacher (and “Prime Enemy Number One”) Mrs. Wardman. He’ll also vent at you in Gaelic if you cross him, and get away with it, because how many other kids and teachers speak it? He has a logical and rational contradiction to everything he is told in school, or at home, or by the psychiatrist thrust on him. His class had a guest speaker one day, who got them to put their thumbprints all over everything and told them they should feel good about themselves because no two thumbprints are the same, and that makes you special. Phin says, “I don’t know how that made us special, but I didn’t say anything. No two worms have exactly the same skin pattern, and nobody thinks they’re special.”

When Mrs. Wardman reveals the new class pet, a White’s tree frog, her and the rest of the class are ecstatic. But Phin rightfully sits there baffled, wondering what kind of fool buys a nocturnal class pet that will be asleep all day in class, and how could she possibly not have thought of that? (He also makes it his duty to save that frog and get it back to Australia.) When Mrs. Wardman gives the class a spelling test that asks, “Lions live in the J—–,” he calls her over to his desk and asks her if it was a trick question, since lions live in the Savannah and “there’s no J word for Savannah.” He’s told to just write jungle.

He knows all this because he is obsessed by and in love with the natural world, and very much consumed by the growing number of the world’s endangered species and the general state of the environment. To the point his mother — a well-wrought character herself — feels compelled to send him to a psychiatrist about his sleep-depriving eco-anxiety. The first thing his psychiatrist advises, is that his mother cut the Green Channel on him. (a symbolic statement, really: that’s how we adults deal with the environmental crisis.  Look away, ignore it, metaphorically change the channel.) His retort: “The Green Channel isn’t what’s making me worried! The extinction of animals is what’s making me worried!”

Gunn’s writing is both true to the way a precocial nine-year-old would see and speak of the world, but there is a fresh and assured diction in Amphibian that is a pleasure to read. There is a distinctive quality to the writing. Gunn’s effective use of constant humour has her readers laughing along, but this constant wit also spares the book any preachy or maudlin moments, and makes it accessible to those not so environmentally conscious as Phin. And it’s not all fun and wit and a message of environmental consciousness. The novel has its sad angles, like his parents’ seperation, the death of a family member, but Gunn scales mentions of these back to stray single sentences that jab you in your softspots when you aren’t looking. There is a calculated style and structure here, and that is the cause of all this book’s tremendous success.

Amphibian is in every way a success and pleasure to read: it is funny, well-written, features a fantastic memorable cast of characters, and a message that you aren’t beaten over the head with, and yet get totally struck by. It is hard to be entertaining, informative, topical, funny, and sad all in the same book. Gunn does it.

(Perk: In a non-obtrusive way: the book also enlightens you and enriches your knowledge of the natural world with a lot of tidbits, like why the spotted hyena is one of very few species in which the female is bigger than the male (she has to be able to stop him from eating her pups).

Ryan Turner, What We’re Made Of (Oberon, 2009)

Short fiction – Turner has been published in numerous journals, like Prairie Fire, Qwerty, and The New Quarterly.

- Shortlisted for the 2008 Metcalf-Rooke Award.

- (Note: A shorter version of this review appeared in the latest Atlantic Books Today.)

The opening line of Turner’s book immediately speaks to his strength as a writer. “[Julie Rossiter has] calves too big for the boots she wants.” A lesser writer would be more literal is describing Julie, more bland, would give us a paragraph-long description of her character and physique. This is where Ryan Turner excels: his honed eye for detail that lets him confidently shed all filler so that his stories are pure punch. His calculated style of writing serves up perfectly presented characters, and he skillfully captures the nuances in the fine threads that bond (or do not bond) his characters together. He delivers clever and calculated one-liners that say it all, and his one-liners give us more insight into a story — its characters and their relationships — than most writers could give us in a paragraph. This economy of words, his spare style, is what makes his writing remarkable, and a pleasure to read. That and how some of his more aphoristic lines beg to be read twice. Another clear strength here is his unobtrusive rendering of dialogue, and the catchy cadence and rhythm to the writing. It’s a style all his own, though comparisons to Burning Rock short fiction, namely Michael Winter, will be inevitable with lines like, “I’ve known her a month and I want a year to pass. I want time to reflect my devotion.”

All the stories in What We’re Made Of share the same protagonist, Benjamin Wallace, which lends a readability to the stories in that you get to know characters in the same way you would in a novel. Taken altogether, it could be said that What We’re Made Of  is a portraiture of a generation, or a segment of a the modern late-twenty-something generation. A generation caught between changing tides, a generation “less likely to know what a screwdriver is for than to have travelled the world, looking for meaning,” a generation severing the connection between human impulse and social constraints, and a generation with new issues and concerns.

There is a line in the opening story, Losing Teeth, “He used to say we’re the accumulation of a gazillion moments.” There’s truth to that, and those moments are kind of what this book is about, what is capturing. The basis of bonds between two people and the potency of passing moments. Turner deftly captures the essence of relationships, what bonds two people, or doesn’t. What lingers when two people separate. “I think of the corridors of ourselves we never travel. How the rooms are built but lights aren’t on.”

With What We’re Made Of, Ryan Turner goes beyond showing promise with his debut: he leaves you wanting more, soon. Short fiction is making its comeback, earning due respect as its own medium, it is being reinvigorated, and it is people like Ryan Turner who are doing that. I was dazzled as a writer, relating as a reader. In his author’s acknowledgements, he says, quote, “… for making me feel like I could actually be a writer with enough dedication and hard work. Let this be a first step.” It’s less like a first step, and more like an Olympic leap into what will be a well-regarded writing career. (if all was fair anyway. I hope all the right people take note of this debut.)

- 2009 Re-release of a Cormorant Bestseller

- Winner of the 2004 ReLit Award.

- A NOW Magazine top ten book of the year, and a finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction and Pearson Canada Readers’ Choice Book Award.

Still Life with June was, by page 9 or 10, clearly going to be of the best books I’d read all year. Before I’d finished it, it had become a plain favourite book of mine. It’s all there: great writing, a distinctive style, an engaging story told in a calculated way. Also, a key ingredient in the recipe for a great book, I’ve come to decide, is how memorable the book is. This book is in every way memorable. It is also unique in structure: there are hundreds of small chapters, some are pages long, some are random story-enhancing bits no longer than this: “The things I hate most are: 1.) middle-east violence 2.) hospital food 3.) Microsoft Word 6 4.) My father.”

Still Life with June pairs heavy subject matter with a comedic tone in a way that makes both the story and comedy more poignant. Greer masks the sadder aspects of this story with a comedic tone, so that the starker side of the story feels all the more potent in those moments when he chooses to haul off  that mask of comedy. In other words, this is dark subject matter outweighed by levity, except for the moments that matter. This is very effective. This novel is outright funny and downright grave: not something most writers could pull of so flawlessly.

In Cameron Dodds’ take on the world there are two types of people: “losers who know they are losers, and losers who don’t know they are losers.” Cameron, a small-time writer, considers himself a loser who knows he is a loser. He works at a Sally Ann drug and alcohol treatment centre, where he steals the file of Darryl Green, a recent suicide case, and gets so engrossed in the file he translates it into fictitious short stories and befriends the deceased’s sister: a Down Syndrome patient named June, who he regularly visits.

We get a hilarious dose of humour-infused, self-deprecation upfront to get to know the character. “I’m losing my hair. Each morning I stand in front of the bathroom mirror with a wooden ruler and measure from the bridge of my nose to my hairline. It recedes about a quarter of an inch every six months.” He gets into how he loves dried apricots, and although he’s allergic to them, he eats them anyway, despite the welts he gets: “If you didn’t know any better you’d probably think I was heavily into S & M.” And the next chapter is only two words: “I’m not.” By page six he is naked and unwillingly handcuffed to a bed by a man who, he explains, fits the profile of a serial killer.

More than anything, this is a novel about identity. Every single character is in denial about something, about who they are, and they are outright lying about who they are, to themselves and others, and in many cases, literally assuming other people’s identities. Cameron, the story’s main character, is a writer pretending to be anything it takes to collect material for stories — including befriending “losers who don’t know they are losers” in gay bars on Christmas day to get their sad stories for his writing. Another main character is a girl pretending to be a writer by outright faking her entire identity. No one is who they seem, or, no one really knows who they are, or, no one is satisfied with who they are. Except for his cat, Juxtaposition, or more affectionately, Juxta. Cameron is jealous of Juxta, wishing he could be his cat for a day and “glory in my sloth, without having to wonder who I am or what my life is about.” Juxtaposition, one of the coolest cats in CanLit history, acts as Greer’s muse for reflections on identity, and why we’re all so self-loathing these days. “My cat doesn’t hate herself. If you hate yourself you don’t spend two hours each day grooming with no chance of ever getting laid. And she doesn’t even know her parents [to blame everything on them.]” Without giving too much away about his brilliant, page-turner of an ending, Cameron quite literally gets lost looking for himself.

Very innovative and edgy, but not in that edgy-for-the-sake-of- it way, Still Life with June definitely deserved a 2009 re-issue and a new wave of appreciation so that people like me, who missed it the first time, can enjoy it this time. And, since it truly is one of those rare gems that begs a second read, people who enjoyed it last time can enjoy it again.  It is a Cormorant bestseller for very obvious reasons: it is an unforgettable and infectious novel. Few writers give us a book this memorable, re-readable, and original. It is screaming film adaptation, and has been optioned.

Come, Thou Tortoise (2009)

Jessica Grant

Knopf Canada

- Available in softcover March 9th!

- A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2009!

- Shortlisted from the 2009 Winterset Award and Amazon.ca’s First Novel Award!

- Winner of The National Post’s Canada Also Reads Competition!

 Pardon all the adjectives, but this books really is a fresh, innovative, unprecedented, unforgettable gem. Pardon the cliché but I mean it: There is nothing quite like this. The story, the tone, the characters,  the diction, the delivery: all Jessica Grant’s. It is also everything great about the fresh, ultra-modern diction of Burning Rock fiction. Grant’s crisp, accurate descriptions dance the story so vividly off the pages. “Her skin felt like an old elbow,” “Her brown hair makes a beaver’s tail down her back.” The story’s heroine, Audrey Flowers, sees and describes the world in a consistently fresh, unique way: “the wind was flappy,” or “Downtown is a bit smooshed. It takes Verlaine five tries to park the Lada,” or “Why did she name her horse [Rambo] after that sweaty, bullety Sylvester Stallone?”

“Bullety”; no one has ever used that adjective before, that apt neologism. And” flappy wind,” a virtually perfect-but-unused adjective for wind, so revealing of her character.  It is no wonder Michael Winter, a CanLit icon known for his attention to detail,  endorsed this novel with a plea, “Please —I beg you dear reader — read Jessica Grant. “

Nutshell summary: Audrey Flowers’ father is knocked into a coma just before Christmas (by a Christmas tree hanging out the back of someone’s truck) and she has to return to Newfoundland, leaving her pet tortoise behind with her friend, Chuck, a dejected player of small-not-big roles in Shakespeare plays. (The tortoise narrates every so many chapters, relaying his chaotic history of ownership and the demise of Audrey’s relationship with her deserting, rock-climbing ex.) Back at home, Audrey, obsessed with the game of Clue, and possibly suffering from a low IQ, ends up slowly piecing together a family mystery and the truth behind her ever-lasting pet mouse, all the while recapping her entire childhood with her unconventional, endearing family. The ending is one of those endings where it is past midnight, and you just want to sleep, but you can’t lay the book down.

As mentioned in her acknowledgements, it is a very “punny” novel.  There is a great sense of humour in the narration, in terms of obsessive references to the game of Clue, two  consistent catch phrases, an offbeat plot and its off-kilter delivery, and a plethora of puns . Random examples:  The narrator purposefully left the L out of her father’s obit, so it read Water Flowers, not Walter Flowers. Her father used to refer to the family unit as “The Bouquet,” (because their last name was Flowers). In the opening chapter, in one of the funniest scenes I’ve ever read, Audrey, in an act of delusional heroics,  gets herself into a predicament in which an air marshal is asking for his gun back through the bathroom door (and his last name just so happens to be Marshall). Even before that, we get the lines, “Winnifred is old, she might be three hundred. She came with the apartment. The previous tenant, a rock climber named Cliff …” (A rock climber named Cliff. And Cliff, by the way, referred to the ceiling as an overhang, because the walls and ceilings of his apartment were equipped with climbing holds, for when he wasn’t busy rappelling from the fire escape). Grant’s outwardly off-kilter novel works because it is balanced with a sadness not milked into melodrama like most writers would do. The offbeat nature of the book, and constant puns and wittiness aren’t exhausted or cheesy; instead they perfectly fuel what makes this novel an utterly unique gem. This is a book you will never forget. It helps that she portrays the wacky Flowers family in a believable and endearing manner. (Her live-in uncle Thoby has one arm longer than the other, for some reason, so he is obviously the one to change light bulbs or scrape ice from windshields.)

Also, it is okay that eight or nine of these chapters are narrated by Audrey’s pet tortoise, because Winnifred is one of the best characters of the year, and hilarious, and might do for the tortoise pet trade what Sideways did for wine? A quote to summarize all my raving, “Audrey’s brilliant. She’s hilarious. I could read about her all day. Same goes for the tortoise.” – The Globe & Mail.

Check out her renowned collection of short fiction as well: Making Light of Tragedy

The Wanton Troopers by Alden Nowlan (re-relased Reader’s Guide Edition)

Goose Lane (2009), 297 pages

Goose Lane recently re-released the legendary Alden Nowlan’s first novel, The Wanton Troopers, after discovering its missing last page. You can read about that unique story, as well as the remarkable life story of Alden Nowlan by clicking here. This re-released reader’s guide edition comes with features like a sincere afterword by David Adams Richards, and a 36-page long interview with Nowlan, that is quite honestly among my favourite author interviews I’ve ever read. The book is worth it for the interview alone.

The Wanton Troopers is a novel in line with of Wayne Johnston’s The Story of Bobby O’Malley or Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, except there is less humour and a more poetic prose. Troopers precedes them both and relies more heavily on the power of language and the irrevocable potency of moments. It should be noted up front that Nowlan was primarily a poet, a renowned poet. When you hear of a novel written by a poet, you expect a certain brilliance in the writing itself, and in the case of this novel, he follows through. There is a consistent attention to detail that boasts itself in the very opening line: “It was raining so hard that Kevin thought God must have torn a hole in the sky and let all the rivers of heaven spill upon earth. The cold spring rain hit the roof with the force of gravel.”

The backcover describes the novel very well: Kevin O’Brien is caught between heaven and hell, torn between the tenderness of his young, adulterous mother and the brutality of his work-gnarled, drunken father. Kevin’s world is unrelenting: bone-crushing poverty, bullying, his first adolescent yearnings, and the fire of sin. Yet, in Kevin’s imagination, there is hope.

It is in Nowlan’s capturing of moments, most notably the shared moments of peace and intimacy between Kevin and his mother, where this book shines. Brightly. As an example, speaking of his mother washing him, “The wind howled like a drowning beast. Inside, there was the warmth and light and music of his mother’s hands and body … he might have been part of her body. She washed him as she washed her own hands. He was, all of him, hers: not the smallest part of him belonged any longer to himself. And in this surrender, there was pervasive peace.” That is one of many passages of Kevin clinging to moments of tenderness and love in an otherwise hostile home, in an ensnaring town that breaks men like horses. And it is no coincidence that during these moments of shared peace and intimacy, his father is never around, or he pipes up to ruin the moment.  His father is always skilfully and intentionally portrayed with beastial imagery: always “roaring” or “glaring” or “growling” but never simply saying or asking, always described like a wretched animal — “Judd O’Brien’s arms were bludgeons, and his horny, yellow fingernails reminded Kevin of hooves.” This was in harsh contrast to his angelic mother and their shared, ethereal moments. “His relationship with his father attained its epitome through the strap,” and these violent scenes are the ones that linger. The ones that taint everything, as Kevin periodically despises himself and even his mother. “He hated her when she caressed him before his father, for he knew that Judd despised all caresses as symptoms of weakness.” 

But it’s the glimmer of resilience in this story, and the humanity of it, the real life story of Alden Nowlan, and rooting for alter-ego Kevin that resonates. Nothing captures this sentiment more than Kevin’s symbolic admiration, on pages 21 and 22, as he identifies with beaten horses. “Something in him responded to the secret light he saw in their eyes, the freedom and grace that could never be wholly destroyed by work or punishment but ended only with death.”

This novel  is tender, it’s bold, it’s beautifully written. It affects you in a very important way. It hurts to read; it’s a pleasure to read. It is honest and resonates as it cuts through to the core of humanity and the need for human connection and self-discovery in the least fertile of places.  That said, some readers will find that, in places, the novel loses momentum into a questionable digression. And, in parts, Kevin’s dated and ineffective dialogue of “Gee” and “Gosh”come off as weak, mismatched responses to pivotal, intense moments in the book.

Nowlan’s The Wanton Troopers combines the authenticity of autobiography with a born poet’s lush prose, and the effect is affecting.

Yes, I am being purposefully witty: February’s book of the month is February, but also because the softcover version just hit stores.

As I read February, I was overwhelmed with the sensation that I was, for the first time, reading the work of a fully evolved writer. In terms of bare-bones writing, in terms of sentence-level writing, and how well an author crafts a sentence to capture a moment in words: There is no one else in the country who can touch Lisa Moore’s elegant rendering of language. Lisa made her mark with Open, and Alligator got all the attention it deserved. But with February, she’s peaked. She’s distinticve, and what she does with language is nothing less than dazzling, and then there is her uncanny ability to inhabit every pore and sinew of her endearingly human characters, and project their stories up off the pages in the most meaningful ways, with her tender, visceral diction. What she does with language is pure art. Pure innovation. With all the right words and nuances, moments and memories are fleshed out and almost x-rayed, until the reader is made to experience her protagonist’s very core and consciousness. Through her rendering of the main character, Helen O’mara, I have felt the irrevocable and deflating loss of a spouse. Lucid is the word I am after, her scenes dance right off the pages and all over your heart. Especially when you have the chance to hear her read her own work. 

If my words aren’t enough, the backcover is graced by the following endorsement from the legendary Richard Ford:  ”Lisa Moore is an astonishing writer. She brings to her pages what we are always seeking in fiction and only find the best of it: a magnetizing gift for revealing how the earth feels, looks, tastes, smells, and an unswerving instinct for what’s important in life.” 

February is the story of Helen O’mara, a woman widowed and left to raise her children alone after she losses her beloved Cal the night of the Ocean Ranger disaster, Valentine’s Day, 1982. In no way does Moore exploit, sentimentalize, or overuse that real-life tragedy. Instead, with a truly shocking and core-penetrating skill, she shows us the effect of that loss on Helen. How and why, years later, her mind still trickles back to that ill-fated February. Structurally, February unfolds in a non-chronological order. Helen’s memories, her daily routines of present day life, her watching her grandchildren or helping her son cope with the reality of an estranged, impregnated fling are all happening at once. Moore’s non-linear narrative structure not only makes the book a more engaging read, it also captures how life really works, the reverberations of our past echoing in the present, often at random. Her memories come at random to pierce through the mundane chores of every day life. This is an important work, and perhaps the apex of CanLit, if not simply a shining example of what is meant by creative writing: sentences that evoke emotions in their reader; words strung together with an artful, calculated precision so that a reader feels what they’re reading.

 February earned its way onto numerous “best of 2009″ lists, most notably the  Quill & Quire’s and Globe and Mail’s.

Lovesongs of Emmanuel Taggart, Syr Ruus

Breakwater Books (2009),  248 pages

Syr Ruus’s Lovesongs of Emmauel Taggart is an off-kilter but ultimately insightful novel that will have its ideal audience reflecting on or relating to its universal story. It stars a well-wrought character, Emmanuel “M” Taggart, whose antics, at times far-fetched but always endearingly human, speak to the universal quest for meaning in modern life. Emmanuel, like far too many of us, is a man boxed in by cubicles and shackled by bad ties and to-do lists that leave no run for play, or possibly even identity. At times that can send a man into moments of introspection, or, in M’s case, a full-on, sad-funny breakdown. This book is a spotlight on a mid-life crisis, done in a fresh, fun way. Taggart does it all: small-scale road trips, new relationships, unfounded infatuations with perfect strangers, mind-numbing introspection, and like so many men in a time of self-examination,he questions the choice of a perfectly good partner like M’s wife, Emily, or, as he more affectionately calls her, “little m.” To quote the book, they call each other “Em & Em. Big M and little m. M&m.” (Aww…)

Considering the caliber of her writing, and the hefty thematic material she handles insightfully, it is hard to believe this is a debut novel. The perk of Lovesongs being a debut is that it takes chances and stretches the bounds of literary fiction in ways that all too often only a first novel dares do. Lovesongs is a well-written little gem, in a style all Ruus’s, that evokes all the senses, at times putting the reader in the character’s body, let alone his head. It’s a compelling, contemporary, and punchy style, without being trendy. It’s catchy and readable. It’s funny. It’s serious. Replete with much life wisdom that isn’t overly heavy-handed or opinionated, just deft and true, and is only occasionally out of context.

It is perfectly normal but tragically human to question your life from time to time, and in the case of Lovesongs of Emmanuel Taggart, it certainly makes for a good book, especially when the writer is one like Ruus, and the main character is a certified hypochondriac with more worries than problems. Syr Ruus plays with the big questions of life in this book, in a way that feels like she has the answers, but holds them back from her fumbling lead character, so that he has to come to the book’s fine closing revelation all his own, as we all do. We can’t change the world, Emmanuel Taggart, but we can change the way we look at it.

The title, by the way, is an homage to T.S Eliot’s epic and much anthologized 1915 poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”  click here to read it.)

Scrabble Lessons is deeply affecting and gorgeously written. As a writer, reading her is like holding on to fireworks. It’s a thrill to be so fondly jealous you never wrote these stories yourself. No detail is left blandly described, and it is all so fresh and vivid. Example: “The tears started, big fat drops cutting inside her cheekbones and taking the easier nose-side route,” and you know what she means. You know she sat back in her chair and saw all her scenes and never missed a thing in describing them; it’s like she’s writing from the inside out. Where most writers might say Gary was confused, or Gary was disoriented, she’d say “Gary felt like he’d stepped inside some weird foreign film, like he should be looking around for subtitles to make sense of it all.” Even each gesture is given a unique visual. For example: “She shook her head like there were flies buzzing around it” or “She held her fingers ruler straight.”

Take the opening story, “Scrabble Lessons.” The detail is there, she talks about the clinking sound of the tiles as she hears her mother and grandmother playing scrabble in another room, and describes everything in a way you see; she really puts you there with lines like: “Rob was two-handing his beer glass like it might get away from him.” And there is some sort of harsh, intentionally paradoxical contrast in many of the lines in this story: a lot of the most vivid violent sentences are played off so casually. Example: “Just about the time the steering wheel was punching through Dad’s chest, Mom was joining VELO to CITY, her V boldly claming the red square of a triple word score.” You get a juxtaposition of the violent, unfathomable death of her father laid over the mundane, everyday routines of her life, except this day, her father dies in a car accident and with these sentences stacked the way they are, you really get a sense of the narrator’s shock via Vryenhoek’s command of language and lingual wizardry. When her mother shares her scrabble wisdom, or lessons, is it not a metaphor for life, done in a subtle way for the deeper reader? A clever parallel between the game of scrabble and the game of life; the approaches to each.

I could make some half-apt and flattering comparisons, so that anyone reading this might get a feel for this book. I could say, “Scrabble Lessons is Lisa Moore’s short fiction meets Kathleen Winter’s,” but there’s something here that’s all Leslie Vryenhoek’s, and that’s what excited me the most. A new voice, and I love it. This is a perfect collection of short stories: punchy, top-notch creative writing that makes you feel something. Jammed in around all these skilfully constructed sentences is raw emotion you feel, seeping out through the words. These are stories you feel as a reader and admire as writer.