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Category Archives: News
The Exquisite Cyclops
“The Exquisite Cyclops,” a new personal essay by Kathy Page, will appear in the next issue of Canadian magazine of ideas and culture, Geist. https://www.geist.com/writers/about
Always a versatile writer, perhaps best known for her fiction (titles include Dear Evelyn, a Writers’ Trust Prize winner, and two Giller–nominated short fiction collections, Paradise & Elsewhere and The Two of Us), Kathy Page now faces the challenge of living with Parkinson’s Disease. The ability to create fictional predicaments has abandoned her (or she it), replaced by a desire to explore and chronicle the physical realities, philosophical perplexities and many ironies of her new situation. “Which is,” she dryly remarks, “more interesting than you might expect. “The Exquisite Cyclops” is the second part of that ongoing project to be published, following “That Other Place,” which first appeared TNQ https://tnq.ca/ and was selected by Mireille Silicoff as a Best Canadian Essay of 2023, Biblioasis 2023.
Off the Record
Robert Weirsema reviews Off the Record in the Toronto Star
“Metcalf’s latest project, the anthology OFF THE RECORD brings together six of the writers with whom Metcalf has worked, in what becomes a dazzling collection of memoir and fiction. If Caroline Adderson, Kristyn Dunnion, Cynthia Flood, Shaena Lambert, Elise Levine, and Kathy Page aren’t quite household names, OFF THE RECORD is a powerful argument for just what a mistake that oversight is.
John Metcalf, who celebrated his 85th birthday on November 12, is the rarest of commodities: an editor who has gained fame in a position which, usually, goes unremarked and unheralded. Also a noted writer in his own right, Metcalf worked for more than fifteen years at publishers Porcupine’s Quill, and twenty years at Biblioasis; in that time he has helped shape Canadian literature for successive generations.
Metcalf’s latest project, the anthology “Off the Record,” brings together six of the writers with whom Metcalf has worked, in what becomes a dazzling collection of memoir and fiction. If Caroline Adderson, Kristyn Dunnion, Cynthia Flood, Shaena Lambert, Elise Levine, and Kathy Page aren’t quite household names, “Off the Record” is a powerful argument for just what a mistake that oversight is.
Each section begins with an autobiographical essay, of sorts, from the featured writer. Shaped by Metcalf’s “continuing questions,” the editor has stepped in to remove any evidence of those interviews. “To leave in the questions once they’d been answered,” he writes in the book’s foreword, “seemed to me rather like leaving up unsightly scaffolding when the building was finished so I removed them all enabling the responses to flow as seemingly unprompted narrative.
That decision, to strip away the artifice and leave the author’s voice to stand on its own, is a hallmark of Metcalf’s editorial approach. Here, it results in a succession of powerful personal narratives, ranging from each writer’s childhood experiences (generally unhappy, often powerfully conflicted, which likely doesn’t come as too much of a surprise) to their early successes (often with a nod to Metcalf’s role as editor), and including insights into their processes, their perspectives on writing, and their interpretation of their role as writers.
The experience of reading each of these stories after reading their paired essay offers a uniquely insightful experience, as one can trace the impact of each writer’s recounted histories and insights within the fiction itself (“death of the author” be damned). Kathy Page’s unprepared immigration from England to Canada, for example, accounts for what she refers to, in her essay, as why it has taken her “a while to get to the point of tackling Canadian settings and characters” in her fiction. “Low Tide,” the story which follows, demonstrates a bridging of those two worlds: it’s a story set, largely, on the sea and in a light-keeper’s cottage, its setting bringing to mind Canada’s west coast while its concerns and voice resonate with Page’s English upbringing…”
Kathy Page’s “That Other Place” selected for Best Canadian Essays 2023
This personal essay about a devastating diagnosis and its consequences was first published in TNQ and has enjoyed hand to hand circulation since. Now available in this selection of best Canadian essays chosen by Mireille Silcoff and published by Biblioasis.
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=592431572885397&set=pb.100063556781453.-2207520000
Kathy Page and Caroline Adderson facilitated retreat/workshop
Coming up in September 2023 at Hollyhock: an opportunity to learn how to turn memory into material and write more resonantly and empathetically.
That Other Place, a personal essay by Kathy Page
Trees
Forthcoming in April 2022 is Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees, an anthology edited by Christine Lowther. Two poems by Kathy Page are included, among work by ninth Parliamentary Poet Laureate Louise Bernice Halfe-Sky Dancer, GG winner Arleen Paré, Canadian icon bill bissett, Griffin Poetry Prize winner Eve Joseph, her husband ReLit Award winner Patrick Friesen, decorated cultural redress giant Joy Kogawa, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Harold Rhenisch, Jay Ruzesky, John Barton, Kate Braid, Kim Trainor, Kim Goldberg, Pamela Porter, Patricia and Terence Young, Russell Thornton, Sonnet L’Abbé, Susan McCaslin, Susan Musgrave, Tom Wayman, Trevor Carolan, Yvonne Blomer, Zoe Dickinson and the late Pat Lowther. The link includes the full list of contributors and contents: https://caitlin-press.com/our-books/worth-more-standing/
Alphabet in Germany
Alphabet by Kathy Page is now available in German. Translator Beatrice Fassbender, publisher Verlag Klaus Wagenbach. https://www.wagenbach.de/buecher.html
“Strangers” by Kathy Page in Five Dials 55
Read “Strangers” by Kathy Page, along with writings by Alain de Botton, Jay Griffiths, Nikita Lalwani, Craig Taylor, and others in Five Dials 55, On Love. Visit https://www.penguin.co.uk/five-dials-archive
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Dear Evelyn in Germany
Dear Evelyn has been translated by Beatrice Fassbender and is published by Verlag Klaus Wagenbach of Berlin as All unsere Yahre. The author/translator tour begins in Frankfurt on 19th and 20th of October and continues via Heidelberg, Dusseldorf and Berlin.
Dear Evelyn Wins Butler Prize
Almost a year after receiving the Rogers Writers’ trust Prize for Fiction, Dear Evelyn was awarded the City of Victoria Butler Prize on October 9th 2019.
From Jane van Koeverden at CBC: Kathy Page’s novel Dear Evelyn has won the 2019 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize, a $5,000 award given to the best book of fiction, nonfiction or poetry by an author from the Greater Victoria area.
The Victoria Children’s Book Prize, another $5,000 award, was given to Sterling, Best Dog Ever by Aidan Cassie.
Page’s historical novel tells the story of a marriage as it unravels over seven decades. Harry, a poetry lover, and Evelyn, the ambitious daughter of a drunk, get married shortly before Harry is deployed overseas during the Second World War.
The novel continues after the war’s end, as parenthood and career pressures widen the fissures in Harry and Evelyn’s uneasy marriage.
Dear Evelyn was inspired by the love letters Page’s father sent to her mother during the war.
“They were very passionate, emotional letters. I was struck by the huge distance between this beginning and where things had ended up in their 70-year-long marriage,” said Page in an interview with CBC Books in October 2018.
Page won the 2018 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for Dear Evelyn.
Link to CBC content including “Kathy Page on how to write great fiction that’s based on real life.”
The Story of My Face new edition
The Story of My face, the first of Kathy Page’s novels to appear in Canada is now available again in a new edition from Biblioasis. “A marvellously well-crafted book, subtle and measured yet with the powerful tug of deep and dangerous water…” Sarah Waters.
Dear Evelyn nominated for the City of Victoria Butler Prize
Dear Evelyn has been nominated for the City of Victoria Butler Prize. Nominees are as follows:
Robert Amos (non-fiction) – E.J. Hughes Paints Vancouver Island (TouchWood Editions)
Lorna Crozier (poetry) – God of Shadows (McClelland & Stewart)
Esi Edugyan (fiction) – Washington Black (Patrick Crean Editions)
Darrel J. McLeod (biography) – Mamaskatch: A Cree Coming of Age (Douglas & McIntyre)
Kathy Page (fiction) – Dear Evelyn (Biblioasis)
The nominees will be celebrated and the winner announced at a Gala in Victoria on October 9th beginning at 7:30 at the Union Club in Victoria. Tickets available. Full details here.
A Lovely Pairing: Dear Evelyn and An American Marriage
Donna Bailey Nurse compares Dear Evelyn and An American Marriage on The Next Chapter, and talks to Shelagh Rogers about both novels, which feature passionate love letters, separation, and women who step out of their marriages….
German translation of Dear Evelyn: All unsere Jahre
Dear Evelyn has been translated by Beatrice Fassbender and will be published in the fall of 2019 by Verlag Klaus Wagenbach of Berlin. Details of author tour 18-23rd October to follow.
Chronochasmus!
A thoughtful article about the way Dear Evelyn moves through its ninety year time span:
http://donlepan.blogspot.com/2019/02/gaps-in-story-kathy-pages-dear-evelyn.html
Dear Evelyn an Ethel Wilson Prize Nominee
Dear Evelyn is one of five nominees for the 2019 Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction. The award is one of the BC and Yukon Book Prizes and the winner will be announced in May.
Kathy Page on Dear Evelyn with Sheryl MacKay on CBC’s North by Northwest
Kathy spoke with Sheryl Mackay on CBC’s North by Northwest in early December. Here’s the episode. The interview begins at 02:09:03
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/shows/north-by-northwest
Dear Evelyn on Books of the Year Lists
The Literary Hoarders’ end of year review:
Harry and Evelyn are 1 in Most Memorable Characters, the book is 3 in Most Beautifully Written Book, 5 in Best Books Read and 5 in Top CanLit….Even the jacket gets an honourable mention. Thanks, Penny! http://www.literaryhoarders.com/pe…/2018-year-end-in-review/
A Globe 100 Best Book of the Year:
“Although the historical events of its backdrop, the Second World War in particular, clearly influence the family’s lives, the story remains personal and intimate in focus. What this painstaking and painful account of a marriage relies on, as much as its period detail, is its precise ruminations on the nature of affection and resentment, and on how love can persist in the face of cruelty.” https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/article-the-globe-100-our-favourite-books-of-2018/
One of five Quill & Quire Critics’ Corner Books of the Year:
“Kathy Page’s Dear Evelyn, a beautifully crafted portrait of a marriage, is definitely one of my books of the year. The novel depicts its characters’ journey from love to alienation with ruthless clarity, but it also fosters the kind of tenderness toward them that we all hope to find in our own imperfect lives.” https://quillandquire.com/omni/books-of-the-year-2018-critics-corner/?fbclid=IwAR3bOQtfaO4cpWNRX5KhHtqgM1IaE-B3icOkmFkF6oDzN9-i7Uzmy3GMROQ
CBC Books Winter Reading List: 15 Canadian Books to Read This Season:
“Winner of the 2018 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, Dear Evelyn is the story of a war-time marriage that withers over the course of 70 years. Harry Miles is an English poetry lover who falls in love with Evelyn, the ambitious daughter of an alcoholic, before shipping off to serve in the Second World War. “ https://www.cbc.ca/books/the-cbc-books-winter-reading-list-15-canadian-books-to-read-this-season-1.4914771?fbclid=IwAR3Vst4C5vq8pVoKN3BflDpIvUsyI4rscG6U61iJLpKGZ47aR_qWEFcKbow
The Toronto Star’s Top Ten Books of 2018:
“Page won the Rogers Writers’ Trust fiction prize for this book, an historical fiction novel that was at once deeply personal, based, as it was, on her own parents’ letters, and that touched a profound emotional chord…. ”
Kirkus Best Fiction of 2018
“A searching, and touching, depiction of the places where married lives merge and the places where they never do.” https://www.kirkusreviews.com/issue/best-of-2018/section/fiction/?page=9&fbclid=IwAR0l3EF90YcoUg7ApGnTjivEFO0fcoFvPgF1lQAKA6gzFkzkO-39WmM09vc
49th Shelf Books of the Year 2018:
“Kathy Page has written a story of a marriage that spans the time period between the WWI and WWII and after, a lifetime of this couple, Evelyn and Harry, whose characters are so well drawn that you feel you are inside of their story. Their relationship just barely gets started when Harry, after enlisting, is sent off to fight in Tunisia. And we follow Harry there through his letters home to Evelyn. This is not a perfect marriage, but this is a perfect telling of it!”
Winnipeg Free Press Top of the Pile:
“Dear Evelyn is a smartly written portrait of a 70-year marriage between Harry and Evelyn set against a backdrop of a world war and the decades that came after. Sometimes sweet and sometimes painful, it is likely to leave readers with a tear in their eye.”
https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/entertainment/books/top-of-the-pile-502720622.html
Kathy Page at Portfolio reading series in Nanaimo Nov 26
Dear Evelyn by Kathy Page is one of 15 great titles on CBC’s winter reading list
Dear Evelyn awarded the Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize for Fiction 2018
Dear Evelyn is the winner of the 2018 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
The jury citation reads:
“Kathy Page’s Dear Evelyn tells the tender and unsettling story of working-class Londoner Harry Miles and the ambitious Evelyn Hill who fall in love as the world around them goes to war. What initially begins as a familiar wartime love story morphs into a startling tale of time’s impact on love and family, as well as one’s complex search for personal meaning and truth. By integrating themes that are universally understood by readers and skilfully crafting endearing characters that surprise and delight, kathy page has created a poignant literary work of art. The result is a timeless page-turning masterpiece.”
Information about the Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize
VIDEO: Dear Evelyn Writers’ Trust video
VIDEO: BT interview the morning after the awards
Macleans: Here’s the the prize for facing parents and siblings head-on
Dear Evelyn is a Kirkus Book of the Year 2018
Dear Evelyn is a Kirkus Book of he Year 2018, and she is in good company.
BT interview Kathy Page on Dear Evelyn after winning the Rogers Writers’ Trust Award for Fiction
Dear Evelyn in CBC Books and Maclean’s Magazine
Dear Evelyn in Maclean’s magazine :
https://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/rogers-writers-trust-spotlight-on-kathy-page/
HOW I WROTE IT — Kathy Page interviewed about Dear Evelyn in CBC Books
BOOKS TO WATCH FOR in CBC Books
Dear Evelyn by Kathy Page reviewed in Guardian UK
Elizabeth Lowry reviews Dear Evelyn in The Guardian: “Page’s eighth novel is many things: a love story, a coming-of-age story, and a brilliantly evocative sketch of Britain in the 20th century…..
Its picture of Evelyn herself is authentically troubling, a study of a woman in the grip of terrible compulsions. The warning signs are there from the start, in her panicky housekeeping (“things were much better after she’d spoken with Harry about the accumulation of books and the fussy, old-fashioned effect it gave a room, especially since his book jackets did not match”), her rigid washing and vacuuming schedules, her obsession with hunting down missing pillowcases. Later she is prone to sudden explosions and to punitive silences that last for days: “There was a line between strong-minded and outrageous that Evelyn now crossed with increasing frequency.” Harry, going into contortions to pacify her, says that while “he could bend, she could not”, but Page is after a darker truth. Under the cover of a domestic history, she has ambushed us with a chilling account of a disordered personality. Evelyn, trapped in her trophy house, is every bit as much a casualty of her time and place as her browbeaten husband. Page’s measured, intelligent novel treads nimbly around this bleak terrain.”
Full text here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/12/dear-evelyn-kathy-page-review
Dear Evelyn is a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Award for Fiction
Dear Evelyn is a finalist for the 2018 Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize for Fiction. The winner will be announced on 7th November in Toronto. Kathy Page’s fiction has previously been nominated for the Giller Prize (twice), and she has been a finalist for the Governor General’s and ReLit Awards.
Evelyn, Harry and the Sick Rose
From the Ormsby Review: Dear Evelyn, the 8th novel by Kathy Page of Salt Spring Island, concerns the courtship, love, and marriage of Harry Miles and Evelyn Hill from the tumultuous early days of the Second World War to their deaths decades later. I know of no contemporary writer who deals so convincingly with love,” writes Paul Headrick “Page consistently dramatizes the ways in which the feelings of intimate couples are puzzling mixtures of hope, lust, genuine caring, resentment, politics, and much else.”
Full text here (does reveal plot)
Frankie does time travel
I began work on Frankie Styne and the Silver Man in Norwich, in 1990, and it was inspired by both my interest in monsters and my living situation at the time: a terraced house, as it is called in England (row housing), with very thin walls. Most of these houses were built in the late nineteenth century as housing for railway workers and other working class people. Little thought was given to privacy, and just a single course of bricks and a skin of plaster divides one home from the next. I could hear a great deal of my neighbours’ lives – and they mine, no doubt, though I was fairly quiet, due to writing so much. It was sometimes hard to reconcile what I had overheard with our polite exchanges in the street or over the fence. I began with the characters, and they, especially former runaway Liz and her baby Jim, came quickly to life.
I plotted out the basics of the story on flip chart paper. Once I began to write (on my Amstrad PC with its grey screen and blurry green type) the story unfolded at a fair pace. I was soon deeply into themes that have always interested me: how people use language to connect (or don’t), how the mainstream culture deals with outsiders, what makes us human, the complications of sexuality, how we depend on stories to make sense of our lives, and so on. I had a lot of fun writing Frankie Styne. It’s a literary novel, but there are elements of horror and touches of speculative fiction throughout, and, to my mind at least, large doses of a dark humour. I write in both a realistic and a more fantastic mode, and in this novel, I was able to combine both. I was also able to pay homage to Mary Shelley and, less directly, Fay Weldon, two literary heroines of mine. Frankie Styne came out in the UK in 1992 to great reviews, but quickly vanished in the publishing upheavals of the time. I always wished it had had more of a life and so I was both delighted and just a little apprehensive when, over twenty years later, Bilbioasis proposed to publish it for the first time in Canada and the USA.
This meant that I had to read it. Reading my own books is something I, like many authors, tend to avoid. By the time a novel is complete, I virtually know the text by heart and am heartily sick of it. The passing of time helped with this. I read Frankie Styne and the Silver Man, and even though (or perhaps because) I am in by now in many ways a different person to the one who wrote it, I did enjoy it. Still, I had to ask myself whether it was it still relevant, and did it matter that the characters use landlines and watch television, that a crucial scene would have been different if Viagra had been invented, and so on? How much to revise? I’d written this novel, which features a mother and baby, before having children of my own, and while it was mostly well imagined, there were places where I had things to add, and there were several important scenes I wanted to improve, but I left the era and as it was, and decided I was not the best judge of the book’s continued relevance.
Early reviews, see below, have answered that question. I’m delighted that Frankie Styne and the Silver Man is now finding such enthusiastic twenty-first century Canadian and American readers.
Frankie Styne and the Silver Man is dark and funny, painful and uplifting, marvellously satirical but never cynical, and thoroughly invested with good faith. Kathy Page is a marvel. This is the very best book that I’ve read in ages, and if I read another half as good in the next few months, that will constitute an extraordinary literary year… Read more: http://picklemethis.com/2016/02/10/frankie-styne-and-the-silver-man-by-kathy-page/
“Page (Alphabet, 2014, etc.) builds layers of meaning into her exquisite writing. Her favored themes are here—the stark dichotomies of life, the power of language, the way the social system tries and fails to help people, and how saving grace can come from unseen places.” Kirkus starred reveiw
“Frankie Styne and the Silver Man by Kathy Page is a fantastic novel. Character driven, claustrophobic, and deeply weird, it has a haunting, discomfiting quality that lingers with a reader….” Read more: http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2016/02/08/kathy-pages-frankie-styne-excellent-oddball.html
“Frankie Styne offers a terrific showcase of Page’s singular style (with its attractive high-low mixture of genres), quirky unexpected invention, and attention to the nuances of psychology. Mere words on a page, her creations linger in the mind long after the reading’s done….” Read more: Frankie Styne in Vancouver Sun
“Five years before The Post-Modern Prometheus aired, Page published her own twist on the Frankenstein story in her native Britain (Page moved to B.C’s Salt Spring Island in 2001), now published in Canada for the first time. In her novel, Page draws on similar pulp material – monsters; aliens; an unhappy, childless marriage – and takes her characters to equally dark places. What’s different is how Page’s monsters display a more complex relationship between inner and outer ugliness and find redemption in responsibility…. Frankie Styne still holds up almost 25 years later.” http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/review-new-fiction-from-gemma-files-kathy-page-and-more/article28743088/
“Kathy Page’s imaginative and crisply written Frankie Styne and the Silver Man is one of the creepiest novels I have ever read.” Largehearted Boy
“An amazing and unique read from beginning to end, Frankie Styne & the Silver Man by Kathy Page is a deftly crafted work of truly memorable literary fiction that is especially recommended for community and academic library Contemporary Fiction collections.” Midwest Book Review Bookwatch
Kathy Page at Banff Writing Studio Spring 2018
For some time now I’ve had to turn down requests to work with other writers on their MS, but here is a wonderful opportunity: Banff Writing Studio. I’ve taught at Banff before and can’t wait to return: dedicated students, gorgeous environment, and no distractions—other than the great hikes and delicious meals.
“This program is designed to offer the freedom of unstructured time in accordance to each individual participant’s needs and desired outcomes, in addition the opportunity to work with our esteemed faculty mentors during the five-week program.
Writing Studio also features a weekly reading series, as well as one-on-one sessions with a voice and relaxation instructor to help participants develop their public reading skills.”
https://www.banffcentre.ca/programs/writing-studio
Reading and Workshop at Blackburn Lake
As part of Canada 150 celebrations at Blackburn lake, Salt Spring Island, on 2nd July at 10 am, Kathy Page will be reading from her story “We the Trees” and and talking about the inspiration for the story, as well as offering a nature-writing workshop. This is part of a two day program of arts and nature events organized by the Salt Spring Island Conservancy. All welcome, free event.
Stories of Intimacy: Amy Reiswig interviews Kathy Page for Focus Magazine
http://focusonline.ca/node/1124
Kathy Page’s new collection of short stories explores the transformative power of one-to-one encounters.
IN THE GLOBAL VILLAGE, our world has grown so big. Our care and concern is called on by people from around the planet, and we are mentally and emotionally stretched in endless different directions. Locally, too, as Focus showcases, there’s no shortage of capital “B” Big issues to be aware of and involved in. Being engaged is one of the great parts of living in a vibrant community like Victoria, but it’s sometimes easy to lose one’s boundaries and bearings amid the tide of so much outward pull.
So I found it incredibly refreshing, especially as I was planning my wedding, to take time to breathe deeply within the covers of Kathy Page’s new book The Two of Us (Biblioasis, September 2016). In this collection of short stories, Page invites us to settle into a series of closer relationships, more homey twosomes, and to expand our awareness inside that smaller and deceptively simple dynamic by questioning who we see, who we are and what we might become.
Tucked away on a winding Salt Spring Island road, Page’s peaceful home is the perfect spot to talk about (and experience) the power of the one-to-one. Attention focuses, stories unfold, and the pattern of listening and responding teaches you something about the other and yourself. That transformative kind of intimate interaction is at the heart of Page’s stories in this 200-page collection, each of which relates to what she calls “the most fundamental thing”: the relationship between the self and another. Whether it’s a father and daughter exploring a cave, a visiting professor negotiating culture and communication with her contact in a foreign country, a hairdresser and client who is facing cancer, a young girl and a dog “big as a wish,” spouses, squatters, strangers, Page’s characters find themselves in pairs—some momentary and some lifelong—in which there is an opportunity to change one another and be changed.
“How relationships work fascinates me,” Page tells me: “How a relationship is structured and built, and what that does to you.” Originally from Bromley, England, Page has published seven novels, including a Governor General’s Award finalist and nominee for the Orange Prize, as well as the short story collection Paradise & Elsewhere, nominated for the 2014 Giller Prize.
But she has also, she says with a smile, had to improvise her day job and is trained as a carpenter and joiner as well as a counsellor and psychotherapist—drawing on an interest to know how she came to be who she was. She has worked in settings that vary from Vancouver Island University to Estonia, a men’s prison and a therapeutic community for drug users. What she has developed is a sharp-eyed and open-hearted curiosity about self and others.
“I’m interested in difficult characters, in when I run up against a difficult person. I find it surprising,” she explains with a lock of her intense but serene sky-blue eyes. “I’m interested to explore them without judgment.” That non-judgmental curiosity not only saved her from resentment when partnered with a somewhat stony carpentry mentor back in England but has made her a writer that pairs probing insight with gentle but direct handling.
For instance, she tunes into the kind of prickly honesty of thoughts and feelings many of us would feel guilty admitting and would never have the guts to say out loud. She presents an older woman who both loves and is bored—even appalled—by her husband and his now slowness in just putting on his shoes. And a husband, awaiting his wife’s genetic testing results, asks himself: “What if there is bad news? How will I be for her? What will I do, what will I say to her as she turns to me?” He wonders if he will change himself into what is needed or just run.
Page reminds us of the simple but important truth that we are mystery. We are always more than one thing at a time, and who we are and how we get there isn’t visible at the surface. “From the outside, no one would guess any of this, not in a thousand years,” one young man thinks while reflecting on his various abilities. In another story, a nervous, tongue-tied man turns out to be a surprising lover—“in the flesh, so articulate.” In a short two-pager, a child considers dragonfly nymphs, how “inside, they produced glittering wings, lungs, and enormous eyes” before splitting their skin and emerging new. She wonders: “Suppose we were just the beginning of something else?”
Skills, sorrows, incredible transformations—Page reveals the hidden and encourages us to look for it, to look differently at the people in front of us or beside us in our own lives, to understand, to forgive, and to wonder about our own new beginnings. A trip into her world is, as one of her characters says, “a day for seeing things.”
Sometimes, Page explains, she begins with just a person or a predicament, other times with something as simple as a staircase. “With short fiction you can improvise,” she says. “It’s freeing. Novels sweep you up in momentum. Short fiction is more like a plunge into the lake” where, Page hopes, you come up and out with a bit of a shock. “You can then sit back and keep the whole thing in your mind.”
Her swimming image recalls a description of free diving in the book’s final story, centred on a swim coach and his prized protégé—a description that applies perfectly to Page’s own writing: “Depth is about the water pushing in on you and separating you from the familiar.” Page’s skill lies in separating us from the familiar by taking us deep into the everyday, making the seemingly typical or unremarkable newly remarkable, from the clink of milk bottles against a step to the slightly moldy smell of damp summer towels and the lake’s response to its swimmers: “The thick green water breaking into golden streaks and swirls with each dive, then resealing itself, perfect each time.”
“All those things suggest human life,” Page says passionately, “and every human life is full of stories. Everywhere you look or listen, there’s a whole rich story.”
A plunge into the intimacy of The Two of Us, Page hopes, helps readers to feel they’re in a different place in the end, even if it’s just a change in what we’re able to notice as we come back up for air ready again for the wider world—“more alive,” she says, “and aware.”
Newly married writer, editor and musician Amy Reiswig is extra appreciative of having a new perspective on the power of pairs.
The Two of Us a Best Book of 2016
GLOBE and MAIL FICTION
THE TWO OF US
BY KATHY PAGE
“One of the most talented short-story writers working today delivered yet another knockout collection that is both darkly funny and terribly sad.”
The Writers’ Trust Best Books of 2016 recommended by Canadian writers
QUILL & QUIRE
Kathy Page
Biblioasis
Following her 2014 collection of fantastical tales, Paradise and Elsewhere, Kathy Page’s newest story collection is notable first as a demonstration of the author’s remarkable versatility. But The Two of Us stands on its own merits: a group of emotionally resonant, poignant examinations of life and love and – most piercingly – death. Page is a highly skilled miniaturist, capable of pulling off powerful effects by way of simple (though never simplistic) prose and a keen eye for human fallibility and ambiguity. –S.B.
Quill & Quire Books of the Year
The Walrus Best Books of 2016
Canadian authors pick their favourite reads
Sonnet L’Abbé
On my bedside table are the books I’m dying to finish when I’m done marking: Kathy Page’s Giller-longlisted The Two of Us, Susan Juby’s Leacock-prize-winner Republic of Dirt, and Kamal Al-Solaylee’s truth-to-power memoir, Brown.
Psychologically rich & cinematic in the best way, the sweet agony of connection
This review of The Two of Us ran in the Ottawa Citizen and the Vancouver Sun, probably elsewhere, too.
“Word is, the publishing industry (a business sector conscious of market demand) doesn’t invest much in, or encourage, short story collections. Alice Munro-like exceptions exist, of course, but — word is — that literary genre is regarded as a money pit. In a Walmart world, apparently, any volume of short stories is artisanal, a hand-crafted labour of love: those who seek it out will cherish it, but the majority of fiction readers desire the engagement or satisfaction or dollar value that only novel-length storytelling is thought to bring.
Based on the evidence of Kathy Page’s The Two of Us and Clea Young’s Teardown, though, someone’s mistaken. These collections, 28 stories representing untold hours of art-making effort on their authors’ parts, invite us into captivating worlds. In ten-page allotments, admittedly, but still. Technically accomplished, they’re immersive, emotionally involving (the proverbial laughter through tears), and insightful.
If you’re a short story reader already, here’s another pair to seriously consider. If you’re not, maybe considering giving them a taste. They’re way more satisfying than kale.
For The Two of Us Salt Spring Island resident Kathy Page selected pieces that focus on pairs. Psychologically rich and cinematic in the best way, they showcase Page’s range of interests, clever setting choice, and singular eye.
Usually taking place in the U.K. (where Page once resided), the stories capture assorted moments in time. For instance, just four pages, “Johanna” features the reminiscences of a man whose philosophy decades earlier had been “love often” and “don’t count on me.” Settled now, he wonders if he’d want to meet one of the children he sired. Not quite two pages, “Daddy” relates just an instant in the day of a girl who is about to begin a caving adventure with her father.
Some stories envision intersecting strangers. A lovely scenario, “The Last Cut” portrays a hairdresser shaving the head of a last-minute client, a woman with cancer who then asks for his help in choosing the perfect hat.
Page often examines familial and romantic relationships. “The Perfect Day” follows shifting allegiances between interchanging pairs: a daughter taking her ailing elderly father to a historical landmark with her waspish mother in tow. Her vow — “I intend to keep smiling and move on through the kind of day I want us all to have” — proves difficult to uphold. That story twins with “The House on Manor Close” and “Dear Son,” where the subtle tensions and evolved dynamics of adult children with elderly parents are portrayed with both humour and finesse.
Showcasing lovers — squatters; worried expectant parents with problem DNA; former friends with benefits; an obese couple struggling with prejudice; and a marriage on the verge — Page hints at the myriad possible trajectories any romance might take. Altogether Page offers a master class in fun with numbers, in this case two. She has been longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize for this collection… “
Brett Josef Grubisic, read in the Vancouver Sun.
It’s also a great pleasure to see this student review in the McGill daily
http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2016/10/the-sweet-agony-of-connection/
To quote from it: “Sweet Agony is one of the shortest stories from the collection. Page proves that you sometimes don’t need to write a very detailed and long story to describe a loving relationship and evoke an emotional response. It describes two lovebirds making love on a hot day of summer while no one’s home. The story evokes the feeling of nervousness, confusion and awkwardness surrounding being intimate with one’s childhood crush.”
The Two of Us Globe Review
Short fiction does sometimes garner short shrift in terms of review coverage. It’s a huge pleasure then, to read Steven W. Beattie’s review of The Two of Us for the Globe, which takes the time to explore one of the stories in depth, mentions their “potent” emotional impact, and at the same time defends the genre.
“…Page’s ability to convey large swaths of emotion in just a few simple gestures; she runs circles around authors who work twice as hard for half the reward.”
Here it is, online: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/review-kathy-pages-the-two-of-us-and-sex-and-death-a-new-anthology-of-short-fiction/article32283064/
A Good Start: The Two of Us nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize
It’s over a week since I heard from Dan Wells at Biblioasis that my short story collection, The Two of Us, had been short-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. It was a delicious surprise and is a great honour and, but since it happened, I’ve been too busy to post here, and have only been only shocked into action by the Giller Prize tweeting an invite to my website yesterday. This is rather like having your parents visiting unannounced, and a bit of belated house-keeping seems in order, so here I am, – delighted, too, with the first review from Quill and Quire: http://www.quillandquire.com/review/the-two-of-us/
My previous collection of stories, Paradise & Elsewhere was long-listed for the same prize in 2014. The two books are very different, so this adds to the pleasure of the current nomination in that I feel both sides of my writing personality and interests have been in some way endorsed. It’s also great to be part of what looks to be a very strong and diverse list.
Many thanks to this year’s jury, Lawrence Hill, Jeet Heer, Kathleen Winter, Samantha Harvey, and Alan Warner – and also to my editor, John Metcalf, and publisher, Dan Wells for all their skilled work and dogged faith in my writing.
Magnets & Monsters
Kathy Page’s guest blog on realism and the fantastic for fellow author Gail Anderson-Dargatz
http://www.gailanderson-dargatz.ca/cms/index.php/blogs/guest-blogs
Spring Readings on the West Coast
The snow has long ago melted (or never really settled) here on the West Coast, and the nights are longer, yet not so warm that you want to stay out gardening: a perfect time for literary readings. I’m taking Frankie Styne and the Silver Man to some great local libraries and bookstores.
29th March, 7 pm, Kathy Page reads with poet Alexandra Oliver at Book Warehouse on Main in Vancouver
5th April, 7 pm, Kathy Page reads with Douglas Gibson at Cowichan Library, 2687 James St, Duncan
6th April 7.30 pm, Kathy Page reads with Douglas Gibson at Russell Boooks, 734 Fort St, Victoria
23rd April, Kathy Page reads in Sechelt
27th April, 7.30 pm, Kathy Page reads with Tricia Dower at Mulberry Bush Books, 28o Island Highway, Parksville
29th April, 10 am, Kathy Page on air with Sheila Peters on CICK 93.9
An Evening with Douglas Gibson (Across Canada by Story)
& Kathy Page (Frankie Styne and the Silver Man)
Frankie Styne and the Silver Man
When Liz Meredith and her new baby move into the middle rowhouse on Onley Street – Liz having lived for years off-grid in an old railcar – there’s more to get used to than electricity and proper plumbing. She’s desperate to avoid her well-meaning social worker and her neighbours Alice and Tom, who, for reasons of their own, won’t leave her alone. And then there is her other neighbour, the disfigured and reclusive John Green, better known to the world as Frankie Styne, the author of a series of violent best-sellers. When his latest novel is unexpectedly nominated for a literary prize and his private life is exposed in the glare of publicity, Frankie plots a gruesome, twisted revenge that threatens others who call Onley Street home. Frankie Styne and the Silver Man is unforgettable: a thrilling novel of literary revenge, celebrity culture and the power of love and beauty in an ugly world.
“A fierce writer; her relentless imagination and pure writing skills bring a broken, nightmare world fully to life.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Page’s monsters display a more complex relationship between inner and outer ugliness and find redemption in responsibility.”—The Globe & Mail
“Frankie Styne offers a terrific showcase of Page’s singular style (with its attractive high-low mixture of genres), quirky unexpected invention, and attention to the nuances of psychology.”
—Vancouver Sun
“This book has the trappings of great pulp … Page’s prose is vivid and alive, with nary a scrap of throwaway writing to be found.”—Publishers Weekly
“Frankie Styne is a taut examination of the complex emotional ties that bind, the methods we employ to distance ourselves, and our ambiguous powers of imagination.”—Time Out UK
“Fresh and engaging. Her writing is crisp and her insights into human behavior are acute.”
—Lynne Van Luven, Monday Magazine
Across Canada by Story
Acclaimed McClelland & Stewart Publisher and Editor, Douglas Gibson, crossed “no man’s land” and entered authors’ territory when he wrote Stories About Storytellers in 2011. The memoir is a fond remembrance of Canada’s elite “literati”: Alice Munro, Alistair MacLeod, Hugh MacLennan, W.O. Mitchell, Barry Broadfoot, Mavis Gallant, Pierre Trudeau, and others. Gibson calls it “a cheerful personal memoir of working with 20 famous Canadian authors, some of whom are still with us.” Gibson’s 2015 title, Across Canada by Story invites readers on a coast-to-coast journey following the Scotsman as he tours the nation with a stage show telling more tales. Often witty, at times tender, and always amusing, the memoir paints a portrait of Robertson Davies, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Terry Fallis, Myrna Kostash, Trevor Herriot and others, with accompanying illustrations by Anthony Jenkins.
His legendary stage presence radiates on the page and his wit, sincerity, and eloquence – a trait that earns him instant rapport with the reader – makes readers feel they are gossiping with an old friend returned from life on the road. Gibson absorbs the landscape, culture, and history of each province he visits, while treating readers to some amusing rendezvous with authors and other locals along the way: He rediscovers James Houston’s riverside distractions in Haida Gwaii; tastes the wine his wife, Jane, is partial to in Prince Edward County; munches succulent peaches and apricots on the Sunshine Coast; daydreams in the Deer Creek sunshine; goes bird-watching with Trevor Herriot on Last Mountain Lake; visits Anne of Green Gables sites in PEI; and you come along for the ride.
Frankie Styne and the Silver Man
“Page’s imaginative powers are electric. She has the ability to analyze the often nightmarish qualities of the human psyche and as a result, Frankie Styne is a taut examination of the complex emotional ties that bind, the methods we employ to distance ourselves, and our ambiguous powers of imagination. She is at once poignant and provocative, stomach-churningly distasteful and yet compulsively readable.” Time Out
“Page is a fierce writer; her relentless imagination and pure writing skills bring a broken, nightmare world fully to life.” Kirkus starred review
I’m delighted to learn that Frankie Styne and the Silver Man is due for release in Canada and the US in February 2016 and has already earned a Kirkus starred review https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kathy-page/frankie-styne-and-silver-man/.
I’m very fond of this novel, which combines fantastic elements with a (mostly) realistic narrative, partly because it is funny as well as serious, stomach-churning, etcetera. It’s set in a terraced street in small town in the UK, where some very distinctive characters live side-by side and sometimes overhear and/or try interfere with each other’s lives. More details will follow, but here’s what the UK edition said:
“Frankie Styne, the successful author of a series of gruesome killer novels, has lived at 125 Onley Street for many years. Meticulous and obsessive, he lives a life of isolation, managing to keep both future and past at bay.
Next door, live Liz Meredith and her new baby, Jim. Liz has been told by her social worker Mrs Purvis that Jim has a rare disorder, and will never be like other children. But Mrs Purvis can’t see, as Liz can, that Jim already knows things no ordinary person could. Besides, Liz doesn’t want any help from the social services, or from Tom and Alice, the couple at number 129 who seem to want to adopt her – or is it Jim they really want? In any case, Liz yearns to be left in peace so that she can imagine her way out of how things are.
When Frank’s solitary anonymity is threatened, he hatches a real-life plot which, as he begins to enact it, unexpectedly changes not only his own life, but also those of Liz and Jim. Sifting through our collective nightmares, Kathy Page has written a novel that is powerful, humorous, tragic and thoroughly surprising…”
My recent novels, The Find, Alphabet and The Story of My Face, are suspenseful narratives about characters who struggle not only with circumstances, but also with their own natures. It was in Frankie Styne and the Silver Man that I began to explore questions about the nature of identity which have continued to animate my work, and to develop a fascination with the inner lives characters who are marginalized, extraordinary or in some way “other.”
“Exquisite writing .. Page is a fierce writer; her relentless imagination and pure writing skills bring a broken, nightmare world fully to life. ” Kirkus starred review
“Frankie Styne & the Silver Man resists being put down for the night… I read on, captivated and creeped-out. But this being Kathy Page, I always trusted I was heading away from a nightmare, towards a happier place. This is Felicia’s Journey, with a big dollop of hope.” Caroline Adderson, prize-winning author of Ellen in Pieces.
“Fresh and engaging. Her writing is crisp and her insights into human behavior are acute.” Lynne Van Luven, Monday Magazine
“Great story. Great writing too. You render down the monstrous, gently fold the abnormal into an embrace and make it human… fantastic!” Helen Heffernan
“Each character in the book is horrific, but each in a different way. I was even afraid of the baby! Was absolutely certain that a truly gruesome ending was in story but couldn’t put it down anyway. Ending was perfect. It’s a keeper. Will read again.” Barb Egerter
Good Company
Kathy Page on the short story, an interview with Trevor Corkum
http://www.malahatreview.ca/interviews/page_interview.html
TC The short story form is chameleon and shape shifting, filled with infinite possibility. The best short fiction, I think, comes into being seemingly fully formed, completely original, sui generis. Who are the short story writers you admire most? What short fiction writers have had the biggest impact on your own work in this form?
KP Yes—one of the wonderful things about the short story is the scope it offers for formal invention, how infinitely various and startlingly new (and at the same time ancient) it can be. Of course, the novel is a shape-shifter too, but brevity makes innovation and radical experiment more feasible, and it certainly makes it possible (though not required) to play around with the way plot is put to work. The short story, in its intensity and in the ways it is structured and read, is as much related to poetry as it is to the novel.
Oddly enough, many of the short fiction writers who have meant most to me have names beginning with C: Carter (Angela), Carver, Calvino, and Chekhov… These are writers who do very different—indeed, almost opposite—things with both the story and the sentence. Carter, for example, plays with folk and fairy-tale motifs but writes in an intricate, baroque fashion, whereas Carver is distinguished by the pared-down style he and his editor arrived at, and by the sheer ordinariness of his characters. Calvino is playful enough to tell a story from the point of view of a mollusc. Chekhov’s characters are so convincing that he can get away with anything: think of the ending of “Gusev,” where the protagonist dies and the perspective shifts to a shoal of fish, a shark, and finally the ocean itself. British writer David Constantine, just beginning to be read this side of the pond, is another C, and then of course there is Joyce Carol Oates, and (moving on to other letters), Kafka, J.G. Ballard and Olivia Butler. Since moving here I’ve encountered wonderful Canadian short fiction writers—to name just a few, Caroline Adderson, Alice Munro, both of the MacLeods…
As for your “fully formed” hypothesis, this is probably a very personal thing. For me, some stories arrive almost complete and others are a struggle to excavate (it’s often a matter of stripping out extraneous parts), but I don’t think you’d be able to judge which is which from reading them.
TC You’ve had a varied career—teacher, carpenter, therapist, lecturer, just to name a few. You’ve also lived and worked in several countries—the U.K., Finland, Estonia, and now Canada. How do the various threads and themes of our lives make their way into fiction? How should we, as writers, treat this real-life source material? Why fiction and not memoir, for example?
KP I don’t think there is a “should” here. What you do with your material and how much you use your own life experience or observations of others depends on whether your interest is in the story and where it can go, or in coming as close as you can to the experience, or the facts, and the meaning they have for you. Intention is important, but I’d argue that even when we try very hard not to, most of us write some degree of fiction. Amy Hempel’s story “The Harvest” pretty much sums the situation up, I feel. I’m by nature a fabricator. I sometimes write memoir, or stay close to my own experience in fiction, but I tend to feel uncomfortable doing it. I want to shape things, edit and exaggerate, and I feel restricted if I don’t, and sometimes guilty when I do. It’s better to feel free.
TC If you could spend a full day with one of your literary heroes, who would you invite, and what would you do?
KP Perhaps I’d go for a hike with Edward Thomas, an English First World War poet with “Eco” leanings. He figures in my forthcoming set of linked stories. My caveat is that we’d go in the landscape of his time and place, not mine. Thomas wrote a few short stories, though his poetry is on the whole more interesting than they are. He’s a fascinating character. Often depressed and conflicted at home, he was at his best outdoors, walking or cycling, and was supposedly a great wayfaring companion. Like most heroes, he might be a disappointment, but the landscape would not.
TC In your own career, you had early success, and then stepped away from writing for a time, disillusioned by the publishing world in the 1990s. Eventually, you found your way back, and have enjoyed great success and recognition, winning or being shortlisted for major literary awards. Dire prognostications of the future of books have been sounding in the literary world for some time—publishers going under, bookstores closing, reading numbers seeming to decline in the age of the virtual world. Given this backdrop, why continue to write?
KP I did step away from writing novels, or I tried to. I flirted briefly with writing for film and TV, and looked into a career in social housing management… However, I continued to write short fiction, and in many ways those years were very productive since the screenwriting side of things taught me a great deal about structure, and I made real progress with my stories. A big part of my problem then was that I was with a big publisher who was then bought by a bigger one. I didn’t really satisfy them in terms of sales. The industry was becoming much more focused on the idea of each title being very profitable, rather than the business simply making a profit over all, as in the old days. So I had a feeling of being a disappointment to them: Could I not just do something differently, though they did not know exactly what, and would I please never write a short story again? I felt bad about it. Now, none of this seems so problematic. Short fiction may not be viable in the new hyper-commercial atmosphere, but nonetheless, I and others (including a few very wonderful publishers) love it, think it’s of huge value and know that it connects powerfully with readers: so yes, this is very much worth doing. The readership may be smaller than it is for best-selling novels or blockbuster movies, but that does not mean its cultural value is lesser. We’re so used to the Hollywood model that we irrationally assume everything should be measured and valued that way.
With a novel, the reader steps into a vast and fully imagined world and may stay there for hours or days on end, pulled along by the emerging storyline, character development and so on. I think this is what many of us want a lot of the time, and it can be a wonderful thing. Short stories ask something different of the reader—a particular, concentrated kind of attention and the ability to sense and absorb the story as a whole. Reading a good story is both intense and very satisfying, but it is not the same as being “carried along.” It’s more like a dive into the lake.
Of course, in the current market, short fiction is unlikely to pay the writer a living wage for the time put into crafting it, and yes, there are many competing forms of entertainment. Even so, I think that the important thing is to make good work and get it out, to build and sustain a short fiction culture, which is exactly what we’re doing here, with this contest.
TC In a follow-up question, what do you think is the state of short fiction in Canada today? Are you optimistic about the short story’s future?
KP Yes. I see many wonderful short story writers and a great deal of respect for the short story in Canada. There’s a tradition of story writing, and some pride about that tradition. Canada’s wealth of independent presses, and journals like this one, are a huge force for the good, ensuring that a huge variety of short fiction can appear. There’s a sense of the Canadian short story moving beyond its traditional confines, especially in terms of subject matter. So all in all, I think the ecosystem is very healthy.
TC You’ve written successfully in both short fiction and in the novel. How and why does a project find a particular form for you?
KP My novels often arise out of a combination of a character or characters who won’t go away, a predicament of some kind, and a big question that needs to be explored and elaborated (rather than answered). The beginning of a novel is rather like making a snowball: more and more seems to stick to what I already have; the thing accumulates, grows, and eventually begins to move, still growing as it rolls along. In a novel, I’ll often be interested in the fruits of a particular action over time. My short stories tend to foreground shorter periods of time, and even when they are full of event they are more likely to focus on the architecture, quality and meaning of a particular experience. I always know when I am beginning something whether it is a story or a novel. Once, I did return to a published short story and use the main characters and events again in a novel. In that novel (Frankie Styne and the Silver Man, which comes out in Canada this fall), the material from the story is not much changed, but there are many other characters and a much longer timeline which stretches either side of the original idea.
TC Finally, what are you looking for in this year’s contest? Any tips for the short story writers who will be entering their work?
KP I want to be surprised, moved, or made to think, and perhaps all three—to read vivid, original stories that have a powerful effect of some kind, whether that is achieved by subtle or spectacular means. One tip: Leave as long as possible between revisions.
“Exquisite writing:” a Kirkus starred review of Frankie Styne and the Silver Man
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kathy-page/frankie-styne-and-silver-man/
KIRKUS REVIEW
FRANKIE STYNE AND THE SILVER MAN
A pulp-fiction writer, an unwed mother, and a couple with marital problems live as neighbors in connected town houses and correct course in their contiguous lives.
Page (Alphabet, 2014, etc.) builds layers of meaning into her exquisite writing. Her favored themes are here—the stark dichotomies of life, the power of language, the way the social system tries and fails to help people, and how saving grace can come from unseen places. Page sets a theatrical stage of three connected homes, with young unwed mother Liz Meredith living in the middle under the watchful eye of a social worker, Mrs. Purvis. Liz stays up late at night listening to the arguments, the sex, and the reconciliations of her neighbors Alice and Tom while feeding her newborn son, Jim. On the other side of Liz’s house, novelist Frank Styne, disfigured from birth, follows precise routines and writes another book. He is shortlisted for the Hanslett Prize and dreads it, fantasizing a hideous revenge on his agent for the embarrassment of his now-very-public persona. While he writes his pulp, Liz ruminates about her son’s silence. Jim has Spinney’s syndrome and will never speak. She adores her baby in spite of this hardship and calls him the Silverboy who will one day become a silver man—the silver lining her beloved Grammy talked about. This is a pained and damaged clutch of people living within hearing distance, drawn into each other’s lives. “Other lives. It was frightening to think of. Because anything was possible. Really anything,” Page writes. The options come quickly at the end, and “anything” does transpire, all because Liz stayed the course, true to herself and to her “silly boy.”
Page is a fierce writer; her relentless imagination and pure writing skills bring a broken, nightmare world fully to life.
Kathy Page’s story The Last Cut in The Walrus online
Kathy Page’s story The Last Cut is online at The Walrus:
Isla Mcketta reviews Alphabet
“…It’s not often that I read a book set in prison. It’s even less often that I read a book set in early 1980s Britain. Even more rare is that I’d enjoy the combination of the two, but Alphabet is a stunningly well written and deeply human book. The nuance of relationships and character development is hard to equal…. even if Alphabet falls as far from your normal reading subject matter as it does mine, I highly recommend trying out this book.”
Read the entire review here, on this thoughtful and wide-ranging site, A Geography of Reading:
“Dear Son” in Fiddlehead
Paradise & Elsewhere reviewed in Canadian Literature
From the Biblioasis blog:
We are pleased to announce that Kathy Page’s Paradise & Elsewhere, Catherine Chandler’s Glad and Sorry Seasons, and Cynthia Flood’s Red Girl Rat Boy have all been reviewed in Canadian Literature!
“The genius of [Page’s] book is the way magic seeps into the stories. It seems so inevitable. Somewhere deep in the ancient part of our brains, there must still be a grasp of the connectedness of all things, of the endless flux of creation and destruction.” –Amanda Leslie-Spinks, Canadian Literature
Read the full review here: http://canlit.ca/article/to-paradise-or-elsewhere/
http://biblioasis.com/new-reviews-for-kathy-page-catherine-chandler-and-cynthia-flood/
Paradise & Elsewhere shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize
Already a Giller Prize finalist and a CBC Bookies Award finalist, Paradise & Elsewhere is now short-listed for the 2015 BC Book Prizes. It’s one of five titles listed for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.
http://www.bcbookprizes.ca/winners/2015
The Malahat Review on Paradise & Elsewhere
http://www.malahatreview.ca/reviews/189reviews_perry.html
Daniel Perry on “We, the Trees.” Each reviewer seems to have a different favourite.
“….Uniting the stories’ themes of exchange, translation, and conversion with their steady attention to the natural world (and loss thereof), “We the Trees” stands among the best-achieved pieces in the collection, telling of a journalism professor’s encounter with Joshua, a strange student who is taking no courses other than hers, who never comes to class or follows assignment directions, and who decamps to the nearby forest to study a fungus said to be a network through which all the trees communicate. The mission costs the young man his life, but his final message—seemingly from the trees, through him—leaves the professor with the sudden realization that it will be her who has to convert this supernatural happening into a story the public can consume through the news media. The professor’s epiphany leads to the reader’s own, revealing the young man’s objective: to force humanity to see the destruction of the natural world from the trees’ perspective for once. The bridging of such divides in these stories can explain the collection’s title: in all cases, there is paradise, and then, an elsewhere. The conflict that arises when shaken out of the former gives these stories life—and, like the fables they resemble, profound meaning.”
Year of Adjectives
Beautiful, daring, giddy, startling, intricate, fine, always intriguing, often dazzling – and while neither comfortable nor flawless – immensely fun to read... Dan Vyleta, choosing Paradise & Elsewhere as his favourite book of 2014 in The Walrus
Dark, haunting, truly original… Scotiabank Giller Prize Jury/CBC Best Books 2014
Lyrical, fabulist, sometimes brutally cautionary, unexpected, erotic… Shawn Syms, Quill & Quire
Sensuous, verdant, lyrical, wicked, fresh, exuberant, impeccable, perfectly timed and executed, startling, surprising, horrific… Stephen W. Beattie, National Post
Immersive, eerie, mystery-laden, restless, memorably skewed, neither imitative nor derivative, simultaneously exotic and recognizable… Brett Josef Grubsic, Vancouver Sun
Tight, strange, nifty... Margaret Atwood on twitter
Compelling, unexpected, memorable… Tobias Carol, Volume 1
Transcendent, nuanced, strange, expansive, intimate, remarkable… Dustin Kurtz, Music and Literature
Lush, mythic… Kate Hargreaves, Cover to Cover in Quill and Quire
Expansive, amazing… Leland Cheuk, The Rumpus
Mind-bending, startling, singular, unexpected, capricious, uncanny, boldy illuminating, elastic, extravagantly outlandish… Malcolm Forbes, Minneapolis Star Tribune
Deeply mysterious, astounding, perfect… Caroline Adderson interview with Kathy Page in The New Quarterly
Brilliant, smart, deep, moody, incendiary, wondrous… Literary Press Group, Full of Lit
Well-honed; there is not an image or a word wasted, full of surprises Lynne Van Luven, Coastal Spectator
Heartfelt, shape-shifting… Barnes & Noble Review selection for their Long List, wherein the author was described as “the Alice Munro of the supernatural.”
Beautiful, profound… Daniel Perry, Malahat Review
As insightful as their older counterparts Globe and Mail
Extraordinary, dislocating, dark, wonderful Kim Forrester, Reading Matters
Thanks too to those who reviewed the new Biblioasis edition of my novel Alphabet, which earned starred reviews in Kirkus, Publishers Weekly and the Library Journal, and its own collection of descriptors.
Double Review: Alphabet and Paradise & Elsewhere in The Rumpus
Leland Cheuk reviews both Alphabet and Paradise & Elsehwere in The Rumpus.
ALPHABET AND PARADISE AND ELSEWHERE BY KATHY PAGE
Studies have shown that reading literary fiction increases a reader’s ability to empathize. In her first books to be published in the U.S., Giller Prize-nominated British author Kathy Page puts that theory to a rigorous test. Would you like to spend 300 pages in the mind of a murderer? How about fourteen stories replete with the vengeful whispers from those vanquished by the injustices of globalization? In both the novel Alphabet and the story collection Paradise and Elsewhere, Page demonstrates that she is a master provocateur, unafraid to ask unpleasant questions about contemporary society, even if she risks being didactic.
Originally published in the UK and Canada in 2004, Alphabet is set in a high-security men’s penitentiary during the end of Margaret Thatcher’s reign. Simon Austen is serving a life sentence for strangling his girlfriend. Twenty-one and barely literate, he develops a hunger for learning in order to combat prison boredom. He learns to read and write. He completes courses that give him the equivalent of a high school education. He begins to answer newspaper ads under a false name from women seeking pen pals. To circumvent the prison censors, he purchases help from a fellow inmate using cigarettes and batteries. Page, who spent a year as a Writer-in-Residence in a men’s penitentiary, does not spare the reader from the cruel horror show that prison is intended to be. Eventually, Austen drops his false identities and sends out letters of increasing honesty. His foray into confessional correspondence can be read in a number of ways: as desperation, as self-education, and as a melancholy search for connection—just as it is for those who purchase newspaper ads and walk around free in the outside world.
When his letters are discovered by the prison regime, they are so surprisingly articulate and intelligent that Simon is chosen to participate in a psychiatric program meant to help address his past, ameliorate his dysfunctional relationships with women, and prepare him, possibly, to one day be free. When Simon develops feelings for his psychiatrist Bernadette, the reader glimpses how far Simon’s emotional intelligence has come in one of his letters:
You are turning me inside out.
When I am with you I feel as if I could become the best of me that has been hidden for so long, and I burn with wanting to. I feel I could pass through an eye of a needle.
So how is the reader supposed to feel about Simon Austen, the murderer-cum-tortured-poet? Page thoroughly captures the voice of a man who has dissociated himself from his crime. She challenges the reader to forget and forgive the crime’s brutal nature and empathize with this bottled-up young man struggling to find the language to confront his disturbed psyche. Despite being repeatedly humiliated and victimized within the prison system, Simon doesn’t want to leave. After growing up in failed foster homes, prison is the best home Simon has ever had.
I could not help but feel deeply sympathetic to the narrator—a testament to Page’s skill. But the reading experience was harrowing. I’m interested to see what the reception to Alphabet will be in the US, where over half of the states have legalized some form of capital punishment. As a society, Americans have by and large accepted that the worst offenders in our legal system do not deserve rehabilitation—certainly not murderers of young women like Simon Austen. And yet the central question of Alphabet, both for society and for Simon himself, is whether he deserves to be rehabilitated.
In Paradise and Elsewhere, Page again asks the big questions, dramatizing interactions between modern societies and less developed ones to address issues of globalization, climate change, and feminism. The stories are very short. Many are under ten pages. They exist between genres, as Page leaps from realism to fable and back, often from page to page. The writing is totally distinct from Alphabet—a testament to Page’s range. In the 3-page gem “Lak-ha,” a family is dropped in the midst of a desert where an ancient tree stands. The wife dies of dehydration, her last tears wetting the wood, making it fibrous enough to braid into rope. A stranger arrives by sea and asks the starving widower for the rope’s price. In this amazing passage, Page hops from the mythic to the real, evoking the rise of civilizations:
Every year more strangers came by sea bringing food and goods in exchange for Hetlas rope.
This explains the name of our village, Lak-ha, which some say means in the old language, “The place where the bargain was struck.” Others say other things. They ask, did the woman know the purpose of her weeping? Who invented the Hetlas rope—the woman, the man, the stranger, Fate? But I say forget it. Come inside. We have everything now: television, internet, iPod, cellphone, denim jeans, Barbie doll, same as you.
Paradise and Elsewhere, likeAlphabet, is about society’s fraying ability to connect with people. In Alphabet, strangers try to connect via the written letter. But in Paradise and Elsewhere, people try to connect through money, through material goods, and through perceived power dynamics. In “Saving Grace,” a news crew travels to a rural town to film a famous soothsayer only to find that what she has to say is not what they want to hear.
“I do apologize. Your fame has travelled, so to speak. Can we please watch you work?” asked Libby, smiling as hard as she could. “We’ll pay,” she added.
“I know that. Stay as long as you like. That won’t be long. None of your plans will come to fruit, you’ll fail completely.” The woman’s baleful stare seemed to enfold them all like a thick, stifling blanket. “You think you’re lucky to live in the cities. You think it’s kinder there and people are more generous, but that’s only because they’ve got more. You’re stupid, and you’re deeply mean. You don’t like your friends drinking too much of your wine. You count up favours and drop people if they don’t pay you back. You’re jealous of your sister Phil.”
“Saving Grace,” like most of the stories in Page’s collection, wears its themes like loud clothes. Each story is a cage fight between the rural and the urban, the tourist and the touristed, the modern and the ancient. In today’s increasingly polarized society, Page’s ironic paradises, so dense with vital questions, will echo and leave you wondering how you measure up to Page’s expansive empathies. Are you like her characters: only able to empathize selectively with so much day-to-day injustice on the planet?