Telling Hours: Journal Stories

Louise E. Allin, a poet and short-story writer, is also an English instructor at Cambrian College.

Delany’s numerous books on medieval literature and women authors
attest to her talents as a writer. Her fiction has appeared in such
prestigious magazines as Ms, Queen’s Quarterly, and The Capilano
Review. Unfortunately, Telling Hours, a journal and collection of short
stories, neither captures the imagination nor sustains the interest.

In “My Mother’s Feet,” for example, she does an excellent job of
characterizing the mother and developing the daughter’s introspection,
but the plot deflates the characters. “At the Pool” is more
successful, with a well-developed narrative. But it lapses into
shameless sentimentality at the end: “Special Paul certainly was, and
I imagine, or hope, that had we been in a real room, had we world enough
and time, we could eventually have become special to one another.” The
ironic, well-plotted “King of the Block,” about a triangle involving
two neighbors and a land speculator, is probably the most successful
entry.

The set piece, in which an atheist stays in a convent to heal her soul
after a shattered love affair, intrigues only while the writer focuses
on her fellows in the retreat. She shrinks too often, though, into
banal-self-tortures about the man in question: “I’m not left with a
person but a condition: Jude-ness. A Principle. It isn’t that love
entered my heart, but that you did.” Better that the journal be
perceived as fiction, for there is something self-conscious and
self-serving about writing personal revelations destined for quick
publication. Indeed, in the final essay, “Journals and Fiction,”
Delaney examines the symbiotic relationship between the two and
confesses that as she wrote her convent journal, “it was also for
another reader . . . an audience I counted on even then when I talked
with no one about these shameful and definitely frightening feelings.”
She provides an excellent history of journal writers, from St. Perpetua
to Salvador Dali, but reading about these diarists is more captivating
than following her own efforts.