Blue Husbands: Stories

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Dickinson’s second collection of stories must rank among the best of a
recent Canadian crop: the writer’s voice is strong and confident;
plots and situations are solidly drawn; and humor abounds.

The capsule biography notes that Dickinson has worked “at jobs as
varied as labourer, fitness instructor, and shepherd.” No fewer than
four of the ten stories in the collection are set directly (or
indirectly) in a gym/fitness club; the last story, one of the best
realized, has a shepherd as its hero.

The striking quality about Dickinson’s writing is that nothing is
wasted, no metaphor misplaced. His considerable hour arises
situationally and organically from the plot, not intrinsically from the
characters.

Men are at the centre of each of the stories; these are gentle and
thoughtful men, wounded by failed relationships and hesitant to embark
on new ones. In the title story, a widow’s wink raises a man’s
consciousness to an unaccustomed level: “Burton turned away and
stumbled across the soggy leaves to his car. He was no expert, but a
wink was a wink—wasn’t it? In his mind he flipped through his meagre
catalogue of winks: the long slow sly; the half-speed deadpan; the brief
crinkle; the twinkle.” Nor is Dickinson a slouch when it comes to
women’s emotions, as witnessed in “Thirty-three Thousand
Push-ups.”

Dickinson’s first collection of stories, Fighting the Upstream, was
greeted with rave reviews. Blue Husbands establishes its author as a
fiction writer of the first rank. Highly recommended.