A Stranger to Myself

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

The dozen stories in this collection, written over a period of 30 years,
were all previously published in one of Bailey’s more than 15 books.
They show a remarkable range of talents and, as a whole, are a virtual
syllabus of creative-writing courses (Bailey began to write in prison
during a nine-year incarceration for theft). There is a strong sense of
place; there are well-developed characters. There are stylistic devices
designed to trigger strong emotions. It matters little whether Bailey
tells a story in the first person or third, whether the tense is present
or past, or whether or not a narrator is omniscient. Nor does length
matter, since each piece skilfully balances beginnings, middles, and
endings. But just as the stories are so artfully patterned, they are
also very different one from another, in tone, voice, and content.

“The Greta Script,” one of the longer stories, is a first-person
account of how a little dog, with its life and death, elicits powerful
sensibilities in a range of disparate people. “Dirty Laundry,” the
story immediately following, is a third-person telling of loneliness and
heartbreak (a man with a cancer-stricken wife travels the city looking
for an open laundromat). The search becomes the hook on which Bailey
hangs the situation: “The place was open and he lugged the bags in and
dumped the clothes into the machines ... He hated doing laundry and up
until three months ago when Wanda got sick he’d always refused to do
it. Now he did everything. Cooking, shopping, cleaning, he did it all.
It was almost like a penance. He knew that in some strange way he was
responsible for her illness.” One of the best stories is “Letter of
Intent,” in which a young woman is reconciled with her delinquent
father. It is simply plotted, as are most of the stories, yet it
contains characters who bring a powerful resonance to the fiction.

A Stranger to Myself won the Margaret Laurence Literary Award for
Fiction. Don Bailey died in Winnipeg in 2003 at the age of 60.