When X Equals Marylou

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

At the conclusion of the title story in this collection of a dozen
pieces, Henrik, the blocked writer, has a bit of an epiphany. Sizing up
Marylou, the band groupie he has followed from Edmonton to British
Columbia, “he wants to tell her how he killed the muse by neglect, by
denying it access to life, to the people, places, and experiences needed
to replenish it; instead, he locked himself up and wrote and wrote until
his reservoirs of material and emotion ran dry.”

This imaginative failing is not true of Dobozy himself. The B.C.-born
author of Doggone (1998) has taken the opposite approach; the fictions
in his second book are invariably muse-driven, quirky with imagination.
The stories are about as variegated as the author’s personal history.
Born in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, Dobozy has lived in Western Canada,
Toronto, Montreal, and Budapest. He now makes his home in Newfoundland
where he was recently appointed assistant professor of literature at
Memorial University. Dobozy’s characters include a game warden trapped
inside a cage with a sedated grizzly, a juvenile pyromaniac, and the
manager of a recycling depot. The stories are populated with addicts and
alcoholics, recovering and otherwise.

In “Riverbottom Rag,” Bob says to his friend and roommate, “if
only I could dream a single dream … I could sleep. So give me one.”
Pleasant dreams in these stories are hard to come by; Dobozy’s
characters are rarely given such an easy way out.