Just Some Stuff I Wrote

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

The “stuff” that award-winning novelist Bell wrote is an excellent
collection of eight short stories. Each character-based story, with one
exception, is principally told from the perspective of an older
adolescent. An elderly woman narrates “The Leaves in this Country,”
which is ultimately about parenting and contrasts well with “The
‘Scream’ School of Parenting” wherein a 16-year-old girl shows
readers two quite different parenting styles. “Apollo and Dionysos”
and “The Promise,” which contain fantasy elements, see their male
protagonists making life-changing decisions; the story is told via a
series of emails sent by the narrator from Scotland to his younger
sister in Canada. “The Staircase” consists of a police sergeant’s
taped interviews with five students and one teacher over a six-day
period as he investigates how a Grade 11 Muslim student fell to his
death at school. Both “Window Tree” and “Chumley” focus on teens
who create fantasy lives as a means of coping with their imperfect
realities. The former portrays a loner girl who, having convinced
herself of her Grade 12 English teacher’s romantic interest in her,
then charges him with sexual abuse rather than acknowledge the truth. In
“Chumley,” a high-school male affects an English accent and wears
outlandish clothing as a means of hiding his family’s poverty. Being
ashamed of one’s socio-economic standing is also central to the
collection’s emotionally moving closing story, “Beer Can Man.”
Highly recommended.