Coming Attractions 97

R.G. Moyles is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
the co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British Views
of Canada, 1880–1914.

The three writers featured in this collection—which gives us a preview
of full-length works soon to be published—are Elyse Gasco, Dennis
Bock, and Nadine McInnes.

Gasco’s point of view (“You watch her grow ...”) is initially
bothersome, but ultimately reader and narrator are bonded through
stories linked by the theme of adoption and the loyalties, loves, and
hatreds generated by real and adoptive parents. Her best story, “You
Have the Body,” is fascinating in its depiction of the realities of
childbearing.

Bock offers a set of family stories that are strangely enigmatic but
familiarly poignant, especially “Stars,” an unsentimental but
nevertheless touching evocation of love between and a father and his
dying son.

In her stories, McInnes says, she is “interested in moral ambiguity,
what inner forces compel people to act and what these actions mean to
our sense of community. The body’s events—birth, sex, death,
illness—challenge the sense of safety and agency in our lives.” This
may sound somewhat clinical, but McInnes’s stories are from it. In
“Claiming the Body” and “The Human Chain,” she vivifies the
“moral ambiguity” that attends the death of an unclaimed relative
and an encounter with AIDS.

All three writers are brilliant stylists; for each, future success can
be predicted.