Coming Attractions 99

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

Coming Attractions 99, the latest volume in a series of volumes
published since 1980, showcases the diversely entertaining voices of
emerging Canadian writers Marcus Youseff, Mary Swan, and John Lavery,
each with three stories.

According to writer/editor Maggie Helwig, these authors “are all, in
some way, talking about how we make ourselves, how we create our
identities.” Such talking involves an identity crisis in each of
Youseff’s stories, with the first centring on a twentysomething film
instructor’s sublimation of his lust for a 16-year-old “Little
Lolita”; the second on an Egyptian-Canadian actor stoically struggling
to present himself, at his agent’s urging, as “more like a person”
while auditioning for bit parts in roles where he is typecast as an
immigrant; and the third on a son who seeks refuge from his adulterous,
dysfunctional parents by watching M*A*S*H. Throughout, Youseff’s
talking is laced with bittersweet irony.

Swan’s stories are tightly constructed, crisply written, and sharply
defined Chekovian vignettes. Her reflective talking is sotto voce as she
describes a young woman with a slightly deformed spine who succumbs to
seaside “overbathing”; then a grieving widow sliding into paranoia
from fear of a dead enemy returning; and, finally, a young man “trying
to remember something his father once said,” lest he electrocute
himself.

For his part, John Lavery distils the essence of his views of identity
creation, first through the strident voice of an “apprentice
revolutionary” refusing to accept the fact that she has been duped
into giving her passport to an on-the-run agent (who is later found
murdered); then through the comical voice of the son of an ambulance
driver of “Egyptian distraction” who once observed his uncle
painting his penis with Mercurochrome as a birth control measure; and
finally through the painfully nostalgic voice of the female professor of
music whose blind protégé, after a lifetime of difficult tutoring, is
“dead at 42 ... with a bowel full of driving cancer cells.”

The voices in this anthology are different, but the melody of each
lingers on.