Coming Attractions 03

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including The
Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret
Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

Coming Attractions is an anthology that highlights three promising new
writers each year. Jessica Grant is a musician who grew up in St.
John’s, Newfoundland; Grant won the Western Magazine Award for Fiction
2003 for her story “My Husband’s Jump,” first published in the
Malahat Review. Her work cleverly combines humour and pathos. The editor
tags Winnipeg-born Liam Durcan as “an anarchist at heart.” Andrea
Rudy hails from Oshawa, Halifax, and Vancouver, and her current interest
centres in mental illness. The topics and talents of these three writers
make for a lively collection.

Grant’s short story “Engineers,” features two lovers who are both
engineering students. Finding a place to make love poses difficulties,
and fosters good comic drama.

In Durcan’s “Blood,” a driver is speeding to the hospital with a
friend who has a severe nosebleed. A third character, the driver’s
friend Mike, occupies much of his thoughts. Both mood and prose style
are shaped by the medical emergency and the dangerous driving. The
atmosphere is hyper. Tense. The tale ends with the two arriving at the
hospital’s emergency entrance, where the patient enters alone. The
driver, exhausted, is left trying to understand what he has learned.

Rudy’s tales all have first-person narrators whose lives are highly
stressed and who are showing the strain. Two or three readings may be
required to clarify who’s who and what’s what. Some readers will
enjoy the challenge.

The short-story form has come a long way from the days of Henry James
and even Margaret Laurence. Readers’ opinions will differ as to
whether the new directions or “coming attractions” are to their
taste. In a short introduction, editor Mark Anthony Jarman calls these
three writers “wanderers crossing fluid borders, united by blossoming
careers and acrobatic talent.” Try them and see.