Coming Attractions 94

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

This year’s Coming Attractions features stories by Donald McNeill and
Lisa Moore, both from Newfoundland, and by Torontonian Elise Levine. The
editors have found three fine writers with very different views of the
world. The two McNeill stories are nostalgic looks back to the
Newfoundland of the 1930s and 1940s. War plays a central part in both
stories. “Cosy and Nell” begins in the late 1930s and telescopes
forward into the war. “Submariner’s Moon” is set in the dying days
of World War II. The latter makes good use of a naive child narrator to
show the devastating effects war can have on the grownups.

Elise Levine’s three stories are set in much more garish contemporary
times. “Angel,” for example, is a tough, urban tale about lesbian
life, alienation, love, and loss, told by a narrator who is all tough on
the outside, but jilted and broken-hearted on the inside. The piece is
written as a high-speed monologue that drives on to its inevitable
sombre conclusion with a relentless energy. “Back There,” one of
Levine’s other stories, is a highly entertaining picture of a
mother/daughter relationship that seems to consist entirely of shopping
trips.

Lisa Moore also places her stories in contemporary settings, but she
writes them in a much lower key than does Levine. In fact, her emphasis
on low-key, everyday realism is one of the chief characteristics of her
writing. Another characteristic, at least in this collection, is her
fascination with the complications of male-female relationships. This
latter trait comes out particularly well in “The Nipple of
Paradise,” in which the female narrator is pushed relentlessly forward
by the processes in which she in involved (pregnancy, marriage,
motherhood) while at the same time she is paralyzed with uncertainty
about her marriage and about her ability to be a mother. Both of her
stories are written in a highly poetic manner, sliding along on images
and the associations between and among them.

Let’s hope that all three writers sign book contracts with major
publishers right away.