Pop Goes the Story: Canadian Fiction Anthology

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.

Pop culture is the overarching theme of this anthology of 23 stories by
22 Canadian writers. Henry Ferris’s “The Donahue Show” is an
account of the televising of an episode of the show from the perspective
of a stoned audience member. Christopher Taylor’s “Diary of a
Cultural Exile” is a running record of pop-culture entries, while pop
culture is the subject of a nine-page rant in Hal Niedzviecki’s
“Speed Culture.” The formerly taboo topic of lesbianism emerges as a
pop-culture theme in Ailsa Kay’s “Vinyl.” In Rob Payne’s “So
Like Candy,” a sexual voyeur, allegedly influenced by television,
scans neighborhood bedrooms with his high-powered telescope. Peter
Darbyshire’s “Still” portrays family tensions against the backdrop
of live television coverage of a police chase reminiscent of the
infamous O.J. Simpson slow-speed drama.

The humorous aspects of the world of pop culture are cleverly displayed
in Laura Lush’s “Women Who Run with Buffalo,” in which the heroine
is a holistic health worker and part-time waitress, and in Emmy-Rae
Wildfield’s “Doing Lunch,” in which a waiter counsels diners about
divorce and corporate takeovers while serving their meals. This
anthology proves that pop culture is here to stay.