Write Turns: New Directions in Canadian Fiction

R. Gordon Moyles is professor emeritus of English at the University of
Alberta, the co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities:
British Views of Canada, 1880–1914, and the author of The Salvation
Army and the Public.

These 15 stories by graduating and former students of the Masters of
Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at UBC are supposed to represent
“new directions” in Canadian fiction. Far from it. There are, to be
sure, a number of fine writers in the group, including Aislinn Hunter,
Nancy Lee, Eden Robinson, and Adam Lewis Schroeder. All write about
pivotal, epiphanic moments in the lives of their characters. But writers
have always written about such moments, so where is the innovation? Nor
is there anything new in the various styles, all straightforwardly
narrative.

The dominant tone of melancholy irritates, but there are moments of
illumination and esthetic pleasures to be found in Andrew Gay’s
amusing “Letters to the Future,” Alison Acheson’s whimsical
“Something Blue,” and Aislinn Hunter’s cleverly ironical
“Hagiography.”