In Fierce, orphaned children share page space with flying grandmothers, and hermaphrodite prospectors have plaques that read, “When God made the Scots, He made them a wee bit better.” This incongruity is for good reason: tragedy and comedy are familiar territory.



I blame my twisted sense of humour on the man who fathered me for four of my childhood years and has continued to do so through my adulthood. His child-rearing techniques included exposure to Monty Python and Benny Hill; food fights; and word-play, largely with corny puns. Birthdays are celebrated with a song that includes the lines, “People dying everywhere; pain and sorrow, and despair. Happy birthday!”

The tragedy comes from the usual places — family, sex, walking down the street in broad daylight, dreams.

Tom in River Rising, for instance, came to me in a nightmare. What I remember now of the dream-Tom was his intense yearning for a long-gone home and the sense of being absolutely lost. We Danced Without Strings, however originated in real life. It is a love letter to an adult friend with Angelman’s Syndrome. As did The Fierce with the Fierce — I nursed Dulcey’s prototype on her death-bed. Though not a hermaphrodite or a prospector, the real Dulcey was tough enough to be the latter, so I set her imagined story in the Yukon, where I lived for a short time.

The act of ugly cruising was an invention of youthful angst. In my early twenties, my girlfriends and myself made ourselves hideous with theatrical make-up, then cruised the streets looking for boys at which to scream, “Hey, baby. Wanna get lucky?” We were single and mad at the boys for not adoring us. In Ugly Cruising Cricket’s motivation is far less shallow.

Simple memories such as a heart-sick drunk walking the breaking Yukon River, bead rooms, canoe races, a sway-backed horse roaming the streets of Dawson City, and a northern ghost town all made their way into the collection — as did a first love run down by a drunk driver, suicidal urges, and my mother’s early death.

All of my characters stole a bit of me, but River got the most. We love our men and children with a ferocity that is never quite enough, but is always the very best we can do. We never lie, but aren’t always believable. We screw up often. And, although it is counterintuitive, we are optimists who prefer to think rainbow not deluge.