CANR
WORK TITLE: The Goat
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 3/25/1964
WEBSITE: http://annefleming.ca/
CITY: Kelowna
STATE: BC
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY: Canadian
LAST VOLUME: CA 255
https://fccs.ok.ubc.ca/faculty/afleming.html * http://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/book-reviews/anne-flemings-middle-grade-book-about-a-kid-named-kid-a-dog-named-cat-and-a-goat-on-a-roof/wcm/386aefcb-7ad7-4a84-a87a-57726e02f4f2 * The Goat has been optioned by David Lipman of Cirrina Studios, who will produce with David Womark.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born March 25, 1964, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada; has a partner; children: one.
EDUCATION:Attended the University of Waterloo; University of British Columbia, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Victoria School of Writing, British Columbia, Canada, former instructor; Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, instructor; Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada, instructor; University of British Columbia, Okanagan, Kelowna, Canada, instructor. Has also hosted a radio show; served on the jury of the Dayne Ogilvie Prize, 2013.
AVOCATIONS:Playing ukulele, hockey, cross-country skiing.
AWARDS:Recipient of National Magazine Awards.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to publications, including the New Quarterly and Toronto Life. Contributor of stories to anthologies, including Journal Prize Stories, Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme, You Be Me, and Great Expectations: Twenty-Four True Stories about Childbirth.
SIDELIGHTS
Anne Fleming is a Canadian writer and educator. She holds a master’s degree from the University of British Columbia, where she serves as an instructor. Fleming has also taught at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and Victoria School of Writing. She has released novels, poetry collections, and collections of short stories.
Gay Dwarves of America: Stories was released in 2012. In its title story, a pair of college students create quirky websites for their own entertainment. Among them is Gay Dwarves of America. A mother writes in to the website and discusses her feelings about her son’s sexuality. Her comments cause one of the students to think about his sexuality. In “Unicycle Boys,” an adult woman remembers a prom she attended as the date of a misfit boy. Formatted as a libretto, “Backstock: The Musical” features characters with high aspirations, who are working together at a menial retail job. The volume concludes with “Thirty-One One Word Stories,” whose title is a direct description of the work.
Shawn Syms, contributor to the Quill & Quire website, commented: “Traditional narrative strategies and formal experimentation, as well as fiction and autobiography, blend comfortably in Anne Fleming’s latest collection of short stories, the delightfully titled Gay Dwarves of America.” Writing on the Toronto National Post website, Steven W. Beattie suggested: “Fleming displays a lithe versatility in this collection, and an admirable willingness to push the boundaries of form and style. Fortunately, she mostly resists the impulse to retreat into technical sophistry: She is wise enough to realize that pure technique, devoid of emotional resonance, is ultimately sterile.” Thomas Trofimuk, critic on the Winnipeg Review Online, remarked: “Fleming’s stories are beautiful intaglios of loneliness, damaged people and the messiness that we create by being human and rubbing up against each other. From the heartbreaking unicycle boy, to the gay dwarves website, to the diary of one family’s puke, these stories entertain and enthrall and titillate. I would not call this a summer read. I would call it a great must-read.”
In The Goat, a novel for middle grade readers, a girl named Kid is the daughter of an actress. They and Kid’s father have moved into a new building in Manhattan, where a goat is kept on the roof. Kid determines to find the goat, interacts with other quirky tenants in her new building, and develops a close friendship with a shy orphan named Will.
Reviewing The Goat on the Vancouver Sun Online, Sherie Posesorski described it as a “wistful, whimsical debut middle grade novel.” Serah-Marie McMahon, critic on the Toronto National Post website, asserted: “The Goat takes a concept that is easiest told as zany and madcap, but instead wisely presents it as perfectly ordinary. If Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach made a kids’ movie (pun intended), this would certainly be their script.” “The list of characters is long, and eccentricities abound, but so do charm and warm humor,” remarked Brenda Kahn in School Library Journal. A Publishers Weekly contributor suggested: “The novel’s underlying theme of people coming together on a shared quest makes for a heartwarming … tale.” A writer in Kirkus Reviews noted that the book featured “delightfully eccentric and warmhearted characters.” The same writer concluded: “The convoluted, intricate tale is filled with joy, sweet sadness, and a triumph of spirit. Lovely.” “With delicate insight and humor, Fleming cleverly unites people … in an offbeat celebration of courage and individuality,” wrote Julia Smith in Booklist. Leslie Vermeet, reviewer in Resource Links, opined: “The book is beautifully patterned, and as the adjacent plot lines come together, readers may per ceive several subtle but important lessons. In short, The Goat is a delightful reading experience.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 15, 2017, Julia Smith, review of The Goat, p. 79.
Horn Book, May-June, 2017, Roxanne Hsu Feldman, review of The Goat, p. 91.
Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 2017, review of The Goat.
Publishers Weekly, December 19, 2016, review of The Goat, p. 124.
Resource Links, April, 2017, Leslie Vermeet, review of The Goat, p. 10.
School Library Journal, February, 2017, Brenda Kahn, review of The Goat, p. 86.
ONLINE
Anne Fleming Website, http://annefleming.ca/ (August 8, 2017).
National Post Online (Toronto, Canada), http://nationalpost.com/ (August 24, 2012), Steven W. Beattie, review of Gay Dwarves of America: Stories; (February 28, 2017), Serah-Marie McMahon, review of The Goat.
Quill & Quire, http://www.quillandquire.com/ (July 1, 2012), Shawn Syms, review of Gay Dwarves of America.
Vancouver Sun Online, http://vancouversun.com/ (May 10, 2017), Sherie Posesorski, review of The Goat.
Winnipeg Review Online, http://winnipegreview.com/ (August 19, 2012), Thomas Trofimuk, review of Gay Dwarves of America.*
Anne Fleming (born 25 April 1964) is a Canadian fiction writer.
Contents [hide]
1 Life
2 Bibliography
3 References
4 External links
Life[edit]
Born in Toronto, Ontario, Fleming attended the University of Waterloo, enrolling in a geography program then moving to English studies. In 1991, she moved to British Columbia. She teaches at the University of British Columbia Okanagan campus in Kelowna. She formerly taught at the Victoria School of Writing.[1]
Her fiction has been published in magazines and anthologies, including Toronto Life magazine, The Journey Prize Stories, and The New Quarterly, where it won a National Magazine Award.[2]
Her first book, Pool-Hopping and Other Stories, was a finalist at the 1999 Governor General's Awards; it was also a contender for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Danuta Gleed Award.[3] Her second book is the novel, Anomaly (Raincoast Books 2005).
Aside from her literary endeavors, Fleming has hosted a radio program, played defense for the Vancouver Voyagers women's hockey team, and also plays the ukulele. She has a partner and child. Fleming's great-grandfather was the mayor of Toronto, and Toronto figures prominently in her writing.[4]
In 2013 she served alongside Amber Dawn and Vivek Shraya on the jury of the Dayne Ogilvie Prize, a literary award for LGBT writers in Canada, selecting C. E. Gatchalian as that year's winner.[5]
Bibliography[edit]
Library resources about
Anne Fleming (writer)
Resources in your library
Resources in other libraries
By Anne Fleming (writer)
Resources in your library
Resources in other libraries
Pool-Hopping and Other Stories, 1998 (ISBN 1-896095-18-6)
Anomaly, 2005 (ISBN 1-55192-831-0)
Gay Dwarves of America, 2012 (ISBN 1897141467)
poemw, 2016 (ISBN 1-897141-76-9)
The Goat, 2017 (ISBN 1-55498-917-5)
Novels
Anomaly (2005)
The Goat (2017)
thumbthumb
Collections
Pool-hopping and Other Stories (1998)
Gay Dwarves of America (2012)
Anne Fleming is the author of five books: Pool-Hopping and Other Stories, shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, the Danuta Gleed Award and the Governor General’s Award; the critically acclaimed novel, Anomaly; Gay Dwarves of America, also shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson; poemw, a book of poems shortlisted for the BC Book Prizes’ Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; and The Goat, a novel for children. Her non-fiction has been published in a raft of anthologies, including Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme, Great Expectations: Twenty-Four True Stories About Childbirth, and You Be Me.
Anne grew up in Toronto and lived in Kitchener, Ontario for a chunk of time before moving to Vancouver, where she received her MFA from UBC. Her fiction has won National Magazine Awards, been commissioned by CBC Radio, and widely published in magazines and anthologies.
A highly regarded teacher of creative writing, she has been on faculty at both UBC campuses, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and the Banff Centre for the Arts. She now divides her time between Vancouver (unceded Coast Salish territory) and Kelowna (unceded Syilx territory), where she teaches at UBC’s Okanagan Campus.
She likes to cross-country ski and play the ukulele, although not necessarily at the same time.
Alternate Bios — Choose Your Own!
Saucy:
Anne Fleming grew up in Southern Ontario idolizing the directors at her YWCA summer camp, two self-sufficient lesbians who raised goats and chickens and built their own kayaks. Later, she started writing. She’s published three books of fiction for adults, Pool-Hopping and Other Stories, the novel Anomaly, and Gay Dwarves of America, which have been nominated for many nice awards, including the Governor-General’s Award and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and one novel for children, The Goat. poemw is her first book of poems.
Goofy:
Anne Fleming tans blotchily, like Alice B. Toklas, and worships homemade cassettes. Her poetic sensibilities are founded on “The Large Dark Aardvark Song.”
Peanut Buttery (2005):
Anne Fleming’s second book, Anomaly, is a novel about two sisters growing up in Toronto in the 70s and 80s. As a teenager, she ate grilled peanut butter sandwiches and played ringette.
Long (2005):
Anne Fleming was born and raised in Toronto, the city that features prominently in Anomaly and the city her great-grandfather was mayor of in the 1890s, the city that continues to enthrall and fascinate her, though she now lives some place completely different.
At age 7 she became a Sprite in the 344th Toronto Brownie Pack. Loved semaphore, hated having to wear skirts and say “tu-whit tu-whit tu-whoo.” Often she skipped Brownies to play foosball or climb out on the roof or wing beanbags at the other Brownies from behind the stage-curtain.
At age nine she was was brought home by police for breaking into the school.
At ten, under the Mount Pleasant bridge, she was put in a headlock by grade sevens, who thought she was a boy and threw lit matches at her head for fun until one of her friends went and got an older brother.
A year or two later, her neighbour sustained major injuries when pinned by a fallen piano up at the school.
In grade nine she fell in love with drumlins and eskers, leading five years later to a short-lived career in geography at the University of Waterloo, and a long-standing interest in land use and aerial photography, which she has given to the father in Anomaly, who has a collection of aerial photographs of Toronto.
After not-quite failing first year geography she spent a term on the graveyard shift at the Yonge and Eglinton Kitchen Table grocery store before returning to Waterloo, this time in English. She began to write inane rhyming poems to amuse her friends, and later, inane stories to amuse her friends, and later still stories and poems not meant to be inane and not meant just for her friends.
After graduating, she pieced together a living in the Kitchener-Waterloo area creating electronic site maps and doing technical editing plus the occasional bout of soil sampling for an environmental consulting firm.
In 1991, she and her partner, Cindy Holmes, moved to Vancouver, for Anne to do the creative writing MFA at UBC. They ended up staying until this year, when they and their two-year-old will move to Kelowna and Anne will begin teaching creative writing at the newly formed UBC Okanagan.
AFter graduating from UBC, the only paying work she could find was at Mountain Equipment Co-op where she spent three years having great conversations while security-tagging fleece jackets with the other artists who worked in backstock.
In 1995 she started the sessional teaching she’s done on and off ever since, with stints at UBC, Emily Carr Institute, Kwantlen University College, Douglas College, the Victoria School of Writing and the Banff Centre’s Wired Writing Studio. Unfortunately, her teaching schedule prevented her from joining the Vancouver Ukulele Circle.
In 1998, she published Pool-Hopping and Other Stories.
In 2002, with a teaching schedule that freed up Tuesday nights, she finally joined the Vancouver Ukulele Circle. It meets the third Tuesday of every month at Original Joe’s restaurant, upstairs at Broadway and Cambie, except for the summer months, when the location changes to Sunset Beach at the foot of Thurlow Street. All are welcome.
[FYI, Vancouver Ukulele Circle is still held the third Tuesday of the month, but now at the St. James Hall on West 10th.]
FAQ
“The day that Mrs. Dorval’s furniture arrived in Lytton, Ernestine and I had gone to the station to see the train come in.”
How do you come up with your ideas?
I think what a lot of people are really saying when they ask this is, “Your ideas are outlandish” (like, say, a family’s story that is revealed through memorable episodes of throwing up, as in “Puke Diary”) or, more neutrally, “I would never have thought of that.” But writing is various and delightful because people, by and large, don’t have each other’s ideas and feel pleasure when they are surprised, especially when surprise is paired with recognition of human behaviour and emotion. My ideas come from news, people, geography (see answer for The Goat, below), phrases that pop into my head — generally, from noticing stuff — and from thinking, “What if?” and “How?”
Where did the idea for The Goat come from?
I was in New York for a conference and away from my kid, who was young and missed me a lot, for four days. I thought it’d be cool to send a new, short instalment of a story each day I was away. The first day, as I walked through Manhattan looking in wonder at the architecture, I noted a building with really wide ledges, and thought, “Man! A goat could live on that building.” That night, in my tiny room at the Pod Hotel, I sent the first instalment of the story: “Once there was a goat who lived in New York City…”
How do you pronounce “poemw”?
I say “po-em-wuh,” but welcome all pronunciations. You could pronounce it “poems,” because the “w” was originally a typo for “s,” or you could pronounce it with a silent “w,” or you could come up with something else entirely.
One Word Stories? Really?
This idea grew out of an obstreperous character in “Atmospherics,” a story in Pool-Hopping. A group of friends are telling stories one winter’s evening. One of them stands up and says, “Salamander,” then sits down.
Can you tell a story in one word? I don’t know. But what if you could? That was a really fun question to try out.
Did you always want to be a writer?
It never occurred to me that I could be. Writers were magical creatures with deep wisdom, startling insight and phenomenal endurance. I mean, they wrote hundreds of pages. I was a reader, though. At one point when I was a university student, I started telling people who wanted to know what I was going to do for a living that I was trying to figure out how I could be a reader. Turns out, being a writer is a pretty good way of being a reader.
The Goat
Roxanne Hsu Feldman
93.3 (May-June 2017): p91.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Horn Book, Inc.. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Sources, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.hbook.com/magazine/default.asp
The Goat
by Anne Fleming
Intermediate Groundwood 159 pp. g 3/17 978-1-55498-916-4 $14.95 e-book ed. 978-1-55498-917-1 $12.95
Although few have seen it, a mountain goat lives on the roof of an apartment building in the heart of Manhattan, and he is "hungry, hungry, hungry." He yearns for the fresh grass he sees across the "black river of giant moving clumps" at the bottom of the "cliff." Meanwhile, eleven-year-old Kid and her parents have temporarily moved into the building while her actor mother is appearing in an Off-Broadway show. Kid is fascinated by the possibility of a goat on the roof and is convinced that finding it will bring her nervous mother good luck. Painfully shy, Kid does not initially interact with the other tenants: a blind skateboarder (and famed novelist) who has recently fallen in love, an elderly woman who takes cares of her husband after his stroke, and a middle-aged man who grieves over his dead father and the missed connections in his life. Things start changing for Kid when she makes a new friend. Will, similar in age, is afraid of windows and heights: perhaps due to having lost his parents in the Twin Towers on 9/11. As the book unfolds, Kid and Will help each other overcome their phobias and accept their individual quirks. The story offers insight through the viewpoints of characters of all ages, making it possible for young readers to understand the effects of trauma and how people deal with life's different obstacles; it's also an affectionate and quirky ode to Manhattan. In the end, the assorted characters converge, during a final dramatic goat-chase sequence, from rooftop to Central Park--finally making, for Kid, the apartment building feel "a lot like home." ROXANNE HSU FELDMAN
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Feldman, Roxanne Hsu. "The Goat." The Horn Book Magazine, May-June 2017, p. 91+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA492995610&it=r&asid=58c81e33b61a68c0554e5ab0a71b122b. Accessed 25 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A492995610
QUOTED: "The book is beautifully patterned, and as the adjacent plot lines come together, readers may per ceive several subtle but important lessons. In short, The Goat is a delightful reading experience."
Fleming, Anne: The Goat
Leslie Vermeet
22.4 (Apr. 2017): p10.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Resource Links
http://www.atcl.ca
(E)
FLEMING, Anne
The Goat
Groundwood Books, 2017. 155p. Gr. 36. 978-1-55498-916-4. Hdbk. S16.95
In this delightfully absurd book, appropriately named Kid finds herself in New York City searching for an elusive roof-top goat that she hopes will bring her mother luck on the opening of her Off Broadway play. Kid's quest brings her into contact with several unusual neighbours, each of whom--including the goat is in pursuit of his or her own personal challenge.
The Goat is told from multiple perspectives beyond Kid's, though, pulling together a cast of characters drawn in light but sure strokes. Joff Vanderlinden is a blind skateboarder-turned-novelist who meets a mysterious woman with a striking way with words. Jonathan and Doris are an aging couple navigating the aftermath of a stroke. And Kenneth P. Gill is the apparently reclusive man who has inexplicably brought a mountain goat to the city. These apparently disparate people and situations are nimbly braided into the story of the goat, providing symbolic and thematic depth and resonance.
Despite the absurd plot, the story strikes many serious, even sombre notes. Kid's accomplice in her search for the goat is Will, whose parents died when the Twin Towers fell; now Will lives with his grandmother and has developed nearly paralysing rituals as a coping strategy. Will's help when Kid needs it most, however, allows the other characters to realize their own goals and helps Kid confront the shyness that has held her back. At the centre of the relationship between Kid and Will is a well of empathy, emotional resilience, and compassion, qualities mirrored in the novel's various subplots.
I admire this book so much for its deft layering, its playfulness, and its poignancy. The book is beautifully patterned, and as the adjacent plot lines come together, readers may per ceive several subtle but important lessons. In short, The Goat is a delightful reading experience.
Thematic Links: Families; Neighbours; Friendship; Emotions; New York City; Cities; Magical Realism
Leslie Vermeet
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Vermeet, Leslie. "Fleming, Anne: The Goat." Resource Links, Apr. 2017, p. 10. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA495033890&it=r&asid=d8dfaf9a24fadd49aac2b6a1a78210a8. Accessed 25 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495033890
QUOTED: "With delicate insight and humor, Fleming cleverly unites people ... in an offbeat celebration of courage and individuality."
The Goat
Julia Smith
113.12 (Feb. 15, 2017): p79.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
* The Goat. By Anne Fleming. Mar. 2017.168p. Groundwood, $14.95 (9781554989164). Gr. 4-7.
Something big is happening at a small Manhattan apartment building. Kid and her parents are newly arrived from Toronto for a few months' stay to look after a relatives dog and be in the city as Kid's mom mounts an off-Broadway musical. What makes this building unique in a skyscraper-filled metropolis isn't its architecture but the simple fact that there is a mountain goat living on its roof. When rumor of its existence makes its way to Kid, she grows determined to catch a glimpse of the creature, as a sighting is said to bring seven years' good luck--and her parents could use some good fortune. With her new friend Will, whose parents died in the Twin Towers, Kid begins to canvas the building for information about the goat, facing personal challenges in the process and setting in motion a chain of events that neatly links the residents' individual lives into a shared narrative. Fleming manages to accomplish an astonishing amount of storytelling in this slender novel, shifting the point of view among Kid, four tenants, and, most wonderfully, the goat, who dreams of leaving his "sad little mountain" and gamboling in Central Park. With delicate insight and humor, Fleming cleverly unites people--and goats--from vastly different walks of life in an offbeat celebration of courage and individuality.--Julia Smith
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Smith, Julia. "The Goat." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 79. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485442592&it=r&asid=c5fd35f169c53de6e80c9682776742e7. Accessed 25 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485442592
QUOTED: "delightfully eccentric and warmhearted characters."
"The convoluted, intricate tale is filled with joy, sweet sadness, and a triumph of spirit. Lovely."
Fleming, Anne: THE GOAT
(Jan. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Fleming, Anne THE GOAT Groundwood (Children's Fiction) $16.95 3, 14 ISBN: 978-1-55498-916-4
There's a goat living on the roof of a New York City apartment building--or is it merely an urban legend?White Toronto native Kid and her parents arrive in the city, where they will live in a cousin's apartment and take care of his dog, Cat, while he is away. Her mom is a scattered, nervous actor who will be appearing in an off-Broadway play that she created. Cousin Doug leaves them a detailed book describing every possible facet of Cat's care and all the people with whom he interacts. Kid feels generally "paralyzed by shyness" except when she is safe in her "family bubble," but she finds herself welcomed by Cat's friends. Brown-skinned Will, whose parents were killed in the twin towers, speaks in Spoonerisms, and is afraid to look out of windows, tells Kid about the goat. Together they are determined to find it, and while involved in their quest, they lose some of their fears. Fleming has created delightfully eccentric and warmhearted characters that exist in a close-knit community in lovely, accurately described New York City venues. The delightfully named, multiply diverse tenants in the building have interesting back stories and are given a turn at expressing their viewpoints. Even the goat tells of his hunger and longings. The convoluted, intricate tale is filled with joy, sweet sadness, and a triumph of spirit. Lovely. (Fiction. 9-12)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Fleming, Anne: THE GOAT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477242350&it=r&asid=7750bc14a2093ddc9c4899f90a4c8199. Accessed 25 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A477242350
QUOTED: "The novel's underlying theme of people coming together on a shared quest makes for a heartwarming ... tale."
The Goat
263.52 (Dec. 19, 2016): p124.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Goat
Anne Fleming. Groundwood (PGW, dist.), $14.95 (168p) ISBN 978-1-55498-916-4
When Toronto native Kid arrives in New York City with her parents to spend several months looking after a cousin's dog, she expects to see new and unusual things, but the rumor of a goat living atop their building seems farfetched, even for Manhattan. But a goat is indeed there, and adult author Fleming (Gay Dwarves of America) uses humorous third-person narration to chronicle the animal's circumstances and the story of how it arrived on the building, switching attention among multiple characters, both human and animal. Several of them have obstacles to overcome--including the goat's hunger, Kid's social phobia, her friend Will's fear of windows, and an older neighbor's frustration at the physical aftereffects of a stroke--which are dealt with as they search for the goat. Kid's adjustment to New York City, her time in museums, and the warm and unusual neighbors make for a lively yet tender story. Will's parents died during 9/11, a revelation handled with sensitivity, and the novel's underlying theme of people coming together on a shared quest makes for a heartwarming and very New York tale. Ages 9-11. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Goat." Publishers Weekly, 19 Dec. 2016, p. 124. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475324369&it=r&asid=51ec20edd0a9e21a3c74e7a72ec07ec5. Accessed 25 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475324369
QUOTED: "The list of characters is long, and eccentricities abound, but so do charm and warm humor."
Fleming, Anne. The Goat
Brenda Kahn
63.2 (Feb. 2017): p86.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
FLEMING, Anne. The Goat. 160p. ebook available. Groundwood. Mar. 2017. Tr $14.95. ISBN 9781554989164.
Gr 5-8--A kid named Kid travels with her parents from her home in Canada to New York City to apartment-sit and dog-sit for a dog named Cat. Her father's uncle is traveling abroad for six months. While this is a great opportunity for her parents (her mother's off-Broadway play is in rehearsals, and her father will use the time to write his own play), Kid is already missing her own pet, a cat, as well as her friends and her school. When she arrives at the apartment building and looks up, she spies a bit of white near the top of the building. Later, upon hearing rumors that a goat lives on the roof, she wonders how that is possible. As she and her father settle into a routine that revolves around calming her anxious, high-maintenance mother, she meets Will, who is homeschooled by his grandmother, who has taken care of him ever since his parents died in the Twin Towers on September 11. Both Will and Kid have their own quirks and fears, and they fall into an easy friendship and soon decide to investigate the mystery of the goat. This slim, slice-of-life novel unfolds slowly as readers are introduced to key residents of the building who may or may not believe there is a goat on the roof. The list of characters is long, and eccentricities abound, but so do charm and warm humor. VERDICT Hand to tweens who prefer quiet, character-driven novels and fans of E.L. Konigsburg.--Brenda Kahn, Tenakill Middle School, Closter, NJ
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kahn, Brenda. "Fleming, Anne. The Goat." School Library Journal, Feb. 2017, p. 86+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479405563&it=r&asid=7df4d9c70aa1149c2e4b0289cc41e79c. Accessed 25 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479405563
QUOTED: "The Goat takes a concept that is easiest told as zany and madcap, but instead wisely presents it as perfectly ordinary. If Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach made a kids’ movie (pun intended), this would certainly be their script."
Anne Fleming's middle-grade book about a kid named Kid, a dog named Cat, and a goat on a roof
Serah-Marie McMahon: The Goat takes a concept that is easiest told as zany and madcap, but instead wisely presents it as perfectly ordinary
The Goat
By Anne Fleming
Groundwood Books
120 pp; $16.95
I once witnessed two casual acquaintances debate the relative merits of various North American cities. One championed Victoria, B.C., because “you can be walking down the street and just happen upon a real live seal, right in front of you!” The other rolled her eyes. “That happens in New York City too.” (If perhaps the sudden appearance of random animals in the Big Apple seems far-fetched to you, consider that on February 21st of this year NYPD spent most of a day pursuing a cow through several neighbourhoods in Queens. It was the second such incident of 2017.)
Anne Fleming would likely side with the eye-roller. Her newest novel and her first for children is The Goat, a book about a mountain goat that has somehow made its way onto the roof of a New York City apartment building. While most of its tenants express mild surprise at the news, no one is exactly shocked by the idea of wildlife living eleven stories up in urban density. It’s just another day in New York.
The mystery of the goat is less whodunit and more whatisitevendoingthere. Six residents each hold a piece of the puzzle, and we put together the story through their reactions to the four-hoofed beast. A blind skateboarder suspects something is nagging his seeing-eye dog. A man recovers from a stroke and watches the goat daily, but is unable – or maybe unmoved – to disclose his sightings. A wife neither sees nor hears the animal but wonders whatever became of her windowsill wheatgrass. An opera lover knows more than he is letting on. And a slightly manic and clearly very hungry goat cares more about food than how he ended up a New Yorker.
But mostly this is the story of a kid named Kid. Newly arrived to NYC by way of Toronto, Kid takes up temporary residence, along with her parents, to care for a distant cousin’s dog, named Cat. The beloved pet comes with a handmade instruction book, filled with detailed drawings of all the people she regularly encounters.
This is how Kid meets Will, who speaks in “spoonerisms” (the transposing of sounds or letters to humorous effect) and is uncomfortably comfortable in his weirdness. Kid and Will eventually strike up a friendship, and upon learning that a real live sighting of the rumoured goat will procure them seven gears of lewd yuck (seven years of good luck) they decide to seek it out.
Fleming chooses her words carefully; I’m not the first to notice. She has repeatedly been called playful, a master of the literary sleight of hand. These ascriptions are accurate, about things useful to have in the arsenal when writing for the not-yet-teen. And so naming her protagonist “Kid” was no accident.
The fact that every review of this book is not titled with a pun on the goat/kid joke shows more restraint than I would suggest advisable when appraising children’s literature. But more poignantly, Fleming avoids pronouns. Not completely, but noticeably. So much so that Kid’s gender is fuzzy in the mind’s eye. I believe this to be intentional. I believe this to be beautiful.
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Buried somewhere in the middle of The Goat is a scene where the blind skateboarder is working on a fantasy novel. He explains that each of his books is just a mash-up of other books he loved. Here, Fleming is winking. She too loves books, and this one pays tribute to the structure of The Westing Game, the city of Harriet the Spy and the language of everything ever written by Polly Horvath.
This book could have gone astray. The tale’s trajectory is tied to Kid trying to determine something the reader already knows for sure, and yet it’s hardly the point. Bits of everyday conversation between parent and child, a chess game in Washington Square and an age-appropriate explanation of 9/11 have nothing to do with the plot and go nowhere, but are far from boring. Characters are drawn as more than their characteristics, with likes and moments and mannerisms that reflect but don’t rely on their brownness, their blindness, their crippling shyness.
The Goat takes a concept that is easiest told as zany and madcap, but instead wisely presents it as perfectly ordinary. If Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach made a kids’ movie (pun intended), this would certainly be their script.
QUOTED: "wistful, whimsical debut middle grade novel."
Book reviews: Anxiety explored in two new novels for teens
Sherie Posesorski SHERIE POSESORSKI
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Published on: May 10, 2017 | Last Updated: May 10, 2017 12:12 PM PDT
The Goat
by Anne Fleming
(Groundwood Books)
For the residents, the rumour of a goat living atop their New York apartment building is merely a fanciful urban legend. Not so, though, to the mountain goat who is among the cast of narrators in Vancouver author Anne Fleming’s wistful, whimsical debut middle grade novel, The Goat.
Principally among those on a quest to find out whether the goat exists is Kid, a young girl who has moved with her parents to the city for six months. Kid believes her parents (actually everyone, she admits) could use the seven years of good luck sighting the goat is said to bring.
The residents (including the goat) and their seemingly disparate storylines render the building a mini version of Winesburg, Ohio, with each feeling isolated by their feelings of anxiety and loss.
While Kid can’t say a word to strangers because she is so shy, her mother Lisa, a playwright, can’t leave any of her calamitous scenarios unspoken, requiring an exhaustingly ceaseless round of reassurance from Kid and her father Bobby.
Bobby avoids the writer’s block he is experiencing by taking Kid to museums. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Kid and Bobby befriend Will and his grandmother Mrs. Lomp, his guardian, legally and literally, never letting him of view since his parents died on 9/11.
It is Will who tells Kid about the goat. Their door-to-door detective style interrogation of the apartment residents for clues in their investigation requires both of them to face down their own fears (in Will’s case of looking out of windows).
It takes a village of poignantly real characters — young, middle-aged and elderly — coming together, each taking a liberating leap of faith over the hurdle of their imprisoning anxiety, in the exhilarating goat hunt that concludes this assured novel.
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Optimists Die First
by Susin Nielsen
(Tundra Books)
Ever since the accidental death of 16-year-old Petula’s younger sister — a death for which she blames herself — Petula sees the threat of death lurking everywhere. You would assume that all this negative thinking and her relentless doom and gloom soothsaying would make Petula a “Debbie Downer,” as one classmate tagged her, and render her narration a depressing read. It’s not so at all in Vancouver author Susin Nielsen’s fifth teen novel, Optimists Die First.
While she is too often her “own worst enemy,” Petula’s lacerating gallows wit, manic anxiety and anguished perceptiveness make her character and narration wrenchingly authentic, but it is leavened by dry, dark humour (think Carrie Fisher’s autobiographical monologues).
In mandated art therapy class — “Crafting for Crazies,” said Petula before becoming an unwilling participant — she meets her counterpoint Jacob Cohen, who has a bionic arm, after losing one in a car accident.
Cohen seems to be everything the pessimistic, anti-social Petula is not — positive, upbeat, adventurous and a friendly mentor to the other “misfits” in the group Nielsen calls a “twisted version of The Breakfast Club.”
In rom-com fashion, these two opposites initially spar in snappy repartee, but Jacob’s warmth and good-natured nudging embolden Petula to step out of her stiflingly restrictive comfort zone.
Here, as in Nielsen’s previous award-winning novels, her use of first-person narration is compellingly believable. The short chapters sprint by with sitcom pacing and snappy dialogue that establishes the secondary characters with immediacy.
Forgiveness of others can be much easier than forgiving yourself. This novel is about how good people can make mistakes and then learn to accept them.
QUOTED: "Fleming’s stories are beautiful intaglios of loneliness, damaged people and the messiness that we create by being human and rubbing up against each other. From the heartbreaking unicycle boy, to the gay dwarves website, to the diary of one family’s puke, these stories entertain and enthrall and titillate. I would not call this a summer read. I would call it a great must-read."
‘Gay Dwarves of America’ by Anne Fleming
Posted: AUGUST 19, 2012
Book Reviews
Reviewed by Thomas Trofimuk
Deceptively beautiful. Surprisingly painful. Heartbreaking. Clever as hell. Funny and real. Anne Fleming’s collection of stories, Gay Dwarves of America, is all of the above and more. These nine pieces sometimes fall into what one would understand a story looks like, and other times, they will poke and push at the edges of convention. I love this about Fleming. She is bold and willing to experiment. This is risky. It takes courage. Massive kudos for making the attempt. And Brava for having the skill, talent and temerity to make it work because in this case, it pays off. These stories are wonderful.
“Backstock: The Musical” is just that – a musical, a libretto of sorts. It’s both funny and witty, and shocking. “Puke Diary” is quite literally a diary of its characters’ puking, starting with Sarah the cat – which had me laughing out loud. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the final piece in this collection – “Thirty-One One Word Stories,” which is exactly what its title says, thirty-one one-word-per-page ‘stories.’
Fleming is a master of literary sleight of hand, as she leads readers into the inner lives of her characters only to twist our perceptions in previously unimagined ways. Or she will turn what seemed like whimsy into something hard and sad. “Unicycle Boys,” for example, is a story that swirls around a single memory of a boy on a unicycle –
There is always a boy on a unicycle. It is not the same boy, but if you collected them together, you’d quickly see what they have in common, besides, of course, curly hair and skinny legs and a certain angularity of shoulder, a certain quality to their skin, be it brown or olive or pink, as if beneath the troubled epi– lay a clear and radiant dermis.
In the course of this wonderful story we meet the boy, the original boy on a unicycle, and we grow to love him as we do the flawed narrator. We see ourselves in these characters and that’s what makes the tragedy of this story so big. In twenty perfect pages, Fleming shines a light on the shallowness and cruelty of youth, the exuberance of first love, and how these things can break you and how sometimes these breaks don’t mend, ever. Sometimes, what doesn’t kill you doesn’t, in the end, make you stronger, contradicting what old Nietzsche said. Instead, these experiences haunt and reverberate for a lifetime.
“Unicycle Boys” is the first story in this collection. It’s the story by which Fleming proves she can deftly craft a brilliant, somewhat conventional short story that hits in the head and the heart.
Then comes the title piece, “Gay Dwarves of America,” which follows the lives of a couple of male college students who create a fictitious website, a dating site for gay dwarves. But the email from a mom who suspects her son, a little person, is in fact gay, starts to change everything between the two friends. The mom would love it if her son would let her know one way or the other – she’s encouraging him to come out – and in an email she writes: “I think I should just let things be for a while. As long as Peter knows I love him no matter what, well, what else can I do?” If this story was a teeter-totter, this line is the fulcrum. After this, everything tilts toward a sad yet oddly hopeful ending.
“The Pear” is a romance that begins with the question of a pear – what is it comprised of? What is the best way to eat a pear? And then: “I will eat the pear she gave me.” And so this story goes – an older woman who is madly in love with a younger woman, a free-spirited butterfly who needs a place to stay, for a while. And in the end, Fleming gives us the pointed denial of the older woman, an affirmation of broken love and loneliness – “…don’t flatter yourself. I would have loved anybody.”
Sometimes the tag “experimental” comes with the baggage of trying too hard to be quirky, or the work can be completely unapproachable. This is certainly not the case with the handful of Fleming’s stories that might be called experimental. While they are stylistically divergent, at no time, even with her “Thirty-One One Word Stories,” which is pretty far out there as far as stories go, does it seem pushed.
Fleming’s stories are beautiful intaglios of loneliness, damaged people and the messiness that we create by being human and rubbing up against each other. From the heartbreaking unicycle boy, to the gay dwarves website, to the diary of one family’s puke, these stories entertain and enthrall and titillate. I would not call this a summer read. I would call it a great must-read.
QUOTED: "Fleming displays a lithe versatility in this collection, and an admirable willingness to push the boundaries of form and style. Fortunately, she mostly resists the impulse to retreat into technical sophistry: She is wise enough to realize that pure technique, devoid of emotional resonance, is ultimately sterile."
Book Review: Gay Dwarves of America, by Anne Fleming
Fleming displays a lithe versatility in this collection, and an admirable willingness to push the boundaries of form and style
Gay Dwarves of America
By Anne Fleming
Pedlar Press
205 pp; $21
Anyone searching for evidence of Anne Fleming’s stylistic playfulness need look no farther than “Thirty-One One Word Stories,” the final entry in the B.C. author’s second collection of short fiction. The title is a perfectly accurate description of the story’s content: 31 separate words, one per page, each presented as a single sentence. The words are mostly nouns, although a number of them (“Rifle,” “Cheat,” “Steer”) could also be read as verbs; the longest word in the story (“Salamander”) is four syllables. The words operate individually and in tandem, thanks to their placement (“Magazine” follows “Rifle,” one letter is added to “Louse” to get “Louise”), and their resonance across the larger narrative. The word “Evening” appears twice, once within quotation marks, the second time with no quotes; the reader is invited to make a distinction between an informal greeting in the first instance and a time of day or the gerund form of a verb in the second.
[np-related]
While this may appear as little more than a game, by reducing narrative to such tiny units, Fleming is able to call attention to the nature of story, and to the reader’s influence in making meaning. Indeed, the 31 words will have different connotations for each reader who comes to them, and each will in effect create a different narrative arc from these building blocks. The placement of each word on a separate page means that the brief text is surrounded by negative space that invites the reader to extrapolate larger contexts.
If all this seems overly academic, the story’s placement at the end of the collection is also helpful: readers less inclined toward experimental narrative can still gain enjoyment from the more recognizable stories that precede it. Indeed, “Thirty-One One Word Stories” is not entirely indicative of the collection as a whole: Fleming is at her best in stories that are much more familiar or conventional (if one may use that word non-pejoratively in a critical context).
“Unicycle Boys,” for instance, is a straightforward tale of a teenaged girl who accompanies a misfit to his high-school prom, much to the disdain of her popular ex-boyfriend. Fleming nicely captures the awkwardness and pathos of being an outsider in a milieu that prizes conformity above all. Even the story’s narrator, who claims to disavow cliques of any kind, must align herself to a group that is defined by its outsider status: “What group did we think we belonged to? Hard to remember. Smart girls with sharp wits, girls who argued with teachers, who questioned authority, who mouthed off but got good marks, girls who thought themselves worldly. Girls who scorned membership in a group.” The decision to have the story narrated by an adult looking back on her adolescence also provides a useful ironic distance, adding a layer of pathos to the story’s conclusion.
The title story features two university students who occupy themselves creating fake websites around the most outlandish subjects they can conjure (“Lithuanian dadaists,” “Soft cheeses north and south”). When they set up a site devoted to “Gay dwarves of America,” John, the more sensitive of the two, begins engaging with a woman who claims to be worried about her son’s closeted homosexuality. These online interactions lead John to examine his own sexuality, which may be more ambiguous than he himself realized. “Thorn-blossoms,” one of the collection’s best, is a heartbreaking story about a woman trying to deal with her mother’s Alzheimer’s. The mother, Lois, was a magazine journalist before becoming ravaged by the disease; Fleming shows with painful acuity the agony that accrues to a life built out of words when those words are suddenly rendered inaccessible.
These three stories are remarkably strong, and largely eschew stylistic pyrotechnics in favour of forthright emotional engagement. Other stories, such as “Soyez Blessé” and “The Pear,” operate in a similar fashion. The only story in the collection that doesn’t work is “Backstock: The Musical,” about a group of stockroom workers in an outdoor supply store. A satire of the stopgap menial job that people take while pursuing other, loftier ambitions, practically everyone in the story is working toward being something else: potter, writer, revolutionary, anti-intellectual intellectual. The story is constructed as the libretto for a musical, which seems like a clever conceit until it becomes apparent that the experience of reading the story is much like the experience of reading the libretto for a musical: somewhat flat. (Although I for one would love to see “Backstock” actually mounted, if only to witness the production number You Can’t Leave a Man in a Coma.)
That some of the more unconventional approaches in Gay Dwarves of America are less effective than others is perhaps only to be expected. Fleming displays a lithe versatility in this collection, and an admirable willingness to push the boundaries of form and style. Fortunately, she mostly resists the impulse to retreat into technical sophistry: She is wise enough to realize that pure technique, devoid of emotional resonance, is ultimately sterile.
• Steven W. Beattie is reviews editor at Quill & Quire.
QUOTED: "Traditional narrative strategies and formal experimentation, as well as fiction and autobiography, blend comfortably in Anne Fleming’s latest collection of short stories, the delightfully titled Gay Dwarves of America."
Gay Dwarves of America
by Anne Fleming
Traditional narrative strategies and formal experimentation, as well as fiction and autobiography, blend comfortably in Anne Fleming’s latest collection of short stories, the delightfully titled Gay Dwarves of America.
Fleming, a University of British Columbia creative writing prof, is also the author of a novel, Anomaly, and a previous short-fiction collection, Pool Hopping and Other Stories, which was shortlisted for the 1999 Governor General’s Literary Award. In her newest book, she employs an engaging prose style to introduce characters chafing at the boundaries of relationships with lovers, children, best friends – and people who in some cases may be figments of their imaginations.
Elements from Fleming’s personal life, such as places she’s lived, from Waterloo to Vancouver, are woven into her fiction. “Backstock: The Musical” features an ensemble cast that includes a fiction writer named Anne who, like the author, is a lesbian. Like another of her characters, Fleming has played defence on a hockey team. Other stories incorporate fantastical elements along with biography, as in “Peter Who Once Loved Margaret,” which features a protagonist named Anne Fleming and her encounter with an aunt who has been dead for more than 50 years.
The stories are also stylistically diverse. “Backstock” takes the form of a musical score. All that’s missing are the treble clef, notes, and rests. “Puke Diary” is exactly what its title suggests: at their father’s suggestion, members of a family document every instance of vomiting they can recollect.
At the furthest end of the quirk spectrum is “Thirty-one One Word Stories,” which features 31 single-word entries, one to a page. Employing one word to tell an entire story is a provocative conceit, and the selected words bear multiple meanings and subtle intertextual relationships.
Often Fleming’s least experimental stories are most successful. In the masterful “Thorn-blossoms,” for instance, a hockey mom combats familial ennui while her journalist mother unravels from Alzheimer’s. In a straightforward narrative, Fleming offers her most affecting example of the fraught relationships that characterize the book as a whole.
Reviewer: Shawn Syms