Contemporary Authors

• Bad Things Happen ( short stories) Biblioasis (Windsor, Ontario, Canada), 2016

• 49thshelf - http://49thshelf.com/Blog/2016/04/26/The-Chat-Trevor-Corkum-Interviews-Kris-Bertin

  The Chat: Trevor Corkum Interviews Kris Bertin
  By Trevor Corkum
  tagged : Kris Bertin, The Chat, short stories
  Kris Bertin
  TREVOR CORKUM cropped

  In this week’s The Chat, I’m thrilled to be in conversation with Halifax writer Kris Bertin, author of the acclaimed debut short story collection Bad Things Happen (Biblioasis). With humour and dignity, and an exceptional eye for detail, these are stories that explore the stubborn, subterranean wounds that animate the private mystery of our lives.

  Writing in Quill and Quire, Brett Josef Grubisic called Bad Things Happen “Brash (in the best possible sense), intriguing, and consummate without being showy, these are terrific stories in a strong, diverse, and fascinating collection.” Shawn Syms, reviewing the collection in The Winnipeg Review says “Bertin finds within perversity a welcome sense of hope.”

  Kris Bertin’s work has been featured in The Walrus, The Malahat Review, TNQ, and PRISM International, among other magazines. He is a two-time winner of the Jack Hodgins' Founders' Award for Fiction and has had his work anthologized in The Journey Prize Anthology, Oberon's Coming Attractions and EXILE's CVC Anthology. He currently works as a bartender at Bearly's House of Blues & Ribs.

  ***
  THE CHAT WITH KRIS BERTIN
  badthings

  Trevor Corkum: What chance coincidences, good or bad luck, or atmospheric weather disturbances were responsible for you becoming a writer? What would you do if you weren’t writing?

  Kris Bertin: Bad parenting, a tumultuous home life, a lack of supervision, and access to comic books and coloured pencils led me here. My writing is an extension of daydreaming and play, the thing I did a lot of when the real physical world was boring or most often upsetting. I did enough of it that I think I screwed up my brain and now it’s how I think. There’s my life, and then all the imaginary ones that are living in my head. Writing is the only way to get that out. It’s really stupid, actually, to live like that, to actually have to sit down and make up weird little stories to be happy.

  As for whatever else I’d do, it’s difficult to conceive of not writing anymore while still being myself. If I had my brain crushed by a rogue tractor trailer tire and lost that part of myself—but otherwise made a full recovery—I’d be using whatever skill sets I had left. Lesser abilities I have are: social perception, leadership skills, the ability to intervene in serious situations, speaking ability. I thought about being a cop for a long time. I guess I’d become an RCMP officer without any other shit going on his head except for what the wife and I are going to have for dinner later.

  Sounds like heaven, actually.

  TC: As the blurb for your collection says, the characters in Bad Things Happen are between things, on the run or on the move or simply waiting for whatever will happen next. Chris, for example, in “Girl on Fire Escape,” is a 22-year-old escapee from PEI who drifts through the back alleys of Toronto in the thrall of a female scam artist. Imagine you’re spending a day with Chris. Where does he take you? What do you talk or argue about? What’s the one thing you learn from him about life?

  KB: Chris has a character arc in Bad Things Happen, so he’s very different from story to story. In "Girl On Fire Escape," he’s struggling with being alone and poor and overworked, so he’d probably take me to the kind of place I’d like. A no-frills bar, not necessarily a dive, but one that’s looked the same for 15+ years. Some place to get obliterated-drunk and forget that you have to clean dishes or windows the following day. I think we’d argue about whether or not things hold meaning (he’d argue life was empty and I’d say some of it can be nice, at least some of the time) and if he would show me anything it’d be that all of our fears and anxieties are mostly temporary, fleeting and conditional, especially when we’re young.

  ”
  “

  ... if he would show me anything it’d be that all of our fears and anxieties are mostly temporary, fleeting and conditional, especially when we’re young.

  The Chris from "Your #1 Killer"—who has overcome his shortcomings, his moral failings, and who has left behind the criminal underworld to become an exterminator—wouldn’t have much to say to me. He’d say there’s no reason to talk to me. If I explained that I had created him and wanted to see what his day was like, he’d say it doesn’t matter what I want. I think maybe, if I followed him, I’d get to see him enter the woods, follow a path marked in his mind, and end up somewhere wholly unexpected, like a cave system underneath the forest floor. Somewhere he can just go and be himself without the filter of another person’s gaze to define him.

  I could learn something from this, certainly.

  TC: Many of your stories are set in rural parts of the East Coast, but several also take place in large urban centres—Halifax, Toronto, Montreal. How important is it for you to nail the real-life details of your fictional worlds, and how much do you feel at liberty to create?

  KB: Details are important, but accuracy isn’t. I think, unless there’s some facet or landmark that I’m really drawn to or need for the story, it isn’t something I rely on. I’m more interested in a place’s atmosphere than recreating a bang-on description of it. If I don’t get the tone right, if the characters and their lives don’t seem right, if it doesn’t feel like the place, then it doesn’t matter if the CN tower is in the skyline or not.

  I feel completely at liberty to fictionalize a locale, and I think it can actually improve it. In Bad Things Happen, I have some made-up places like Kennedy Narrows, or Onecdaconis or a few others, and they represent the kinds of places I’ve been or seen, a more distilled version of a place that actually exist. Fictionalizing towns allowed me the kind of flexibility to make my own mythology, people, names and geology—to exaggerate or downplay some feature—while still using something from my own experience to make something compelling.

  TC: What’s your own litmus test for good fiction? Are there particular writers or works that have influenced your own development as a writer?

  KB: As a youngster I was inspired by Stephen King, Edward Packard’s Choose-Your-Own-Adventures, Tolkein, and countless Marvel and DC comic books—probably my favourite from back then were Walt Simonson’s Fantastic Four and Thor. As an adult I’ve liked mostly John Irving, Don DeLillo, Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, and—still in the world of comics—European writers like Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, Garth Ennis. Those things changed my world, and made me feel like writing had actual value because they had inspired so much feeling in me. It’s also weird to say this, because I’m friends with her, but Amy Jones and even earlier, David Adams Richards, made me feel like I could write about where I’m from and who I am and it could be Real Fiction.

  ”
  “

  Amy Jones and even earlier, David Adams Richards, made me feel like I could write about where I’m from and who I am and it could be Real Fiction.

  I will say, however, that I’m always eager to drop something that’s boring, stupid, or tiresome, and get to work on my own stuff. For me, my litmus test is really simple. It’s physical. How soon into reading have I yawned or involuntarily rolled my eyes? Do I feel anything inside my chest cavity? Anything at all? Has my pulse picked up?

  ”
  “

  I’m always eager to drop something that’s boring, stupid, or tiresome, and get to work on my own stuff. For me, my litmus test is really simple. It’s physical. How soon into reading have I yawned or involuntarily rolled my eyes? Do I feel anything inside my chest cavity? Anything at all? Has my pulse picked up?

  TC: What’s a question no one has asked about your book yet, that you wish they would ask?

  KB: I think it’s interesting that in only maybe half of my interviews or reviews does humour get mentioned. I’m not sure if that’s because that half doesn’t find it funny, or if they’re so highbrow that they don’t think humour is an element of fiction that deserves mentioning. It might just be that CanLit is a very serious place. Or maybe that the stories are only funny to me. I don’t know. My hope is that people find the stories as funny as they do moving, because a lot of it really does make me laugh. A lot of it gets written because it makes me laugh. I’ve heard from a lot of readers who think the collection is endlessly bleak. I didn’t know that.

  The question I want is: what’s the funniest part of Bad Things Happen?

  The answer is: the scene in "Make Your Move" when the Champ has to come up with a lie about why he didn’t show up to work (because he was getting drunk with some kids at Wendy’s at a campground) and decides to say that he got carjacked in his limo, defeated his attacker, and is now back and ready to work. He even sits and draws a storyboard about it on diner napkins, then uses them as flash cards to help him through his fib.

  That’s my favourite.

  ***

• Currently Living - https://trevorcorkum.com/2013/05/11/kris-bertin-1/

  Q & A with Kris Bertin (Part One)
  by trevorcorkum on May 11, 2013
  Kris Bertin

  Rising Literary Star

  Kris Bertin is one of Canada’s rising literary stars. Based in Halifax, he’s a provocative, award-winning writer of some of the best short fiction currently being written across the country. We recently had the chance to communicate across the miles about all things literary.

  Among many awards, Kris has twice won the prestigious Jack Hodgins Founders Award for best short story published in The Malahat Review in a given year. He was also shortlisted for the Vanderbilt/Exile Fiction Award in 2012. We appeared together in Journey Prize Stories 24 last year.

  I’m a big fan of Kris’ work and think he’s one of the hardest-working, most exciting writers out there today. Look for his new story “The Eviction Process” in The Walrus this July.

  _____

  When did you first realize the deep, dark secret that you are a writer? Did it come at you suddenly, like the voice of God?

  It would be nice if things worked this way, but no, it was nothing like that. I can’t think of a moment where I realized I was a writer, it’s just something I’ve always done. Literary orientation is not a choice. I was born this way.

  When I think back to where it manifested, it was probably with my brother (I shouldn’t have led in to this with a gay identity analogy). I was blessed with a very bright and charismatic older sibling with only an average amount of disdain for his younger brother. But it was just me and him in the middle of nowhere, so he made it his business to entertain us. For as far back as I can remember, our imaginary play was utterly immersive and thrilling, with story arcs that ran for years and incorporated a number of highly complex elements that were far beyond our ability to grasp (like, say the Vietnam War, or Eugenics) and combined them with comic book and action movie sensibilities. We played out bizarre cannibal psychodramas using hand-sewn sock puppets. We played ‘army’ where I endured countless physical and mental tests, early in the morning, while my brother scored my performance with a clipboard and pen. We constructed whole worlds for our action figures that I still remember and hold dear, though today my brother has forgotten them completely. (This was a common occurrence for us—he’d get bored with an idea and not want to play any longer while I would be enraptured with it and go play by myself or else draw up some unreadable comic book about where I thought things might go).

  What was just games for him ended up being one of the only ways I was able to express myself, and represented the purest form of fun available to me as a kid (with an otherwise wretched home life). While I’d look forward to seeing what world my brother had imagined for us to inhabit when I’d get home from school, I began doing the same thing for my friends at recess, dedicating a lot of my classroom time to drafting adventures for me and my pint-sized pals. Inevitably, whatever story I’d write for class would end up being a commercial for the smash-bang doozie of a thriller that we were all going to run outside and act out (making lots of kicking and punching noises, no doubt). I was so nuts for writing stories that I was put in the enrichment program and sent away to weekend learning Camps where I got to watch a hot lady dissect a cow’s heart.

  You are amazingly prolific, publishing and producing short stories and finishing a couple of novels in the space of a few years. What’s the key to your discipline? Do you write every day?

  It’s funny that you say I’m prolific. I don’t feel that way. A good friend of mine has an ungodly output that I’ve tried to match as long as I’ve known him. I can’t even touch that guy.

  I do write every day. I’ve tried to build my work schedule around this so that I can get the job done—generally I write from 1pm to 5pm or some equivalent span of time before I have to go do my other job as a bartender.

  I don’t think it’s discipline. At this point it’s habit. Imagining imaginary people doing imaginary things has never stopped being fun to me, even after I was taken out of those programs. I kept doing it even after being deemed unspecial in my teens because all my other grades had turned to shit and I was developing anger problems (and boners). I never stopped writing, and did it mostly in private until my senior year in high school when my electives had stacked up enough to let me take classes tailor made for me: Journalism, Drama, Creative Writing, Advanced English, Canadian Literature and Creative Writing II. Those classes got my GPA out of the toilet and got me to college, where I made a name for myself as the guy who wrote two good essays, did all the readings, then didn’t take the exam because he was a loser and a fuckup.

  After I dropped out, I kept writing, even when I was working awful jobs, even when the writing was awful (which it was, always). Writing was just a part of my life, and how I made myself happy. If I don’t do it, I don’t feel happy. It’s as simple as that, I think.

  How long does it take you typically to finish a piece?

  I don’t really have a good answer. It’s kind of all over the place. Sometimes I bang out a story in a month and it’s done. A couple times I’ve made something in an evening. Other times I’m going through drafts for months. My story in The Walrus (The Eviction Process, July 2013) was a story I wrote, then killed, then reworked, then killed again. Then I wrote it completely fresh, from scratch, maybe six months after its first incarnation, and was mostly satisfied with it.

  But regardless of when it’s finished, it doesn’t become a piece unless it’s any good. More than half of the stories I write get buried in my story graveyard and never see the light of day. Once something’s done, I leave it alone for a while, forget about it, and then go back to it and pretend it’s a stranger’s short story found at the grocery store. If it’s terrible, I leave it behind (usually in a grocery store).

  I know a lot of us young writers are in a rush to be successful, but if you’re sticking bad shit into envelopes, you’re only going to hurt yourself. I’ve sent out some bad stuff and regretted it, and it’s something I work very hard to avoid.

  I think, too, that sometimes we aren’t ready to write a story when we first try to do it. Maybe you’re not smart enough or you don’t have an angle or any insight into this situation that interests you. Maybe you haven’t experienced the right things yet. But you might, later on. You have your whole life ahead of you (barring horrible disaster, of course). Wouldn’t you rather wait, and tell a great story later on instead of telling a mediocre one now?

  What do you aim for when you write? How does the story hook you? Do characters ever surprise you or does the plot take you into unexpected directions?

  I’d say that most of the time I’m just trying to write something that I’d like to read. I like work that’s mostly realistic, and if not that, then imaginative is just as good. Funny is better than not, though funny goes quite well with sad, or even scary. But in the end, I think the very best thing a story can be is weird. Most people read books or watch movies and go ‘oh my god that was so weird’ like it’s a bad thing—weird just means something is unfamiliar, or maybe has a fleeting familiarity combined with something frightening and uncomfortable, too. There are Calvino and DeLillo stories that I can’t un-remember because there was some captivating moment or image in them that was utterly thrilling. Weird is the highest compliment that can be paid.

  Characters are my first concern. There is no story without character. Plot, mood, atmosphere, theme, all of that stuff is secondary to the little people you’ve made. I write from the point of view that the characters run the show. You make them up, out of memories and behaviors you’ve seen or imagined, but they make the story happen. If we’re working with a realistic framework, settings and circumstances (even when they are highly abnormal or exceptional) are never going to be what makes a story. The maze isn’t interesting. The rat is interesting. I’m in the business of rearing good rats.

  I do am routinely delighted by the decisions of my rats, and this is definitely when I’m ‘hooked’ on a story. When a character is strong enough that he or she is changing my intended goals for the story because it doesn’t suit them, that means I’m imagining something that has real power over me, and, if I do my job right, the reader.

  When is something “done” for Kris Bertin? Do you get a special feeling inside? Any stories that have been more of a struggle?

  I think it’s the absence of a feeling. A story is done when I read it out loud and don’t hear anything that makes me sick to my stomach with shame (I call this feeling the groans, as in: that last passage gave me a real case of the groans). When a story is groans-free, I am happy.

  Lots of stories are a struggle. Like I said earlier, sometimes I’m just not smart enough to pull off the thing I’m trying to do. Sometimes a story is one that you’re meant to write, but it’s not meant to be shared. Sometimes you make something for yourself and it’s not really a story—it’s a diagnostic on what you’re not good at, or hopefully, what you’re not good at yet.

  Do you typically work on more than one project at a time?

  Yes. There’s usually a ‘main’ story or project that I’m quarreling with, but there’s always something floating around that needs more work. There’s a threshold of how much work I can get done in a day, but there’s also a threshold for how much I can work on a particular project before I start to hate it, which usually comes much quicker. Working on multiple things lets you maximize your day’s output when you start to lose steam on a particular project.

  Are you a fan of working with editors?

  I have some trusted advisors that I can go to personally, though I haven’t been using them as much lately. I want to know that I can fix something and get it up to snuff on my own without depending on others, so I’m reserving asking my guys for help when it’s for a very specific purpose, like a big contest or a story that’s particularly difficult for me.

  Working with the editors of magazines can be hard, because it’s often the case that you have conflicting concerns. For every comma that they remove for clarity, they’re taking away some particular inflection or sonic idiosyncrasy I’ve slaved over. Every style guide correction they make removes voice. What I try to do is marry myself to the few contested parts that do the most work, and explain why, then fight for them. Everything that’s less important gets changed as a form of appeasement. I think you’ve got to be flexible, or else it’s not going to work.

  The things I’m not flexible on, however, is the story itself. An editor edits for clarity or else style. They don’t get to write your story. Suggestions for how the plot should change, or what oughta happen with this character or that one is unacceptable. If an editor gives you any of that guff, they aren’t editing, they’re writing by proxy, which is a shitty thing to do.

  Q & A with Kris Bertin (Part Two)
  by trevorcorkum on June 11, 2013
  Kris Bertin

  Rising Literary Star

  Kris Bertin is one of Canada’s rising literary stars. Based in Halifax, he’s a provocative, award-winning writer of some of the best short fiction currently being written across the country. We recently had the chance to communicate across the miles about all things literary.

  Among many awards, Kris has twice won the prestigious Jack Hodgins Founders Award for best short story published in The Malahat Review in a given year. He was also shortlisted for the Vanderbilt/Exile Fiction Award in 2012. We appeared together in Journey Prize Stories 24 last year.

  I’m a big fan of Kris’ work and think he’s one of the hardest-working, most exciting writers out there today. Look for his new story “The Eviction Process” in The Walrus.

  _____

  We both grew up in military families and moved around as kids. We also both grew up in the Maritimes, far from the bright lights and big city. How has this had influenced how and what you write? Do you feel you are part of a broader group of Atlantic Canadian writers?

  I think of myself as an Atlantic Canadian, and therefore an Atlantic Canadian Writer as a result. If you didn’t know who I was and you had all my stories to look at and figure it out, I think you could come away thinking I’m a Maritimer. A lot of my characters are burdened with drinking and unemployment, rural monotony and the call of the ‘Big City. Likewise, there’s often a tree line within eyeshot for a character to look at and dream of disappearing into. I have still tried to have fun with it. I wrote a story that took place in Onecdaconis, New Brunswick (Bad Things Happen, The Antigonish Review #166), a place so rural it doesn’t even exist.

  But these aren’t the only things I’m interested in writing, and lots of stories I’ve had published have been about other places and kinds of people. I’m happy to be an Atlantic Canadian Writer so long as it means I can still write about whatever I want. If every story has to be about a guy with a dog and a pickup truck, you can count me out. My familiarity with a place can give me some richness to draw from if I have a particular kind of story to share, but I have no interest in defining myself solely by the Hopewell Rocks that are on my Medicare card.

  You’ve had some well-deserved success lately, including publication in the Walrus and snagging a couple of big awards. Are you more aware now of an audience? Do you feel any pressure to please or meet the expectations of readers or editors?

  I have a website and I can see that more people are looking for me, but for the most part, they’re all writers, looking to do the same things I’ve been doing. Most of my ‘fan mail’ has been from people like me who read my stuff and dug what I was doing. The payoff here, of course, is not pride or acclaim, but great friendships with up-and-comers such as yourself, Chris Donahoe, Will Johnson, Andrew Hood, Naben Ruthnum, etc.

  I don’t feel any pressure I didn’t feel before, which is to make good work to the best of my ability.

  What about your novel?

  What about it.

  I like to think about what’s at stake when we write. For me, good writing has something at stake or something at risk, not just for the characters but for the writer. Your writing is honest, free of bullshit—real. What’s at stake for you when you write?

  This question is great because it’s frustrating and I don’t want to answer it. Not because it’s a stupid question but because it pains me with very real issues about what I do and who I am and how I value myself. In fact, it might be too good, and therefore too demanding of your subject (so fuck you).

  I think you said it though. Honesty is very important to me and is what I strive for in my work. Sometimes what’s true is unpleasant and/or unpopular to say, but it’s nonetheless your job to say it. I’ve had work rejected for those reasons, and have endured some real trials in the workshop because my work had some seemingly un-PC element to it. And while all of that was awful and exhausting, even when I fail in my attempts to realize a difficult story, it’s got to be better than producing something that’s fluffy and quirky and utterly benign. If you shy away from something because it’s upsetting or politically incorrect, you might be a coward. That’s probably what’s at stake for me personally. I have to write what I see and feel and think, regardless of whether or not a grad student deems it appropriate or not.

  Contrarily, another thing that’s at stake is whether or not my story (and therefore me) will be considered reasonable or fair. As much as I have write with honesty, it’s all for nothing if I fail to acknowledge the complexity and contradictions and uncertainty behind any statement or situation. The minute I start saying ‘this is how things are’, I blew it. When exploring a theme, it’s important to remember and acknowledge that the conclusions that we (and our characters) draw from the story are ultimately subjective and not at all fixed. I think one of the ways to do this is to point to a variety of possibilities in our prose, and make very clear note that this is only one outcome of many.

  You said in a recent interview that you want to avoid being labeled part of “angry guy” lit. I don’t see this in your work – your characters are complex and full and you handle them honestly but with deep compassion. Do you ever worry about being pigeon-holed?

  Thank you for saying that.

  I do worry about it, and I think it makes sense to worry. If you produce a lot of work, and people read it, it’s their job to compare one thing to the next. The only remedy, I think, is to dig deeper and write things that we’re not comfortable with, come up with projects that we aren’t exactly sure about. With each subsequent project, I’m trying more and more to imagine different kinds of people to write about with situations and circumstances tailored for those characters. I try to write from a variety of perspectives and work on creating vocabularies that reflect each project’s characters and tone, but most of all I just try to get to a place where I can honestly say I didn’t expect this to happen. I’d like to think if I’m surprised my readers will be.

  This pigeon-holing stuff is, of course, unavoidable. However we think of it, we each have our unique voice, and there are things that are inextricable from the work we produce and even the way we produce it. There is such a thing as a ‘Kris Bertin story’, just like there’s a ‘Trevor Corkum story’, and they reflect our needs as readers as much as they say something about our aesthetic as writers. Ultimately, when people people read your work, they build their own definitions for what it is and who you are. If enough people do this, there’ll be some kind of consensus. It probably won’t be wrong, and if it is, it’s maybe your own fault, right?

  You’ve had three Chris Rose stories now, and in each we see Chris at a different stage and in some kind of new light. Can we expect to see more of Chris?

  I’d say never except I’m not supposed to say that. I feel like what’s interesting about this part of his life has been fully explored in the little trilogy I made. That I was able to satisfactorily write three distinct stories about the same character and get them all published seems like enough. I could maybe see visiting that guy again when we’re older, but until then, there are lots and lots of other stories I’m much more interested in.

  You’ve said many times that one of your goals is to get your stories into the hands of as many people as possible, including people who maybe don’t read “literary fiction” that often. What’s your sense of the state of reading in general? What are your thoughts on how to get your stories out in maybe unconventional ways while still getting paid?

  I hear a lot about how stupid everyone is now, but it seems to me that being able to express yourself with words has never been as important for as many people as it is today. Look at your social media. If you can’t differentiate between possessive ‘your’ and ‘you are’, your friends hate you. People with strong, concise storytelling abilities, good grammar, and a sense of humour have this platform to interact with their friends that has never before existed. People are forced to communicate through a keyboard daily, often making work for the entire world to see—work that will be around forever. Our writing and reading and even our typing skills just matter more now.

  I can’t speak for the state of literary fiction. Everyone says it’s dire, but I don’t know if it is. When things change, the doomsday people come out in droves to herald the end, but this sort of thing is too simplistic. People have been listening to and reading and watching stories for as long as we had language. That’s not going to go away just because we have a little computer in our pocket.

  I think what we’re going to see a lot more of is websites that host good, exciting literary fiction that pay their authors with ad dollars. Pay-sites seem to go down pretty fast, so this is probably how things will end up being. Buy the magazine in print for X amount of dollars, or else if you can’t, go online and read it for free, where revenue is derived from advertisers. Seems to make sense to me.

  Crystal ball: where will Kris Bertin be in ten years? What’s the dream?

  The dream is to write in a variety of genres and mediums. I love literary fiction, but I also love comic books and film and animation. The thing that would make me most happy is to be able to come up with an idea and realize it using the best possible medium for that story. In ten years, I’d like to think I would have published at least a couple books and only work at a bar because I love doing it, not because I need to.

• Ottawa International Writers Festival Web site - http://www.writersfestival.org/authors/spring-2016/kris-bertin

  Kris Bertin ’s stories have appeared in The Walrus, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, PRISM International, and other magazines. He is a two-time winner of the Jack Hodgins’ Founders’ Award for Fiction and has had his work anthologized in The Journey Prize Anthology, Oberon’s Coming Attractions and EXILE’s CVC Anthology. Bertin’s debut collection of stories, Bad Things Happen, was published with Biblioasis in 2016. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

• Kris Bertin Home Page - http://www.krisbertin.com/

  Kris Bertin is a writer from Halifax, NS with work featured in The Walrus, The Malahat Review, TNQ, PRISM International and many others. He is a two-time winner of the Jack Hodgins' Founders' Award for Fiction and has had his work anthologized in The Journey Prize Anthology, Oberon's Coming Attractions and EXILE's CVC Anthology. His first book of short stories, entitled BAD THINGS HAPPEN is published by Biblioasis.

  Born into a military family, Kris lived in BC and Ontario as a child, then did the rest of his growing up in Lincoln, New Brunswick. He attended Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, studying English Literature and Creative Writing, but left before graduating. Since then, he has worked as a mover, a general labourer, an assistant curator in an art gallery, a call-centre cell-phone rep, a Mongolian-grill cook, a bouncer, and a writer. He currently works as a bartender at Bearly's House of Blues & Ribs.

• Publisher -

  Kris Bertin’s stories have appeared in The Walrus, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, PRISM International, and other magazines. He is a two-time winner of the Jack Hodgins’ Founders’ Award for Fiction and has had his work anthologized in The Journey Prize Anthology, Oberon’s Coming Attractions and EXILE’s CVC Anthology. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

• LOC Authorities -

  LC control no.: n 2015023813

  Descriptive conventions:
  rda

  Personal name heading:
  Bertin, Kris

  Associated country:
  Canada

  Affiliation: St. Mary's University in Halifax

  Profession or occupation:
  Author

  Found in: Coming attractions 14, 2014: t.p. (Kris Bertin) page [120]
  Kris Bertin studied English and Creative Writing at St.
  Mary's University in Halifax; he has twice won the Jack
  Hodgins Founders' Award for Fiction)

  Associated language:
  eng

  ================================================================================

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
  Library of Congress
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Bad Things Happen
Publishers Weekly. 263.18 (May 2, 2016): p29.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:

Bad Things Happen

Kris Bertin. Biblioasis (Consortium/Perseus, U.S. dist.; UTR Canadian dist.), $14.95 trade paper (202p) ISBN 978-1-77196-054-0

In this excellent debut collection of 10 stories, men and women are caught at precipitous crossroads in their lives. In the title story, two teenage girls break into a local heartthrob's home to discover he's not at all what they expected; in "Your #1 Killer," a mother learns of her mendacious son's true calling as a master exterminator. "Make Your Move" and "Everywhere Money" play with structure in interesting ways: the former includes multiple endings as if life were a noir-ish choose-your-own-adventure tale; the latter details in similar fashion the many ways in which people convince themselves to walk away from a life. "Is Alive and Can Move" and "The Story Here" both deal with perspectives in transition. In the first, a recovering alcoholic becomes convinced the college building in which he works as a janitor is alive and is physically moving and changing of its own accord; the second, the most affecting story in this collection, focuses on one woman's awareness of her own family's history as her father's many divorces are contrasted with her dreams of the end of the world. This is a forceful, well-written collection with breadth of imagination--at times melancholy but never depressing. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Bad Things Happen." Publishers Weekly, 2 May 2016, p. 29+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA452883967&it=r&asid=7bc387753b0f22801a6830568a0f00fd. Accessed 21 Jan. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A452883967

• Quill and Quire
  http://www.quillandquire.com/review/bad-things-happen/
  Word count: 616

  ★Bad Things Happen

  by Kris Bertin

  An armchair profiler challenge based on the acknowledgments page in the debut story collection by Kris Bertin, a Haligonian bartender: We are presented with the fact that the stories were written when Bertin was between the ages of 23 and 30; his claim that the stories “might be the only things [he has] ever taken seriously in [his] life”; effusive thanks given to Alice Munro fan Alexander MacLeod and Wes Anderson–lauding cinephile Ryan Paterson; further nods to bar staff and customers for “supplying the raw materials with which to make” the stories. What’s fair to expect from the work itself?

  Screen shot 2016-01-26 at 2.22.23 PMSerious? Jokey? Youthful? Quirkily stylized? Woebegone in a David Adams Richards vein? Cinematic? Munroesque with tinges of bleary-eyed Bukowski? Yes, no, sometimes.

  In fact, Bertin’s collection offers a delightful showcase of interests and an accomplished range of styles and tones, running from relatively straightforward realism and mirthful comedy to transplanted “swamp Gothic” that wouldn’t have felt out of place as a border-crossing episode in the darkly panoramic first season of True Detective.

  Consider the exemplary bookends, the title story and “Your #1 Killer.” In the first, set in a bleak New Brunswick town “so rural it doesn’t even exist” (as Bertin quipped in an interview), the restless and bored adolescent girl narrator breaks into the porn-strewn hovel of a gas station attendant she and her friend have crushes on. In the last, a mother struggles with her angry, secretive, and troubled son – who may or may not be returning home after brushes with the law (he’s as unforthcoming as a stone). In each of these pieces, Bertin conjures tense and memorably vivid tableaux that rest on a strong foundation of fraught understanding and hit-and-miss communication between emotionally invested individuals.

  Chris, the lost and underemployed son in “#1 Killer,” also appears (at different ages and in different locations) in “Girl on the Fire Escape” (which won The Malahat Review’s Jack Hodgins Founders’ Award for Fiction in 2011) and “Everywhere Money.” With themes involving sowing oats, the tricky promise of easy money (via live-sex websites and credit-card scams), and other ethical entanglements, these three stories form a coming-of age triptych with an ironic but wholly satisfying and apt conclusion.

  “The Narrow Passage,” a mini-masterpiece that traces the route of junior and senior garbage collectors (as well as their evolving masculine power dynamic), flirts with literary horror as its attention shifts toward a junk-heap of a house on a rural New Brunswick road whose inhabitants may have mistaken The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for a documentary.

  “Crater Arms” is tinged with David Lynch–style grotesquerie, but uses it to largely comic effect, as Bertin peers into the goings-on at a creaky low-rent apartment building. He touches on the hallucinatory and surreal in “Is Alive and Can Move,” a tale of a custodian recovering from alcohol dementia. In a different vein, “The Story Here,” an amusing and incisive family drama, captures the tensions of a squabbling clan brought together for inauspicious reasons. The clever and smile-inducing experiment “Make Your Move” contains four complete sections, each of which illustrates the limited options available to a limousine driver over a particularly disastrous night shift. “The Eviction Process” straddles comedy and sobering realism as it traces a pair of gentrifiers with dubious values whose attempts to evict tenants is neither as easy nor consequence-free as they’d presumed.

  Brash (in the best possible sense), intriguing, and consummate without being showy, these are terrific stories in a strong, diverse, and fascinating collection.

• Globe and Mail
  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/review-kris-bertins-bad-things-happen-and-helen-simpsons-cockfosters/article29178986/
  Word count: 1265

  Review: Kris Bertin’s Bad Things Happen and Helen Simpson’s Cockfosters

  STEVEN W. BEATTIE

  Special to The Globe and Mail

  Published Friday, Mar. 11, 2016 12:14PM EST

  Last updated Friday, Mar. 11, 2016 12:14PM EST

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  Bad Things Happen

  By Kris Bertin

  Biblioasis, 201 pages, $19.95

  Cockfosters

  By Helen Simpson

  Jonathan Cape, 145 pages, $31.99

  Two separate stories in Kris Bertin’s debut collection involve characters who imagine the ground literally shifting underneath them. In Is Alive and Can Move, an alcoholic struggling to beat his addiction falls off the wagon and has the sensation of the very earth trembling: “Everything shook – and I felt it, right in the middle of me – and the city actually moved, moved a whole block over.” Later, in The Story Here, a mother hopped up on Valium to deal with anxiety and depression brought on by her extremely dysfunctional family dreams of a rockslide that collapses the foundations around the family home, sending the entire edifice tumbling downward.

  The notion of instability is pervasive throughout Bad Things Happen, the title of which represents a plain and straightforward distillation of the stories’ content. Bertin’s characters are misfits and malcontents, battling various demons and addictions while trying to stay sane enough or straight enough to make it through one more day. The title Is Alive and Can Move refers directly to a crack one character makes about the dipsomaniac protagonist’s qualifications for landing a job, but it also symbolically refers to the environment in which the protagonist finds himself, where withdrawal hallucinations and nervous tension render the world around him uncanny and changeable.

  Of course, it’s not just depressives and alcoholics who experience the world as something that frequently operates outside of their control. Bad things happen to everyone: It’s pretty much the human condition. But Bertin’s characters are typically outsiders or people striving to fit in to a society that has largely rejected them. Not that this outsider status is entirely devoid of its own rewards: In the final story, a woman’s adult son returns home after an extended period away with $18,961.22 in savings, which he has earned in what we gather to be shady, even criminal, endeavours.

  Bertin’s characters often respond to challenges by running away, either literally (as in the title story, which opens the collection, or Everywhere Money), or via booze or antidepressants. Or, like Richard, one of the garbage collectors in The Narrow Passage, by succumbing to a kind of divided psyche: “He could feel himself split in three, between the person he was, the one he claimed to be, and the one he wanted to become.” The Narrow Passage resembles its central character in that the narrative is divided between the story’s early stages, which feature relatively commonplace depictions of working-class men toiling away at a thankless and dirty job, and the latter half, as Richard becomes increasingly obsessed with the garbage left by a shadowy family in a ramshackle house. One of the longest stories in the collection, The Narrow Passage is a bit too leisurely in getting to where it’s going: By the time it makes its descent into David Lynch-style eeriness, it has sacrificed a certain amount of its momentum.

  The same is true for stories that employ distracting stylistic devices: The conceit of Make Your Move involves offering a series of alternative paths down which the narrative could reasonably travel, and The Story Here is slowed down by sections that reproduce a white board on which the protagonist and her brother make a catalogue of their father’s infidelities. Bad Things Happen is at its best when it sticks to the spirit of its title: blunt, forthright and jarring.

  The title of British author Helen Simpson’s sixth story collection, Cockfosters, refers to the terminal stop on the Piccadilly Line in London’s Underground. This is the destination to which the story’s characters, Julie and Philippa, travel to retrieve a pair of eyeglasses one of them has left behind on a train. Old friends who have reached the age at which most of their peers are “unabashedly grey-headed and bespectacled,” the two women have reunited after an extended period apart, ostensibly to attend an art exhibition. As they travel the length of the Piccadilly Line, their conversation veers from the aggravations of requiring corrective eyewear to the current situations of the pair’s erstwhile university friends, cumulatively providing a snapshot of the women’s lives in late middle-age.

  Simpson employs vision as her guiding metaphor in the brief, impressionistic piece. (Clocking in at barely more than 10 pages, the story is structured around the tube stations the women pass on their way to the end of the line.) The degradation in Julie’s eyesight (“I’ve turned into a bumbler overnight”) is emblematic of the passage of time and the accompanying decrease in strength and vitality as the years wear on. It’s no accident that the film the women struggle to recall during their trip is Luis Buñuel’s expressionist masterpiece, Un Chien Andalou, the classic scene of which involves a straight razor bisecting a woman’s eyeball.

  This is also somewhat overwrought, as are many of the stylistic or structural gimmicks Simpson employs in these stories – the tube stations in Cockfosters, the ingredients for a cake the protagonist is making for her daughter’s birthday in Kythera, a list of subjects the protagonist of Arizona discusses with her acupuncturist during a session. The final entry, Berlin, is structured around a week the central couple spend in Germany to take in Wagner’s Ring cycle. By far the longest entry in the collection, Berlin further echoes the opera’s self-indulgence by including extended internal monologues set in italics and lists of German vocabulary words the female protagonist is learning.

  If the stories in Cockfosters exhibit a tendency toward stylistic excess, they are also smart and frequently very funny examinations of the pangs of age, the inequities of gender and the generational divide. In Cheapside, a lawyer attempts to explain to an uninterested youth how “duty of care” is construed in a legal context by using the story of two hitchhikers who bum a ride on a flatbed truck. The first, who has taken refuge from the rain in an empty coffin the truck’s driver is transporting, pops out unannounced, frightening the second so badly that he leaps from the truck and breaks his leg. The would-be mentor asks his charge whether there was “sufficient proximity in this case for either the truck driver or Hitchhiker One to assume a duty of care to Hitchhiker Two?” The insouciant young man’s inexpert – though not inaccurate – assessment is that the first hitchhiker is “a nutter” and the second is “an idiot.”

  This exchange highlights Simpson’s facility for character: the supercilious lawyer juxtaposed with the insouciant youth who ends up being smarter than he appears. Where Bertin’s characters exist on the margins, Simpson’s are well within the ambit of so-called conventional society; her fiction zeroes in on everyday moments and concerns with precision and intelligence. Like Bertin’s stories, however, Simpson’s work best when they are freed from the constraints of unwieldy or obvious narrative devices.

  Steven W. Beattie’s column on new short-story collections appears monthly.

• Star Tribune
  http://www.startribune.com/review-bad-things-happen-by-kris-bertin/389923731/
  Word count: 544

  Review: 'Bad Things Happen,' by Kris Bertin
  FICTION: Unsettling short stories follow scammers, drifters and general losers.
  By ANTHONY BUKOSKI Special to the Star Tribune
  August 12, 2016 — 1:40pm

  In Kris Bertin’s debut short-story collection, a character’s father is “doing twenty years in Dorchester,” a Nova Scotia penitentiary. Drunk and high on schizophrenia drugs, the man’s son walks around Barrington Street in Halifax, “yelling and in a panic.”

  Quite a few of the scammers, drifters and general losers in “Bad Things Happen” should be jailed or at least reported to authorities.

  Despite the darkness, the 10 stories by this Halifax bartender make captivating reading. It’s hard to turn away from bad things when an author’s prose seduces you, and when he understands the world he’s dramatizing. “I’d made it through a real rough patch,” one story begins. Another starts, “Let’s say you’re a tough guy.” Still another, “There are two kinds of emptiness. The one I had, and the one I needed.” What follows reflects a mind gradually learning that various psychological and emotional problems are unsolvable.

  In addition to Halifax, the bad, eerie things that Bertin describes take place in Montreal and in rural towns with little to recommend them.

  In Onecdaconis, the Carnation store at the Esso truck stop is the place to socialize. Enamored of “hunky” Jason Parvis, a middle-aged Esso employee, two curious teenage girls break into his house, then regret what they find. In “The Narrow Passage,” garbage men on a rural route allow the Cliftons to leave whatever they want by the roadside, items that would be “unhaulable everywhere else.” “Their brains are scrambled,” Gene says of the family. His partner finds how deranged the Cliftons are when he refuses to take their swing set to “the sorting centre.”

  In “Girl on Fire Escape,” a sex-trade worker steals from her employer, Sensualcam.com, nearly bankrupting the business. In “Your #1 Killer,” a strange, unstable son returns home to live with his mother. In “Alive and Can Move,” a drunken ex-janitor thinks he sees a building move.

  Despite humorous lines and scenes, the bleakness is so great that you wish light could shine on these desolate souls.

  One triumphant moment occurs in “Crater Arms.” In an apartment building where everything “smells like boiled eggs,” a new tenant sees Mrs. Tremblay, the owner, for the first time. “Draped in white blankets like a bride,” unable to speak or move because of an illness, she’s brought outside in a wheelchair. “She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in maybe my whole life,” the troubled renter thinks. Even Michelle, the obese spiritual medium pushing the wheelchair, becomes beatific by association with Mrs. Tremblay. Yet can we believe men like the renter, who suffer from alcoholic dementia or who’ve been hit too often in the head?

  These are gritty stories, but very good ones, tough, truthful and unsettling.

  Writer Anthony Bukoski of Superior, Wis., has reviewed for “Books in Canada,” “Canadian Literature” and “The Fiddlehead.”

  Bad Things Happen
  By: Kris Bertin.
  Publisher: Biblioasis, 201 pages, $14.95.

• Winnipeg Review
  http://winnipegreview.com/2016/04/bad-things-happen-by-kris-bertin/
  Word count: 960

  ‘Bad Things Happen’ by Kris Bertin
  Posted: April 16, 2016

  Book Reviews

  Bad Things HappenReviewed by Shawn Syms

  Bad things happen. And they cause us to reinvent ourselves—though not always in the ways that we would want or choose. This utterly destabilizing and vital process is captured poetically in Halifax writer Kris Bertin’s debut collection of short fiction. The stories of Bad Things Happen explore typical themes—work, love, cash, sanity—in atypical ways. This impressive collection offers stunning and disorienting shifts between lucid naturalistic prose and occasional descents into surrealistic hallucination. The general mood veers between hope and despair but even at the best of times, the effect of Bertin’s atmospheric prose is eerie and unsettling.

  “Bad Things Happen,” the title story, explores how it can feel to be stuck somewhere—geographically, metaphorically, psychologically—and the repercussions of either trying to break free, or choosing to remain. There are only two places to go in tiny fictional Onecdaconis, New Brunswick—Carnation Food and the Esso station, and they happen to be in the same building. Trying to escape their fate to one day work as waitresses at Carnation (the only job in town for women), teens Dee and Tan hang out in the Esso all day and flirt with the guy at the cash, Jason. Over the course of their banter, Jason claims to be a lot younger than his thirty-four years, while the girls—especially Tan—strive to appear older, if not always successfully:

  She’d put on her sister’s clothes and big earrings and a ton of makeup. Her boobs were all jacked up in a push-up bra, but it wasn’t sexy looking. They just looked unnaturally swollen, like she was allergic to something.

  The story begins as the girls are breaking into Jason’s filthy bachelor pad, and ends with Tan’s desperate decision to leave town and the revelation as to why Jason is lodged in stasis. In the first of the book’s many perfect, imagistic endings, the waitresses at Carnation Food shiver in their uniform skirts as they are questioned by the police.

  The police are nowhere to be found in “The Narrow Passage” (which is excerpted in this issue of the Winnipeg Review)—though they probably should be. The Narrow Passage—alternately referred to as Kennedy Narrows, or the old township—is a dishevelled, rural in-between place, and home to the Cliftons, whose trash output is both voluminous and suggestive of dark and possibly criminal activities. Struggling to haul it all away are garbageman Gene and his younger sidekick Richard. Collecting refuse out in the country is both physically backbreaking and psychologically illuminating for the two men as Richard struggles to keep up with, and eventually supersedes the capacities of, his aging mentor.

  Enumerating the contents of one of their truckloads, Bertin uses vivid description to illuminate the mood of disquiet:

  And then there was the stranger stuff, what they didn’t expect to see. Items that peeked out from cantaloupe guts and coffee grinds and used tissues. The realness of a man’s blonde toupee, wet and gleaming from the contents of a nearby plastic bottle of chicken stock. An old scarecrow made of pantyhose and chicken wire, twisted up like a circus rubberman. A hundred or so tiny ceramic busts of Mozart, all identical, most of them still intact and smiling painted smiles. Dozens and dozens of smudged brass casings from spent ammunition all mixed in with heaping strings of red-and-brown animal entrails. Three deer heads, stinking and staring and missing an oval of skull where there had once been antlers.

  Over the course of the plot, the depravity of the Clifton family is viscerally elucidated. In both the unfolding evolution of Gene and Richard’s male homosocial relations as well as the evocative revelations about the creepy Cliftons, Bertin recalls the best Stephen King.

  Most of the stories consider in some way the deterministic impacts of work, class and cash in characters’ lives, perhaps most inventively in “Everywhere Money.” Chris Rose works in a clandestine call centre where the objective is to gain fraudulent access to credit cards and where all staff are paid in cash. As a result of the dirty work, Chris has more paper money than he knows what to do with:

  Inside my clock. In the hollow base of my bedside lamp. In a Ziploc bag sunk to the bottom of the litter box. Taped between every single page of every single issue of Motocross magazine from 2006 to 2010.

  It’s a job that is hard to leave in more ways than one—but eventually Chris figures out what to do with the overflowing cash and how to execute an exit strategy. For anyone who has ever had a source for “easy money” with some heavy ethical strings attached, this story will resonate.

  After burnout from the call centre job, Chris heads home to his mother’s place in a subsequent story, the collection closer “Your #1 Killer.” Chris has been vague about his recent employment history, and his mom’s low-level anxiety about it mirrors the familial angst that forms a common thread across multiple stories in the collection. But when Chris emerges from a worrisome depressive slump and finds a new sense of purpose as an exterminator of assorted vermin, it’s a source of relief and happiness for them both. In this curious resolution, Bertin finds within perversity a welcome sense of hope—as in so many of the rich and strange stories in this unique and excellent debut collection.

• Malahat Review
  http://www.malahatreview.ca/reviews/196reviews_kenyon.html
  Word count: 946

  Fiction Review by Michael Kenyon

  Kris Bertin, Bad Things Happen (Windsor: Biblioasis, 2016). Paperbound, 202 pp., $19.95.

  Bad Things HappenI'm impressed. I'm very impressed. This first book is line by line quite brilliant, the stories varied and beautifully turned and paced – tragic, yes, but at times very funny; the voice is consistently informal, the tone sincere and the choices essential.

  Kris Bertin wrote these fictions between the ages of twenty-three and thirty. They are first and foremost character-driven, and readable in the page-turning way that might suggest that style is secondary. Even though he says in an interview, "I just come up with the characters and the conflict and let them run the show. Then I get to watch a movie in my mind, and that's the story," these stories are stylish. And they are marvellously structured, experimental too in a quiet way, though they do not draw overt attention to themselves. Bertin employs various approaches and points of view—first, third, and second-person narrations, male and female narrators—while maintaining a distinctive voice (Maritime—he's from New Brunswick),and his themes are global in their implications, touching on specific psychological problems (loneliness, isolation, disconnection) in rural, small town, and city locations; and beneath all, the engine that drives these tales is a kind of "love in the ruins," to borrow Walker Percy's 1971 title. The stories do not boast about themselves, but they accomplish a lot. And somehow they don't come across as dark, though they are all full to bursting with human pain, and sometimes almost unbearable suffering.

  I have thought a lot about male writers and the characters they create, what, back in the twentieth century, we used to call "anti-heroes": Beckett's Malone, Hamm, Vladimir and Estragon; Updike's Rabbit Angstrom; Alan Silitoe's Smith in "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner"; any number of Woody Allen male figures. Kris Bertin's men in Bad Things Happen got me thinking once again, and I believe the term "anti-hero" can be buried. This young male writer, in any case, is not ruled by anger or beligerence, nor is he identified with the hapless, comical, doomed, self-conscious and high-strung male protagonist. I sense, through these stories, that the existential crisis (viz Sartre and Camus) at the heart of many twentieth-century works by men has bloomed in this century into a different sort of crisis. And we have a new kind of hero.

  When the depressed, or stressed, narrator of the apocalyptic "The Story Here" responds to her husband, who is trying to rationalize subdivision development and human population growth, with: "I know, but it still really sucks, doesn't it?" I get the sense that we are way beyond anger and narcissistic peevishness and into a simpler and wider field right next door to end-of-days despair but with a view of the distant mountains. Nervousness abounds, and there's a sense at the close of many stories that this might be the last gorgeous flowering of a plant about to die rather than one more existential crisis (read philosophical awakening) in the history of humanity.

  If there's a conspiracy being cooked against us humans—as Jack in "The Eviction Process" thinks there is against him—then its construction is man-made and rooted deep in the human condition. And maybe this conspiracy is eternally linked with such good embodied moments as the one with which this bright new writer ends this story: "I put my arms around him [Jack] and press his head to my chest … same as my father would do when something scared me, same as his father did with him, and so on, all the way back down the line to the very start of everything."

  Closing the book, looking back at it through the window of the final story, "Your #1 Killer" (about a mother's helplessness in the face of a troubled and possibly psychotic son), the sense that something is wrong here rises. Something is deeply and unknowably wrong with us, and this is, perhaps, what this book of stories is about—something is wrong with us for which only dumb love and telling the story can provide a little solace, a little company. We're still in Sartre's existential dilemma, but now, these days, the gig is up, or if not "up," close to something that could be transformation, but might also be the last scene of the last act, with characters looking around at one another saying things like: "Let's say you're a tough guy. And by that I mean you're confident, self-assured. You don't take shit from people but you don't go around starting anything either" ("Make Your Move"). Or things like: "No one's in charge. Not on this floor, or in this house, or on this parcel of land. Not anywhere along this road, not even where it ends and branches out in every direction, like lightning" ("The Narrow Passage").

  The children have been abandoned at the end of "The Narrow Passage," and the world they are distracting themselves from by watching television is brutal. But they are being witnessed by an adult trying to make sense of this world. Perhaps, still (I sense Bertin waving at us), when there's a little time left over from all the repetitive work we have to do to make ends meet (the ends that keep unravelling), or when we look up from trying to forget the enormities of suffering across the planet by pulling out our devices, such good storymaking can provide ground for the integration of grace and dread.

  —Michael Kenyon
  As in The Malahat Review, 196, Autumn 2016, 116-118