Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Zolitude
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Montreal
STATE: QC
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY: Canadian
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:University of British Columbia, B.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and librarian. NOASS Arts and Culture Project, Riga, Latvia, writer in residence, 2012; works as a librarian at a record label, Montreal, Canada.
WRITINGS
Contributor of stories to publications, including the Incongruous Quarterly, Briarpatch, and the Fiddlehead.
SIDELIGHTS
Paige Cooper is a writer and librarian based in Montreal, Canada. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of British Columbia. In 2012, Cooper served as a writer in residence in Riga, Latvia, at the NOASS Arts and Culture Project. Her career as a librarian has found her working for a Montreal record label. Cooper’s short stories have been featured in publications, including the Incongruous Quarterly, Briarpatch, and the Fiddlehead.
In an interview with Sarah Selecky on the Sarah Selecky Writing School website, Cooper discussed her daily writing process, stating: “I’m a troll: all for habit and ritual, and guarding my best hours. I keep my mornings clear. I get up in the dark, light a taper, burn a fingernail of sage. Then it’s either 8:45 and I have to book it to work, or it’s the weekend and I can pour hot water into my dead tea leaves and start again. To avoid resistance, I usually decide on what I’ll be working on the night before, as I’m falling asleep.” Cooper discussed the difficulties of writing dialogue in an interview with a contributor to the Open Book website. She remarked: “Dialogue is one of the embarrassments of realist prose, along with doors opening and closing and people looking around. I see why some writers skip it or minimize it by refusing to embellish it with quotation marks. I use it, though I try to avoid reading it out loud in public. Don’t get me wrong: I like jokes, I like banality and self-delusion.” Cooper continued: “But there’s no pretending that the sounds that come out of our mouths are capable of adequate signification, not when stripped of tone, expression, gesture. We’ve collectively decided as writers we can’t do anything about this—we’re working with black lines and white space—which is why we’ve all agreed that any dialogue tag except ‘said’ is tacky.” Cooper added: “All that said, the most helpful thing I learned about dialogue when I started writing again was subtext. Conversation in fiction can be anything, it can be contextless and incoherent, but the subtext must be relentless.”
In 2018, Cooper released her first book, Zolitude: Stories. In “Spiderhole,” a veteran of the Vietnam War chooses to retire in Vietnam. Married scientists move to a colonized Mars in “Pre-Occupants.” “Thanatos” finds a woman looking back on her precocious childhood, during which she created a time machine. In “Record of Working,” the sun is dying, and a nuclear reactor is set to replace it.
Critics offered favorable assessments of Zolitude. A Kirkus Reviews writer asserted: “Cooper is relentlessly original in every sentence.” The same writer concluded: “In short, these are not stories whose meanings unfold cleanly. Readers willing to give themselves over to some mystery will be rewarded.” Brett Josef Grubisic, reviewer on the Toronto Star website, identified similarities between Cooper’s writing in Zolitude and the work of David Foster Wallace and Mark Leyner, suggesting: “Their inventive playfulness, rollicking absurdity and unabashed oddity gets revisited and revamped in the striking pages of Zolitude.” Grubisic added: “Like the stories themselves, the sentences are disarming. They’re unexpected and bizarre and like poetry demand lingering consideration.” Dana Hansen, contributor to the Chicago Review of Books website, commented: “Zolitude combine[s] the sometimes real and recognizable with the frequently fantastic and unfamiliar. The result is some refreshingly smart and offbeat storytelling befitting our curious times.” “The stories in Zolitude are skilfully executed and show great promise, and the collection as a whole builds almost novelistically in effectiveness and strength. While her style and technique are sometimes repetitive, Cooper’s characters are never clichéd, and her examinations of love are urgent and energetic,” remarked Melanie Brannagan Frederiksen on the Winnipeg Free Press website.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2018, review of Zolitude: Stories.
ONLINE
Chicago Review of Books, https://chireviewofbooks.com/ (May 3, 2018), Dana Hansen, review of Zolitude.
Open Book, http://open-book.ca/ (February 13, 2018), author interview.
Sarah Selecky Writing School website, https://www.sarahseleckywritingschool.com/ (October 1, 2014), Sarah Selecky, author interview.
Toronto Star Online, https://www.thestar.com/ (March 2, 2018), Brett Josef Grubisic, review of Zolitude.
Winnipeg Free Press, https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/ (March 10, 2018), Melanie Brannagan Frederiksen, review of Zolitude.
QUOTED: "I’m a troll: all for habit and ritual, and guarding my best hours. I keep my mornings clear. I get up in the dark, light a taper, burn a fingernail of sage. Then it’s either 8:45 and I have to book it to work, or it’s the weekend and I can pour hot water into my dead tea leaves and start again. To avoid resistance, I usually decide on what I’ll be working on the night before, as I’m falling asleep."
In the Spotlight: Paige Cooper
OCTOBER 1, 2014 BY SARAH SELECKY 2 COMMENTS
I met Paige Cooper at an epic writing workshop I led at Banff. Since then, she’s dedicated herself to her craft with enviable passion and discipline. It’s so affirming to watch what happens when a writer deeply commits to her practice! I feel fortunate to have worked with Paige, and it’s been wonderful to watch her writing (and writing career) unfold. I’ve been waiting to feature her in a spotlight for a long time — I’m excited to finally introduce her to you.
Read her interview and excerpt below, and see for yourself why I dig her work so much. Her writing is stunning: the images burn with liquid heat, and her dialogue crackles; she moves her story forward in the same way lava creeps over the ground.
Also: “pearly laplets”? “When the light goes apricot”? “Brutalizing a raspberry”? This piece reminds me why I love words. You can really feel, reading this, the mastery that comes from writing practice.
Paige Cooper
Paige Cooper’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Fiddlehead, Briarpatch, and The Incongruous Quarterly. She holds a BFA from the University of British Columbia, and has participated in workshops at Bread Loaf and the Banff Centre. In 2012 she was writer-in-residence at NOASS Arts and Culture Project in Riga, Latvia. She works as a librarian at a record label in Montreal, and writes tiny lies as @paigesaracooper.
Meet Paige
Handwriting or computer?
Computer
Page count or time count?
Two hours of mandatory butt-time.
First drafts or revision?
Both!
Writing solo, writing partner, or writing group?
Door-locked solo. Plus a small group of incredible editors.
Earplugs/quiet or headphones/music?
Grimes’ album Visions, every time.
How do you make time for your writing practice? How do you handle resistance?
I’m a troll: all for habit and ritual, and guarding my best hours. I keep my mornings clear. I get up in the dark, light a taper, burn a fingernail of sage. Then it’s either 8:45 and I have to book it to work, or it’s the weekend and I can pour hot water into my dead tea leaves and start again. To avoid resistance, I usually decide on what I’ll be working on the night before, as I’m falling asleep. Sometimes I change my alarm so that the label reads as an instruction: “SHE’S REALLY DAMN SATISFIED ON THAT BEACH” or “THE TWIG IS A FINGER OF ANTLER” so that the day’s task is the first thing I see when I open my eyes.
What’s the best advice you would give a new writer?
Write through everything. Through the love affair, through the job hunt, through the trip to visit your childish and irritating granny. Allow that sometimes writing is four hours at the keyboard and sometimes writing is three words in your notebook on the sweaty sidewalk, and sometimes writing is wandering slackjawed through the Guggenheim then going for gin sours. With practice, this means that the morning after you’ve moved out of your ex’s apartment, you can still write that western drug bust. Alternately, when the weather is magical and you’re in love with your foster dog, then you can write the story about your lost home. Or, yeah, write it as it comes, sometimes it happens that way, too. Regardless, make sure you’re tapping it, make sure you’re connected, even when you’d rather just take the wine into the bath. Our job is to locate that place that most people spend their lives avoiding, enter it, and come back with a story. Then, we craft it.
Tell us about your experience with Story Is a State of Mind. How it has changed your relationship to writing?
Either I found SSM when I was at a crux, or it created the crux, I can’t tell which. It was a catalyst. First, it established that writing is a practice, not a goal. Secondly, it taught me that the feeling of good writing is the feeling of being exposed. When I worked with her at Banff, Sarah taught us to go after the fear, the too-much, and to dwell in it. I do improv comedy as well, and my teacher there loves to say, “Steer for the sound of the guns.” Trust your craft and instincts, but really live for the discomfort. Sarah entirely changed my relationship to writing, in that I stopped being afraid of it. This, in turn, forced me to change my life to support that relationship. So. Enter at your peril.
Tell us about the excerpt you’re sharing today
I’m obsessed with adventure narratives, lately. I’m often accused by my merciless, canny, psychic group of editors that ‘nothing happens.’ So this year I’ve been re-examining drafts – is this ambitious enough? What is the most awesome thing that could happen? (Usually by ‘most awesome’ I mean ‘worst.’) I’ve been following my imagination as much as my emotional instincts, which is perhaps why this one is about Tarzan’s wife turned mad scientist in a dilapidated Croatian castle. The other half of it is that this year when my fiction group got together for our annual meeting, we spent an evening analyzing each other’s themes and pinning down our obsessions. We challenged each other to write stories where those obsessions were inverted, or satisfied somehow, and to see what came out. In short, I had to write a story about a happy relationship. Ha.
QUOTED: "Dialogue is one of the embarrassments of realist prose, along with doors opening and closing and people looking around. I see why some writers skip it or minimize it by refusing to embellish it with quotation marks. I use it, though I try to avoid reading it out loud in public. Don’t get me wrong: I like jokes, I like banality and self-delusion."
"But there’s no pretending that the sounds that come out of our mouths are capable of adequate signification, not when stripped of tone, expression, gesture. We’ve collectively decided as writers we can’t do anything about this—we’re working with black lines and white space—which is why we’ve all agreed that any dialogue tag except ‘said’ is tacky."
"All that said, the most helpful thing I learned about dialogue when I started writing again was subtext. Conversation in fiction can be anything, it can be contextless and incoherent, but the subtext must be relentless."
If you think a short story collection packed full of police horses with talons, were-deer, and time machine-building nine-year-olds can't be relatable, you clearly haven't read Paige Cooper's Zolitude (Biblioasis). As strange and wonderful as the characters in these pages are, they are grounded in real emotion and experience, longing and loneliness. It's no wonder Kirkus praised her writing saying "Cooper proves that she can do just about anything."
We're thrilled to welcome Paige to Open Book today to talk about her fresh, odd, sometimes violent and always memorable characters for our In Character series.
She tells us about the division between narrators and all other kinds of characters, discusses the limitations of dialogue, and gives us the best (and most comprehensive) list of fascinating characters that we've seen.
Open Book:
Some writers feel characters take on a "life of their own" during the writing process. Do you agree with this, or is a writer always in control?
Paige Cooper:
Maybe there are two kinds of characters: narrators and everyone else. Literature is lucky to have narrators—not all art does. A narrator is less a name with an eye colour and a ‘motivation,’ more a circumstance in need of complication, the complications manifesting as fractal details as the writer and reader descend the thermocline of examination. Hopefully this allows for puny and massive uglinesses. Also, annoyingly, contradictions. This does not necessarily mean anyone (the reader, the writer) understands the narrator, but that every detail in the story is part of the narrator. This examination is a narcissistic and cannibalistic process that never feels like control to me—though the language poets have me half-persuaded that writing narrative is totalitarian, anyway. A non-narrator character may also have this sense of crystallizing vertigo, but, because non-narrator characters are actually just details, that depends on the narrator.
By details I mean: emotionally-loaded direct perception; metaphor; fissures, and distortions. Narrators decide who’s hot, who’s wise, who’s terrifying, who’s all three—their opinions are not ours, or the reader’s, but they are hella sneaky. A ‘living’ character implies an autarkic whole, a reality-effect that erases language. To be lifelike is achievable by any simulacrum, from sitcom husbands to your face in the mirror to twitterbots, a Barthesian “triumph of artifice”—ok, a stereotype. James Wood in How Fiction Works makes an argument for so-called ‘flat characters,’ and I do like a good half-sentence abstract; some succinct authoritarian flourish.
The temptation is, as soon as we have seen the other, to reduce it to something containable, and then dismiss it and go back to tending our personal galaxy of suffering. It’s the non-narrators—because they are separate, visible, other, because we have dismissed them as knowable when nothing is knowable—that get to do the surprising, which is the best part, the part where they’ve tricked us into believing they’re separate from us. Or, I guess, alive.
OB:
What is your approach to crafting dialogue, particularly for your main character? Do you have any tips about writing dialogue for aspiring and emerging writers?
PC:
Dialogue is one of the embarrassments of realist prose, along with doors opening and closing and people looking around. I see why some writers skip it or minimize it by refusing to embellish it with quotation marks. I use it, though I try to avoid reading it out loud in public. Don’t get me wrong: I like jokes, I like banality and self-delusion. But there’s no pretending that the sounds that come out of our mouths are capable of adequate signification, not when stripped of tone, expression, gesture. We’ve collectively decided as writers we can’t do anything about this—we’re working with black lines and white space—which is why we’ve all agreed that any dialogue tag except ‘said’ is tacky.
Meanwhile, we’ve also agreed that the sickest burn for an unsuccessful bit of dialogue is ‘clunky’ (unnaturally formal, unnaturally lengthy, unnaturally dull, unnatural.) Of course, if we were linguists transcribing human conversation we’d be using more sounds than words, and the sentence would become irrelevant. So, writers hone and prune, each of us locating our own sweet spot on the continuum.
All that said, the most helpful thing I learned about dialogue when I started writing again was subtext. Conversation in fiction can be anything, it can be contextless and incoherent, but the subtext must be relentless. Subtext occurs because of desire or fear, whether the speaker is conscious or un-. My favourite dialogues are when the characters are trying to speak honestly, but the subtext betrays them, or, even better, they try to manipulate the subtext so it does the lying for them, or the subtext just swells up and chokes the whole thing. Someone, preferably the reader, should probably be surprised. I find this easiest to achieve if the dialogue surprises you when you’re writing it.
OB:
How clearly do you see your characters' physical appearances while writing, and how relevant are their appearances to your writing process?
PC:
So now we’ve all grown up with video. Most of us hate our bodies. Most of us don’t see ourselves represented. The way a writer describes their characters is the easiest way for a reader to judge that writer—you know, morally. There are easy targets: prose that devotes substantial word count to the details of a woman’s body and face, and passes men off with a ‘tall’ or a ‘stern;’ prose that only mentions skin colour when it isn’t white. Just observing fatness or thinness is a judgment and a statement. Describing clothing can be as bad as referencing music: there’s a strained vanity there (amirite, guys? guys?). I suspect the key is to embrace subjectivity and utilize misdirection. Donna Tartt does this.
My non-narrator characters often look like people I know, but of course I can’t admit that, and also I am a coward who doesn’t want the reader to know I distrust blond men, so I actively under-describe. I have only a loose idea of what most of my narrators look like—at least, the ones who aren’t obsessed with their own appearance. Still, narrators are prone to lingering over the details of their lust- or disgust-object, which is often just me taking the chance to linger over the details of mine.
OB:
How well do you "know" your characters? Is it relevant to you to know a lot of information about them that doesn't appear on the page?
PC:
I had a blue-and-brown hardcover book that I bought at the Chapters at Chinook Mall in Calgary in 1996 called something like How to Write Memorable Characters. It had pages and pages of Character Profile Worksheets. I penciled in answers about first jobs, favourite foods, marital status, age, morning rituals, religious practices, scars and identifying marks, idiosyncrasies, flaws. The notion of ‘flaws’ is what makes me laugh most. Like we’re all mannequins with scuffs from getting taken out of storage, missing hands, unfortunate wigs. Like we can point to the one wrong thing, and in naming it eradicate it, and resume our perfection.
I suppose now, an adult woman, I could consult Meyers-Briggs, zodiac birth charts, IQ tests, depression worksheets, BMI charts, lung capacity measurements, Sephora marketing emails, Facebook quizzes (Which NFL quarterback am I?): all the pseudoscience and claptrap I use in my attempts to index myself. We’d all like to see our flaws clearly, so that we can identify our underlying perfection.
What I’m talking about is essentially the difference between a Tolkien world, where even the trees have names, and an Ana Kavan world, which is a labyrinthine, gappy, half-obscured mirror where even the revelations are untrustworthy because our perception is the thing that is flawed.
OB:
Who are some of the most memorable characters you've come across as a reader?
PC:
Catwoman; Cardi B; Siri; Marcus Aurelius; the Donner Party; Alvin Kamara; Adrienne Rich; the vampire Lestat; Colonel Kurz; Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune; Elena Ferrante; Elizabeth Holmes; the Trung sisters; Charlotte Shane; Peter Thiel; Egon Spengler; wolf spiders; my grandma who my family wouldn’t let me visit after she got Alzheimers; Charlize Theron getting tutored by Eve Ensler on the set of Mad Max; the ex I’m still afraid of; Black Beauty; Shia LaBeouf; Kathy Acker; Margaret Atwood post-#MeToo; Tilikum the orca that killed three people; my dear friend who has been suffering; the Texas-sized trash vortex floating in the Atlantic; Jason Bourne; Morticia Addams; Medusa; Rupi Kaur; the last unicorn; an artist I know who is poisonous to the people she dates but who we all know will be famous; L. Ron Hubbard; Christopher Hitchens; Slenderman; She-Ra; the guy I played ‘hooker’ with when I was like seven or eight; Lydia Davis when she was married to Paul Auster; myself when I was at my most jealous; a writer friend who is no longer a friend because he became a men’s rights activist on Reddit and teaches his students about it; my friends who married each other and are the happiest people I know; Drew Brees’ baby catching confetti at the 2009 Superbowl; Michael Jackson; Mavis Gallant; Tiffany Trump; the AI Google is developing to read all the books they scanned; a friend who describes himself as pathologically compelled to be the funniest person in the room; myself when I was at my most vicious, furtive, and harmful; a friend who we all thought would die but has been in the hospital for four months with massive brain trauma from getting punched outside a club on Ste-Catherine; the woman who started calling herself his girlfriend when he was in a coma; the starving polar bear in that viral video; Rachel Cusk; Lisa Simpson; Anna Karenina.
_________________________
Paige Cooper was born and raised in the Rocky Mountains. Her stories have appeared in The Fiddlehead, West Branch, Michigan Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast Online, Canadian Notes & Queries, The New Quarterly, Minola Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, and have been anthologized in The Journey Prize Stories and Best Canadian Stories. She lives in Montreal.
QUOTED: "Cooper is relentlessly original in every sentence."
"In short, these are not stories whose meanings unfold cleanly. Readers willing to give themselves over to some mystery will be rewarded."
Cooper, Paige: ZOLITUDE
Kirkus Reviews. (Feb. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Cooper, Paige ZOLITUDE Biblioasis (Adult Fiction) $14.95 4, 17 ISBN: 978-1-77196-217-9
These stories from a Canadian writer feature characters at odds with their surroundings--and each other.
In her debut collection, Cooper proves that she can do just about anything. She's as comfortable telling a story from the perspective of a hip young record-label employee--which she actually is, in her day job--whose hand is blown off by a mail bomb ("Ryan & Irene, Irene & Ryan") as she is telling the story of a mounted police officer who lives on the edge of loss and violence ("The Emperor"). Her settings are equally wide-ranging. A Vietnam War veteran lives out his retirement in the same country he once fought against in "Spiderhole." In "Pre-Occupants," husband-and-wife scientists arrive on Mars and must adjust to their new environment--and their new neighbors. This isn't the only story with sci-fi leanings. Cooper moves as fluidly through genre as she does through character and setting, recounting the tale of a nuclear reactor attempting to replace the sun in "Record of Working" and a woman who built a time machine when she was a child in "Thanatos." What unites these eclectic stories is Cooper's style--sharp-edged and oblique, these are not narratives that move in usual ways. Like a poet, Cooper is relentlessly original in every sentence: a drunk's hand "is waving tentacular over his private cemetery of beer bottles"; mountains are "imbricate rows of corroded teeth." The logic of the stories seems poetic, too; what would be traditional narrative context is often jettisoned in favor of a resonant image or associational logic. Occasionally, plots and subplots have obscure relationships to each other. In short, these are not stories whose meanings unfold cleanly.
Readers willing to give themselves over to some mystery will be rewarded.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Cooper, Paige: ZOLITUDE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527248243/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5cba4164. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527248243
QUOTED: "Their inventive playfulness, rollicking absurdity and unabashed oddity gets revisited and revamped in the striking pages of Zolitude."
"Like the stories themselves, the sentences are disarming. They’re unexpected and bizarre and like poetry demand lingering consideration."
Author Paige Cooper’ Zolitude molds its own reality
By BRETT JOSEF GRUBISICSpecial to the Star
Fri., March 2, 2018
Remember the ’80s? That decade’s literary innovations, I mean, and more particularly the unhinged storytelling exuberance showcased by the “ridiculous vision” (so declared the Times) of Mark Leyner (“I Was An Infinitely Hot and Dense Dot”) and David Foster Wallace (“My Appearance”)?
Intending no disrespect, I’d make the case that select roots of Zolitude, Montreal-based Paige Cooper’s debut story collection, take nourishment from that pair. (Arguably, Philip K. Dick, Franz Kafka, and Will Ferrell as Mugatu in Zoolander provide inspiration too.) Their inventive playfulness, rollicking absurdity and unabashed oddity gets revisited and revamped in the striking pages of Zolitude.
That distant ancestry aside, though, across fourteen stories Cooper builds strange, genre-defying, sci-fi- and fantasy-infused realities that are distinctly her own. Truly, they’re like nothing else you’ve read lately. Whether funny, erotic, puzzling, Mirror Universe-y, or claustrophobic, they’ll lodge in your memory.
A small warning: Cooper’s evidently not aiming for a mass-market embrace; her pieces can’t be regarded as being notably accessible. Though requiring sea legs and time, they’re rewarding.
From envisioning a cold planetary outpost and an unscrupulous genetics labs to a south Asian jungle occupied by enormous reptiles, Paige’s a whiz at magicking mesmerizing, otherworldly atmospheres into existence. Even the title story, set in a very real concrete housing district in Latvia, seems off-kilter. In it, a disgruntled, lonely narrator —“Some women are born with archer’s bodies. I was born with witch’s fingers. They took up tennis, I took up expert masturbation,” she confides — half-heartedly researches a thesis while passing through eerie and surreal days. Her spiritual sister in “La Folie,” a rural Albertan stuck in an utterly foreign jungly place with unceasing rain (while in search of her incarcerated sister), becomes more disoriented and distraught with every passing week.
In addition to the acutely visual settings and singular plot developments (which range from weird to weirder), there’s handful after handful of individual lines. Between “My home is a place so beautiful it will burn you alive” and “I thought the key prerequisite would be our psychological capacity to drink each other’s filtered urine,” Cooper comes up with “He ordered horse tartar and an IPA” and “When I was nine I used a time machine to go into the future and meet myself.” Like the stories themselves, the sentences are disarming. They’re unexpected and bizarre and like poetry demand lingering consideration.
Brett Josef Grubisic’s fourth novel, Oldness; Or, the Last-Ditch Efforts of Marcus O, is out in October.
QUOTED: "Zolitude combine[s] the sometimes real and recognizable with the frequently fantastic and unfamiliar. The result is some refreshingly smart and offbeat storytelling befitting our curious times."
‘Zolitude’ Is the Speculative Debut of the Year So Far
BY DANA HANSEN
MAY 3, 2018
COMMENTS 0
Speculative short fiction is enjoying a particularly good moment in Canada. Last year saw the publication of Torontonian Camilla Grudova’s acclaimed book of short stories, The Doll’s Alphabet (2017), a genre-defying collection of upside-down, otherworldly narrative weirdness. This spring, the fourteen stories that make up Montrealer Paige Cooper’s disorienting first book, Zolitude, combine the sometimes real and recognizable with the frequently fantastic and unfamiliar. The result is some refreshingly smart and offbeat storytelling befitting our curious times.
In many of the stories in Zolitude, the characters find themselves in strange, almost post-apocalyptic environments where a sense of loneliness and disconnect pervades the everyday business of being alive and relating to other people. “Pre-Occupants,” for instance, is the story of a couple just landed on Mars to join two other couples in the early stages of settling the inhospitable planet. Sent by the Foundation to catch and destroy comets that threaten the planet, the unnamed narrator and her husband Paul face years of sacrifice and isolation on this foreign terrain.
“In sixty years,” she says, “we hope to raise the atmospheric pressure to Alps-like levels, which would be enough to suck a sheet of manufactured gases close to the ground. Another twenty years and breathing might be possible, with a respirator. Six years ago I paid twenty-three thousand dollars to cut out my uterus as part of the qualification process. In one hundred years the Foundation will send a breeding pair.”
In contrast to the starkness of the setting is the couple’s love story as they depend on each other for basic human needs and comforts, especially through sex and physical touch. Fittingly, given their bleak situation, the narrator wonders, “Is there such a thing as being adequately close?”
In “Record of Working,” one of the more timely and cautionary tales in the collection, a project funded by thirteen “Domestic Agencies” to build a nuclear fusion reactor (bearing some resemblance to the real-life ITER energy project) is underway in a jungle location in Venezuela. With rampant violence, “wildfires in Austria and breadlines in Canada,” and a climate that is “drunk, liable to mania and then sullenness and then lashing out,” it seems that “civilization has collapsed,” and the need for energy is urgent.
Arthur, the Director General of the project who has promised that energy “delivered in milk bottles every morning,” is missing. Without his vision, there is no reactor. A madman with a god complex, he is obsessed with what he calls the Elemental Woman – “the perfect image in the heart of man” of the nature of a woman. In his record of working, he notes that to continue his work, he must find this “TRUE WOMAN who will flame the TRUE WORKING.” Too late, Arthur’s subordinates realize the project will fail.
Other notable stories in Zolitude include “Thanatos,” named for the Ancient Greek god of death and loosely based on disgraced Theranos CEO, Elizabeth Holmes. The story centers on the brilliant and loveless Charlotte Giang, CEO of Thanatos, recently “barred from owning or operating a laboratory” in which she performed parabiosis on human subjects. While her “valuation went from six billion to zero” overnight, she has more pressing concerns: she is about to go on a blind date set up by her board member Henry Kissinger, and her nine-year-old self has arrived from the past via the time machine she built as a child.
“La Folie” concerns Canadian twin sisters Catie and Audrey, the former imprisoned in Vietnam following an accident, and the latter travelling to bring her home. What initially seems to be a straightforward story of Audrey’s journey to rescue her sister and the reflecting she does along the way on her troubled relationship with a woman named Fawn, soon becomes anything but ordinary when it is revealed that Audrey was sold by her parents as a five-year-old into a legalized twenty-five-year debt bond in order to provide Catie with an elite, expensive education.
The title of the book and its lead story, which comes from the name of a former Soviet district in Riga, Latvia, and obviously plays on the word solitude, establishes the mood of the entire collection. While some of Cooper’s stories – in truth the less affecting ones – include fantasy elements like prehistoric creatures and shapeshifters, overall this incisive collection is about the very human experience of alienation in a foreign environment. Cooper’s rich language, clever narrative structures, and uncommon storylines make Zolitude a fine addition to the speculative genre.
9781771962179_1328f
FICTION – SHORT STORIES
Zolitude by Paige Cooper
Biblioasis
Published April 17, 2018
Paige Cooper was born and raised in the Rocky Mountains. Her stories have appeared in The Fiddlehead, West Branch, Michigan Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast Online, Canadian Notes & Queries, The New Quarterly, Minola Review, and Cosmonauts Avenue, and have been anthologized in The Journey Prize Stories and Best Canadian Stories. She lives in Montreal.
QUOTED: "The stories in Zolitude are skilfully executed and show great promise, and the collection as a whole builds almost novelistically in effectiveness and strength. While her style and technique are sometimes repetitive, Cooper’s characters are never clichéd, and her examinations of love are urgent and energetic."
Beautiful and strange
Anxiety, matters of the heart feature in surreal short-fiction debut
Reviewed by: Melanie Brannagan Frederiksen
Posted: 03/10/2018 3:00 AM | Comments: 0
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Montreal writer Paige Cooper’s debut collection of short stories, Zolitude, is a timely exploration of love and humanity.
The characters in these 14 stories are beset by myriad contemporary anxieties about how to live in the world and how to connect with others.
In Slave Craton, Erin attempts to explain her many self-inflicted scars to her lover. She hangs herself on hooks, an act she calls "a practice... better than an internet-poker practice."
Regardless, it’s not, she insists, suffering: "‘Do you know how many Lakota teenagers tried to kill themselves last winter? A hundred and three. Nine actually did it.’ In South Dakota... The word love is weather between them. He thinks it constantly. She does too, because she clings to him in the night, smiles as she opens her eyes to him. ‘That’s suffering. This is not suffering.’"
Adam Michiels
Author Paige Cooper’s stories are skilfully executed and show tremendous promise.
Adam Michiels
Author Paige Cooper’s stories are skilfully executed and show tremendous promise.
The juxtaposition of love and suffering is repeated throughout. In the opening story, the main character struggles to find her place in a burgeoning long-distance romance, even as she acts as a go-between for Simona and Lars, the man she’s just left.
The narrative oscillates between these experiences — the narrator’s desire and Simona’s fear of Lars — building the tension until the narrator seems paralyzed: "If she doesn’t come, I will go home. I will cope. If she comes — no. I cannot even think it. I cannot even think of what might happen if she comes." This resistance to the conclusion, devastatingly effective here in Zolitude, is characteristic of Cooper’s technique.
As with a number of other recent collections of short stories — Camilla Grudova’s The Doll’s Alphabet and Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, among others — Cooper incorporates elements of surrealism and fantasy into her literary fiction. Sometimes, this technique is effective, as it is in Moriah, which, because of its reference both to a real place, Moriah, N.Y., and to the infamous mines in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, occupies a provocatively ambiguous territory between realism and the fantastic. Sometimes, however, especially when they are peripheral to the story, the surreal elements are jarring.
In their most effective use, surreal and fantastic elements dramatize the emotional disorientation of the characters.
In Ryan and Irene, Irene and Ryan, the narrator characterizes her experience in the world: "The dream runs in tandem harness with reality, but it is separate and unique. It’s hard to twist out of... Time fogs like it’s long gone already. Last night in the dream I came to work, then went home and worked. I came to work, then went home and worked. You see why I have trouble telling everything apart."
This sense of never quite being sure if the characters in the story are living a dream, a nightmare or a life carries through the story, and the overlaying of reality with dream adds emotional resonance to the narrator’s experience when she opens a mail bomb sent by a client’s ex-lover.
The stories in Zolitude are skilfully executed and show great promise, and the collection as a whole builds almost novelistically in effectiveness and strength.
While her style and technique are sometimes repetitive, Cooper’s characters are never clichéd, and her examinations of love are urgent and energetic.
Melanie Brannagan Frederiksen is a Winnipeg writer and critic.