Spotlight On: BLUE FIELD by ELISE LEVINE

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Welcome back to Biblioasis’ Spotlight series! For the month of December, we’ve chosen to feature Elise Levine’s claustrophobic and visceral novel Blue Field (April 11, 2017).

BLUE FIELD

When her friend Jane dies while exploring an underwater cave with her husband Rand, Marilyn takes up diving again, to honour—and outdo—her late friend. Marilyn drags Rand with her as she increasingly pushes herself far past her limits and skill level, endangering them both in their private underwater version of hell.

More than two decades after the release of her sensational, critically acclaimed collection Driving Men Mad, Blue Field marks Elise Levine’s much anticipated return to form.

Elise Levine’s Say This: Two Novellas is forthcoming in March 2022. She is also the author of the recent story collection This Wicked Tongue, the novels Blue Field and Requests and Dedications, and the story collection Driving Men Mad. Her work has appeared in publications including Ploughshares, Blackbird, The Gettysburg Review, and has appeared four times in Best Canadian Stories. She lives in Baltimore, MD, and teaches in the MA in Writing program at Johns Hopkins University.

 

A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR

On New Work

Who gets to say? What’s it like to begin—to even just begin to begin—thinking and living in terms of your own story, and not the one handed to you? What desires might you inhabit if you were free to own those desires?

These are the questions that animate Say This: Two Novellas, due out in Spring 2022.

Here’s a little more about how the book goes, which also asks, What do we owe each other?

A celebrity journalist hopes Eva will tell him everything about the sexual affair she had as a teen with her older cousin, a man now in federal prison for murder. Thirteen years earlier, Lenore-May answers the phone to the nightmare news that her stepson’s body has been found near Mount Hood, and homicide is suspected.

I think of the book as a set of portraits that speak to one another. There’s the portrait of Eva’s unsettling ambivalence towards her confusing relationship. And the portrait of her cousin’s victim through a collage of the perspectives of the slain man’s family—and a portrait as well of their various lives, filtered through the lens of grief and joy and love.

Writing a book is like taking a sustained flying leap. You get an idea, a sense of character, circumstance. So many questions. The obsessive desire to follow where they lead. And off you go, hoping for the best. Hoping in the end that you’ve sufficiently looked your characters’ complexities in the face to accord them the freedom to rise and meet their self-determined fates.

Now that Say This is close to landing—in book form, that is—I’m kiting similar questions about desire and identity in new work I hope takes off and catches the light and reflects new angles.

It’s early stages, but here’s what’s on my mind.

GIANT: Stories. Nine stories, in fact. About ambition, will, self-creation—and their discontents. Stories about brazenly going off the rails. Stories that might go off the rails. That might have a blast.

You can find the first story, “Arnhem”, in Best Canadian Stories 2021. Maybe you’ll look it up?

Elise

 

Get your copy of Blue Field here!

Pre-order Say This here!

And why not check out Elise Levine’s other fantastic titles here?

Spotlight On: ALL SAINTS by K.D. MILLER

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Welcome to Biblioasis’ Spotlight series, a new monthly feature highlighting our brilliant backlist titles! This also includes a brief word from the authors themselves on their past work, an update on what they’re up to now, or thoughts on future projects. Our featured title for November is the short story collection All Saints (April 15, 2014) by K.D. Miller.

 

ALL SAINTS

Shortlisted for the 2014 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
Longlisted for the 2014 Frank O’Connor Award

In a linked collection that presents the secret small tragedies of an Anglican congregation struggling to survive, All Saints (April 15, 2014) delves into the life of Simon, the Reverend, and the lives of his parishioners: Miss Alice Vipond, a refined and elderly schoolteacher, incarcerated for a horrendous crime; a woman driven to extreme anxiety by an affair she cannot end; a receptionist, and her act of improbable generosity; a writer making peace with her divorce. Effortlessly written and candidly observed, All Saints is a moving collection of tremendous skill, whose intersecting stories illuminate the tenacity and vulnerability of modern-day believers.

K.D. Miller is the author of two previous short story collections, Give me Your Answer and Litany on a Time of Plague, and an essay collection, Holy Writ. Her work has twice been collected in The Journey Prize Anthology and Best Canadian Stories, and she has been nominated for a National Magazine Award for Fiction. She lives and writes in Toronto.

 

A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR

On Alice Drive by K.D. Miller

Out my study window, I can just catch sight of a little street called Edith Drive. I frequently incorporate Edith Drive into my daily walk. I have tried, and failed, to find out who Edith was and why these two short blocks are named after her. And several years ago, I spent a good part of New Year’s Eve watching half of one of Edith Drive’s semi-detached houses burn. The adjoining house came out of it unscathed and still habitable, while the one that caught fire was a blackened shell for two years or more.

I can’t remember exactly when Edith became Alice in my imagination, or Alice Drive the working title of what I hope will be my next collection of stories. But the neighbourhood is growing as more and more characters move in.

I have published four collections of linked short stories. In each case, I have come to regard the characters as imaginary friends—a community I work with and get to know and miss, once the manuscript is in my publisher’s hands. Any writer will tell you that a fictional character has a life of their own, and exercises more than a bit of control over what happens to them.

Whenever I’m working on a collection, there comes a moment when someone playing a minor role in one story convinces me that they deserve to star in a narrative all their own. In All Saints, for example, Gail, a church receptionist who is briefly mentioned in “Still Dark,” takes centre stage in “Spare Change,” demonstrating that there is more to her than typing, filing and picking up an office phone.

Characters don’t just migrate from story to story, either, but from book to book. I was pleased to welcome Kelly into two of the stories in All Saints, twenty years after she made her debut in my first collection, A Litany in Time of Plague. It was fun to find out what she had been up to, and what was going to happen next. Right now, as I’m working on the title story of Alice Drive, I’m getting reacquainted with Pete Aspinall. Pete had a brief mention in All Saints’ “October Song,” then a major supporting role in the same collection’s “Heroes.” A lot has happened in seven years. He retired from teaching, moved into a house on Alice Drive, met René, the love of his life, and is now mourning René’s untimely death. Add to that the fact that his house seems to be haunted …

But I’ll let Pete tell you his own story. Once he’s finished telling it to me.

 

Get your copy of All Saints from Biblioasis here!

And why not check out K.D. Miller’s other fantastic titles here?