Mavis Gallant F Ancine P Ose Damon Galgut Aleksanda
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Brick celebrates Mavis Gallant, with contributions from Michael Helm, Francine Prose, Alison Harris, Michael Ondaatje, and Nadia Szilvassy & Tara Quinn. A LITERARY JOURNAL Aleksandar Hemon talks to Eleanor Wachtel Obi Nwakanma in conversation with Madeleine Thien Grant Buday on Thomas De Quincey Damon Galgut on E. M. Forster Andrew H. Miller watches The Clock The watch continues to tick where the story stops. — stops. story the where tick continues to The watch permanence. grief without are the look, The lie, the David L. Ulin traces our expressions Myrna Kostash searches for Eliza McLean William Everson meets Theodore Dreiser ichard Sanger says goodbye to Seamus Heaney Tara Quinn follows Leonard Woolf to Sri Lanka Jim Harrison misses Paris A dispatch from Siberia by Sean Michaels A ri on Tolstoy by Jessica Michalofsky Amitava Kumar’s train stories Mark Marczyk’s notes from Ukraine Mavis Gallant Mavis Poems by Jan Zwicky and Sharon Olds Photograph of Mavis Gallant by Alison Harris. eviews by Laurie D Graham, John McIntyre, $. and ebecca Silver Slayter MAVIS GALLANT FANCINE POSE DAMON GALGUT And Zachary Lazar on Angola Prison’s Passion Play, ALEKSANDA HEMON SHAON OLDS ZACHAY LAZA with photographs by Deborah Luster £. DEBOAH LUSTE MICHAEL HELM OBI NWAKANMA JIM HAISON MADELEINE THIEN JAN ZWICKY The New Brick Reader Summer Special A Brick subscription plus The New Brick Reader — only $55* Subscribe, Renew, or Give! Visit BrickMag.com and click on “The New Brick Reader Summer Deal.” *plus shipping for the Reader Offer expires August 31, 2014 The New Brick Reader Summer Special A Brick subscription plus The New Brick Reader — only $55* Subscribe, Renew, or Give! Visit BrickMag.com and click on “The New Brick Reader Summer Deal.” *plus shipping for the Reader Offer expires August 31, 2014 Mavis Gallant, 1960, Île Saint-Louis number 93 summer 2014 © brick, a literary journal, issue 93, summer 2014 publisher & managing editor: Nadia Szilvassy all rights reserved editors: Michael Helm, Michael Redhill, issn 0382-8565, isbn 978-1-928166-00-9 Linda Spalding, Rebecca Silver Slayter, Laurie D Graham Publications Mail Agreement No. 40042720 assistant editor & circulation manager: Liz Johnston Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to contributing editors: Robert Hass, Anne McLean, circulation department: Tara Quinn, Colm TÓibín design: Mark Byk brick intern: Anna Gallagher-Ross Box 609, Stn P original design: Gordon Robertson, Rick/Simon Toronto, Ontario m5s 2y4 logos: David Bolduc Canada copy editor: Heather Sangster We gratefully acknowledge the support website design: Mark Byk with Mike Stringer of the Canada Council for the Arts and founders: Stan Dragland & Jean McKay the Ontario Arts Council. brick accepts unsolicited manuscripts of non-fiction only. Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with Please send submissions with appropriate return postage to: nothing to be so little appreciated as with criticism. brick Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them. Box 609, Stn P Toronto, Ontario m5s 2y4 — Rainer Maria Rilke Canada Subscribe online! www.brickmag.com From time to time we may make our subscriber list available to similar-minded magazines or arts organizations. To be excluded from these mailings, please email us at [email protected] or write to us. brick is published twice yearly by Cypress Avenue Inc. and is printed and bound in Canada by Marquis Book Printing Inc. Distributed in Canada by Magazines Canada, in the United States by Ingram Periodicals and Ubiquity Distributors, and overseas by Central Books. an Ontario government agency un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario In This Issue working with mavis gallant 8 mark marcZyk Euromaidan 74 michael helm, francine prose, alison harris, michael ondaatje tara Quinn For Mavis Gallant 11 Woolf in Ceylon 80 eleanor wachtel damon galgut An Interview with Aleksandar Hemon 20 Dear Masood 92 william everson the review An Encounter with Theodore Dreiser 36 with contributions from Laurie D Graham, John McIntyre, & Rebecca Silver Slayter. 102 sharon olds Two Poems 38 madeleine thien A Conversation with Obi Nwakanma 110 andrew h. miller Timepiece 42 david l. ulin God Willing 122 mavis gallant Prose 50, 91, 121, 141, 162 jan Zwicky A Poem 128 Zachary laZar photographs by deborah luster sean michaels We forgive those who trespass against us 52 Note from Magadan 130 BRICK 6 jessica michalofsky jim harrison Fidelity 133 Eat or Die 158 grant buday Contributors 165 The Pope of Opium 136 Credits 168 amitava kumar The image of Mavis Gallant’s passport is reproduced on the Mofussil Junction 142 front cover by kind permission of Mary Kae McLeod. The photograph of Mavis Gallant at the Dome, Paris, 1996, is myrna kostash by Alison Harris and reproduced on the back cover with her Who Was Eliza McLean? 145 kind permission. richard sanger Goodbye, Seamus 153 I have lived in writing, like a spoonful of water in a river. — Mavis Gallant Working with Mavis Gallant Brick published an interview with Mavis Gallant in best to guide us, was given to fits of glee. Mavis Gallant issue 80 (Winter 2007/8) that was as endlessly layered was the caller, and she had some things to say about the as any of her stories. It was conducted in French by interview, which we had sent to her for approval. Contact presenter Stéphan Bureau and translated And so began, also, a treasured exchange. To by Wyley Powell, and we weren’t sure what direc- shape the interview, we took the steer from Mavis tion, precisely, to take it—there was so much good herself. She sent in photographs with personal anec- material, so many stories, and they fanned out across dotes written on the reverse and edited the pages pages and pages of dialogue that could have filled the of the interview in a firm, flawless script. When we entire magazine. had questions, Nadia called her on the phone, and In the interview, Gallant compares the way she sometimes Mavis called us with stern queries and sees the beginning of one of her stories “to a play corrections. One day Nadia announced she was going when the curtain rises and you see the stage. You to New York City and told Mavis that she would be don’t know what’s going to happen, but you know leaving the interview in the care of Tara Quinn. somebody is going to come on stage. If it’s a light “Tara Quinn, Tara Quinn,” mused Mavis. “I see comedy, somebody will walk on and answer a white a girl leading a horse out of a barn that’s caught fire.” telephone. But that’s only the beginning, and you There could be no more auspicious a start to life know nothing yet about these characters.” at Brick than to be shown by Mavis Gallant how to Well, we have a white telephone at the Brick edit an interview. The experience informed how office, and one day in July 2007 it rang, and so began a we edited all interviews in issues to come. The voice light comedy—comic mostly because we, the newly had to come through with a force equal to that of arrived managing editor and assistant editor, were so Mavis on that first phone call. We’d all do well to green, while our production manager, who did her keep listening. — Nadia Szilvassy & Tara Quinn © Alison Harris Mavis Gallant, August 11, 1922–February 18, 2014 For Mavis Gallant Michael Helm Mavis Gallant had no natural constituency. Her childhood transplantings left her without early allegiances to population or place. At the time of her emergence as a writer, Canada had a small serious readership and a low regard for women artists, which is partly why the ones it produced, among them Gallant and Alice Munro, were impractical and single-minded. For having claim to two continents, Gallant was for a time, at least, unclaimed by either, viewed from both perspectives to be allied with foreigners. Though there came to be Gallantian characters, absurdities, turns of thought and phrase that made even the rabbit holes in a story her rabbit holes, her subjects and set- tings could not be fit onto a postage stamp. She wrote about Quebec lumber camps and French tax offices, about men, women, and children of disparate origins, never to gather except in her pages. It’s hard to find a mass-reproducible adjective to describe her fiction even falsely. She was never one of those good or great writers who become popular for the wrong reasons, the kind who are well read narrowly and badly read widely. Decade to decade she wasn’t the subject of much serious scholarly focus amid the myopias of academic criticism, though her work was anthologized in Canada and so half-lost upon many dozen nineteen-year-olds every year, including, one year, me. Those who read her collections and any of the more than a hundred stories she published in The New Yorker tended to want to talk about them. A friend now long gone once said he’d found an obscure but certain pattern of Proust allusions in one of the stories, and he just had to walk me through them, and we walked, and I was convinced. (In one amber drop in the mind from the mid-1990s I see a group of Toronto friends in their twenties and thirties, professionals and students, whose tastes in fiction ranged from the realist-traditional, if not conservative, to the somewhat studied avant-garde, to the outright anarchic, all of us conducting a years-long conversation about Gallant. We’d drop by or phone one another—as I recall it we wore topcoats, wooden shoes—upon BRICK 12 At Les Deux Magots with Doyle Klyn, 1953 discovering newly published stories or books.) Like historical setting, feel of the present, except for con- the used bookstore I found it in, lost now too is an old taining a worldliness lacking in most current short Best American Short Stories anthology from 1980, in fiction.