First Fiction Fridays: Seep by W. Mark Giles


Who:
After many years mired in the middle-management muddle of transnational corporations, W. Mark Giles is now a writer and an educator. His first book Knucklehead (Anvil Press) was honoured with the W.O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Award. His writing–fiction, poetry, and non-fiction–has appeared in magazines in both Canada and the U.S.A. Saskatchewan-born, Edmonton-raised, with stops in Victoria, Kelowna, Montreal, and Halifax, W. Mark Giles now calls Calgary home. 
Why you need to read this now:Seep is a gritty and brisk debut novel from W. Mark Giles who won the W.O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Award for Knucklehead and Other Stories.Dwight Eliot was born on a baseball diamond, during a dugout-clearing brawl between his hometown team, The Seep Selects, and a team of barnstorming Cuban All Stars. Decades later, when he sees his childhood home being moved on a truck down the highway, he begins a quest to research the history of his hometown and of his family. Seep is being dismantled, and the land is being redeveloped as a master-planned recreational townsite to complement a nearby First Nations casino. And then his brother Darcy arrives on his doorstep with the force of a bus crash. In the face of the town’s erasure, he tries to preserve its stories; so doing, he comes to question his own.Seep limns the tension between land development and landscape, trauma and nostalgia, dysfunction and intimacy in a narrative of twenty-first century Canada.
What other people are saying about Seep:“Mark Giles assuredly steps in the footsteps of his predecessors who so engagingly limned the Alberta prairie: W.O. Mitchell, Henry Kreisel, W.P. Kinsella, and Robert Kroetsch. Giles’ Seep is a wickedly wonderful account of how our senses of self and of place can be interrelated, with the swirl of emotions involved in each part of the equation making for a complicated world and illuminating fiction.” — Tom Wayman