The Short of It: Catherine Bush & Skin

For Short Story Month, one author will join us every Friday to answer five questions about their work and share an excerpt from their short story collection.

All Lit Up: Tell us about your collection in a few short sentences.

Catherine Bush: The stories in Skin delve into unexpected intimacies during fraught times—intimacies between people, and between humans and the more-than-human world (dogs, birds, a glacier, the wind). When I began work on what became the collection, my first collection of stories after five novels, I wasn’t yet thinking about it as a collection. I was interested in seeking pleasure through the story form and respite from the exhaustion of late-pandemic days. I wanted to write stories that pressed up against the urgencies of the present even if not all are set in the current moment—one is set in 17th-century France. I want to invite readers to overturn their expectations, be startled, travel from tenderness through odd humour to grief and back again. I had the great good fortune to work with André Alexis as my editor on this book; he was the one who first suggested that I turn the stories into a collection and offered to edit it.

ALU: How do you approach writing a short story—do you start with an image, a character, or something else?

CB: I’m a magpie and usually begin my stories with a theft, or at least a borrowing from the world. I’ve taken snippets of stories told to me by others, overheard stories, a story gleaned from a social media account or from my own history and real-life encounters. I’m not interested in transcribing the documentary but in transforming these points of origin into something else entirely, even as they bear traces of their origins in their story DNA. Why do these elements compel me? They say, Go there. Transform me. Go deeper. For instance, the story, “Glacial,” draws upon an expedition I took with the Arctic Circle Residency on a tall ship, the Antigua, up the coast of Svalbard, high above the Arctic Circle, during which we encountered a series of melting glaciers. While I did get shut up by myself in a hut, what happens to the story’s protagonist is not what happened to me. Some of the stories were written years ago; these were edited and re-written for the collection. Some use old ideas and completely revamp them. Some stories are entirely new. While they’re not autobiographical, the stories offer a kind of pixellated autobiography.

ALU: What do you love about the short story form?

CB: I’ve always been a novelist. Even as a child, I started out writing novels. I began writing stories in university until, a few years later, I had the great bad luck of encountering a professor/instructor in a summer program who held up a story of mine to the workshop and asked, Is this a story? Does anyone here think this is a story? I took the bait, sculpted a well-made story out of some of the material, published it, then turned the beating heart of the story into my first novel and never looked back—until, a few years ago, when stories returned to me. I love the compression of the form, the ultra-compression of flash, the need in any story, to leap, put pressure on time, image, incident and language. Something different happens to time in a story than a novel. That’s interesting. The story involves a radical engagement with what must be left out (yet sensed). A story, whether flash or novella-length, contains a world, and I love moving between story worlds, both as reader and writer.

ALU: Who are some of your favourite short story writers?

CB: When I read short stories, I read for the leap, the swerve: the swerves of time and expectation in Souvankham Thammavongsa’s “Good Looking,” told by a narrator looking back on his childhood from forty years on; the way Bryan Washington uses line breaks and space breaks to create leaps in a story like “Foster,” in which the gay narrator navigates life with his lover and his imprisoned brother’s cat, while re-seeing his snarled relationship with his brother. The stark shifts in understanding experienced by the female narrator of Alexander McCleod’s “Once Removed” so that every relationship in the story is altered in an afternoon. The leaps within and between sentences in “Guy de Maupassant” by the great Russian writer, Isaac Babel. The sudden switch of point-of-view in the final sentence of Mavis Gallant’s “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street.” The propulsive, seductive energy of Lisa Moore’s stories. The distilled prose of Yiyun Li’s stories, a distillation that nevertheless plunges us into haunted and ferocious feeling.

ALU: What are three things on your writing desk/place of writing?

CB: A black-and-white photograph by my dear friend, the American photographer Dona Ann McAdams (the image also appears in her new book, Black Box), of our first poodles, mine blonde, hers black; they’re slightly blurred and so have the appearance of ghost dogs, fitting as they are both ghost dogs now. It’s thanks to Dona that I live with poodles (I have two). The photograph is full of relationship, landscape and moody mystery, as any good story should be.

A micro-painting of the sea by the New York-based landscape Lisa Lebofsky, whom I met via friends on Fogo Island (the setting of my last novel). I’m writing a new novel about the ocean and I live in the middle of the continent, far from the sea, so Lisa’s image, while smaller than a postcard, nevertheless allows me to fall into its expanse of water and sky.

I’m working on a project that draws on the life of American 20th-century environmentalist Rachel Carson. I’ve been lucky enough to visit her actual cottage in Maine and gathered shells (periwinkles, a tiny scallop) and beach glass from the nearby shore. I keep these talismans close, even travel with them, alongside other ephemera like Post-it notes, which I can’t live without!