It includes my story “27 Days” and also a reflection on the story behind the story, posted below:

I have been writing short stories for two decades and from the beginning I’ve been curious about the elements that go together to make a story successful. What makes a story different from an anecdote? From a joke? Stories can contain anecdotes and jokes, but they are also something more. And without being highfallutin, I’d argue that that something more is mysterious and beyond definition. It isn’t something we can ever reach, but how we approach it makes all of the difference.

I have two school age children, and from the assignments they bring home I see that they have been told a story is something that has a beginning, middle, and an end. Myself, I’ve always been most interested in beginning and endings. A story, if I were to risk a definition, is a series of beginnings and endings that cluster around a theme. Douglas Glover has called these segments narrative nodes. The story “27 Days” is rich in nodes, though it’s possible some readers will simply say it’s rich in fragments. There are lots of different bits; how do they fit together? How did they come to be ordered that way?

First, the first draft of the story was very different. Actually, I never finished the first draft. I got about halfway through, then couldn’t continue. At that point, the story was about the father with the twins (which is a true event, based on a friend’s experience). I lost the thread, I think, because I didn’t know who the narrator was. I’m always conscious that the story the narrator is telling needs to reflect back on the narrator in a meaningful way, and I couldn’t figure out what it was about the narrator that made the story of the twins meaningful. Was it about the cruelty of life? The absurdity of life? The struggle to maintain meaning in the face of tragedy? And what would those look like in the narrator’s life (i.e., in real, concrete terms)?

Years later I was looking through my electronic file drawer full of story fragments, and I thought I saw a way to fit a number of them together into a single piece. Many of them (and this is unusual for me) are real-life examples, either from media reports (German cannibal, returning US soldiers, couples psychologist, the Nigerian refugee) or from people I’ve known (father of twins, two elderly ladies). I worked on the story for a while, but I still couldn’t come up with an ending. Another year or so later I picked it up again, determined to finally finish it, and I found an ending that brought it all together.

Or so I thought. Because when I submitted the story to TNQ, I received a note from the editors that they pleased with the story, but they also couldn’t publish it because the ending seemed too sudden. No, no, I thought. The ending is the ending. I have no Plan B for the ending, but I could see their point, too. The ending did take one by surprise, so I reorganized the nodes, cut material that seemed extraneous, wrote some transition pieces, and resubmitted the story to TNQ, original ending intact.

And that is the story you see.

What drew me to the material? What effects was I after in settling on the story’s particular imagery? These are hard questions to answer. Having plugged away at short stories for two decades all I know is that there are certain images and narrative strategies that keep appearing. I try to press against them, challenge them, complicate them, but at the end of the day I write about what I write about and I don’t really know why. I write about the emotional lives of men. I write about the transition from youth to adulthood. I write about the absurdities of contemporary life. My characters are often optimists in a world determined to turn them into cynics. Hope is better than fear, as Jack Layton said, but naïve hope is stupidity. Beauty, however, abounds.

My wife, as those who have read below know, has a particularly virulent kind of breast cancer. This past week we bought both an all-expenses trip to Mexico and burial plots. (See also Kate’s Flickr photos.)

Enjoy every sandwich, as Warren Zevon said.

Also, look forward to new fiction from me in the Winter 2012 Found Press issue. It’s a short story called “Survival,” and, yes, the title is stolen from Margaret Atwood. More details to follow.

The Winter 2012 issue of The New Quarterly includes my story, “27 Days.” It should also be out soon.

Issue #32 of The Danforth Review is also imminent. In the meantime, check out new interviews with Matthew Firth and Sarah Selecky.

I was at the 2003 concert where Bruce Springsteen recorded this (included on the WZ tribute album, Enjoy Every Sandwich):

And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.

Table of contents:

• Boys and Girls, Girls and Boys
• Beginnings and Endings
• Running with that Indian
• Border Guard
• Watching the Lions
• Book of Job
• Six Million, Million Miles
• Yes, I Wanted to Say
• Niagara
• My Life In Television
• Bonus Track: Hercules

Read these stories and more in:

• Thirteen Shades of Black & White (Turnstone Press, 1999)
• Only A Lower Paradise & Other Stories (Boheme, 2000; e-book, 2011)
• The Lizard & Other Stories (Chaudiere, 2009)
• How Many Girlfriends (Blurb, self-published, 2010)

A real month.

On October 1st, Kate found a new lump, the second cancer, now in her liver.

On Oct 4th, she returned to chemotherapy.

She’ll be in chemotherapy for some time yet.

This week friends sent the hat you see me wearing in the attached photo.

Says it all.

• Cigar Box Banjo: Notes on Music and Life by Paul Quarrington
• The Perfect Order of Things by David Gilmour
• Beauty & Sadness by André Alexis

I have been reading new fiction submissions for a couple of weeks now, but just this morning posted the first new content on TDR in over two years, interviews with Zsuzsi Gartner, Jessica Westhead and Rebecca Rosenblum.

One year ago, on the first day of school, September 2010, my wife, Kate, and I dropped the kids off at school (then starting grades one and five), then went out for breakfast, then went downtown to await for her appointment at the breast cancer clinic at Mount Sinai Hospital.

She had found a lump a couple of days earlier and was scheduled for an ultrasound. Her referring doctor had pressed on her that she should press for a biopsy. The ultrasound technician agreed and they stabbed an enormous needle in her chest.

Confirmation of cancer would come two weeks later, but by then we weren’t surprised.

Tomorrow is the first day of school and an anniversary of sorts. In the past 12 months, Kate has enduring six chemotherapy “treatments” (18 weeks), surgery to remove her left breast and a dozen lymph nodes in her left arm, five weeks (25 daily doses) of radiation, the ongoing physical and psychological pain of all of the above and the additional indignities of the side-effects of ongoing hormone drug treatment.

And she has consistently blogged at Auntie Cake’s Shop.

Yes, we both had panic attacks, fearing she would die. Or what would happen if she died. Or how are we going to get through all of this.

The kids, I have to say, have been remarkably resilient. Of course it has often been hard. Sometimes irredeemably hard. But they have taught me much about how to keep on keepin’ on.

Which brings me to the turducken, a turkey stuffed with a chicken and a duck. All of the birds need to be de-boned. Then you BBQ at roughtly 400F for eight hours.

Sound crazy? Well, go big or go home.

We rented a cottage for the end of the summer, our chance to leave cancer behind and relax and jump in the lake and …  prepare turducken.

Because, why not? Because, life is for living.

But, man o man, it took me 90 minutes to de-bone the turkey. And an hour to de-done the chicken. Kate de-boned the duck and made the stuffing.

All told, it took us three day to prepare this thing! (Video evidence of parts of the process and the results are below.)

The list includes Douglas Glover, Mark Anthony Jarman, John Lavery, and Greg Hollingshead, four short story writers I greatly admire.

Also included are interviews with Gwendolyn MacEwen’s biographer, Rosemary Sullivan, Alden Nowlan’s biography, Gregory M. Cook, the editor of John Newlove’s Selected Poems, Robert McTavish, and interviews with Carrie Snyder, Evelyn Lau, Lynn Coady, Leon Rooke, Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, Emily Pohl-Weary and K.I. Press, among others.

Most of these interviews were done for The Danforth Review.