sewn paper
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Fiction / Stories
September 1999
252 pages
ISBN 0-88984-208-6
$18.95
Give Me Your Answer
K. D. Miller
`I was never a child,' asserts K.D. Miller, author of two collections of short fiction from
The Porcupine's Quill. `Or at least, the child in me was ``killed'' sometime before my conscious
memory kicks in.' No particular traumatic event or series of events brought this about, Miller
says. In fact, her childhood sounds boringly routine. Miller grew up in Hamilton, Ontario in the
1950's world of housewives and breadwinners, of pink plastic radios in the kitchen and
workbenches in the basement, of fathers who hardly spoke and mothers who couldn't stop talking.
All of this finds its way into her stories, along with the feeling `of being different, of not quite
fitting in, of being here on sufferance,' and the distinct sense that `the world could be a dark and
menacing place.'
In `The Other Voice', the story that begins Give Me Your Answer, the child witnesses the
aftermath of a car accident in which a child was hit, maybe killed. She can tell that the woman
who `sings' about how sad it is isn't sad at all, more gloating at the punishment meted out to
errant child and careless adult, both `getting what's coming to them' in an Old Testament,
righteous kind of way. The `other voice' of the title is the little girl's own voice, blunt with reality,
almost unrecognized as her own, that gives the lie to the innocence of children.
Of her influences Miller says, `I've always been attracted to anything Gothic. As a child I
must have read Jane Eyre about eleven times, and I was morbidly fascinated by the works of Poe.
I still love the southern Gothic writers: Eudora Welty ... Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor.'
Margaret Laurence was an early, powerful influence. `When I first began to think of myself as a
writer, I got cartloads of permission from Margaret Laurence. Permission to write, permission to
think of myself as a writer, permission to pause and dwell on what is small and ordinary.' Miller
remembers reading Laurence's A Bird in the House and suddenly realizing it was all right to write
about everyday things, `the way the light came in the mother's window,' and make it special. And
indeed Miller's stories are full of the small details that render an ordinary scene significant.
Give Me Your Answer is K.D. Miller's second collection of short
stories. The book is made up of twelve stories which together trace the
evolving life of the protagonist, Daisy Chandler, from childhood to marriage
and subsequently to divorce and a deepening religious conviction.
First as a painter, then as a writer, Daisy struggles to understand
her family, her friends, her lovers and herself. With one foot in the fifties
and the other on the millennium, Daisy bears witness to herself and her
companions with unflinching honesty and a wickedly irreverent sense of
humour.
These stories further reveal K.D. Miller's huge talent. Her language
is crisp and precise and even the most sombre of the stories is flecked
with her trademark wit and humour.
K.D. Miller's debut collection, A Litany in
Time of Plague, won her a loyal and growing following. Give
Me Your Answer will engage and delight those readers and will win her
many more.
`... I found myself laughing frequently.... Miller takes the right turns
and sustains her narratives without tricks or complications ... if K.D.
Miller can evoke such feelings in a first collection, I am certainly looking
forward to her second.'
- The Malahat Review
While still maintaining an interest in theatre, she began to concentrate more seriously on writing. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Capilano Review, Canadian Forum, Writ, The New Quarterly, McGill Street Magazine and The Lazy Writer.
In this new collection, two stories -- `Sunrise Till Dark' and `Egypt Land' -- were nominated for the Journey Prize, and a third -- `Missing Person' -- was nominated for the National Magazine Award in 1998.
Her latest publication is a collection of essays called Holy Writ.