sewn paper
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Also from Newfoundland
Other Burning Rockers
Stories; FIC 029000
March 2004
168 pages
ISBN 0-88984-235-3
$18.95
published by PQL
So Beautiful
Ramona Dearing
Like Michael Winter, Lisa Moore, Libby Creelman, Jessica Grant and Claire
Wilkshire, Ramona Dearing is a member of St. John's' now-legendary
fiction collective, Burning Rock. While it would be misleading
to claim that these writers constitute a movement -- Dearing's writing
is less impressionistic than Moore's, less autobiographical than
Winter's, and many of her stories take place far from St. John's --
they are all remarkably talented writers whose stories are full of
vitality. Readers who enjoy one Burning Rock book tend to love
them all.
There's a peculiar itch for justice in this debut collection. In the
opening story, Lyle Margoulis is prompted to resume the search for
his missing grandson after finding a body in a ravine. A young woman who
likes to punch people on the nose learns the man she admires
spends time with her only because they live in isolated Labrador.
A Christian Brother on trial for sex abuse at Mount Cashel Orphanage
begins to accept his guilt once he understands the jury is going to
send him to prison. These stories are alive with fear, humour, contradiction.
`Ramona Dearing's So Beautiful could just as easily have been named
Beautiful Losers, had the title not already been taken. The debut
collection features an assortment of characters who are all, if not
fallen, certainly on their way down. At the fall, however, they are all
seeking grace. As a character in one of the stories puts it, they want
to feel pure. The book presents a cross-section of Canadian life. A
rough, hard-living woman is forced to confront the fact that her
favourite drinking buddy only spends time with her because they're stuck
together in an isolated base in Labrador. A young Vancouver woman
worries about her roommate, who entertains fantasies of suicide. A
priest on trial for sexual assault of boys in a Newfoundland orphanage
struggles to understand his past. The characters all suffer from a
combination of loneliness and guilt. They're estranged from each
other--from themselves, even--yet they keep reaching out for contact,
for atonement. They're not quite sure what they've done wrong, but they
know their lives went astray somewhere. ...
`Dearing's greatest strength is her understated style. Entire lives lie
under the surface of her sentences, and characters convey more in what
they don't say than in what they do. Dearing also shows a startling
versatility for a new writer, with her stories covering various
territories, not only of Canadian geography, but also of social class,
emotion, and, most of all, identity. Equally as impressive, Dearing
refuses to provide easy answers for her characters' problems. There are
no feel-good endings here, no morally correct resolutions to complicated
situations. Instead, there are believable human tales. So Beautiful
isn't a book that lays out what people should be--it's a book that sums
up what they are, and what they can never be.' `Ramona Dearing is a Newfoundland-based writer and member of the Burning Rock literary collective.
Although she has published in several literary magazines, So Beautiful is her first short-story collection.
By and large, Dearing's characters are ordinary people in bleak, but realistic, circumstances.
In one story, Lucy is in love with Mitch, who, in turn, fosters the crush out of boredom and loneliness.
In another, a graduate student learns to deal with an emotionally needy roommate who just might be dipping
her toothbrush in the toilet for fun. Darlene, in a third tale, comes home from school to discover
that her parents have put the family dogs to sleep. The characters are all regular folk,
if a little hard, and their situations are commonplace, if disagreeable.
Dearing's gift, then, lies not so much in the tales as in the telling.
Her characters are heartbreakingly aware, and Dearing's curt prose is more evocative
of their deep emotions than any florid writing style would be. Dearing, in fact,
is a literary minimalist in a similar manner to Alice Munro; those who enjoy Munro
will be delighted to read works by this new author.
Perhaps influenced by the geography of her home province, Dearing has created a collection
that is stunning in its fierce austerity. In other words, it lives up to its name.'
-- Peter Darbyshire, amazon.ca
-- Naomi Brun, Canadian Book Review Annual
`Ramona Dearing's So Beautiful is a terrific collection of stories
about the people you get stuck with in life. Roommates, siblings,
drinking buddies, all the ones you think you would never choose, but who
become central to the way you function in the world and even to the way
that you evaluate your own worth.'
-- Natalee Caple, the Globe & Mail
`Often what Dearing writes about here is the inability or
unwillingness to trust -- a word synonymous, perhaps, with love. Many of her
characters, struggling with habits of denial and self-delusion, are not
particularly trustworthy or lovable. Yet she renders them in ways that
are always charged and sometimes surprising. And occasionally, miraculously,
trust and truth meet.'
-- Maureen Garvie, Quill & Quire
`These stories are like blood from a fresh cut -- shockingly
bright, quick, alive. Sharp sensation, and tenderness. Full
of humor, hurt and bald honesty. Dearing's writing makes us
feel, deeply.'
-- Lisa Moore
`So Beautiful is full of amazing, weird, busted talent
travelling crossed paths that might lead us to God. Here's
a writer that smashes the sentimental and leaves us with a
mysterious zip of longing, a zip that smelts the iron out
of the ironic, an iron that buckles my heart. If pets
could read, they would read Ramona Dearing's stories.'
-- Michael Winter
`The text as physical object doesn't usually make or break a book,
but it helps when a little thought has been given to the form the work
takes. So Beautiful has a weird, splashy, eye-catching blown tulip
on the cover that will surely coax some people to pick it up. The cover
is soft, but the binding is sewn and there are lovely, embossed green
endpapers. ... I was recently taken to task for commenting on the writers
who gave cover endorsements to a recent collection of stories. I'll compound
the crime here by saying that the only bad writing in the book is Michael Winter's
totally nonsensical blurb on the back cover. So Beautiful is a very
lively, varied and interesting collection, but to call it "busted talent
travelling crossed paths that might lead us to God" is just downright silly. ... Ignore
the endorsements -- buy the book because it's a good read.'
-- Robin McGrath, the Northeast Avalon Times
`Ramona Dearing writes in a marvellously understated but powerful
fashion about the lives of everyday people. There are, in her fiction,
no easy, facile endings, no `issues' that come before character. Her
stories are at times funny, at times sad in the most wonderfully
redemptive way. This is one of the best fiction debuts I've read in quite
some time.'
-- Wayne Johnston
`Reading Ramona Dearing's "So Beautiful the Firemen Would Cry" is like
sitting in a springtime café, with a lively storyteller recounting crazy
times with a difficult and beloved room-mate in Vancouver. Story as
visit. Good visit.'
-- Gale Zoe Garnett, The Globe and Mail
`Love: the title of Ramona Dearing's "Love Bites & Little Spanks"
aptly captures the punchy quality of a narrative in which
ambivalence carries off a marriage. The narrator's husband,
Lenny, is having an affair with her cousin Gracie. The narrator
pictures the adulterous couple stormbound in Billy's Cove, "The
bar in the middle of the bed making them arch like dolphins, the
TV on, the smell of burning teeth." "Love Bites" creates a sense
of emotional directness, which goes well with Dearing's gift for
understatement and sudden images.'
-- Claire Wilkshire, Canadian Notes and Queries
`What is so beautiful about Ramona Dearing's debut collection
of short fiction? The writing itself is beautiful; her words crackle
with energy. She has the sensibility of a poet and provides surprise
through language, paints images vividly, and does not settle for easy
descriptions. The structure of each piece is beautiful too. Dearing knows
that plot matters and these stories drive forward like Newfoundland rain in
November.'
-- Jay Ruzesky, the Malahat Review
`So Beautiful is Ramona Dearing's first book. She joins fellow
Newfoundlanders Wayne Johnston, Michael Crummey, Michael Winter and Lisa Moore
as one of the country's best young(ish) writers. Central, Western, and Northern
Canadians should stop thinking about Newfoundland as the periphery. It is the centre.'
-- Harold Hoefle, Front and Centre
So Beautiful was shortlisted for the fifth annual Winterset Award for `excellence in Newfoundland writing' administered by The Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council. This prize was established to commemorate the memory of the St John's-born social historian and prize-winning author Sandra Fraser Gwyn who did so much to promote an awareness of the arts of Newfoundland across the country. The award is named after the house, on Winter Avenue in St John's, where Sandra grew up and lived until the age of eleven when her parents moved to the mainland. Soon afterwards, the house, one of the oldest residential properties in the city, was demolished.
`In her first book Ramona Dearing
has shown us her ability to almost effortlessly touch the core of what
matters. She is a funny and serious writer, a writer who asks all the
right questions while being smart enough to never pretend she owns the
answers.'
-- Danuta Gleed prize jury
