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FICTION / Short Stories
  (single author)
August 2006
216 pages
ISBN 0-88984-284-1
$24.95

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World Body

Clark Blaise

Clark Blaise's fiction and its (presumed) autobiographical sources have drifted further and further apart in recent years, and World Body is the latest evidence. The first three volumes of his New & Selected Stories (Southern, Pittsburgh and Montreal Stories) are celebrations of variant lives within the familiar outline of a not-quite Clark Blaise whom Clark Blaise would nevertheless recognize. Volume Four explodes the easy identification of a writer with his own life-experience. In World Body, Blaise weaves an intricate tapestry of terror and desire; the geography of Blaise's concerns is unique in the modern canon.


In story collections, context is all. Many of these stories have appeared in earlier books (notably, If I Were Me and Man and His World), but here they stand alone, bouncing off each other in a revised sequence, a different display.

Fate, family and marriage have conspired to make me into a hydroponic writer: rootless, unhoused, fed by swirling waters and harsh, artificial light. In Canadian terms, a classic un-Munro. A Manitoba mother and a Quebec father, an American and Canadian life split more or less equally, can do that to an inquisitive and absorptive child. I never lived longer than six months anywhere, until my four-year Pittsburgh adolescence and fourteen years of Montreal teaching. As a consequence, when I was a young writer, I thought that making sense of my American and Canadian experience would absorb my interest for the rest of my life.

But a five-minute wedding ceremony in a lawyer's office in Iowa City forty-two years ago delivered that inquisitive child an even larger world than the North American continent. I married India, a beautiful and complicated world, and that Canadian/American, French/English, Northern/Southern boy slowly disappeared. (I wonder what he would have been like, had the larger world never intervened). The stories in World Body (Volume 4 of New and Selected Stories) reflect a few of those non-North American experiences. I now live in California, but my California, strangely, presents itself through Indian eyes.

 



Clark Blaise has taught in Montreal, Toronto, Saskatchewan and British Columbia, as well as at Skidmore College, Columbia University, Iowa, NYU, Sarah Lawrence and Emory. For several years he directed the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Among the most widely travelled of authors, he has taught or lectured in Japan, India, Singapore, Australia, Finland, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Holland, Germany, Haiti and Mexico. He lived for years in San Francisco, teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. He is married to the novelist Bharati Mukherjee and currently divides his time between San Francisco and Southampton, Long Island. In 2002, he was elected president of the Society for the Study of the Short Story. In 2003, he was given an award for exceptional achievement by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
 

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