Today’s BOOKSPO ventures beyond the human as I talk to Catherine Bush about her sixth book, which is also her first short story collection, SKIN. She tells me about how she, like many writers, began writing short fiction, but soon realized that the novel was the container for the stories she was telling, and would focus on novel-writing for years…until an interest in flash fiction brought her back to short stories. SKIN includes some of those flash fictions, as well as longer pieces, stories she’s written recently and other reworkings of stories she’d written in the past, the result a collection that’s rich and eclectic (in terms of form and approach), but with fascinatingly recurring touchpoints, which reflect Bush’s preoccupations as a thinker and an author over the years.
And her BOOKSPO pick is Ali Smith’s COMPANION PIECE, a book that inspired Bush for the ways in which it seems to be fiction pushing right up against our present moment, with both humour and urgency at once. She talks about the sense of play in the book, which is a sense that infuses her own stories in SKIN. And about how she admires the role that animals play in Smith’s novel, which—like her own book—gives a vision of the world that’s more than merely human.
A blistering book of short fiction from one of Canada’s most loved novelists.
In Skin, Catherine Bush plunges into the vortex of all that shapes us. Summoning relationships between the human and more-than-human, she explores a world where touch and intimacy are both desirable and fraught.
Ranging from the realistic to the speculative, Bush’s stories tackle the condition of our restless, unruly world amidst the tumult of viruses, climate change, and ecological crises. Here, she brings to life unusual and perplexing intimacies: a man falls in love with the wind; a substitute teacher’s behaviour with a student brings unforeseen risks; a woman becomes fixated on offering foot washes to strangers.
Bold, vital, and unmistakably of the moment, Skin gives a charged and animating voice to the question of how we face the world and how, in the process, we discover tenderness and allow ourselves to be transformed.
Catherine Bush is the author of five novels. Her work has been critically acclaimed, published internationally, and shortlisted for numerous awards. Her most recent novel, Blaze Island, was a Globe and Mail and Writers’ Trust of Canada Best Book of the Year, and the Hamilton Reads 2021 Selection. Her other novels include the Canada Reads longlisted Accusation; the Trillium Award shortlisted Claire's Head; the national bestselling The Rules Of Engagement, which was also named a New York Times Notable Book and a L.A. Times Best Book of the Year; and Minus Time, shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Award. The recipient of numerous fellowships, Bush has been Writer-in-Residence/Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich and a Fiction Meets Science Fellow at the HWK in Delmenhorst, Germany. An Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, she lives in Toronto and in an old schoolhouse in Eastern Ontario.
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