from The Perils of Karst Topography in Your Life

 His phone makes a series of popping sounds and suddenly there are nude photos in the conversation thread. Her body in these photos is graciously unadorned but says so much in that non-verbal language that sex makes so eloquent. His penis in turn has gotten the memo and is replying s’il vous plait to her implied mother tongue...

Revu for Michael Blouin's I Am Billy The Kid

 I Am Billy The Kid by Michael Blouin is a novel that pools together much of the lore that has surrounded one of America’s favourite outlaws. In it, the man himself recounts the life he lives after allegedly taking a fatal bullet from one Pat Garrett, which is the pivotal event that sends him into hiding to live a sort of pseudo-afterlife. In it, he encounters the headstrong Turner, a young woman of undetermined age who becomes the undercurrent of the story that our protagonist shares. As a whole, the novel is a paean to Turner’s strength and indomitable spirit, existing as an understated tribute to the strength of the feminine in all its manifestations.

The afterlife figures as a strong metaphor throughout the novel, not just as Billy’s new lease on life, but also with soliloquys and anecdotes from the Other Side where souls recently departed will breach the veil to communicate and describe what life after death is like, for better or for worse. It gives the novel a beautiful depth that lasts for the reader.

 As a writer, Blouin is all about vernacular, relaying his stories in a conversational style. He even affected a convincing Texas drawl during the launch reading in Ottawa, which shows how immersed in the language he really is. In his books he always tells the story through its characters. If he is a frightened and abused teenage boy, as in Chase & Haven, his narration inhabits that. If he is a booze addled Ottawa Valley hosehead as in Skin House, that’s who tells you the story. If he is a rugged 19th century outlaw of the American Southwest, it is that voice that recalls his life. This is what draws you in. It always makes you feel like you are sitting across a booth from the narrator.

Stemming from that, he is also a master of dialogue, always spicing it with humour and clever turns of wit. His characters are always arguing and confronting each other, cutting each other up at every opportunity and you always feel blessed to witness such hilarious exchanges.

One other great thing Blouin does is he makes his non-linear breakneck transitions so fluid and logical, you really do feel like you are in a carnival ride, with gravity, time and space whipping you in all directions, making it a thrill to experience. In I Am Billy The Kid, you can be at any point in the protagonist’s life, recounting a significant (or not, even) event and it is always relevant and illuminating, never straying from the point. As a writer, I learn so much from him.

         All told, I Am Billy The Kid is a novel artfully crafted by an author with much ammunition at his disposal. Blouin knows when to shoot and when to wait to bring about the best outcome possible, giving rich life to the story and leading up to a satisfying ending and a warm afterglow when you finally lay the book down, knowing you have something good to look back upon.

July 29, 2022

    Life can be like a game of cards. The outcome depends on how you play the cards the dealer hands you. This might make the dealer seem like they have some kind of power over you, but that perception is misleading. The truth is the dealer hasn’t got a goddamned clue what they’re dealing you either. The power is in the cards and in the choices you make with them.

The power is yours, Planeteers.

Supplicant

 I want to make a pot of spaghetti but am pre-empted by a lack of spaghetti sauce.  I really don’t want to go anywhere, really not wanting to wade into the fluorescent lighting, the garish assaultive advertising and brave the lineups to get what I want.  I don’t want to get what I want, but I have to.  I get in the car clumsily and lumber out of the driveway, begrudging set on my mission. On the way past the Catholic Church down the street, I spy a young man, a teenage boy, kneeling on the sidewalk, thin and bent like a bough under a torrent. It's such a hot and humid day and he kneels there in a full pale yellow suit, maybe his Sunday best. Such a lost looking thing. In the rearview mirror, I can see he is not gardening, not stooping for a dime. Hands clasped, head bowed, he is praying. Poor lost thing.

At the Walmart, it’s a foray through the categories, a mathematical foraging through subdivisions of supply and demand.  I find the spaghetti sauce I want in the pasta department, there the rice and couscous is also kept.  The 1-8 item lineup is bovine and as fate would have it, the clerk can’t get the price of a turnip and needs to call for a price check.  There are full cart checkouts that are finished before I pay for my single can. On the way home, the boy is still kneeling in the same place and position, still supplicating under the sun. What could have driven him to kneel out there in the full sunlight on tiled stone?  Is there a point where we fall so far that we can only look up from our knees?

    I think of my mother in her last days. While sick with emphysema, she kept her crucifix under her pillow, out of sight but always close to her thoughts. When we are scared and have lost control, we turn to a great controller, I suppose. When we refuse to abandon hope, yet can’t find solution, we need to turn to magic.  Faced with the impossible, we turn to something we deem to be invincible.  Our faith is only as limitless as our imaginations.  Hope springs eternal.

    The poor boy. He kneels there on the hot concrete. Why hasn’t anyone taken him in? Why hasn’t a priest come out to give him some sanctuary, or at least an audience? It’s quite possible there are no priests there. Maybe the boy doesn’t want to go in. Maybe the recipient of his prayers is not someone inside.  He kneels there alone and unassisted. Why have the gods turned away?  Why do they hide?  Can’t they see this young man’s sincerity? Is he not ardent enough? Should he be quaking? Should he be whirling?  Should he be cutting a lamb’s throat? Should he be cutting out a virgin’s heart? Should he be hurling himself off the top of a mountain?  Should he be speaking in tongues?  Which tongue?  Aramaic? Latin? Yiddish? Sanskrit? There are so many questions in the mystery of God. Whenever there is no answer, that answer is always God.  And God, evidently, never answers...

In all the excitement of writing my novel, I've noticed that I have been woefully inadequate in acknowledging my first labour of love, my short fiction collection "Virtus", for which I am aggressively shopping for a publisher. Above is the proposed cover concept that I've designed, which will hopefully feature this great piece of photo art by T. Lee Kindy of Hard Candy Portraiture. I think it ties in to the concept of the Virtuous Man and all its implications which I explore in the collection. The flame of the candle might represent a halo while the mess of the wax could be the failings and shortcomings of a man's pursuit of virtue, dropping uncomfortably over his head, almost blocking his eyes; all the highs and lows of masculinity.

    And that's basically what the collection is about; the broad range of experience that comes with being male in this society, as a father, as a boy, as a husband, as a teenager dealing with an emerging sexuality, a bounder wrestling through maze of alcoholism or a middle-aged man pondering over the loss of a friend. In it, I try to touch on a variety of gender issues from every hue of the gender spectrum, using original storylines and, hopefully, with a fresh narrative voice each time.

    Most of the stories simply come from conversations I've had with friends both male and female that illustrate the disparity between the genders and the clumsy attempts to bridge those gaps, as well as incidents that had resonated with me, from which an entire storyline would unfold in my mind the moment it came to me. Some were first-drafted years ago while I was still married, and the perspective shows in their point of view, while others are more recent; written in the fortuitous opportunities of free time that the Covid-19 lockdowns have afforded me. I'm grateful for all the experiences that had brought these stories about. Some were negative at the time, but in the end they became ripe fruit to harvest.

    I spent most of last summer revising and editing the stories, with a ruthless edge for purging extraneous words and sentences while expanding on ideas that needed more room to breathe. In the end, I have a strong library of stories that I'm sure will stand up in the market and in readers' minds.

    After all this, I've now decided to focus more on getting this collection to publishers in the hopes that one will pick it up and I can use the momentum to carry on with works in progress. I've already reached out to agents that may help, and have sent out a couple query letters to publishers that I know would be a good match.  Either way, the end result will be publication because I believe in this anthology and am confident it will help advance my intentions to see this and other projects through.

    I have so many ideas in queue for publishing, Virtus, the novel in progress LefTturn, a novella called Back to the Holocene, a chapbook entitled Holophrasis inspired by John Koenig's Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, and another short fiction collection I am going to call Second Saturn Return. I have enough work to last me the next ten years, no doubt. Now if someone would just pick up the god damned first one, I can get the ball rolling!

The work never ends! And I LOVE IT!

Thank you all for your support! Hopefully this will be the year I have concrete news to give you!

Beste;

Kees
 

Fresh Poesie

  

Beedahbun- the horizon is a strip of blazing red dissecting a blue and grey behind the jagged array of nearly-naked trees. It’s November. The only motion he sees are the leaves falling from the trees with little to no provocation at all. There is no wind, so they seem to just let go as if they’d been waiting for the right time. They sail down on the resistance of air and sway to and fro until they reach the frosty ground, where they settle, where they are prepared to spend eternity.

That Left Turn

There is a front of clouds over Irishtown Park that looks like the wave front of the tsunami that devastated Indonesia in 2011, a white, petulant boundary of vapour rolling over the blue with a wake of brooding grey behind its lead. It swoops over the sky like a blanket thrown over a bed, billowing and then settling down over the earth with long-term intent. Underneath it all, Jobe leaves his truck in the parking lot of the Forêt Acadienne trail. He’d gotten up at first light and driven out to the park so he could sit in the parking lot and sample a ripe and willing bottle of Gibson’s for his morning pick-me-up. Muzzy and buoyant, he descends into the mouth of the trail, happy to bob along whatever the woods had to offer that day. The park is picturesque in some ways, with its tourist-friendly bridges and streams and even an old dam for those fleeting insta-moments, but those views always drew a scourge of people, which only served as distractions and obstacles for Jobe to avoid, so when a side trail presents itself, he turns the boat in his head to the right and is soon scuffling happily down the trail’s throat. 

After a while, in his tottered state, Jobe loses the concept of how long he’d been on the trail. He calculates that he’d needed to stop for a piss twice in all that time but still he'd lost the time and has no idea where he is. Eventually he decides that he’d taken a wrong turn somewhere. None of the trees or rocks look familiar to him, although it’s hard to get his eyes to focus on anything as he could neither stand still enough nor train his eyes to focus on any one thing. He stands and studies his surroundings for a good long time, then finally decides with a sinking in his gut that he should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque somewhere along the way.