The Day of the Dead

Sliver Fiction, Short Stories & an Homage

by Catherine Owen

tagged: short stories (single author)

Description

The Day of the Dead: Sliver Fictions, Short Stories & An Homage is a series of collisions between genders in the realms of sexuality, relationships, art and grief in three sections: Men & Women, Muses and The Dead. Owen explores secrecies, abject pasts, misunderstood desires, the urgency to create and the horrors of loss. The Day of the Dead takes the reader into discomforting worlds, thorned with fantasy and dark humour but rooted in the harsh and sometimes beautiful realities a woman and artist can face in 21st century society. Like the subtitle connotes, Owen's "sliver fictions" are short and sharp, unapologetically getting caught within inconvenient areas of the heart and mind. Familiar settings, like the cafeteria of a BC ferry, are made unheimlich, or uncanny, with the choice of conversation by strangers, or the memory of a character's early sexual experiences. Interactions between boys, girls, ghosts, men, women and all sorts of bystander animals make for brief but elaborate tales twisted into hauntingly confounding shapes and angles.

About the Author

Catherine Owen, from Vancouver, BC, has published sixteen collections of poetry and prose, including The Wrecks of Eden (Wolsak and Wynn, 2002), Frenzy (Anvil Press, 2009), Designated Mourner and Riven (ECW, 2014 and 2020). Her work has won the Stephan G. Stephansson Prize, been translated into Italian and toured Canada twelve times. She now edits, tutors, and hosts the podcast Ms. Lyric's Poetry Outlaws from Delilah, her 1905 home in Edmonton, AB.

Contributor Notes

Catherine Owen lives in New Westminster, BC. She is the author of ten collections of poetry, among them, Designated Mourner (ECW, 2014), Trobairitz (Anvil Press 2012), Seeing Lessons (Wolsak & Wynn 2010) and Frenzy (Anvil Press 2009). Her poems are included in several recent anthologies such as Forcefield: 77 Women Poets of BC (Mothertongue Press, 2013) and This Place a Stranger: Canadian Women Travelling Alone (Caitlin Press, 2014). Stories have appeared in Urban Graffiti, Memwear Magazine, Lit N Image (US) and Toronto Quarterly. Her collection of memoirs and essays is called Catalysts: Confrontations with the Muse (W & W, 2012). Frenzy won the Alberta Book Prize and other collections have been nominated for the BC Book Prize, ReLit, the CBC Prize, and the George Ryga Award. In 2015, Wolsak & Wynn published her compendium on the practices of writing called The Other 23 and a Half Hours or Everything You Wanted to Know That Your MFA Didn’t Teach You. She works in TV, plays metal bass and blogs at Marrow Reviews.

Awards

Short-listed, ReLit Award

Editorial Review

“These intense snapshots, portraits of women (and some men) at the edge, throw an unflinching light on intimacy’s dark, twisted and hungry moments. This is as macabre a festival of sex and death as any Day of the Dead aficionado could wish for – yet shot through with a striking, deadpan humour”

— Shaena Lambert, author of Oh, My Darling and Radiance

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