Note: I just saw a contract, so I can tell you that I have a short story collection coming out in fall 2024 (presuming I can get these edits done over the next few months) with University of Alberta Press. Exciting! There is a thread in the collection of thirty-plus stories of my character Alberta (ironically enough) who was the main character in my second published novel, Missing Persons (The Mercury Press, 2009). In the novel, she’s a teenager, and in the short stories of On Beauty, she’s an adult, married with a teenaged daughter. I won’t offer more than that (some of those stories are out in the world, including one of the Alberta stories that appeared in PRISM International a few years ago). It was Amanda Earl who prompted it, actually, simply offering a query of “I wonder what happened to her after?” and apparently that was enough to keep going.
Honestly, the character emerged from a novel that never did cohere, one of a larger cast of characters. I needed to figure her character out further, so launched into Missing Persons, and that earlier novel manuscript was set aside.
Since On Beauty was completed, I’ve included the same character, even further down the line from there, into a novel I’ve been working on, but I have also written her in other ways, in other places. It is odd to have a character I’ve been exploring for more than twenty years, honestly. To celebrate the acceptance of the short story manuscript, here is a previously-unpublished story she appears in, somewhere between Missing Persons and On Beauty.
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It is hard to pinpoint time.
Tiana Clark
1.
Ali flipped through the pages of the literary journals at Mags & Fags, a magazine store she’d discovered on Elgin Street. She was tempted by the interviews with writers in Paris Review, and by the poems in Descant. She was tempted by filling Station. The ads at the back of Poets and Writers promised the possibility of the perfect place in which to write, with editorial support and encouragement from some of the best contemporary writers from around the world. Spend springtime in Paris, or the summer in Lithuania.
Ali hesitated to consider this kind of travel. Even beyond whether or not she could afford it, she couldn’t break through the barrier of another language. The plate glass between herself and the rest of the world. Where she could see them, but not have a clue what they’re saying.
Her mother was always distressed by her lone daughter’s inability to absorb any language but English. Her Slavic roots had little patience with an adherence to a single language, a single way of speaking. It is such a lonely way to think, she would say. What had that school been teaching her, Jolan wondered, her own thoughts forming words in a mix of English, Czech and Hungarian. After a rare glass of wine, the occasional spoken German word. If anyone were to notice, Jolan would shake her head and wave them away. Her speech turned to butterflies, and took to the air.
2.
Ali had landed at nineteen in this government town, this capital city, and immediately sought ground. Keep to small, as her mother warned. She began in a coffeeshop, doling out espressos and lattes to businessmen, most of whom, in return, offered either a combination of contempt and disinterest or vain pick-up attempts. Ali shifted to retail as soon as she could: a clothing store on Rideau Street that sold leather boots, silk and lace outfits, and corsets. It was a lateral move, but one that offered less in the way of a difficult public. Her lack of conversational French meant she was less running the register than restocking racks and shelves, but she didn’t mind. She met like-minded peers, including the owner, a tattooed matron who opened her arms to every stray. After a while, the real perk emerged through store discounts: boots with spiked heels, adding stature to Ali’s five-foot-three frame. A low cut, long sleeved black dress with Victorian-style lace and matching gloves. In her own way, she’d landed in the city and immediately fell into the business of living. She had no idea that writing programs or courses existed. She spent her days working and reading and sketching out stories and story ideas. Ever a pen and a notebook in her small leather pouch.
Five years into arrival, Ali still marvelled at the tall buildings and the shopping mall crowds, but dreamed of the wild expanse of flat prairie. Perhaps there was no escaping it. She would wake with a shake of her head, as though the dreams that clung to her heart, lungs and stomach could be removed as easily as a circling insect. She dreamed of open spaces, fields shorn of wheat and that endless clear blue. This new world was compact, and crowded. She needed to navigate the excess. There were too many people. How do they all fit.
On Friday, they’d head to the clubs. Drinks and dancing with co-workers, friends, beneath the black lights. The turquoise glow of their favourite club’s signature drink, the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.
She claimed a weakness for stupid men. She could talk for hours to the smarter ones about books or philosophy or art, but oh those stupid ones. The way they would look at her.
3.
Change is scary until it isn’t anymore. Until it is no longer change. Until it is the way things have become. Ali once lived in another place and had a mother and a father and a brother. She once had a brother, but her brother died. Their father as well. And everything changed. And then that’s how things were.
4.
Ali knew: this book wasn’t going to ignore itself.
She wished to write the story of her life. She wanted to write the story of her constructed life. To disappear within it. To say her father was away at sea as her mother waits on a lonely shore. To claim the wind blows cold off the North Atlantic, along the coast and across the landscape. Into the interior. Her whole life right now feels incredibly interior. The silence of another notebook.
Her collection of dollar store spiral-bound notebooks, filled with sketched-out thoughts and attempts, sorting her afternoons and evenings with endless coffee.
The writing retreat. From what, exactly, was she to retreat? She already lived alone in this room. She pondered the Banff Writing Studio, set in the mountains. She had never seen mountains.
Might she get anything done? The pressure of nothing at all but the book. The lack of release from daily routines, from life. Escape, disappear, erase. One needs to clear the slate before one can begin, again, to write.
5.
When one exhausts the rational, one is forced to turn elsewhere.
She’s been pouring through the novels of Milan Kundera, Kristjana Gunnars and Robert Kroetsch. The language like water, unfurling and expanding endlessly across the white page. The small blocks of Zero Hour, one step immediately following another. She fell in love with the work of Neil Gaiman, reading through issues of The Sandman. Death: The High Cost of Living.
There was so much about writing that would take her years to figure out: the difficulty of attempting and failing in what she thought a novel was supposed to look like. It took time to realize the shape of the book that she could write. That only she could write. She would eventually discover the possibility of building what couldn’t have been possible by anyone else.
She’d recently heard that her childhood best friend, Em, was organizing a social to fundraise for her divorce. For as long as Ali had known her, Em an escape artist in training. Always the next thing. The next best thing. Always one foot out the door.
Alberta Nagy was twenty-four years old, and wished to conquer the world.
“Some people live in two places,” she wrote. Perhaps that’s all that there was.