You hold me in your porcelain arms and I lie in your warmth. The room is imbued with steam, and the scent of eucalyptus. I am acutely aware of my breathing. In a life that seems to move so quickly, I savour this moment. Soon I stand, a puddle of draining water caressing my feet. A light flickers on my face, and I reach up toward the lamp to tighten the bulb. If there is no light, then my beauty is invisible, and I count among my beauty the deep creases around my eyes, around the edges of my mouth, the startling squareness of my once-round chin. I become older with each year, while the women who dance onstage with me, they never age. (“I Am Claude François and You Are a Bathtub”)
Further to bedtime rituals, middle daughter Rose and I read through Cobourg, Ontario poet, fiction writer, critic, editor, publisher and mentor Stuart Ross’ third collection of short stories, I Am Claude François and You Are a Bathtub (2022). I thought, somehow, that if Rose was open to reading the short stories of David Arnason, she might be ready to read through some Stuart Ross. As though one might ever be.
It might be easy enough to be distracted by Stuart Ross’ prolific output of poetry collections and miss that he’s published multiple works of fiction across the length of his writing career, from his prior short story collections Henry Kafka and Other Stories (1997) and Buying Cigarettes for the Dog (2009) to his novels Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew (2011) and Pockets (2017), as well as The Mud Game (1995), the collaborative novel he write with Gary Barwin. Back in 1982, Ross published the short novel Father, the Cowboys are Ready to Come Down from the Attic (1982) through his own Proper Tales Press, possibly one of the finer book-titles across Canadian literature (second only to William Hawkins and Roy MacSkimming’s infamous 1964 collaborative poetry title, Shoot Low Sheriff, They’re Riding Shetland Ponies!, a title that even Frank Zappa praised during an interview for Rolling Stone magazine). Father, the Cowboys are Ready to Come Down from the Attic was a title originally composed as part of the infamous 3-Day Novel Contest run through Vancouver’s Pulp Press (later, Arsenal Pulp Press), submitted to the contest the same year no winner was declared. As Canadian writer and playwright Tom Walmsley, by then well established in the Vancouver literary community, wrote in the introduction to Ross’ small volume: “There should have been a winner. This book should have been it.”
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