Clark Blaise

An Indo-American Canterbury Tales, by a North American master of short fiction.

Stories

The Meagre Tarmac

It is difficult today to imagine life before standard time was established in 1884. In the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, there were 144 official time zones in North America alone. The confusion that ensued, especially among the burgeoning railroad companies, was an hourly comedy of errors that ultimately threatened to impede progress. The creation of standard time, with its two dozen global time zones, is one of the great inventions of the Victorian Era, yet it has been largely taken for granted. In Time Lord, Clark Blaise re-creates the life of Sanford Fleming, who struggled to convince the world to accept standard time. It’s a fascinating story of science, politics, nationalism, and the determined vision of one man who changed the world. Set in a time marked by substantial technological and cultural transformation, Time Lord is also an erudite exploration of art, literature, consciousness, and our changing relationship to time

Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time

Time Lord

The author looks back on childhood and his relationship with his enigmatic father, and attempts to learn more about both his father and his family heritage

A Post-modern Autobiography

I Had A Father

A Book of Short Fiction

A North American Education

This is the biography of an idea, and the remarkable story of the man who created—and then convinced the world to adopt—a unified standard for telling time. Today we take the accurate telling of time across the world for granted. Yet little more than a hundred years ago, people even in neighbouring towns lived by different time schedules: noon was simply whenever the sun happened to be overhead—Toronto time, for example, was different from Hamilton time some forty miles away. None of this mattered when people travelled in the slow style that had been the norm for generations. But then, as Clark Blaise makes vividly clear, trains arrived—and in the new age of communications myriad local times became a mind-boggling obstacle, and the rational ordering of time an urgent priority. Sandford Fleming, a young emigrant from Scotland, performed the remarkable task of solving the unfathomable temporal riddle of how to knit together a world stippled with thousands of local times. That invention was the start of an exhausting campaign to persuade the squabbling international powers, the diplomats and scientists, to adopt a unified time system—a campaign that came to a dramatic conclusion at the Prime Meridian Conference in 1884. His achievement turned out to be one of the greatest gifts of the Victorian Age to our global modern world. This was the great "Decade of Time," as Blaise calls it, that extraordinary ten years that also saw the invention of electric light, the telephone, Impressionism and high-speed cameras. Time Lord is an absorbing reflection on the mythic origins of time itself, as well as a meditation on science, psychiatry, art and literature (from Dickens to Sherlock Holmes to Hemingway); the roots of depression and anxiety; and the results of one man's fascination with clocks and watches and railway schedules. At the heart of the story is the mild but fierce-minded communications genius who sketched and surveyed his way from coast to coast, oversaw the building of the great Canadian railroad, designed the first Beaver stamp, and invented the world-circling, sub-Pacific cable; who saw the world as a whole and changed its nature forever.

“Blaise is probably the greatest living Canadian writer most Canadians have never heard of.” —Quill & Quire “If you want to understand something about what life was like in the restless, peripatetic, striving, anxiety-ridden, shimmer cultural soup of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries," writes Margaret Atwood, "read the stories of Clark Blaise." This Time, That Place draws together twenty-four stories that span the entirety of Blaise's career, including one never previously published. Moving swiftly across place and time, through and between languages—from Florida's Confederate swamps, to working-class Pittsburgh, to Montreal and abroad—they demonstrate Blaise's profound mastery of the short story and reveal the range of his lifelong preoccupation with identity as fallacy, fable, and dream. This Time, That Place: Selected Stories confirms Clark Blaise as one of the best and most enduring masters of the form—on either side of our shared borders.

Selected Stories

This Time, That Place

"Engaging, stirring, and hard to put down."--The New York Times Book Review First published in 1979, Lunar Attractions is the story of David Greenwood, a whimsical boy from the Florida backwoods whose shocking sexual awakening propels him into the world of murder and extortion that roils beneath the surface of 1950s America.

Lunar Attractions

Clark Blaise's Selected Essays brings together another aspect of his tremendous and courageous oeuvre: belle lettres, essays and occasional pieces which range over autobiography, his French-Canadan heritage, the craft of fiction, American fiction, Australian fiction, and the work of such individual writers and Jack Kerouac, V.S. Naipaul, Salmon Rushdie, Alice Munro, Leon Rooke, and Bernard Malamud, his friend and mentor.

Selected Essays

In story collections, context is all. Many of these stories have appeared in earlier books (notably, If I Were Me and Man and His World), but here they stand alone, bouncing off each other in a revised sequence, a different display. Fate, family and marriage have conspired to make me into a hydroponic writer: rootless, unhoused, fed by swirling waters and harsh, artificial light. In Canadian terms, a classic un-Munro. A Manitoba mother and a Quebec father, an American and Canadian life split more or less equally, can do that to an inquisitive and absorptive child. I never lived longer than six months anywhere, until my four-year Pittsburgh adolescence and fourteen years of Montreal teaching. As a consequence, when I was a young writer, I thought that making sense of my American and Canadian experience would absorb my interest for the rest of my life. But a five-minute wedding ceremony in a lawyer's office in Iowa City forty-two years ago delivered that inquisitive child an even larger world than the North American continent. I married India, a beautiful and complicated world, and that Canadian/American, French/English, Northern/Southern boy slowly disappeared. (I wonder what he would have been like, had the larger world never intervened). The stories in World Body (Volume 4 of New and Selected Stories) reflect a few of those non-North American experiences. I now live in California, but my California, strangely, presents itself through Indian eyes.

World Body

`I grew up without a home -- what was it, the south, Pittsburgh? -- and by my mid-twenties the anxiety had grown palpable. My most potent memories were southern, but the inherited memories were of my parents' Canada, especially Montreal, where they had met and life had taken an improbable turn for both of them. But by 1966, when I moved my family to Montreal, my parents had divorced, my father was in Mexico, my mother had returned to Winnipeg, I had married a woman from India, and I didn't know where I'd come from or where I was going. Montreal provided the answer. `I re-entered a world I had never made, Montreal, and determined I would become the son I might have been, and would assert authority over an experience I could and should have had, but never did. Confusion remained, but at least I would be the French and English son of befuddlement, the crown prince of Canadian identity.' - Clark Blaise

Montreal Stories

`Written over four decades, Pittsburgh Stories, is the second in a projected four-volume set of Clark Blaise's selected short stories. Set largely during the forties and fifties, these nine stories, with one exception, are reminiscences about a distant Pittsburgh adolescence. The previous and inaugural collection in the series, Southern Stories, was also unified by one locale. `Blaise's prowess as a writer is evident from the outset. The opening story, ``The Birth of the Blues,'' written in 1983, is clearly the work of a skilful, deft craftsman. A well-honed tale, it impresses with its subtlety and detail. The protagonist, young Frank Keeler, witnesses his father's humiliation before a woman who has hired him to fix her pipes. Standing before the two Keelers in her bathrobe, she reprimands Frank's father and summarily dismisses him. In so doing, she sets both father and son alight with desire, ``becoming for Keeler, the prototype of all beautiful women. For his father, the most perfect bitch.'' '

Pittsburgh Stories

and writing: perhaps especially for those who wish to learn how to read and write more astutely and more caringly. Here you will find the reflections of one of North America's finest contemporary writers, author of some 20 books of fiction and nonfiction, founder of the pioneering Creative Writing Program at Concordia University in Montreal and two-term Director of the prestigious International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, teacher of and mentor to many. Reflections set down in 40 years? worth of conversation by Clark Blaise with fellow writers such as John Metcalf and Alexander MacLeod or with scholars such as Catherine Sheldrick Ross and the volume's editor, J.R. (Tim) Struthers.

The Interviews

Bharati Mukherjee

In 1973, Clark Blaise and his Bengali wife, Bharati Mukherjee, decided to spend a year with her family in Calcutta. Clark came as a Westerner; Bharati, as an adult woman examining her life as it might have become had she followed the traditional course expected of her. They recount a modern passage to India with insight, humor and compassion.

Days and Nights in Calcutta

The stories collected here in Volume One are among the earliest in Blaise's forty-year publishing career. The experience of Florida -- particularly the underdeveloped north-central areas close to modern Disneyfied Orlando -- profoundly affected a `Yankee' child with Canadian parents. The Florida Blaise describes is little-changed since the Civil War. The stories in this volume trace a young writer's journey towards his life's work. By the close of his Florida experience, he has discovered a way of integrating his Canadian, and especially his French-Canadian, background into a sub-tropical foreground. Included are two very early stories, `A Fish Like a Buzzard' and `Giant Turtle, Gliding in the Dark', which have not previously been published in book form. Southern Stories assembles the best of Clark Blaise's early work in one collection. His powerful writing is as relevant to our times now as it was when these stories first appeared. Included here are stories from A North American Education, Tribal Justice, Man and His World and Resident Alien.

Southern Stories

The remarkable Canadian who missed his train, and changed the world.

The Remarkable Canadian who Missed His Train, and Changed the World

Richard Durgin desires and marries the beautiful, sophisticated, and gifted Rachel, his opposite in many ways, yet he never comes to understand or truly love her until after her death

Lusts

Novellas

On Middle Ground

If I Were Me is the culmination of Clark Blaise's career as a geographer of the human heart. In the character of Gerald Lander he has created a modern Faust who carries the world within him, but must travel to learn its meaning. At the age of fifty, Gerald Lander is granted a vision. He reads his future, resolves his past and for ten luminous years applies himself to the mysteries of language, Alzheimer's and consciousness itself.

Clark Blaise

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