My short story “Goodbye is a Mouthful of Water” will appear in the anthology The Playground of Lost Toys (Exile Editions), edited by Colleen Anderson and Ursula Pflug. This is a story about childhood, family, memory, and one of Ontario’s Lost Villages. It’s basically everything I’ve been exploring in my poetry rolled up into one little story. It was the most difficult thing I’ve ever written, and I think it’s also one of my best. Here’s a list of the authors who will appear in the anthology:
- Karen Abrahamson
- Nathan Adler
- Lisa Carreiro
- Kevin Cockle
- Geoff Cole
- Christine Daigle
- Joe Davies
- Linda Demuelemeester
- Candas Jane Dorsey
- DVS Duncan
- Rhonda Eikamp
- Chris Kuriata
- Claude Lalumière
- Catherine MacLeod
- Rati Mehrotra
- Dominik Parisien
- Alex C. Renwick
- Dr.Robert Runte
- Shane Simmons
- Kate Story
- Meghan Whan
- Melissa Yuan-Innes
I’ve also sold my poem “To A Dying Friend” to the fantastic Uncanny Magazine. I love the work Michael and Lynne Thomas have been doing with the magazine, and it’s a tremendous pleasure to have my work appear there. The poem means a great deal to me–I wrote it in memory of my friend Denise who passed away in September 2013. Here’s part of what I wrote on Facebook the day of her funeral:
“Earlier today I attended the funeral of my good friend, Denise Rager, who passed away in September. She was 83 years old. I met her through Les Petits frères des pauvres, a charity for the elderly without family. The ceremony itself almost felt like the funeral scene from The Great Gatsby – the only people in attendance were the priest and I. When I delivered Denise’s eulogy, it was to her urn alone. It was a very sobering experience. I knew, of course, that the elderly at the charity didn’t have families, but it never struck me before just *how* alone some of them truly are.”
Finally, my poem A Portrait of the Monster as an Artist is now available online at Mythic Delirium. I wrote the poem for Helen Marshall who, incidentally, recently won the Shirley Jackson Award for her truly excellent collection Gifts for the One Who Comes After. The collection has also been nominated for the World Fantasy Award and the British Fantasy Award. If you haven’t read it yet, you should.
Dominik Parisien 