Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Salty Ink Spotlight: Laura Boudreau

Salty Ink's Canadian Affair this month is our own Laura Boudreau and her Suitable Precautions.  Chad raves about Precautions as "quite fantastic" and offers up the following:

Her deeply human and deftly crafted stories feature the right balance oddness and ordinariness to make them both original and universally appealing. Not to mention poignant and memorable. Her fine balance of humour and profound humanity — the kind that defines the best of ultra-modern Canadian short fiction — shines like stars here. I’m not alone in thinking so. Her work has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including The Journey Prize Stories 22GrainThe New QuarterlyPRISM internationalCanadian Notes & Queries, and Oberon’s trustworthy Best Canadian Stories series.
Her fresh writing and engaging stories show good range, and are unified by, to quote the backcover, “a sense for the strange, tenuous fragility of human bonds.” Laura Boudreau is among the next wave of Canadian writers to watch for. That’s a fact. The thing with all the good first books coming out lately is they’re pumping new blood into CanLit, and diversifying it. I would, comfortably, place this book into the hands of any reader curious of what I mean by the new wave of contemporary CanLit. Suitable Precautions, among other things, captures  what it is to be human in an unfair and unpredictable world.

He goes on to interview Laura about her collection, process, and the origins of several of the stories in the collection, including The Meteorite Hunter, which he's just published online in a web exclusive.  Here's Laura on the origins of the story:

“The Meteorite Hunter” was inspired by a magazine article about, well, a meteorite hunter. This man’s quest to collect space rocks struck me as both noble and fruitless, and I wanted to capture that dichotomy in my main character’s struggle to connect with his daughter. I found it difficult to focalize the narrative through David, a divorced man and estranged dad (that’s pretty far from my own experience, and subject position), but I must have done something right because the story seems to resonate with readers, particularly men. I think it’s healthy for writers to stretch their voices. If you find you’re writing endless incarnations of yourself, you’d probably be better off investing in a private diary. As one of my teachers used to say, nobody cares about what it feels like to be a potato.

If you would like to read the whole interview -- and you should -- please go here.  To read 'The Meteorite Hunter' please go here.

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