Read an Excerpt

From Margaret Atwood's Foreword to This Time, That Place

When you’ve been dragged around as a child as much as Clark had, you become adept at camouflage. Think of him as a cuttlefish: when in a clump of seaweed, look like seaweed. He could “do” someone from almost any background. And of course, in order to blend into a background, you need to observe that background closely: its textures, its smells, its symbols, its furniture. Perhaps the richness and accuracy of detail and the attention to the nuances of dialogue for which Blaise has been so justly praised has come in part from these early experiences. To avoid being prey, how do you hide in plain sight?

For a fiction writer, such a talent can be both an asset and a liability. If you don’t have just one single “identity,” you aren’t confined to it: your range is cosmopolitan. But when you have so many possible identities at your command, where is the centre? Are you a trickster figure, wandering the margins like Odin in disguise, always observing but never fully rooted? Is your “identity” the fact that you aren’t definable by your membership in a single group? Are you a shape-shifter like werewolves and gods? Are you a conglomerate, like Walt Whitman, who announced, “I contain multitudes?” Was he a part of all that he had met, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, or was all that he had met a part of him, as is the case with all-devouring dragons? Where was the boundary line between self and surround? Were roots a good thing to have, or did they render you parochial and xenophobic? What is “belonging,” and why exactly would you want it? If you ‘belong,” do the demands of others exceed anything you may expect to gain from them in return? What do “national boundaries” mean, anyway? In asking such questions, Clark was well ahead of his times. This clutch of themes was to preoccupy him in his fiction, appearing in many variations and through many personae over the next fifty-odd years.

***

Did Clark know he would become one of the preeminent story writers of his generation? Probably he did not. But probably he intended to bust himself trying. We were nothing if not dedicated.

“What was that writing thing I was doing, then? Why was it so important?” another writer—an octogenarian—said to me recently. It’s a good question, especially now; in the midst of so many crises—environmental, political, social—why write? Isn’t it a useless thing to be doing? Maybe, but so maybe is everything else. We know what we know about the Great Mortality of the fourteenth century because some people wrote things down. They bore witness.

Let’s suppose that this is what Clark Blaise has been doing.

So, future readers—or even present-day readers—if you want to understand something about what life was like in the restless, peripatetic, striving, anxiety-ridden, simmering cultural soup of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, read the stories of Clark Blaise. He’s the recording angel and the accuser, rolled into one. He’s the eye at the keyhole. He’s the ear at the door.