Junction Reads

A review of Lake Effect and other stories by Dayle Furlong.

Join us for a reading and conversation, Sunday March 26 at 5:00pm ET. Register through EventBrite and you might win a copy of the collection from Cormorant Books.

The very first story in LAKE EFFECT from Dayle Furlong opens with a blockage that “had been disregarded as trash: a cluster of plastic bags, a few water bottles, and what looked like a discarded red jacket, swollen with water, caught in a bushel of cattails.” It is a bloated body, perhaps the missing stepson of the narrator in Tributaries, or another of the boys that keep disappearing in Thunder Bay.

Opening with this story, a reader gets the sense this collection isn’t going to be a light-hearted romp through the small towns surrounding the great lakes, but the opening story isn’t about murder, nor is it about the suspected swim coach. Tributaries is about love and its heartbreaking loss, and perhaps, more importantly, it is about being loved.  

The twelve stories in LAKE EFFECT are about people in places and situations that demand our attention. A chubby woman in a boring marriage obsesses over her younger, hotter next door neighbour while his wife has an affair; a man falls in love with an Iranian woman despite the anti-Muslim hate filling his small town; a woman steals a diamond ring when she discovers her gambling addicted husband has once again threatened their livelihood; a young woman finds the father she thinks abandoned her only to learn the truth her mother tried to hide, and a young ex-heroin-addict sits in jail awaiting news on the fate of a moms and babies program whose end would mean the removal of her son from her care.

These stories ask us to imagine what we might do, who we might be in similar situations. After spending a bit of time with all of Furlong’s characters, I am still wondering about the woman who married a man and moved to Paris at the drop of a hat. I’m still thinking about the ex-wife of the hot next-door neighbour and wondering if she thinks she’s the good guy in her story. And to be honest, I’m now thinking about opening a hot dog stand when I retire.

LAKE EFFECT is a collection filled with maudlin characters you can’t feel sorry for, because they don’t feel sorry for themselves. They get on with it. With precision and an incredible grasp of lyrical and metaphorical language, Dayle Furlong offers up the most glorious people, places and situations. When I read, that he’d curled up like a salted leech, I threw my head back in awe. When I followed Aurora, in Ebb, on her obsessively detailed walk home, I counted the steps with her, I also wanted to know the total number of spilled sugar granules that caught her attention. And when Candace, in What Follows the Falls, finds her new best friend Amy curled up on her daughter’s bed with one of her baby onesies stuffed down her shirt, I cringed. Furlong’s attention to the physical and emotional details is impressive and her accurate portrayals of family, friendships, loneliness, and loss is what will bring me back to her prose again and again.

In LAKE EFFECT, love feels a lot like drowning. If the water doesn’t kill you, you have three choices: dive back in, only go in up to your knees or avoid it altogether.

“Dayle Furlong is the author of the novel Saltwater Cowboys, a 2015 Toronto Public Library Dewey Diva Pick, and a collection of poetry entitled Open Slowly. Her short fiction has appeared in The Great Lakes Review, The Puritan, and The Saturday Evening Post. Her fiction has been awarded an Award of Merit from the Summer Literary Seminars international literary competition and was a finalist for the 2018 Curt Johnson Prose Awards in the USA. She is a graduate of the Humber College School for Writers and has a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.”

You can purchase a copy of LAKE EFFECT from your local bookstore. Find your closest location through the publisher, Cormorant Books.

February makes a bridge and March breaks it.

Georges Hebert

We have a few more readings before we call the season over. Still online and still accessible to everyone with a computer or tablet, we are excited to share details, if only to give you something to look forward to in the bleakest of times.

Check back, as we may have more events and news of future in-person events.

On Thursday February 16, join us on Instagram for a live chat with Denise Davy at 7:00pm EST. We are still hosting our The First Thirty events on our @JunctionReads page, so check us out.

From Wolsak and Wynn: “Margaret Jacobson was a sweet-natured young girl who played the accordion and had dreams of becoming a teacher until she had a psychotic break in her teens, which sent her down a much darker path. Her Name Was Margaret traces Margaret’s life from her childhood to her death as a homeless woman on the streets of Hamilton, Ontario. With meticulous research and deep compassion author Denise Davy analyzed over eight hundred pages of medical records and conducted interviews with Margaret’s friends and family, as well as those who worked in psychiatric care, to create this compelling portrait of a woman abandoned by society.”

February 26: We get to sit and chat about historical fiction, specifically war fiction in THE GUNSMITH’S DAUGHTER, with Margaret Sweatman. From Goose Lane Editions.

“1971. Lilac Welsh lives an isolated life with her parents at Rough Rock on the Winnipeg River. Her father, Kal, stern and controlling, has built his wealth by designing powerful guns and ammunition. He’s on the cusp of producing a .50 calibre assault rifle that can shoot down an airplane with a single bullet, when a young stranger named Gavin appears at their door, wanting to meet him before enlisting for the war in Vietnam. Gavin’s arrival sparks an emotional explosion in Lilac’s home and inspires her to begin her own life as a journalist, reporting on the war that’s making her family rich.”

Register on Eventbrite.

On March 26, I get to chat with Dayle Furlong about her beautiful collection of stories, LAKE EFFECT from Cormorant Books.

“The humanitarian crisis in Thunder Bay is seen from the perspective of a police officer whose stepson is missing; fearing he will be found, like so many others, in the McIntyre River, his mother’s grief causes an insurmountable rift. Crumbling buildings, high rent and condo developments in Toronto are playfully satirized. A young mother waits inside a Chicago-area prison to find out if funding for the Prison-Mother Baby program will continue. A man drives from Traverse City, Michigan in the midst of a lake effect storm to transport his Iranian-Canadian girlfriend across the border illegally. A Canadian mother befriends an American woman, employed at Target, whose desperation for a baby leads her to seek the advice of spiritualists in Lily Dale, New York.“

Register on EventBrite.

On April 16, Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust award-winning author Nicholas Herring joins us to chat about his novel, SOME HELLISH, from Goose Lane Editions.

“Herring is a hapless lobster fisher lost in an unexceptional life, bored of thinking the same old thoughts. One December day, following a hunch, he cuts a hole in the living room floor and installs a hoist, altering the course of everything in his life. His wife Euna leaves with their children. He buries the family dog in a frozen grave on Christmas Eve. He and his friend Gerry crash his truck into a field, only to be rescued by a passing group of Tibetan monks.” Everything changes when Herring is lost at sea for days.

Register on EventBrite.

All of our events – except The First Thirty – are pay what you can. Please consider a paid ticket if you can, as ALL proceeds go to the authors.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to watch videos of past events.

The end of last season was a rush. We were all racing to the summer and the relaxing sunny days ahead. If you missed our event with Anna Dowdall on May 5, you can check out the video of our event here.

APRIL ON PARIS STREET was released by Guernica Editions in October 2021.

“In April on Paris Street, a Montreal private investigator of half-Abenaki heritage takes a case that looks like old-school damsel in-distress rescue but that then turns into something unnervingly different. The narrative weaves working class Ashley Smeeton’s personal story (trying to connect with her Abenaki relatives, the death of a grandmother she’s hardly known, an ill-considered fling with a handsome vaurien) into the story of the privileged young woman, Mirabel Saint Cyr, whose fashion mogul husband hires her.” It is a gorgeous novel that takes the reader on a journey through Montreal and Paris.

APRIL ON PARIS STREET is filled with incredibly complex and duplicitous characters. The story itself feels like background to the lively characters. It is much like an Agatha Christie novel, where you can imagine each character having a novel to themselves. You also mention the Orient Express at one point. I wonder if you’d talk about any literary or creative influences?

How can I deny the influence of Agatha Christie and why would I want to?  Utterly without pretension and highly accessible, her books are genius.  But my influences are probably a real mix of this and that. I love Ursula Curtiss, and my first book, After the Winter, meant to read fallaciously like mid-century romantic suspense, is a tribute to her.  Then there’s Rebecca West, for the admirable subtlety of her female characterizations. Lucy Montgomery is probably partly responsible for my love of immersive setting. And if Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins can have all over the place “run on” plots, why can’t I?  And, finally, there is nothing UK screenwriter Sally Wainwright has done that I haven’t wanted to imitate. 

The women you write are strong and determined, even when others think they’re indecisive or weak. Creating a book filled with very different multi-dimensional women must be a challenge.

Can you talk about characterization and how, as a writer, you approach character development?

I’ve been drawn to writers whose female characterizations are considered ground-breaking or at least in some way unusual. In crime fiction, it is so easy to fall into sexist gender tropes. There is a prevalence of female victims in books by both male and female writers.  I cracked a Canadian hard-boiled crime story recently, saying I’d stick with it if the first female character wasn’t a hooker. Not only was she a hooker, but she also didn’t show up until page 81. In some ways what I do is almost elementary. I try to create female characters who don’t stab each other in the back; don’t talk about men all the time; take centre stage in the book; have a wide range of human preoccupations, and whose behaviour can be very unexpected. In crime fiction, this latter element is part of how a writer can misdirect the reader. You hit the nail on the head in your question, and the depths and strengths of women in my books are part of the reveal. My three novel endings one way or another are meant to be feminist repliques to commercial crime fiction with its voyeuristic female victims and typical endings.          

There are several doubles in the novel. Some we cannot mention, but near the beginning of the novel, there are two women named Mira, thugs described only as Thug One and Thug Two and other paired characters who work together to bring the story to the page. Can you talk about this in APRIL ON PARIS STREET, and how doubles work to amplify the tension and conflict in the writing?

A probing question. I’m not sure I can answer it fully. I have had a lifelong obsession with doubles. Maybe I am a little double myself, one way or another? But…having dumped all the doubles I could think of, related to form, plot, setting and character, into April on Paris Street, I guess I can stand back and say, almost as a reader, that they add to the uncanny feeling of the story, of things not being ever quite what they seem.  Maybe almost philosophical, as if I want to portray an uncertain world of ramifying and duplicating realities, even of eternal returns.  However, I hope I’m not as nuts as Nietzsche, although everybody should be a little bit crazy once in a while.  

Ashley is a working Private Investigator, and the Saint Cyr case is not her only job. In many novels with a PI as the lead character, we don’t get to see other cases they are working on. I couldn’t help but wonder if the ones in APRIL may appear again in a future novel. Can you talk about your choice to include such detail with the other cases?

It was part of my need to embroider motifs of doubleness wherever I could. The other cases are like mini plots, reflecting on and modifying the main plot and the theme, ie, betrayal where you least expect it. The neighbour’s wrong un boyfriend isn’t such a wrong un. The overworked pediatrician’s husband on the other hand exemplifies the double life. Etcetera. My second book, The Au Pair, explores a theme of tragic plagiarism and I also work in snippets of another plagiarism case, with comic overtones, to foreshadow the direction of my main plot. I do this type of thing almost automatically. I’m like a bower bird sorting my objects and colours, only they are themes and variations on themes. I could easily use these in future books! April on Paris Street ends with Dominique of the bright green eyes gone missing in the mysterious east (end.) Maybe Ashley will be hired to look for her.   

You do such a fine job of describing in vivid sensual details the surroundings in the novel: the cold, the wind, the darkness. How does physical space play a role in your storytelling?

Thank you for your kind words. The “place” of the story is the world I need to wander around in as I write. Again, it’s not a deliberate choice as much as a natural predilection. Even as a kid, I always preferred books that built a very complete world, in both its natural and human-made aspects. The interplay between setting and character fascinates me, as it is subtler than the tango between character and plot and captures the impalpable via mood. In crime fiction in particular, setting’s menacing and unknown aspects are a gorgeously ambiguous interactive frame for the unfolding story. Place, in my estimation, is what contributes magic to stories.

Paris and the Parisian Carnival really come alive in the book. Have you spent time there? Have you gone to Carnival? Have you been to a masquerade party? I’d love details on the research.

I was raised in a French-Canadian community and participated in many local Carnavals as I was growing up. I once won a prize as a Pierrette on skates. I love Paris, who doesn’t, and have spent much time there, in modest hotels in sketchy parts of the city. And I did spend five days in Paris, just researching Carnaval. I went to the research centre of the Archives Nationales de Paris, the archives of Le Figaro, a Musée Carnavalet special exhibit, and there were relevant collections at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Musée Bourdelle too.

Ashley meets her father’s family for the first time in APRIL ON PARIS STREET and it is a complex relationship, given she didn’t grow up with Abenaki traditions and culture. How much will you dive into this with her if she appears in the next novel?

I don’t know! But probably quite a bit if she is to feature in a future book. However, to keep things fresh, I might invent a mysterious and just discovered half-sister, who dies in problematic circumstances perhaps. Just to add a wrinkle. That, by the way, is a contrivance of my first book, After the Winter. No matter how detailed my characterization, I like to place my rounded characters adjacent to fairy tale and fable plot elements. I’ll never write social issue novels, although I adored reading them when I was younger.

From Guernica Editions:
Anna Dowdall was born in Montreal and recently moved back there, which surprised no one but her. She’s been a reporter, a college lecturer and a horticultural advisor, as well as other things best forgotten. Her well-received domestic mysteries, After the Winter and The Au Pair, feature evocative settings and uninhibited female revenge, with a seasoning of moral ambiguity and noir. She reads obscure fiction in English and French and thinks Quebec is an underrecognized mise en scène for mystery and domestic suspense.

We are so excited to share the news that Sarah Campbell is joining Junction Reads. The best news? She will be our Social Media Coordinator and I cannot be more thrilled to have her join the team! Look out for more posts with recommended reads, reading events and other bookish things.

Sarah Campbell is a writer, a Roots Of Empathy Instructor and a lover of all things pop culture. When she isn’t reading she also writes book reviews for 49th Kids (kids.49thshelf.com.) Most recently, she has been published in the Quarantine Review. She and her husband, their two sons and dog Bingo live in Waterloo, Ontario. You can follow her at Pink Fish Reads.