If Only Stories - Stockland, Peter

If Only Stories by Stockland, Peter

Format: Paperback

Published by Siren Song Pub., 2011

Stockland's thirty-year career in national media—including a stint as editor-in-chief of The Gazette in Montreal and his current role as director of the Cardus Centre for Cultural Renewal—gives him a broad scope for his role as storyteller. In his debut short story collection, Stockland is attuned to the private desperations of both priest and junkie, hooker and housewife, urban and small-town life. These are quiet stories; their modest unfolding belies the violence at their core and the peril that lurks often in plain sight: on street-corners, in buses, on the steps of public libraries. Stockland's use of violence—often killing off characters as a sort of punctuating, despotic finale—seems rooted in a conviction that suffering is senseless: we don't always get what we deserve. But as his characters contend with this fact, Stockland also explores the quieter collisions of human longing.

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