The Dead Are More Visible (25 page)

“Shared Room on Union” appeared in
The Fiddlehead
and was anthologized in
2010: Best Canadian Stories
(Oberon, ed. John Metcalf). The story received the 2009 gold National Magazine Award for Fiction.

“OutTrip” appeared in
The Malahat Review
.

“The Dead Are More Visible” appeared in
The Walrus
and in
The Albawtaka Review
(Egypt); it was anthologized as an audio story on
Earlit Shorts
(ed. Susan Rendell and Janet Russell). The story received the 2007 gold National Magazine Award for Fiction.

“Noughts & Crosses” appeared in
The Walrus
and was anthologized in
The White Collar Book
(Black Moss Press, eds. Bruce Meyer and Carolyn Meyer).

“Fireman’s Carry” appeared in
Geist
.

“Heart & Arrow” was first published in the United States in
The Northwest Review
and in Canada in the short-story collection
On earth as it is
(Porcupine’s Quill, 1995; Granta Books, 1997; Vintage Canada, 2001). It appears in this book in a different, somewhat shorter form.

“Nearing the Sea, Superior” appeared in
Descant
and was anthologized in
2012: Best Canadian Stories
(Oberon, ed. John Metcalf).

——

As always, I thank my family and friends. Let me list with gratitude the names of people who have made specific contributions to this book over the past few years, whether by reading drafts of individual stories or by talking over ideas with me: Mary Huggard, Rich Cumyn, Grace O’Connell, Jared Bland, Judith Cowan, Mark Sinnett, Ingrid Ruthig, Sandra Ridley, Michael Holmes, Angie Abdou, Alvin Lee, John Metcalf, Jenny Haysom, Ginger Pharand, Tim Conley, Michael Winter, Michael Redhill, Alexander Scala, Alison Pick, Natalee Caple, Rachel Sa, and Jane Warren.

Thanks to Sue Sumeraj, again, for her exacting eye.

Special thanks to Anne McDermid, Martha Magor, and Monica Pacheco of Anne McDermid & Associates.

Above all, I wish to thank my editor, Amanda Lewis.

THOSE WHO WOULD BE MORE

In 1992 the Porcupine’s Quill published a book of my short stories called
Flight Paths of the Emperor
—stories set mainly in Japan. For the next decade or so, I kept feeling that I should have written another story for the book; there were three bits of Japanese material that I regretted never having used (one being my experience of learning Japanese from a bizarre primer possibly authored by a psychopath), but none of these strands of narrative DNA seemed enough, in itself, to tease out into a story. Nor could I see any way of braiding them together. Then, a few years ago, I figured it out. Raising a daughter was probably the main thing that
made the braiding possible, but I don’t say that with any certainty, and in fact I’ll say nothing more on the subject. It’s disingenuous for fiction writers to pretend they know how their stories really gestate.

A RIGHT LIKE YOURS

Some years ago I ran across a website brilliantly called
Runs With Dog
—hence my idea for the name of the dog (Runs With Man) in this story.

OUTTRIP

For their assistance and advice, I am indebted to Arlen Baptiste, of the Nk’Mip Desert Cultural Centre, and his grandfather, Richard Armstrong, of the En’owkin Centre, Penticton, BC. These knowledgeable men are not responsible for the presence of coywolves—properly an Eastern phenomenon—in my hallucinatory version of the Okanagan Desert.

FIREMAN’S CARRY

My thanks to firefighter Doug Caldwell for carefully checking over the story.

STEVEN HEIGHTON is the author of the novel
Every Lost Country
, which was a national bestseller, a
Globe and Mail, Amazon.ca
and
Maisonneuve
Best Book, and a finalist for the Banff Mountain Book Award, and which has been optioned for film. His novel
Afterlands
appeared in six countries, was a
New York Times Book Review
Editors’ Choice as well as a Best Book of the Year selection in ten publications in Canada, the United States, and Britain, and has been optioned for film. He also wrote
The Shadow Boxer
, a Canadian bestseller and a
Publishers Weekly
Book of the Year. His work has been translated into ten languages, and his poems and stories have appeared in the
London Review of Books, Poetry, Tin House, The Walrus, Best American Poetry, TLR, Agni, Brick, Best English Stories
, and many others. Heighton has received four gold and one silver National Magazine awards (for fiction and poetry) and has been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Trillium Award, a Pushcart Prize, and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award. Visit his website at
www.stevenheighton.com
.