FFWD Weekly
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Wordfest by Trevor Klassen Stop what you are doing. Sit down a moment. Make no noise. Now think about who you are, how your life has come to this point. Too difficult? Then open the pages of Barbara Scott. Her fine delicate writing will quicken your thoughts. Scott’s debut collection of short stories, The Quick, is a smorgasbord of sensuality. Take, for example, the play of young Mike in "Lifeguard": "He crouches down at the edge of the pool and rolls himself up into a ball, then slowly tips himself off the edge backwards, gradually unfolding as he sinks deeper and deeper into the water... all he does is a limp deadman's float..." This apparent triviality actually contains much substance. Mike's floating eventually proves a curative for an auto accident that killed his parents and left him the sole survivor. It is metaphor, too: the floating is freedom, a release, an acceptance of the forces that surround and cannot be controlled. Scott's writing is rife with such specific imagery, making one wonder how much of it derives from personal experience. "The images come from things observed," she says, "but the plotted events are created. A gesture or glance will make it into a story. I could be at a party and notice some woman's ankles. Those ankles will make it into the story. What happens to those ankles is another matter." But Scott denies that she is particularly observant. "My husband bothers me about it, in the sense that he can walk into a room and tell you everything that was in it. I can't. But one or two things I will notice with real clarity, and whatever they are stays with me for a length. The rest? Ha!" She laughs heartily. "It's a blur." Are those images meant for her? "Yes," she says, "by way of threads of connection, and the mind churns up the details. Some of the details are quite old. Mike's game is one I used to play 30 years ago." Looking at Scott, smartly attired in black slacks and a crisp black blouse with what appears to be Ukranian patterns across the left shoulder, is to see appearance agree with persona – she is articulate, broad-minded, sophisticated, humorous. She is ambitious, too – currently working on her first novel, she is tight-lipped on works in progress. She reveals only that it involves three generations during the Great Depression, an epic of historical fiction. Scott is a writer's writer, subtle and probing. And when not writing, she is a woman of varied interests – she teachs literature at the Alberta College of Art and Design, plays folk guitar and classical piano, and by her own admission watches too much television. Rarely idle, even her television offers lessons that inform her prose. "Reality TV, for instance, is anything but. It is pre-conceived and manipulated. People don't watch for the boredom of everyday life. I watch for the underlying assumptions of society revealed. TV has such vast influence it helps me stay informed on what people are thinking." She suggests that reality is complicated, that human emotion is textured and varied. "I don't think a life is defined by one act. It is a series of many small things done or undone that make a life." In the half-light of the room her eyes look a piercing grey, as though searching for some image that will tell a story to hurt you to the quick.

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