Dorothy Speak, Pseudo. Friesen Press, 2021.
The twelve short stories in this collection are written by an author who once lived in Lowertown’s historic McCullough apartments on Tormey Street. Her knowledge of the area is reflected in glimpses of familiar Lowertown places like the narrow path that runs beside the river, the island with the home for seniors.
This is the author’s fourth collection of short stories and one that reveals a high degree of proficiency with the form, carefully setting scenes and developing characters in limited space. Each story offers insight into the characters and their past and present lives through intense encounters with other people or events.
Many of the descriptions of place in the stories are poetic in their language, evoking sights and sounds and smells of particular landscapes and environments. These portrayals of the physical world are often matched by the emotional state of the human characters who struggle with relationships that are sometimes gentle and soothing but often distressing and unpredictable.
The author is willing to take risks, and some stories reveal life at its harshest with characters that have difficulty to sustain relationships. Here are people of all ages who live together, work together, create children together, play together and yet are often strangers to each other. For the reader, there is the challenge of reflecting on the book’s title (Pseudo) in understanding the complexities in each story. As in life, relationships are fragile with some based on false premises and some stifled by regrets. Yet like life, there are also surprising individual acts that offer hope and positive resolutions.