On earth as it is

by Steven Heighton

The interlocking worlds of the erotic and the religious are explored in the novella and ten stories in this collection. The stories range through time and space, from present-day Toronto to the nineteenth-century high Arctic, from the Greek Islands to Kathmandu, from a tunnel under Vimy Ridge in 1915 where a Canadian sentry hears his enemy singing through the wall, to a tourist town in the Rockies where a painter and her dying husband make love for the last time.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories

240 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Steven Heighton (born August 14, 1961) is a Canadian novelist, short story writer and poet. He is the author of ten books, including two short story collections, three novels, and five poetry collections.[1] His most recent novel, Every Lost Country, was published in 2010.

Heighton was born in Toronto, Ontario, and earned a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degree, at Queens University.[2]

Heighton's most recent books are the novel Every Lost Country (May 2010) [3] and the poetry collection Patient Frame (April 2010).[4]

Heighton is also the author of the novel Afterlands (2006),which appeared in six countries.[5] The book has recently been optioned for film. Steven Heighton's debut novel, The Shadow Boxer (2001), a story about a young poet-boxer and his struggles growing up, also appeared in five countries.[6]

His work has been translated into ten languages and widely anthologised.[7] His books have been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Award, the Journey Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award (best book of the year).[8] He has received the Gerald Lampert Award, gold medals for fiction and for poetry in the National Magazine Awards, the Air Canada Award, and the 2002 Petra Kenney Prize. Flight Paths of the Emperor has been listed at Amazon.ca as one of the ten best Canadian short story collections.[9]

Heighton has been the writer-in-residence at McArthur College, Queen's University and The University of Ottawa.[10] He has also participated in several workshops including the Summer Literary Seminars, poetry work shop, in St. Petersburg, Russia (2007), and the Writing with Style, short fiction workshop, in Banff, Alberta (2007).[11]

Heighton currently lives in Kingston, Ontario with his family.[12]

Reviews

[W.D. Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

R.I.P. Steve (1961-2022), beloved in Canada perhaps not as widely known outside its borders. I knew him personally through running at first, but went on to spend my life with his poems and stories.

This the epigraph to this book's best story, "Townsmen of a Stiller Town," that place of first imagined sorrow in which we who knew him or his work all now do dwell:


The story concerns a young 18-year old in the early 1990s, a boy with a vague yearning for some kind of heroism but with few actual material or spiritual prospects. Having drifted along through high school on that insouciance gifted to the immortal adolescent, he finds himself suddenly reduced to working for his aunt's fast-food franchise in a dying Ontario town as graduation summer prepares to give way to autumn, and on a day that another 18 year old has just been killed in a motor vehicle accident this other, not-so-"smart" lad, our protagonist, is challenged to, as the Arcade Fire so transcendently sing, "Wake Up".

Something filled up
My heart with nothing
Someone told me not to cry

But now that I'm older
My heart's colder
And I can see that it's a lie

Children, wake up
Hold your mistake up
Before they turn the summer into dust

If the children don't grow up
Our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up
We're just a million little gods causing rain storms
Turning every good thing to rust

Baroquely tragicomic, with allusions to classic literature and 1990s popular culture piling up left and right, the story is intricately crafted in its line by line movement, densely coded in its structure (and yet still comes across as a complete, seemingly organic whole to the reader), and does everything a great short story should do, I feel. Having re-read it dozens of times, it never fails to send a thrilling shiver along my spine, every line and arcing towards Aquinas's "Wholeness, Harmony and Radiance" in its epiphanic memento mori. Wake up, dear reader. Wake up to life, wake up in order to live--Steve's work (an athlete's vaulting spikes, "raised like knuckles to the sky"--see the poem in the comments section below) was always so charged with the grandeur of life, fashioned by the hands of a lifelong journeyman who never affected mastery, who respected his material and his craft most of all.

Edit: I have curated a few poems for those who have Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/CclJz0BLWpK/
and have a pdf of the aforementioned story to share, just ask.

[Ruta · Rating 5 out of 5]

À fleur de peau.

[Isla McKetta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of these stories really hit, others do not. But I still like Heighton's voice.