Q: How has writing this collection of short stories, Skin (Gooselane Editions, 2025) been different than writing a novel? And how has your publishing experience been different if it has?
A: Like many writers, I started out writing stories but very quickly discovered that a story I cared about deeply was trying to be a novel, so I plunged headlong into long-form fiction and never looked back. That unwieldy story became my first novel, Minus Time. I felt like the novel was my natural breath as a writer. A few years ago, I became intrigued by the wild and meaningful compression of flash fiction – the opposite of a novel. I started writing stories again more intently during the pandemic at a time when I felt exhausted and unable to start a new novel. Writing stories allowed me to enter other worlds on compressed timelines, to play, try out new things, seek pleasure at a time when pleasure was hard to find. I love the challenge of bringing a complex world to life in no more than a few pages. I love aiming for unpredictability in the story form, unusual intimacy, the swerve. The short arc rather than the long one. One of the perhaps unorthodox qualities of my collection is that it assembles stories of truly varied lengths, from flash to novella and those in between. A few of the stories, such as The International Headache Conference, about a woman who has an intense hook-up-type encounter with another migraine sufferer, or Voices Over Water, which draws on stories told to me by my father and grandfather, are older, re-edited for the collection. Benevolence, the long story that opens the collection, takes an idea that I began to explore years ago and totally re-imagines it. The title story, about a woman obsessed with foot washing, and Derecho, in which a man finds himself strangely attracted to extreme winds, are two of the newer stories. Because the stories were conceived over a long span of time I think of them as kind of a fictional autobiography (emphasis on fiction!).
My editor, André Alexis, was the person who said that he thought I should turn the stories into a collection and as I revised them, we both gave a lot of thought about how to order the stories to create a meaningful journey for the reader and, ultimately, a sense of a whole. Honestly, I think that the taxonomic distinction between novels and stories is a bit of a false one: novels come in all sorts of forms and lengths, as do stories. Whatever fiction you’re trying to create, it needs to find its necessary length – and breath!
More about Skin:
Now, for the first time, a blistering book of short fiction from one of Canada’s most loved novelists.
In Skin, Catherine Bush plunges into the vortex of all that shapes us. Summoning relationships between the human and more-than-human, she explores a world where touch and intimacy are both desirable and fraught.
Ranging from the realistic to the speculative, Bush’s stories tackle the condition of our restless, unruly world amidst the tumult of viruses, climate change, and ecological crises. Here, she brings to life unusual and perplexing intimacies: a man falls in love with the wind; a substitute teacher’s behaviour with a student brings unforeseen risks; a woman becomes fixated on offering foot washes to strangers.
Bold, vital, and unmistakably of the moment, Skin gives a charged and animating voice to the question of how we face the world and how, in the process, we discover tenderness and allow ourselves to be transformed.
About Catherine Bush:
Catherine Bush is the author of five novels. Her work has been critically acclaimed, published internationally, and shortlisted for numerous awards. Her most recent novel, Blaze Island, was a Globe and Mail and Writers’ Trust of Canada Best Book of the Year, and the Hamilton Reads 2021 Selection. Her other novels include the Canada Reads longlisted Accusation; the Trillium Award shortlisted Claire's Head; the national bestselling The Rules of Engagement, which was also named a New York Times Notable Book and a L.A. Times Best Book of the Year; and Minus Time, shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Award. The recipient of numerous fellowships, Bush has been Writer-in-Residence/Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich and a Fiction Meets Science Fellow at the HWK in Delmenhorst, Germany. An Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, she lives in Toronto and in an old schoolhouse in Eastern Ontario.