The Vagrant Revue of New Fiction

By Anne Chudobiak

Vagrant Press, the fiction imprint of Nimbus, Canada’s biggest English-language publishing house to be found east of Toronto, recently released The Vagrant Revue of New Fiction, a collection of stories featuring fifteen different authors from Atlantic Canada, some of them relatively new to writing.

In an interview for the Chronicle Herald, editor Mary Jo Anderson comes clean on the difficulties of the selection process in what is, after all, a small community (she and co-editor Sandra McIntyre received two hundred anonymous submissions): “I discovered [afterwards] that a rather large number of my friends had submitted stories which were not chosen. Fortunately, they are pros, they understand the process, and they are still my friends [….] There were very few stories that I think were publishable as they were and there was potential in them but they needed considerable work.”

I am making my way through the collection. So far, the standout story is Elizabeth Peirce’s Fifteen Heresies, which is about the selfishness of selflessness, and seems to take some details (but not all!) from Shambhala International, the Halifax-based Tibetan Buddhist community, which in recent decades has attracted a growing group of mainly American sophisticates to Canada's East Coast. In the story, a woman falls for a man, in part because of the exotic pull of his religion, only to become quickly disenchanted.