Skin by Catherine Bush

After thirty years of novels that have shaped the CanLit landscape, including her celebrated debut Minus Time, and her most recent, the critically-acclaimed Blaze Island, Catherine Bush has released her first short story collection. Skin collects thirteen stories written over the course of Bush’s esteemed career, some exploring themes familiar to readers of Bush’s novels, and most of which analyse intimacy, contact and the distance between people. Despite several commonalities, these stories vary greatly in subject and form, and display the breadth of Bush’s talent.

The collection opens with “Benevolence: An East Village Story,” which tells of a substitute teacher, Ellen Larsen, who takes Chris, a troubled student, into the apartment she shares with her absentee husband. Essentially a novella, the story takes us through the life of a Canadian artist, actress and teacher, living in New York City, the AIDS crisis looming large in the arts scene backdrop. She takes a position as a substitute teacher, and meets a promising student with a precarious housing situation. Fearing that the young man might not graduate without a stable home life, she takes him in. Chris displays what Humbert Humbert might consider nymphet qualities, as it appears that men and women of various ages seem to desire him, creating tension between him and Ellen on more than just obvious levels. Ellen struggles to balance her benevolence, that tension, the appearance of propriety, care for this young man and her own understated desires. Bush steers readers through that torrent with a steady hand, allowing us to feel the magnetic forces between Ellen and Chris, both the attraction and the repulsion.

There is a tenderness in these stories, not drenched in sentimentality, but constructed on a real, human foundation.

The propriety, or impropriety, of human contact recurs in many forms throughout the collection. The title story, told from the point-of-view of a daughter, tells of a mother who ministers to strangers by washing their feet. It’s not a cultural tradition, or really a trademark of one particular denomination, but an act she takes upon herself to feel human contact and impart that same feeling on others. “Touch,” a story that takes place at the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, explores contact and intimacy while the clock ticked towards a lockdown. It’s a well-wrought and interesting story in its own right, but works well in a collection where the AIDS crisis of the eighties has already been explored.

For longtime fans of Bush’s work, certain stories stand out as thematic siblings to her novels. When her novel Claire’s Head was released in 2004, it was lauded by Dr. Shane Neilson in the Canadian Medical Association Journal for its portrayal of migraines and those who suffer from them. With the story “The International Headache Conference,” Bush revisits that realm of one of the more misunderstood ailments. With the deftness that she has shown from her earliest work, Bush shows us the connection between those who suffer, those who understand, and the distance between those who don’t, especially when the most intimate partners cannot grasp their lover’s pain.

Those of us who became fans of Bush’s writing with her most recent novel, the masterwork Blaze Island, will find a lot to appreciate about the stories “Derecho” and “Glacial.” Just like the novel, they take us to far-flung islands and the frozen north, leaving us at the mercy of the elements. Her detailed descriptions of scientific research, which had served Bush well in books like Minus Time and Blaze Island, add richness into these pieces of what some might call “climate fiction.” It is remarkable how, through precise language, she is able to breathe warmth into the coldest, most remote regions in our hemisphere, and infuse scientific disciplines with the same wonder and sense of adventure that Hemingway brought to fishing and hunting.

The stories in Skin range from epistolary to experimental, some set in the past, some in the present, providing a showcase for Bush’s talents. There is a tenderness in these stories, not drenched in sentimentality, but constructed on a real, human foundation. Skin is at once fresh and vibrant while being a culmination of decades of practice and craft. It stands as a fine primer for Catherine Bush’s writing and an exciting debut story collection by one of Canada’s master novelists.

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.

Publisher: Goose Lane Editions (April 22, 2025)
Paperback: 8″ x 6″
ISBN: 9781773104317

Jeff Dupuis

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Jeff Dupuis is a writer and editor living in Toronto. He is the author of The Creature X Mystery novels and numerous short stories, which have been published in The Ex-Puritan and The Temz Review among others. Jeff is the editor, alongside A.G. Pasquella, of the anthology Devouring Tomorrow: Fiction from the Future of Food, which will be published in 2025 by Dundurn Press.