Mind the Gap by Alice Zorn

First, a disclosure: when I read Alice Zorn’s brilliantly polished short fiction collection Mind the Gap, I already knew some of the stories. But my encounter with early drafts of a couple of these gems was years and continents ago. As in the piece that provides the book’s title, when Barbara meets her Austrian cousin Freddy as an adult, much has changed in the interim. Zorn was always a wise, observant, and smartly spare writer. Mind the Gap shows her in full mastery of the storytelling craft.

The seven stories and one short novella in Mind the Gap are sensual and psychological delights, cold-climate manners and tightly controlled personas exhaling, sometimes frantically dissolving, in locales thick with warmth, movement, smell, and vivid colour. Two women on a quest to find a truant boyfriend lose more than their way amid the jigsaw welter of stalls in a Moroccan medina. In Mexico City, Sally sees her “first glimpse of blue – a jolt.” Her gait marred since birth, she craves freedom from controlling parents and longs for the uncaring magnificence of Frida Kahlo, who had similarly crooked legs.

Zorn brings honesty and depth to her explorations of the human condition. This is why, for all the exotic spices, azure waters, and “flowers as tiny as embroidered French knots but vivid as tangerines,” I hesitate over the back cover description of Mind the Gap as “travel fiction.” Zorn’s stories are not escapist, nor are they fantasies. The settings are stunning but serve as far more than decoration. The particulars of place (and Zorn is wonderfully specific in her locales) isolate and lift for inspection universal human experiences of inner estrangement, desire, discovery, and uncertainty. The stories might take place in Morocco, Oaxaca, Tunisia, Austria, London, and Texas, but the real action occurs between two friends separated by a night of casual sex, in the frustrated uncertainty of a girlfriend confronted by her partner’s petulant and jealous daughter, or within a textile artist slowly coming to understand the weave and warp of Mexico’s “land of the clouds.”

Zorn’s rich overlaying of sights, tastes, and smells is matched by the ease with which, in so few strokes, she can paint a setting, a social interaction, or a state of mind. Moose hunters in north-eastern Quebec point to dried weeds and nod and murmur, “a group of sages agreeing.” In southern Texas “an accordion door [sits] half-open on TV noises and the smell of fried food.” A Canadian adopted as a baby from Mexico, on a trip to find her birth mother, buys a hat in yellow, turquoise, gold, and purple, “Knots of colour that will tie her to here.” The umbilical cord, this time, is one that she has chosen.

The typical vantage point for Zorn’s characters is educated, urban Canadian: Montreal plays a minor role in the book, and there is a slightly repressed, northern, politely multicultural feel to many of the protagonists. They are tested against elsewheres that highlight the fault lines in their characters and the sometimes-gaping blind spots in their understandings of the world and of themselves. A non-communicative gas attendant in a landscape of unending flatness queries the true reasons Vance has flown across the continent for the ashes of an ex-partner he hasn’t seen in years. Bev and Nessa watch two boys on a neighbouring roof bend metal to make an upright T-shaped structure. “Is that…” Nessa said with a low voice. “Are they making a crucifix?” Bev watched for a moment. “I think it’s supposed to be a TV antenna.” There is both deconstruction and decolonization in these stories, but the process happens subtly, through our empathy with the characters. We learn with them, sometimes ahead of them, and sometimes when they don’t.

Alice Zorn has a cool eye and a warm heart. Both are at work in this collection. The real alchemy of Mind the Gap is that an author so unsparingly honest about her flawed characters can spin such glorious stories showing how, despite everything, they – and we – may yet redeem ourselves.

Matthew Anderson

Hi! I’m Matthew Anderson, a writer and professor living and working in Mi’kma’ki, on Nova Scotia’s North Shore. I’m the author of six non-fiction books and numerous short stories. Two recent award winners areSomeone Else’s Saint: How a Scottish Pilgrimage Led to Nova Scotia(2025, Pottersfield) andThe Good Walk: Creating New Paths on Traditional Prairie Trails(URP, 2024). I blog atwww.somethinggrand.caand produce a podcast atPilgrimage Stories From Up and Down the Staircase.