subTerrain — Brown Dwarf

Off The Shelf — Brown Dwarf

Brown Dwarf by K.D. Miller is a mystery and a love story told by Rae Brand, a successful mystery series writer herself, who has returned to the “scene of the crime” in Hamilton, where the crime is hers. “I didn’t exactly kill my best friend,” she writes in her adult diary. “But I destroyed her nonetheless. You don’t have to lay a finger on somebody to destroy them.” The novel is the gradual revealing of what happened in 1962 between Brenda Bray, the girl Rae Brand used to be, with the pink-stitched “Pleasingly Plump” labels in her clothes, and her disturbingly precocious friend, Jori Clements as they haunted the escarpment that summer in their Jori-obsessed pursuit of escaped serial child killer, Clarence Frayne. Jori offers danger and excitement to brow-beaten Brenda and a strange kind of love that is too compelling to resist. Scenes of Brenda’s life with the mother she calls “Hurricane Annie”, who is one minute exploding with rage, the next offering Brenda extra syrup for her pancakes, and Brenda’s entanglement with Jori and her upwardly mobile parents—Professor Clements quizzing Brenda on her views on euthanasia while Mrs. Clements hands around lemonade—alternate with the adult Rae Brand, walking the straight line streets of Hamilton, searching for clues to unearth the truth she has buried. The story moves back and forth in time as memory does, accumulating details, unravelling the secret like an outworn garment that no longer warms or protects, the multi strands of what really happened becoming available to be knit into a new and truer self.

A “brown dwarf” is a character in crime fiction, the villain who is far from the prime suspect, too dull to be noticed. Also, it is  “an astronomical wannabe”, once on its way to becoming a star, but it doesn’t shine, “something in its makeup was lacking”. Rae Brand tracks the villain, thinking she knows who the brown dwarf is, but, as in the best mystery stories, there is more to be found.

K.D. Miller is a poet and essayist as well as a fiction writer who writes with a clear-eyed humanity and devilish wit. Her novel illuminates the brown dwarf parts of us all as Rae Brand comes to see Brenda for who she was, neither entirely guilty nor completely innocent, but “culpable”, and in seeing that finds the love in her that wanted to shine.

— reviewed by Melinda Burns (www.melindaburns.ca) in Off The Shelf, the newsletter of the The Bookshelf of Guelph Ltd.

The New Quarterly — Brown Dwarf

In the wee hours of this morning, unable to put the book down, I read the last few chapters of K.D. Miller’s novel, Brown Dwarf. Miller expertly builds and maintains the tension in this concise psychological drama until the very end. The plot involves a serial killer, a long missing girl, and the narrator, Rae’s, need to put to rest an old guilt that has plagued her since childhood. By walking the routes she used to frequent alone and with her Seventh Grade best friend, Jory, Rae also revisits the emotional terrain of her middle school years, and discovers something she always knew—that the monstrous resides in each of us, along with the potential for compassion.

—Kim Aubrey

from The New Quarterly

The National Post — Brown Dwarf

When a novel about a perfect murder is just a bit too perfect

By Jeet Heer

If there is any truth to the directive that authors should write what they know, then it follows that it would help a crime-fiction novelist to have a shady past.

This occurred to me recently while reading K.D. Miller’s taut new psychological thriller, Brown Dwarf (Biblioasis, $17.95). Without giving too much away about a book rich in surprises, Brown Dwarf tells the story of Rae Brand, herself the writer of a popular series of mystery novels. Her series detective is Elsinor Grey, a lady sleuth in Edwardian Toronto. When she was young, Brand went by the name Brenda Bray and was involved in the disappearance of a close friend — though her degree of culpability remains uncertain until the novel’s compelling conclusion.

Of course, there have been several instances of real-life mystery writers who have been involved in crimes.

In 1928, Chester Himes, a young ne’er-do-well, was arrested for armed robbery soon after he had been kicked out of Ohio State University. He served eight years in prison, using the time to launch his literary career writing for Esquire, among other magazines. Early on, he wrote gritty tales of poverty and crime, but later he wrote the series for which he is remembered, about the African-American detective duo Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones. Himes said that the two detectives, although on the side of law and order, were based on the types of men he met in prison.

Here’s another, more recent case. In 2000, the body of Dariusz Janiszewski was discovered in Poland’s Oder River. The murder went unsolved for many years, until the Polish police noticed the remarkable similarities between the grisly crime and a similar slaughter described in a 2003 novel, Amok, by Krystian Bala. He was convicted of murder, and is currently in prison — working on another novel. (The case is described in The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, by David Grann, who first wrote about Bala in The New Yorker.)

But, in several significant ways, the case of mystery writer Anne Perry most closely resembles the fictional Rae Brand in Miller’s Brown Dwarf.

In 1954 in New Zealand, two teenage girls, best friends Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker, murdered Parker’s mother because they blamed her for trying to separate them. They made it look like an accident, then concocted an elaborate cover story. But the police tumbled to the truth, and both girls served long jail sentences. As an adult, Hulme remade herself as Ann Perry (taking the name of her stepfather) and became a successful mystery writer, with scores of novels under her belt, including the William Monk series and the Thomas Pitt series.

Miller uses the conventions of the detective novel but is concerned with more than just the bare-bones question of whodunit. Although she remains under-appreciated, she is one of Canada’s finest writers, able to probe deeper into the human heart than the best surgeon. Here, as in her earlier stories, Miller’s concern is with why people do what they do rather than just what they do. Miller has a keen sense for how mixed all human motives are, how closely aligned love and hate can be and how deceiving others always involves a bit of self-deception.

Aside from its literary resonance, the story of Brand and her childhood friend Jori Clement also tells us more about Ann Perry’s real life story than any of Perry’s own books. In both the actual Perry murder case and in Miller’s novel, young girls in the hothouse of early adolescence form an intense quasi-sexual friendship that leads them to behave in unexpected ways.

This sort of larval lesbianism is a rich and underexplored topic (as is the parallel phenomenon of boys forming tight bonds in early teenage years, sweatily wrestling with each other in hormonal passion). This latency period, transcending as it does the familiar categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality, makes many people uncomfortable and doesn’t get discussed much. One of the attractive features of Miller’s novel is that she isn’t squeamish about exploring such subjects.

The critic Edmund Wilson observed that detective novels are ultimately unsatisfying because the solution can never live up to the thrill of the initial mystery. Brown Dwarf addresses this by making the mystery of the human heart the central concern — thus, the solution is but one facet of a larger puzzle.

From The National Post

Pickle Me This — Brown Dwarf

K.D. Miller’s novel Brown Dwarf is a delicious secret. A slim volume, gorgeous to behold (and to hold! that cover. those thick pages. such an elegant typeface, perfect leading), it knows far more than it is telling. Rae Brand, a successful mystery novelist, turns to her own personal narrative in order to confront a pivotal event from her childhood. Though she’d been Brenda Bray then, lumpen outcast, daughter of a depressive, the character Rae Brand has been escaping ever since.

The novel alternates between Brenda’s story in third person, and Rae’s voice, addressing her childhood friend Jori. Though their relationship had not been a friendship exactly, the power dynamic far too unequal. Jori had been an outcast as much as Brenda, though for different reasons, and had seized onto the other girl, dominating her. Brenda had followed along with Jori’s scheme to catch an escaped serial killer hiding in the wilderness of the Niagara Escarpment, th0ugh what had gone on between the girls exactly is never entirely clear. Something sexual, other things even more complicated than that, and one day after Brenda leaves her in the woods, Jori is never seen again.

A brown dwarf, writes Rae Brand, is a character in crime fiction, the villain. Ugly, understated, far from the prime suspect because just too dull to be noticed, but this stigma is the brown dwarf’s ulterior motive. Particularly dangerous, because this character blends so well into the background, and Brenda Bray is such a character. Miller provides a particularly strong perspective of her personality but using the present-tense, second-person address, and showing us young Brenda in third person (this even more interesting when we understand that this is also filtered through Brenda/Rae’s point of view). The gap between these two presentations wide enough that Rae/Brenda still remains somewhat elusive, which is probably as intended.

Are we to trust Rae’s rendition of events? So much is going on between the lines here (and hence that leading, amazing!). Even the book’s main weakness could be deliberate– I didn’t find Jori altogether convincing as a character. She wasn’t meant to be authentic either, more of an Eddie Haskell type (and is there a more modern reference point than Eddie. Anyone?)– but Jori read like a substandard version of Cordelia from Atwood’s Cat’s Eye. But then mightn’t Brenda want us to see her that way? To block any light that Jori might have shone?

Brenda’s character turns out to be the real driver of the narrative, in a way that’s so subtle we don’t even notice until the climax. But is Rae Brand a better writer than we realize? Has she pulled the wool over our eyes altogether? Such gaps and ambiguity make Miller’s novel an engaging and absorbing read.

from Pickelmethis.com

Quill & Quire — Brown Dwarf

Toronto Star — Philip Marchand — A Litany in Time of Plague

Linked short stories lodge in the memory

Homo sapiens is not just the thinking animal or the tool-making . animal, but the dissembling animal. The stories in Toronto-based writer Kathleen Miller’s first collection, A Litany In Time Of . Plague, suggest that capacity for pretence defines our humanity as much as our ability to employ syllogisms or kitchen knives.

Miner’s first story, “This Is Important,” demonstrates that this capacity begins early in life. The protagonist of the story is a 7-year-old girl named Ariey, questioned by a policeman about a man who had urged her to get into his car. What Ariey hides from the policeman is how attracted she was to the stranger.

She thinks of him as “the dark man,” whose lure is not candy or money but an unspecified knowledge. When she tells him that her parents have forbidden her to enter the car of a stranger, he replies, “That is because they are afraid to find out. And they try to make you just as afraid as they are. So that you will not find out either.”

What she is supposed to “find but” is never made dear to the reader — whether it has to do with precocious sexuality, or self-abandonment, or simply the pleasures of “darkness,” that is, evil. Its unspecified nature piakes the promise all the more powerful — in various ways, Ariey, who reappears throughout these linked tales, is tempted by the promise all her life.

Besides Ariey, the two other recurring characters are Kelly, a librarian deserted by her husband, and Raymond Mayhugh, a successful writer Alouming the loss of his male lover. The stories are united not (inly by their presence but by the collection’s ambitious, stimost schematic, structure. : It begins, for example, with a Story told from a child’s point of

view and ends with one told from the point of view of an old man — Mayhugh in a geriatric clinic. Within this span of a human life, the stories also enact an equivalent of the biblical drama of fall and sacrificial redemption. They begin, that is, with Alley’s listening to a tempter offering. strange knowledge and end with a series of spiritual and/or physical deaths.

This is heavy intellectual freight for a collection of short stories, but one the author has deliberately invoked through numerous explicit references to the Bible and Christianity. She has made it all but impossible for a reader not to think of religious themes while absorbing her stories.

What is extraordinary is that these themes co-exist with a striking emphasis on the characters’ physical and sexual natures. Ariey, in particular, is a loose cannon, sexually. Not coinddentally, she is the character who most frequently resorts to dissembling — in one story, for example, she reaches orgasm by fantasizing about another man during intercourse.

But the other characters also assume false poses, a tendency summed up in the collection by the image of the theatre — all three main characters have links with the stage, and Ariey herself is a professional actress. The only relief from such posing, it seems, is death — physical death, or a kind of spiritual or symbolic death.

Ariey, Kelly and Mayhugh undergo such deaths, which are accompanied, or prompted, by acts of the spirit. Ariey serves food to the homeless and thereby encounters a sorrow, within herself so huge that she feels utterly hollow, “as if she’s nothing.” Kelly, overwhelmed by grief over her separation, half-heartedly attempts suidde and then attends a requiem mass where she adds her and her ex-husband’s name to the list of the dead.

In the last story, set in the future, the aged and decrepit Mayhugh confronts physical death. “Death counsellors” in his nursing home routinely suggest assisted suidde to patients such as himself. But Mayhugh — who has throughout his life been caught between flippancy and his need to love ~ stubbornly refuses to be “assisted” to his rest. It is a refusal that seems to be without meaning — death comes to him shortly, anyway — but it highlights his essential humanity.

In the Gospels, Christ insists that rebirth must be preceded by some form of death, but Miller offers no easy assurances that any of these deaths are a prelude to something greater. The “story of Kelly and the requiem mass, for example, leaves the reader to decide whether her mass-going is just another symptom of neurotic guilt, or an occasion of insight and reconciliation.

Miller’s characters are so credible that these questions are genuinely troubling. Nothing stands between the reader and these characters — certainly not an obtrusive prose^style. When not actually spoken in the voice of a character, Miller’s narratives are transparent — all that is visible to the reader is the painful confrontation of characters with the terrible limitations of their minds and bodies.

Philip Marchand is The Star’s book critic.

Quill & Quire — A Litany in Time of Plague

This collection of stories by K.D. Miller features recurring characters moving forward in time, and so teccers on the edge of being a novel. Miller has created a mesmerizing core of characters for her stories, beginning with Arley, whom we meet at age 7 and last see as a young adult who has be- come an actor. The first episode in Arleys life has a haunting quality - she is being grilled by her mother and a policeman after a man has tried to entice her into his car. It’s plain from the outset that Arley is an odd little thing, and she main- tains this oddness as she grows up. She is drawn to the man in the car and the menacing truth he represents, but lacks the courage to “find out” what it is the grown-ups have warned her against.

Arley faces tests of her courage again and again - most poignantly when she develops an adoles- cent crush on a writer friend of her mother’s, who is gay. This character, Raymond Mayhugh, ex- hibits an acid wit worthy of Oscar Wilde. Although he disappoints the young Arley - which as an adult he must - he doesn’t disappoint us; in fact he rather overwhelms the narrative. Miller, who has a background in theatre, wisely focuses on Raymond in her very affecting closing episode.

As Arley grows up, other characters come into view, most notably Kelly, whose husband leaves her after seeing Arley one night in a play. Kelly gets a chapter or two other own, although her husband, Phil, who pursued Arley, drifts our of the picture, as, indeed, docs Arley herself. ‘1 “he last Stories revolve iiround suffering, splrirualltv, and death. And this brings us to the meaning of the ride - which is taken from Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe’s work of the same name. The immediate parallel is with the AIDS plague, of which Raymond gains intimate knowledge. Miller seems to be saying, in the words of Raymond’s lover, Robbie, who wrote about Nashe in an undergraduate essay, that Nashe’s (and by extension every) “plague is the common plague of mortality.” What works symbolically doesn’t always make sense, however. Raymond gers to live out his allotted days; Robbie does not.

Similarly, the man following the7-year-old Arley may be Death or j ust a pervert: either way she shouldn’t get into his car. However, it is a tes- tament to Miller’s emerging genius that she makes us care so much about her characters and their fates, their courage, and their compromis- es. - by Nancy Wigswn, a Toronto writer.

Ottawa Citizen — A Litany in Time of Plague

Seven-year-old Arley has been followed home by a man in a car. Forgotten by the usual convoy of parents at a Brownies’ meeting, she had set out alone. So begins This is Important, the first and most impressive story in this debut collection of short fiction by K.D. Miller, a Hamilton-born writer now living in Toronto.

‘“I know you’re a big girl,’ Arley’s mother admonishes her. ‘But even big girls don’t walk home alone at night. They just don’t.’ Except that she did. And the man found her. If she did it again, would he find her again?”

Arley describes what amounts to a curious courtship betweeri herself and the pedophile, who emerged from his car and bowed to her out of courte-sy and made repeated, but never forced, advances. Small details linger, like a sour taste: the sound that a slow-moving tire makes on pavement — “a dusty, whispery noise” — the image of a man inching his car forward to keep pace with a little girl’s step.

The title of the collection, A Litany in Time of Plague, is a fair signpost to what’s inside, and this first story sets the tone. There is danger out there; it’s in the air. And to a child it has no name but fear. That may be why I liked this story so much, because the men- ace is only hinted at. (Miller reminded me here of Bonnie Burnard, a gifted Canadian writer of electrically charged short sto- ries.)

What follow are some fine pieces, some less so. Miller has little interest in the physical land- scape. No, it’s hearts and minds she’s after — motive and under- pinnings, what makes relation- ships tick, fall apart. Miller i.s astonished (as perhaps you are) by how little we understand each other as we countenance child- hood, adolescence, maybe mar- riage, divorce and inevitably, the big adios.

These linked stories probe the interior lives of Arley as she ages and becomes an actress, of a gay writer named Raymond Mayhugh, of a married couple named Phil and Anne. But I wish that Miller had had more confidence in her own talent and in her reader, more trust in detail and dialogue to reveal the codes. I wanted more story, less analysis. When her characters wallow in their loneli- ness, the tension snaps like a dry rubber band and the stories tip into melodrama.

On tlie other iiand, I admired the. sparse, clean prose that smartly moves the stories along. Miller has a pretty good, albeit dark, handle on our IIIUL-S. The title story describes a faithless woman who enters a church and writes down her own name and that of her ex-husband in a book of the dead.

There is lots of sex in the book, both real and imagined — both pose risks. Characters long to be touched, yet fear touch — as young Arley did. “In tag, if some- body touches you, you’re it. If King Midas touches you, you turn to gold. What would have hap- pened if the dark man had touched her?”

What plagues us now, I understand Miller to be saying, is not just the HIV virus but fear — fear that turns us inward toward self-obsession, self-pity and a spiritual dying long before that last breath. Keep an eye out for K.D. Miller: this is a new writer worth watching.

Lawrence Scanlan is a producer with CBC Radio’s Writers & Company and a freelance journalist based in Camden East, Ont.

Malahat Review — A Litany in Time of Plague

K. D. Miller’s first collection of short stories raises a chorus of literary and cinematic echoes, most notably through its structure, narratives con- nected in a loose sequence. Although a series of stories sharing common characters is not unique—Linda Svendsen’sAfcrnie Ll/eand Denis John- son’s Jesus’ Son come to mind readily—Miller links her stories the way filmmakerRobertAltman links the lives of certain citizens of Nashville or draws together Raymond Carver’s stories in Short Cuts. Characters prominent in one segment fade to the periphery, even disappear, in the next.

The keystone in Miller’s arching panoply of characters is Arley, whom Miller presents chronologically from her near abduction at seven, through adolescence, undergraduate studies and later work as an actor with a small theatre troupe. In ‘This Is Important,” a policeman questions Arley about the details of her brush with a pedophile. Such material, sadly, runs the risk of being too familiar in current fiction, but Miller’s story succeeds beautifully by contrasting the banal and hopelessly ear- nest interrogation with Arley’s simultaneous interior monologue. Arley notices that “when the policeman talks to her, he sounds different than when he talks to her mother. That’s because he uses his real voice to her mother, and a pretend one to her, the way most grownups do.” She remembers that the molester or “dark man” talked to her in a voice that “sounded just like he looked, and just like he was.”

Arley is the protagonist in several stories; in others she shares the stage or even retreats to allow the development of earlier connections.

These are often as interesting as Arley herself. Of the stories in which Arley figures prominently, tl’e strongest is “Stigmala” which, despite its grim ending, demonstrates a distinguishing quality of this collection: humour. The comedy disappears, however, when Miller explores a darker and ultimately tragic one-sided love relationship between Nick, Arley’s drama teacher, and John, an embarrassingly obsequious and timid professor of English.

Both the collection and one of the stories derive their title from Eliza- bethan writer Thomas Nashe’s poem, “A Litany in Time of Plague.” It is possible to see this book as a commentary on our present plague, but I don’t think it is necessary to do so. The title story is indeed one in which AIDS looms unavoidably large, but, as in ‘This Is Important,” Miller steers away from didactic statements. She sidesteps the presentation of disease as global metaphor and^ocuses on the personal loss that— arises out of any plague. The story’s narrator, Raymond Mayhugh—the adolescent Arley is infatuated with him in the story “Author Of”—a curmudgeonly and cynical writer, is wrenched out of his smug self- assurance by the revelation of his former lover’s illness. The history of their relationship is filtered through Mayhugh’s sometimes bitter and sometimes witty recollections and, despite the cloud of death that hangs over the story, I found myself laughing frequently.

Because there are aspects of the novel in a sequence of linked narra- tives, the final story is alrpost as important as the final chapter. Miller chooses to end her book with “Lifcsaver” in which Mayhugh is once again the central figure, but perhaps because I missed Arley in the List half of the collection, and perhaps because “Lifesaver” takes such a long leap into Mayhugh’s old age, I found myself dissatisfied with the end.

On the whole Miller takes the right turns and sustains her narratives without tricks or needless complications. She has the realist dramatist’s ear for dialogue. “Requiem,” one of the most effortlessly readable and beautiful stories 1 have read in some time, persuaded me that Kelly/ Anne, whose marriage ends when her husband Phil falls in love with Arley, is a person I have known all my life, and one 1 will miss. If K. D. Miller can evoke such feelings ina.firstcollection, I ,-un certainly looking forward to her second.

ID Magazine — A Litany in Time of Plague

In a time when structured religion is no longer a crutch or an assurance, K.D. (Kathleen) Miller’s first pub- lished collfction cofronts us with a seriesof characters in search of personal, spiritual fulfilment. A Litany in Time of Plague is an ironic title, for not only does the plague refer to AIDS, but hu man need and loneliness. Since a litany is a formal exchange, the response of a congregation to a priest’s recital in the absence of a priest, leaves the characters to answer their own personal (sometimes even ceremonial) pleas. It is unclear if they are ever answered.

Miller’s project is ambitious and executed brilliantly. All ten short stories are linked mainly through the character of Arley. The opening story, “This is Important,” is written from seven-year old Arley’s perspective. We watch attentively to her confusion and discomfort with the adults’ reaction to an incident involving a man, a ‘dark’ man according to Arley, who followed her in a car. In consecutive stories, Arley grows up, becomes an actress, and is continually tempted by that initial promise of darkness. Raymond is Arley’s “uncle,” a gay friend of her mother's, who deals with a friend dying of A IDS in the title story. He eventually succumbs to old age in the final story, “Lifesavcr.” Although the two never meet, Arley is responsible for the breakup of Kelly’s marriage and Kelly becomes the central character in the collection’s most noteworthy story, “Requiem.”

In “Requiem,” Kelly attends an Anglican mass and adds her name and her ex-husband’s to the list of the dead. She may be surrounded by ritual (the congregation rises, sits, and recites around her), but she is never engulfed in the ideology.

Nor is this the intent. As Miller explains, “I would say that the characters [in the stories] dabble in traditional structures of religion, particularly Kelly, going to that requiem mass. But I don’t think Kelly comes out of that an Anglican. It’s been a very important gesture for her, but she struggles with the traditional form; it just doesn’t work for her.”

Miller herself struggles with traditional religious structures, although much differently than her alienated characters. She explains, “I am an Anglican. I go to church, which is an odd thing to do these days. But it’s a kind of love/hate relationship. I felt the need for a spiritual exercise, and I had a fondness for Anglican liturgy and I still do, but I’m very involved in trying to make my church a little more gay positive, which come in part from my theatre exposure. So many of my friends and professors were gay.”

Miller began a career in theatre after finishing a B.A. in drama from the University of Guelph and a M.F.A. in directing from UBC. After winning a short story contest in Quest magazine, she abandoned her theatrical pursuits and chose to focus on her writing at age 36: “I really have more control over the writing situ ation. I can do it any time I want; whereas, as an actor you have to get hired and then collaborate with a lot of other people.” Now 44, Miller lives, works and writes in Toronto.

The choice for compiling a collection of linked stories is also somewhat ironic. For as the individual characters struggle to find their place in a larger whole, the stories themselves connect with each other, yet each remains independent as though the author resisted the temptation to tie all the characters together in a novel form. The structure of A Litany in Time of Plague, apparently, was completely unconscious. “They weren’t planned,” Miller explains, “I never thought 1 would sit down and write a serics of linked short stories. But gradually something evolved, this group of people evolved. Then, with John Metcalf [Miller’s editor], he helped me order them and encouraged me to fill in some of the gaps, as lie put it, create a world for these people... For instance, in the first story, Arley makes reference to this funny old car her uncle Raymond has. I think originally that was uncle Ted, or something, but I thought no, let’s start the link-ups, all the little things that hold this thing together. So it was a very organic process and not very conscious. It looks planned but it wasn’t.”

What was planned, however, is Miller’s carefully constructed, psychologically exposed characters. Secondary to the development of these characters’ world is the time and place in which they evolve. Who they are and how they feel in their search for inner, personal, and consequently, spiritual fulfilment is most important. And also most disconcerting.

But not for the author- “For me there is a sense of something positive happening in each of these character’s lives,” Miller explains. “At least they find out the truth. It’s not a terribly bleak or dark book, and I kind of enjoy the humour in it But, as you say, we’re really setting aiul timcot-ieiitedand when those particularities are stripped away, then we’ve got just the voice of thecharacter, we’ve got the character in our face. For a lot of people, that’s very uncomfortable. Not for me, though.”

Within A Litany in Time of Plague, the spiritual journey becomes a confrontation with the self rather than an escape into traditional rituals. Miller simply lays bare the dark fears and inwointics which lurk within all of us and offers no solutions, only consolation.

The Book Shelf — A Litany in Time of Plague

One of the great joys for a voracious reader is discovering a new writer who can make you laugh and touch you to the core in one 19-page story. I came upon K.D. Miller’s short story “A Litany in Time of Plague” in the 1993 Journey Prize Anthology. The main character is Raymond Mayhugh, an aging, gay, self-described “professional bastard” whose sharp wit skewers himself and everyone near him like so much barbed wire fencing around his heart. In this story he is going over his recent encounter with a former lover that has rendered him “fashionably traumatized.”

How did I know? Well. the signs were subtle. My heart was trying to thump its way outj through my ears. There was a ! big hole just under my breast- bone. as if someone had taken an apple corer to me. But whatreally tipped me off was the fact that I was sitting in my bedroom closet in the dark knees to chin.

He left Robbie twenty years ago because “he always brought out the worst in me, then forgave it. Presumptuous little __.” The plague in the title refers to AIDS which Robbie has contracted and also the modem plague of isola- tion and loneliness which Raymond has in abundance.  K.D. Miller lets us see through Raymond’s sardonic wit to the great love he had for this man and the choice he faces now. to light of Robbie’s Illness, of whether to turn him into “words, words, words” and “rationalize him down to nothing” or to care for him.

Miller’s voice speaking for Raymond rang so true that I had to check more than once to as certain that K.D. Miller is indeed female. Born in Hamilton, she graduated from our own University of Guelph before going on to the University of British Columbia for an MFA in Directing. A Litany in Time of Plague is her
first collection of fiction, with ten linked stories, three concerning Raymond in various stages of his life. The others track characters who. like Raymond, must make a decision while face-to-face with themselves and their own dark needs

In the first story, “This is Important,” Arty, a child of seven. is being questioned by her mothef and a policeman about her encounter with a potential moles— ter. The story takes us inside the child’s view of the questioning adults’ fumbling attempts to lead her to the responses they expect, in chilling contrast to the stranger’s seeming respect for her as he repeatedly slows his car. steps out. and politely asks to take her home. The contrast is in the voices the different adults usg. with her

When the policeman talks to her, he sounds different than when he talks ro her mother. That’s because he uses his real i»ice to her mother, and a pretend one to her, the way most grown-ups do. But the dark man talked to her in his real voice. She could tell. be- cause it sounded just like he looked, and just like he was.

Finally something In the stranger’s tone. “like a voice - under his voice,” betrays his need, and Arly hesitates. But even a child feels d.the allure of the dark- ness, the possibility of finding ot^t “the answers to all the questions the grownups wouldn’.t answer.” , Arly imagines going to the car af\a looking back at herself on the i sidewalk. “For a second, 1 lookeo. Into my own eyes.” Then, apologeticalty, she makes her decision.

The stories are stark in their portrayal of human desperation and the compelling pull of self- destruction and yet, both to the great humour of observations aw the possibility of choosing again and again, they are redemptive and heartening. There is a sens6 of litany to them, of practised belief to the human spirit and it? ability to find its way even to time of plague.
Reviewed by Melinda Burns

Toronto Star — Give Me Your Answer

Daisy's incredible journey
By Sherie Posesorski

In Toronto writer K. D. (Kathleen Daisy) Miller's second collection of short stories, Give Me Your Answer, Daisy Chandler travels from childhood to middle age before she can accept what cannot be known and understood about her family, friends and lovers. In these perceptive interconnected stories, largely set in Hamilton (where Miller was born and raised), we see Daisy struggle from age five to fifty to connect the facts and observations she collects about the people in her life. The more facts she collects, the greater the understanding, Daisy presumes. But maybe not. (Just ask Edmund Morris, who after spending 13 years researching Ronald Reagan before discovering his subject's essence remained impenetrable and mystifying.)

In the story “Sunrise Till Dark,” five-year-old Daisy attacks her family and relatives with ferocious curiosity and imagination. When her parents, Bill and June, go out, she's left in the care of a couple she knows as Uncle George and Aunt Ella. While they watch over her, she's watching them, and wondering. How did Aunt Ella get that purple birthmark on her face? How come Uncle George is touching Aunt Ella in a way her brother Ted never touches her? Are they really brother and sister? In this story, as in all the stories, Miller deftly delineates Daisy's perceptions, emotions, concerns, which are never more than her age would suggest. At five, children demand rock solid explanations. If you can't provide them, they will build explanations themselves - for what facts won't supply, the imagination will. Daisy does just that with poignant, comic results.

As she grows up, just when Daisy is sure she has finally figured out her parents, something happens, widening but contradicting her comprehension. Hidden aspects of their personalities briefly emerge like shadows, then disappear. In the story “Brebeuf and Lamont,” Daisy and her parents are out digging for Indian artefacts. The only passion her taciturn, emotionally contained father will let show is his love of relics. When he accidentally shatters a pot he has been so carefully unearthing, he looks so devastated that Daisy's mother goes over to comfort him. Daisy wonders: This is my father? His vulnerability startles and unnerves her, as will her own as she gradually develops a prickly, hard edge to disguise her own feelings of vulnerability.

Miller captures the minute calibrations of oscillating emotions in the Chandler family - a witch's brew of love, gratitude for support, fear of neediness, bafflement, guilt, respect, regret. The stories quietly accumulate meaning but never spell it out - unfortunately so in the several stories that document Daisy's affairs with a married man she has contempt for, and later with a self-absorbed actor. In those stories, the themes are as pre-assembled as a railroad set, leading to foregone conclusions.

In “Missing Person,” Daisy tells of one of the rituals that have bound mother and daughter through the years - the repeated telling of the great escape of her mother's close friend, Elvira Tomlinson. Orphaned at age 14, Elvira was left to take care of her four brothers. One day, having had enough, she boarded the train and went as far east as she could to see the ocean. She remained there until the Mounties came to take her back to Hamilton. Elvira's taste of independence, however, frees her to live her own life. The significance of this tale alters for Daisy and her mother as they age, both acutely aware that every choice carries its own joys and limitations, and that life, as these stories are, is alive with ambivalence.

Toronto Star - Best of '99 — Give Me Your Answer

An equally powerful collection of linked stories … is K.D. Miller's Give Me Your Answer. The stories centre around the character of Daisy Chandler, a mildly eccentric and tough-minded woman who goes through life like an exposed nerve ending. Her adventures are unforgettable.

Publisher's Review — Holy Writ

Holy Writ is not “chicken soup for the soul”. It isn't a guide for getting int touch with your inner nobel prize winner either, or a twelve-step program for recovery from writer's block. Holy Writ is one author's examination of the creative and spiritual sides of her life. Often hilarious, always unorthodox, K.D. Miller's reflections on writing as a form of worship, selfishness as a virtue and church-going as a necessary evil, will delight believer and skeptic alike. In several of the essays, she is joined by colleagues from the writing community — practicing Catholic Philip Marchand, one-time Quaker Elizabeth Hay and atheist Russell Smith among them.

Miller argues: “I am a Christian because I am imaginatively hooked on the story of a convicted felon who not only gets away with it, but goes on to be an all-time international best-seller. What is his crime? Growing up. Finding his voice, telling the truth with it and not giving a damn what anybody thinks. Holy Writ, in other words.”

“K.D. Miller’s Holy Writ is a sequence of concise, luminous epiphanies that charm and enliven the human spirit. The cumulative effect is surprising: it’s as if a representative of our own metaphysical restlessness had charged a passageway through the perilous territory of doubt and insecurity.”

—John Fraser, Master of Massey College

Toronto Star - Philip Marchand — Holy Writ

IF NOTHING else, K. D. Miller deserves points for bravery.

Miller is an accomplished short story writer whose latest book, Holy Writ, is a collection of essays on the subject of her religion. Among other things, she outs herself as a regular church-going Anglican.

This is not cool. Being Buddhist is cool. Being a Mother Earth pantheist is cool. Being agnostic is ho hum, but perfectly acceptable, if not the norm, among Canadian literati. But Anglican? “I’m still not sure why, at the age of thirty-nine, I started sneaking into an Anglican mass on Sunday mornings,” she writes. I was so terrified of being seen doing this supremely uncool thing by anyone I knew that I travelled blocks out of my way to get there, walking briskly, head down, just short of ducking behind trees.”

Raised a Presbyterian, the Toronto-based Miller began a “long slouch toward atheism” in her late teens. In her 30s, she reversed direction and eventually found a spiritual home in the Anglican Church - where, at 39, she was confirmed in 1990.

Holy Writ is an apology, in the classic sense of an explanation or defence, for this move. Miller also sent a questionnaire to 16 writers published by Porcupine’s Quill (the publisher of her short story collections) asking them about their religious affiliations and the connection, if any, between such affiliations and their writing. In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention I was one of those writers - the reader may find a couple of my philosophical gems quoted by Miller. She also prints in full four essays sent back by Melinda Burns, Robyn Sarah, Antanas Sileika and John Metcalf.

These essays, and the quoted remarks of her correspondents, certainly do add liveliness and diversity to the book. I like Russell Smith’s robust statement of 100 per cent unabashed materialism. “I am hostile not just to organized religion but to any form of spiritual belief … to any talk of spirit or chakras or life-force or gods or fairies or elves,” he pronounces.

Then there’s the acute observation of Elizabeth Hay, who was born into a Quaker family. “You can’t go to a Quaker meeting without shaking everybody’s hands afterward,” she comments. “Supposedly the most direct form of communion with God, unmediated by a minister, it makes you most aware of the people around you.” This reminds me of Annie Dillard’s comment that she became a Catholic because nobody at Mass asked her to bake a casserole.

But the book is Miller’s show. The belief prompting it is summarized succinctly in her introduction: “I may be wrong, but I believe we are by nature worshipful creatures. We sense in our bones that there is something bigger and better than our immediate circumstances, and we want to know and be known by it. I believe the creative impulse, the desire to make beautiful things, is a desire to be at one with our Creator.”

The relationship between creativity and spirituality lies at the core of Miller’s faith. “Writing stories is the way I pray,” she notes early on - a statement repeated a number of times throughout the book.

Miller reaches for analogy to bolster this statement. “To search for the right word is to search for the word that tells the truth,” she writes. “And the struggle to portray a character honestly, that is, free of cliché or stereotype, is a struggle to love that character.” Moreover, “the attitude of writing, with its surrender of conscious control and its willingness to wait in silence, is identical to the attitude of prayer.”

Art, it must be said, seems to have an inner coherence that suggests a larger coherence in the world that produced it. It is not just as a believer in God but as a writer that Miller can say, “I tend to look for connection, order and meaning.” Or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “We love whatever affirms, connects, preserves; and dislike what scatters or pulls down.”

Miller’s form of Christianity, in fact, bears close relationship to the faith of such 19th century men of letters as Emerson and Matthew Arnold, a faith that looked to Christ but could not stomach the Christian creed. Arnold’s Literature And Dogma, with its belief in “something not ourselves that maketh for righteousness,” echoes Miller’s craving for “something bigger and better than our immediate circumstances.”

Arnold prefaced his book with the flat statement, “Miracles do not happen,” and in this respect Miller also follows suit. “The accounts of (Christ) walking on water and stretching a loaf of bread to feed thousands are fables as far as I’m concerned,” she writes. “They have great symbolic value; but to take them literally is to render Christ a magician or party trickster.” This is far too glib. In fact, to take these accounts literally is to render Christ the opposite of a magician or trickster. The latter deal in illusion through sleight of hand, which is not what Miller, presumably, is talking about. Nor do these accounts, taken literally, suggest that Christ is acting as a magician in the occult sense - that is, as someone achieving supernatural results through the recitation of certain formulas or the performance of certain prescribed actions.

There is no doubt, however, that miracles are a scandal to many readers of the New Testament. Miller would prefer to finesse this scandal, and the whole problem of the historicity of the Gospels in general, by regarding Christ in the light of a fictional character. “Reading His story as fiction is the way to make it my own. And to make it real,” is how she puts it. “Faith and remembrance,” she writes. “With the imagination, they form a kind of trinity. And they’re all we ever have, I suppose, in the end. No matter what in fact happened.”

But is she serious about the second member of that trinity, remembrance? If so, then it matters a great deal whether remembrance is true. We all know that memory is tricky - but on the basic trustworthiness of that faculty we base a great deal, in law and politics, and in every area of life. “What in fact happened” matters terribly, and not just in the reading of the Gospels.

It won’t do to get around the question of remembrance by making everything fictional, as the sacrament of the Eucharist becomes, in Miller’s view, “a tiny, symbolic meal.” If the Eucharist is a symbol, Flannery O’Connor said, to hell with it. If the resurrection never happened except on a symbolic level, then to hell with Christianity. Russell Smith’s good “old-fashioned rationalist mechanistatheist” views are more palatable than Miller’s “agnosticism with a spritz of Jesus.”

To make everything a fiction has the curious effect of making fiction less interesting, since fiction most comes alive when it points to something beyond fiction. After a while, Miller’s frequent references to the act of writing begin to weary the reader, much as do the enthusiasms of a health nut talking about diet and exercise. And Christ as somebody’s fictional character always seems less compelling than what is on offer, for better or worse, in the Gospels.

“I am a Christian because I am imaginatively hooked on the story of a convicted felon who not only gets away with it, but goes on to be an all-time international bestseller,” Miller writes. “What is his crime? Growing up. Finding his voice, telling the truth with it and not giving a damn what anybody thinks.”

Is Jesus Christ as a first century Norman Mailer really that fascinating?

Star literary critic Philip Marchand appears weekly.

Montreal Gazette — Holy Writ

A mere 150 pages and penned with a brisk, without-fuss elegance, K. D. Miller’s Holy Writ is one of the few brave books I’m aware of that tries to face down the fearsome question of spirituality’s role in creativity.

Yes, the topic has a certain dryness (it’s certainly nowhere as smart-ass as, say, a disquisition on Jesus’s sexual habits), and yes, readers (who for the most part are a secular and suspicious bunch) will dislike having their noses pushed into devotional matters. But believe me when I say that rarely has so unfashionable a project been so stylishly executed. Miller brings to the subject such an acute sense of mischief and irreverence that Holy Writ deserves an immediate seat among the best Canadian books of the year.

Not exactly a stalwart of faith - she once dreamed of writing a story called Escape From the Planet of the Churchgoers - Miller finds much in religion that is foolish and feckless. And it’s precisely this skeptical distance from any official creed that furnishes the book with its intellectual excitement and element of surprise.

“Holy Writ is neither a theological treatise nor an ad for Jesus,” she writes. “I lack the mental muscle for the former, and as for the latter, haven’t an evangelical bone in my body.”

What we don’t get, in other words, is Christian partisanship and theological extremism. What we do get is a bid to disinter - as colloquially, anecdotally and amusingly as possible - a few freestanding truths from the doctrinal heap of organized religion.

Miller addresses her writing routine (she hits her desk at 5:20 each morning) and the misery of knocking off for a 9-to-5 job (“in the morning on the bus I look at faces and wonder if every one of them is masking some tiny grief for a garden, a child, a book or a musical instrument they’ve had to abandon till the end of the day”). Included, as well, are solid pieces on God’s authorial quirks, the Old Testament’s literary merits, celibacy and Emily Bronté. Add to that a splendid meditation on her “theistic personality” and a persuasive defense of her churchgoing. Moreover, Miller peppers her prose with so many snappy one-liners one can’t help but see her as some smart-talking gumshoe snooping around for criminal traces of transcendence:

“After all, what do I have to go one? An army of Christian soldiers renowned for shooting themselves in the foot. A gut feeling that I call belief but that many a psychiatrist would dismiss as wish-fulfillment. And finally a book in whose pages I find accounts of murder, rape and ethnic cleansing comparable to anything I’ll read in the newspaper, and carried out in the name of a God who most often resembles Hannibal Lecter in a Santa suit.”

Interestingly, Miller also trawls for help. Sixteen of Porcupine’s Quill’s best and brightest answer a questionnaire and are quoted in a terrific chapter called An Amazed Witnessing. Four of them - Robyn Sarah, Antanas Sileika, Melinda Burns and John Metcalf - have their answers reprinted outright as separate chapters.

Miller deserves high marks for this last gambit. It flatters her determination to buck a preferred path of inquiry. You can trust your life to any number of roads, seems Miller’s point, and reach exactly the same destination.

But what is most attractive about Holy Writ is the questioning certainty it is premised on, where doubt - not defiance, not cynicism, not outrage - becomes part of Miller’s moral rigour (she labels herself as a “Christian atheist.”) what evemerges is a portrait of an extraordinar;y decency: a sensibility which, if still flustered by her own creativity, is maybe a little less baffled by its origins.

Something there is in our current literature that doesn’t love religion: we ration, put a small margin of our attention for works of spiritual curiosity. But if CanLit ever becomes safe again for writers to crew their ecclesiastical craft - where, in the words of critic James Woods, writers can “act skeptically but perform religiously” - we could have Miller’s good offices to thank.

- Carmine Stamino, Montreal Gazette, Sept. 2001

Tapestry — Holy Writ

Out of the “God” closet

In the early 1980s, the short-story writer K. D. Miller found herself confessing to a friend that she was a “latent Christian”. By that she meant not that she was a believer, but that her world-view was essentially Judeo-Christian. As her firend started to recoil, she hastened to reassure him, “But I am still an atheist”. Several years later, when she did return to the church, she did so surreptitiously.

But K. D. Miller is no longer an atheist, ans she is no longer in hiding. And in her new book, “Holy Writ: A Writer Reflects on Creation and Inspiration”, she explores the connection between her creativity. In a funny, honest, earthy conversation, host Don Hill talks to K. D. Miller about her new book.

Listen to the broadcast (requires RealMedia Player)

The United Church Observer — Holy Writ

I suffered a severe case of “writer's envy” as I read Miller’s book. To say that she is refreshing, original, or direct are all understatements. Miller’s spiritual integrity cuts through pious platitudes and quick-fix faith fluff like an icebreaker on a long-lost frozen ocean called religion.

This is a book for the seeker/writer who lives in all of us, a collection of Miller's essays and work from authors who are not, as one chapter title puts it, “Coward souls.” They believe and do not believe with a passion that gives us new creation from what was once dust and destruction.

In her opening piece Miller names writing as her “Morning Prayer.” And lest you start to drift off into bliss land, let me ground you with her words: “Writing stories is the way I pray … to search for the right word is to search for the word that tells the truth.” Later she writes: “Prayer, whatever form it takes, is not Prozac. And I know I'm doing my best work when what appears on the page scares the hell out of me.”

If you are looking for a nice feel-good, means-well book this summer to keep you from the deep water, this is not it. If, however, you are looking and longing for something from someone who is not afraid to get real about religion, faith and things spiritual, then I dare you to do the deep waters with these writers. Holy Writ is not “an ad for Jesus,” nor it is a self-help, writer’s manual. What it is, I think, is an invitation to face questions like “What does popularity have to do with the love of God?” Enjoy is probably not the right word to bring you to this book, but then again, if you enjoy the wonder, risk and curiosity of an intimate faith, this book will set your words free to become holy writ.

Karen E. Toole, The United Church Observer