Features
Central Europe Theme of Short Stories
College of Arts prof to give reading from new book Dec. 3 in Waterloo
BY TERESA PITMAN
When he first began gathering up his short stories for his newest book, A Grave in the Air, Prof. Stephen Henighan of the School of Languages and Literatures didn't immediately recognize the Central European theme that ultimately became the focus of the collection.
“It was originally intended to be a longer book,” says Henighan, “but the editor pointed out that several of the stories had that theme, and by removing the ones that didn't fit, we ended up with a strong and more focused book.”
Why Central Europe? “It's a good place to look at the relationships between individuals and history, and how historical events have shaped people's lives,” he says. “The stories also look at how that is changing, how the fluidity of the modern world is putting to the test that relationship.”
He emphasizes, though, that “first and foremost, they're just stories.”
Don't let the word “just” fool you. Henighan's stories — this collection is his third, and he's also published three novels — are widely acclaimed, and he was nominated for the 2002 Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction for his book When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing.
His publisher describes A Grave in the Air this way: “Whether moving readers to reflection or providing engaging entertainment, Henighan's prose is sharp and clean. Once again, he is as instructive in his understanding of peoples and cultures as he is instinctive in taking us inside the worlds that shape them.”
Henighan notes that the book “has kind of a chronological sweep. The first story is about my great-grandfather's attempt to prevent the outbreak of the Second World War. He had this idea that he'd take a soccer team to tour Austria and Germany in 1939, with the hope that the ‘sporting spirit' would prevail and war could be prevented.” Henighan adds that his family has a long history of idealistic projects that ended in failure.
That story is balanced by the final one in the collection, which looks at the war in Bosnia and considers how the idea of belonging to a particular culture has changed now that people tend to move so freely and so often from one country to another.
These topics appear in Henighan's writing because he is “more attracted to the edges of things, the margins, not the middle of the road. I'm interested in the shapes of European culture when it's pushed to the edge. That stimulates me.”
For Henighan, writing is simply essential. “I write every morning before I come in to work. Otherwise I'd go crazy. I feel like I'm going flat out the whole two hours. Then when I think the story is finished, I'll put it away for three months, and when I take it back out, I usually realize it's not finished at all. Some of the stories in this collection have been revised many times over a period of years.”
As he works to promote this newly released collection, Henighan, who had harsh words for Canadian literature and literary institutions in When Words Deny the World, notes that it's “much harder to get reviews of Canadian fiction today than it was even three or four years ago. There are fewer publishers and fewer review outlets, so you get less varied responses.”
He's done a number of readings from the book at events in Guelph, Toronto, Ottawa and other locations and has more scheduled, including one to be hosted by Words Worth Books Dec. 3 at 7:30 p.m. at Knox Church in Waterloo.
Currently, Henighan is working on a novel set in Guatemala that was inspired by the five months he spent in that country co-ordinating Guelph's semester abroad there.
Inspiration, he points out, is an odd thing. “You can go to some fascinating place for six months and write nothing about it, or you can go somewhere that seems less interesting for 10 days and end up writing three stories based on that.”
Even with all his other accomplishments and interests, writing fiction remains central to Henighan's life. No matter how immersed he gets in teaching Spanish-American literature and culture or doing research or translation, he always cones back to his fiction, he says.
“It's always the core. Everything else spins off from that.”