Watermark

by Christy Ann Conlin

Overview

From Christy Ann Conlin, the critically acclaimed and award winning author of Heave, comes a breathtaking and unforgettable collection about how the briefest moment can shape us forever.

In these evocative and startling stories, we meet people navigating the elemental forces of love, life, and death. An insomniac on Halifax’s moonlit streets. A runaway bride. A young woman accused of a brutal murder. A man who must live in exile if he is to live at all. A woman coming to terms with her eccentric childhood in a cult on the Bay of Fundy shore.

A master of North Atlantic Gothic, Christy Ann Conlin expertly navigates our conflicting self-perceptions, especially in moments of crisis. She illuminates the personality of land and ocean, charts the pull of the past on the present, and reveals the wildness inside each of us. These stories offer a gallery of both gritty and lyrical portraits, each unmasking the myth and mystery of the everyday.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781487003432
Publisher:	House of Anansi Press
Publication date:	08/13/2019
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

CHRISTY ANN CONLIN is the author of two acclaimed novels, Heave and The Memento. She is also the author of the short-fiction collection Watermark, which was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the Forest of Reading Evergreen Award. Heave was a national bestseller, a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book, and a finalist for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the Thomas H. Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, and the Dartmouth Book Award. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals including Best Canadian Stories, Brick, Geist, Room, and Numéro Cinq. Her short fiction has also been longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the American Short Fiction Prize. Her radio broadcast work includes co-creating and hosting CBC Fear Itself, a national summer radio series. Christy Ann studied theatre at the University of Ottawa and screenplay writing at the University of British Columbia. She was born and raised in seaside Nova Scotia, where she still resides.

Read an Excerpt

We moved to the North Mountain the summer I was four and my mother was pregnant with my little sister, Morgaine. My father made the house himself and we lived in a tent pitched in a meadow surrounded by forest while he built it. My mother told me this. I remember the tent was green and there was a path through the meadow to the house. I loved this path, which cut through the tall grasses. In the meadow, purple vetch threaded up through the grass stems and touched my mother’s round belly. The grasses grew so high they were taller than me, but I could look up and see how they touched my mother’s breasts. I drew pictures on her stomach with icing coloured with beet and carrot juice. Then she’d let me lick it off. The acreage was mostly forest, except for the clearing around a large, rickety barn. They put a sandbox in the clearing where I played with my pail and shovel.

There was also a path through the woods. It was a twisting path my father had cut through the pines to the clifftop jutting out from the trees over the Bay of Fundy. He called the path “the labyrinth of life.” It snaked through the forest to the perilous brink of the cliff. The path was difficult and winding, with sharp turns where you had to slow down. My father said this was the main purpose of his pathway: everyone was forced to stop hurrying and consider their journey as it unfolded. People needed to be open to sudden turns and trust the way ahead. Being in the moment would take over and time would lose meaning. Before you knew it, you would arrive at your destination, and le voilà, enlightenment, or éclaircissement, as the French Acadians say, when you reached the bench of wisdom! Every age had an awakening, her father said, with those like him, who were called to be its prophets, ushering in the awakening. On a clear day you could stand at the edge of the cliff and see all the way down the bay toward Maine, which was four exhilarating hours away by boat as the crow flies or a long, boring two-day drive by car, as my father explained.

The bench at the edge of the crumbling cliff my father had made from driftwood, which the elements had cast to a silvery white. He encouraged us to sit on the bench and look for water nymphs. He insisted people had been spotting them in the bay for generations. They swam in with the tide, he proclaimed, as though he were a marine biologist with a peculiar specialization.

Table of Contents

Eyeball in Your Throat 1

Dead Time 23

The Diplomat 69

Full Bleed 89

Occlusion 115

Late and Soon 147

Back Fat 165

Insomnis 203

Desire Lines 213

Beyond All Things Is the Sea 249

The Flying Squirrel Sermon 265

Acknowledgements 301

What People are Saying About This

Lisa Moore

Watermark is propulsive. These linked stories are gothic dark and sparking with brilliant twists. Characters so vivid you can hear their voices, feel their pulse. Here are deep psychological fractures and betrayals, loss and longing. Adventure and abandon. Conlin’s characters are a splendidly complex; they are sometimes prisoners, and sometimes breaking free. This book is a dangerous joyride.

Annabel Lyon

Conlin’s characters are fierce, lonely, dangerous, and wild. This is the best short story collection I've read in years.

From the Publisher

PRAISE FOR CHRISTY ANN CONLIN AND WATERMARK

Finalist, Danuta Gleed Literary Award
Finalist, Forest of Reading Evergreen Award
Gold Medal, The Miramichi Reader’s “The Very Best!” Book Awards: Best Short Fiction

“Christy Ann Conlin’s stories achieve a dizzying balance of light and dark — the magical with the murderous. Over and over again, Conlin masterfully depicts the lush, somehow uncanny splendour of high summer only to chill us with a counterbalancing night world of hidden creatures and terrible human secrets. The results make for mesmerizing reading.” — Lynn Coady, author of The Antagonist and Hellgoing

“Watermark is propulsive. These linked stories are gothic dark and sparking with brilliant twists. Characters so vivid you can hear their voices, feel their pulse. Here are deep psychological fractures and betrayals, loss and longing. Adventure and abandon. Conlin’s characters are splendidly complex; they are sometimes prisoners, and sometimes breaking free. This book is a dangerous joyride.” — Lisa Moore, author of Caught and Something for Everyone

“Watermark takes us beyond mere appearances, offering intimate portraits of characters you quickly realize you only think you know. These are powerful stories that tell secrets — that are interested in, and unafraid of, all the messy details that make up a person, a life.” — Johanna Skibsrud, author of Quartet for the End of Time and The Sentimentalists

“A sometimes-mystical Gothic in which the horror arises from those closest to us … Watermark is taut, sharp writing.” — Globe and Mail

“Eerie and haunting stories.” — Toronto Star

“Conlin’s characters are fierce, lonely, dangerous, and wild. This is the best short story collection I've read in years.” — Annabel Lyon, author of Oxygen and The Golden Mean

“From the Gothic heart of the Annapolis Valley to the dreamlike shores of British Columbia, these stories sparkle with wickedness and dark beauty, reminding us again that Conlin is one of Canada’s most daring and original writers. The range and breadth of style and voice in this collection is astonishing, and her gift for the uncanny is as assured as her masterful writing. Whether it’s through the skewed vision of a heartbroken widower or the vivid delusions of an unrepentant killer, she presents a moving and uncompromising exploration of the deep undercurrents of the human psyche, and the tricks that our minds play — on ourselves and each other.” — Kerry Lee Powell, author of Willem de Kooning’s Paintbrush

“If you have faith in Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, or if you watch Werner Herzog’s films with a sense of awe, then Christy Ann Conlin’s collection of stories is for you. Equal parts lovely and loathsome, terrifying and tender, this elemental book works with the rawest of raw materials. This is honest and revealing writing from an artist at the top of her craft.” — Alexander MacLeod, author of Light Lifting

“Rich with humanity and atmosphere.” — Booklist

“These stories are deliciously discomfiting … Suspenseful excavations of family secrets, as smart as they are creepy.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Riveting, disturbing tales … Watermark has enough to fascinate and scare throughout.” — Winnipeg Free Press

“A stunning, highly novelistic collection of stories … In Watermark, Conlin, in keeping with her two previous novels, depicts richly complex characters intersecting with memory and place … Conlin’s language, concise and gorgeously vibrant, seduces readers into her detailed, empathetically imagined worlds … From its first lines, Watermark, a collection like no other, will seize your heart and refuse to let go.” — Hamilton Review of Books

“There is purpose, precision, and an incredible haunting darkness, all of which are the reasons why Watermark is such a pleasure to read from cover to cover.” — Pickle Me This

PRAISE FOR CHRISTY ANN CONLIN AND THE MEMENTO:

“Nothing short of dazzling … The dizzying speed of revelation produces, in its masterly way, the effect of what T. S. Eliot calls ‘genuine poetry.’” — Toronto Review of Books

“The Memento is a classic spine-tingler, centering on a haunted house and children hovering between evil and innocence, power and vulnerability … Conlin’s novel lingers on relationships between children and servants, children and their (often absent) parents, and elderly relatives — all within the span of one sultry, sordid summer.” — Globe and Mail

“The Memento is a novel of the uncanny, drawing together a coming-of-age story with elements of ghost stories, haunted houses, family curses, and folk tales. It’s a dizzying feat … a masterful accomplishment from a powerful writer.” — Toronto Star

“Expertly weaving gothic elements, maritime superstition, and the lingering effects of grief, The Memento is an eerie return to form — ceaselessly tense until the last page.” — The Coast

“Trust in Christy Ann Conlin. Follow the mythic thread she has expertly woven through this rich labyrinth of a novel and you will be transported. This is the work of a master storyteller operating at the height of her craft.” — Alexander MacLeod, author of Light Lifting

“In this exuberant novel, Christy Ann Conlin offers us a grab bag of gothic delights — a creaking groaning mansion, a precocious twelfth-century-born twelve-year-old, tea parties with the dead, and an unnerving number of fleeting darting “somethings” only glimpsed in the corner of your eye. Wildly imaginative.” — Caroline Adderson, author of Ellen in Pieces

PRAISE FOR CHRISTY ANN CONLIN AND HEAVE:

Finalist, Amazon.ca First Novel
Finalist, Thomas H. Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award
Finalist, Dartmouth Book Award
A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book

“Simply a marvellous book … The writing is fine, smooth, and tight. This is an honest tale of family love and hate … Heave is a powerful book. It’s hard to believe this author is just beginning. I can’t wait to see what she accomplishes next.” — Globe and Mail

“One book I will not be passing on is Nova Scotian writer Christy Ann Conlin’s marvellous first novel Heave. This book prompted a whelp of excitement from me.” — National Post

“[Conlin] has produced an extraordinary book … that won’t soon be forgotten.” — Toronto Star

“Conlin proves herself a keen observer of family life, adept at teasing out the loose ends and following them to uncover the lumps and knots in the fabric.” — Hamilton Spectator

“Highly visual and visceral prose … Right from the first line Heave is a crazy ride.” — Halifax Daily News

Lynn Coady

Christy Ann Conlin’s stories achieve a dizzying balance of light and dark — the magical with the murderous. Over and over again, Conlin masterfully depicts the lush, somehow uncanny splendour of high summer only to chill us with a counterbalancing night world of hidden creatures and terrible human secrets. The results make for mesmerizing reading.

Johanna Skibsrud

Watermark takes us beyond mere appearances, offering intimate portraits of characters you quickly realize you only think you know. These are powerful stories that tell secrets — that are interested in, and unafraid of, all the messy details that make up a person, a life.

Editorial Reviews

Riveting, disturbing tales … Watermark has enough to fascinate and scare throughout.

Winnipeg Free Press

Eerie and haunting stories.

Toronto Star

Rich with humanity and atmosphere.

Booklist

A sometimes-mystical Gothic in which the horror arises from those closest to us . . . Watermark is taut, sharp writing.

Globe and Mail

2019-05-14
In these moody tales mingling family sagas with the fantastic, almost everyone in rural Nova Scotia seems to have a skeleton (or a mermaid) in their closet.

The author of two gothic novels, Conlin (The Memento, 2016, etc.) shows her flair for crafting mystery and suspense even on the smaller stage of the short story. "Dead time" peels back the layers of 15-year-old Isabella's insistence that she didn't murder her boyfriend's ex-girlfriend. A widower carrying on his late wife's tradition of taking her elderly relatives on an annual outing winds up delivering them to an unexpected end in "Full Bleed." And in "The Flying Squirrel Sermon," in the wake of her grandmother's disappearance, a woman travels to her ancestral home to piece together the mystery of "women evanescing." While these stories are deliciously discomfiting, when Conlin hews closer to realism she captures the true horrors of family dysfunction. This is especially true in "Eyeball in Your Throat," which chronicles Lucy's perpetual disapproval of her daughter, Deidre, who flirts with drugs and alcohol and winds up in rehab—only to reveal on the last page just how self-injurious Lucy's lifetime of disappointment is. Conlin has cleareyed sympathy for women trying to get over breast cancer, beastly husbands, sexual abuse, and tragic childhoods; consequently, there aren't many happy endings, though the prose soars effortlessly throughout. When Eve in "Desire Lines" unexpectedly hears from her hippie father, whose negligence led to her 4-year-old sister's death 30 years earlier, she considers the nature of memory, how "even as adults we never stop trying to complete the childhood story. We never stop trying to find the ending."

Suspenseful excavations of family secrets, as smart as they are creepy.

Kirkus Reviews