Douglas (Herschel) Glover Biography

Most of what I write comes from a place so personal, so intimate, and so painful that I cannot write about it except as fiction. Elements of my style—the obsessive repetitions, the phantasmagoria of images, allusions and comparisons, the mix of comedy and violence, the grotesquerie which is the joke of horror—were always present, but have been reinforced by reading the novels of the late great French Canadian writer Hubert Aquin, especially Blackout and The Antiphonary. Nabokov lurks somewhere. And back of Nabokov the ghost of Viktor Shklovsky telling us to make things "strange."

I like to write stories that touch the mind and the heart at once, stories that don't necessarily mean but which nonetheless refer to the world's miraculous complexity, its unexpectedness, its divine playfulness. I write about love and memory, the weight of memory and history and the multifarious messages of culture and the past which run through us and, briefly, use us before passing on. What is the self that's being used and what is using it? I ask. And how do lovers love? Why are people cruel? And whither the words, when the wind blows … ?

As an individual I find it difficult to separate the rhetorical from the personal. I am a nomad, an expatriate, a wandering Canadian (which is worse than just being a Canadian, I am doubly displaced, a Canadian squared), and I can no longer tell whether that's because I am a writer or why I am a writer. Some mornings I wake up and it's a problem. Some mornings I wake up and it's a dance.

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