Skin: Stories by Catherine Bush
Reviewed by Emily Weedon
Catherine Bush’s prose in Skin is sleek and immersive. Bush is a masterful storyteller with an utterly confident style that allows a reader to disappear inside her words and worlds, like slipping into body temperature water. You don’t even notice the moment you go under, nor the shift in pressure against your skin.
Her opening story, “Benevolence: An East Village Story” draws us into a world so complete that we are permitted to forget it is constructed, and tightly so. There are shades of Nabokov in the opener, though a different set of meanings and suppositions emerge as a teacher and her student who enter into an arrangement are an older woman and a younger man. Chris and Ellen are different poles in their lives, both on the threshold of change. He is 18, she is almost 30, and the gulf is massive. In other ways they are akin. Bush keeps her hand on the dials of desire, caution, longing, loneliness, backed with a spine of a need and desire to do what is right and good, as suggested by the title. One page, one paragraph to the next, it is unclear where things will wind up, which I really appreciated - there is no second guessing this writer.
Eventually I stopped trying to. I was allowed, by the power of her narrative to let go and be drawn along into the complete world of New York City in the 1980s. You can still smell the lingering cigarette smoke tinging the air of dives and galleries where her characters drink, perform, show art, love. There is a glow to it, a golden-brown nostalgia tinted by the recently passed 1970s and studded with the plastic and spikes and safety pin punk of the surly 80s.
These days, being surely drawn inside a story to forget the world around, are a potent reward in the glare of sick screens and global events which render us powerless. As realizations and aches wash through the prose, it grows into a clean, crisp piece of transcendent storytelling that made me want to slow down. It made me want to savour, and delay coming to the end as long as I possibly could. I love as well that Benevolence is a long short story, a little shy of a novella proper, but in the telling exactly as long as it should be, not one word too long or too short. Why should everything fit inside 3000 words or 90 minutes of screen time?
Many of the other stories in Skin are very short — two pages at times, perfect for reading right before sleep, a primer for dreams. In “Touch”, Bush captures the bittersweet moments of the beginning of the end at the start of the pandemic, made more poignant by our knowing what was to come.
One of my other standout favourites is “The International Headache Conference” which is both flat out hilarious and touching. The humour comes through in small observations like a cat on a lap “prick-prick-prick” which captures the experience of happy-cat-on-lap utterly. And situational comedy, through the two agonized souls suffering from their own headaches, together in a room in their suffering, trench mates in a war that rages in their heads and therefore forever separate.
“Bush, however, is mightily accomplished with five novels to stand on. It helps that she is brilliant.”
Writing short stories in Canada is not for the faint of heart: they are increasingly tough to pitch through gatekeepers in the industry and while championed by some, I read them maligned by others. (Who hurt you, you short story detractors?) I’m told that one must be very accomplished to even pitch short stories these days. Bush, however, is mightily accomplished with five novels to stand on. It helps that she is brilliant. She deploys her short stories with soulful brevity, proving that distilled works of art like the short stories of Skin speak to the very ephemerality of life. These moments we live, these droplets on skin, these little breaths. Wildly recommended.
About the Author
Catherine Bush is the author of five novels. Her work has been critically acclaimed, published internationally, and shortlisted for numerous awards. Her most recent novel, Blaze Island, was a Globe and Mail and Writers’ Trust of Canada Best Book of the Year, and the Hamilton Reads 2021 Selection. Her other novels include the Canada Reads longlisted Accusation; the Trillium Award shortlisted Claire's Head; the national bestselling The Rules of Engagement, which was also named a New York Times Notable Book and a L.A. Times Best Book of the Year; and Minus Time, shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Award. An Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, she lives in Toronto and in an old schoolhouse in Eastern Ontario.
About the Reviewer
Emily Weedon is a CSA award-winning screenwriter and author of the dystopian debut Autokrator, with Cormorant Books. Her forthcoming novel Hemo Sapiens will be published in September 2025, with Dundurn Press. https://emilyweedon.com/
Book Details
Publisher : Goose Lane Editions (April 22 2025)
Language : English
Paperback : 50 pages
ISBN-10 : 1773104314
ISBN-13 : 978-1773104317