If I Were Me

Clark Blaise was born in Fargo, North Dakota in 1940 to French and Anglo-Canadian parents. He moved often during his childhood years as the family followed the usually disastrous fortunes of his furniture salesman father which have been chronicled in the author’s ‘post-modern’ autobiography I Had a Father. Blaise graduated from Denison University in Granville, Ohio in 1961 and then went to Harvard to study writing with Bernard Malamud. In 1962 he moved to attend the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, where he met and married the well-known American novelist, Bharati Mukherjee. He emigrated to Montreal in 1966 in search of his French-Canadian roots and taught for the next twelve years at Sir George Williams University where he established what is now Concordia’s creative writing workshop. After a brief period at York University, Clark and Bharati moved back to the United States where Clark took up the position of Director of the prestigious International Writing School at Iowa.Blaise’s brilliance was immediately obvious in his first two books of stories A North American Education and Tribal Justice. After more than twenty years they remain monumental in the world of the Canadian Short Story. The stories that make up the novel If I Were Me are written in a different style and cadence, sombre and demanding work which will enlarge Blaise’s already stellar reputation. Barry Cameron writing in Canadian Writers and Their Works concludes his article with the following words: ‘Blaise has given us, in my judgement, some of the most rewarding books of fiction ever produced in Canada.