Morwyn Brebner: Hey 45

I think that writing comes from a desire to complete some kind of emotional circuit; or making something gives you a sense of emotional completion, celebrated Canadian playwright Morwyn Brebner told Toronto Life in 2005. You look around the world and you feel like you’re not represented. You see things a certain way and you have a drive to be known-to hide and to be known at the same time. And I think writing fiction is about that, because you can be incredibly confessional and still make things up, and nobody knows which is which. You can reveal yourself while hiding behind the guise of fiction. Brebner’s newest work of fiction fulfills this condition exactly. Hey 45 is a hybrid book that pairs her captivating novella with found photographs of high-school sports, taken from the Middletown Press, a Connecticut newspaper. These photos obliquely illustrate Brebner’s funny and moving tale of family, adolescence and shame.