Story House - Softcover

Now recognized by both reviewers and readers as one of Canada’s prose masters, Timothy Taylor took a somewhat unexpected route in establishing his writing career. After completing an economics degree at the University of Alberta and an MBA at the Queen’s School of Business, Taylor worked for four years in commercial banking, during which time he arranged to transfer from Toronto to his childhood home of Vancouver, where he still lives. However, Taylor had known since he was a child that he wanted to write, so he made the decision to leave his job and try to make a go of it, establishing his own Pacific fisheries consulting practice in order to give his new freelance writing career some stability.

As Taylor mentioned in one interview, it was all part of the slow process of developing himself as an author: “It’s difficult to have serious writing ambitions and run your own business at the same time. Both pursuits deserve your full attention, but writing won’t return a living wage at the beginning, so there are some hard realities.” Yet Taylor also feels that his writing has benefited immensely from his work in other areas: “I needed exposure to people in different fields with problems and issues and objectives outside the world of writing. If I had tried to start a novel in my mid-20s after studying creative writing, I can’t imagine what I would have written about. I admire people who succeed this way and, recently, I’ve met quite a few.”

During this time, Taylor began writing his first novel, Stanley Park, and also worked on his short fiction, which began to be accepted by literary magazines. This turned out to be a valuable step for Taylor, as he began to feel a part of the literary community. As he said in one interview, “For me, literary magazines were really important to how I ended up making contact with anybody whatsoever. Because, I think, for beginning writers the only dialogue you have going on about your writing – where anybody will actually talk to you – is the letter exchange you have with lit mags ... And that conversation – you writing and submitting, and them writing you back this letter – represents this small dialogue, and it’s the only one you’re having.” The time spent perfecting his short stories came to fruition when Taylor’s “Doves of Townsend” was awarded the Journey Prize (Canada’s equivalent of the O. Henry Award) in 2000. Remarkably, he had two other stories on the competition’s final shortlist that year, and was the first Canadian writer ever to have three short stories up for the prize and included in the Journey Prize Anthology.

The following year, Stanley Park was published as part of Knopf Canada’s New Face of Fiction program, to outstanding reviews. (It was at this point that Taylor was finally able to wrap up his consultancy business and write full time.) The novel follows a food artiste named Jeremy Papier into the inner sanctums of Vancouver’s culinary scene, and Jeremy’s father, an anthropologist who camps out in Stanley Park to study homelessness, into the city’s underbelly. As one reviewer commented, “Taylor may be on his way to becoming the head chef of Canadian Letters.” Stanley Park was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, the City of Vancouver Book Award, the Ethel Wilson Award and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

That novel was followed by Silent Cruise, a spectacular collection of short fiction, in 2002, and Story House in 2006. Today, Timothy Taylor continues to publish stories in Canada’s leading literary magazines, as well as writing travel, humour, arts and business pieces for various periodicals and writing for film.
From the Hardcover edition.

17 years before the ­beginning
Pogey remembered them appearing from nowhere. Ghosting into view. He remembered them like a punch he hadn’t seen coming: only later, when consciousness had ­returned.

He didn’t hear the car arrive on the street above, didn’t hear the gym door open up top, or feet on the stairs. He was working target mitts with one of the neighbourhood kids. ­One-­two. ­One-­two-­hook. ­One-­two-­hook with an uppercut. Again. Gloves slapping home in the basement air. The bell marked the round. Pogey turned. And there they ­were.

“Hey,” said the blond one. Chunky, with the colouring of indulgence, of a life spent on pleasure boats: light tan, ­sun-­bleached crewcut. Easy on the feet too, as if he’d been in the room before. As if he knew its dimensions and ­possibilities.

Pogey crossed over to the ropes. “Lessons are five an hour. ­Drop-­in fee is a buck.”

“We’re here to fight,” the kid said. “Each other.”

Fourteen, fifteen years old. Not train, not spar. ­Fight.

“You got a name, killer?” Pogey asked ­him.

Graham ­Gordon.

“And you?” Pogey said to the other. A different sort altogether, this one. Asian maybe. Lean, ­bony-­shouldered with long dark hair and hard eyes. With insolence etched in the smirk lines, in the bad posture. And yet that same quality, unhurried possession of his particular space such that Pogey found he did not dispute the ­claim.

“Elliot,” Graham said. “My brother.”

Which elicited a snort from the ­dark-­haired one as he dropped his gym bag and squinted around the room like a dubious matchmaker. “­Half-­brother,” he ­said.

Pogey took the stairs in twos. He found the third party to this transaction leaning against the front fender of a ­late-­model Lincoln Town Car, scanning the facade of the building. A ­six-­footer. Older than Pogey expected, maybe seventy, with a faintly squandered feel about him. Houndstooth jacket, ascot, white shirt, cufflinks like Scrabble tiles: one G, one E. ­Cigarette-­stained fingers and ­all-­concealing sunglasses intended for the unforgiving light of glaciers. These lenses lowered heavily on Pogey as he emerged, affording him the special discomfort of seeing, in reflection, precisely what was under hard ­appraisal.

“You’re Nealon,” the man ­said.

Pogey nodded. ­Squinted.

“Packer Gordon,” he said finally, lifting himself from the car and extending a hand. “I take it you’ve met my boys.”

First thing Gordon wanted to know was why there were clamshells littering the front steps and sidewalk in front of the building. The detail seemed to annoy ­him.

Crows, Pogey said. Crows that for reasons he couldn’t explain favoured 55 East Mary Street over all other buildings in the neighbourhood. For strutting and making a racket, yes. But also for the killing of dozens of razor clams daily, which they dropped from the eaves to shatter on the steps below. “But are we talking birds here, or about your two warriors downstairs?”

They had boxing experience, apparently. The younger one, Graham, boxed intramural at some fancy boys’ school in the hills. “Elliot,” Packer Gordon volunteered, “takes a more or less ­self-­taught approach to life.”

Decisive first instincts came naturally to Pogey. Still a ­flint-­hard welter in these his middle years, with 117 amateur fights behind him, he knew how to assess incoming risk. He knew about pulling the trigger. “Sorry, but I’m full up with kids,” he said. “We’re busy in the summer.”

Gordon motioned him close, dropping his voice. And Pogey, leaning forward, now caught sight of himself again, this time in the car’s side mirror, the white front of his own building, where he lived, where he’d run his gym for thirty years, sweeping upward and into the blue sky behind him like a temple, serene and attendant. Taut with ­judgment.

“They box,” Gordon said. “The problem is they prefer fighting.”

“Everyone prefers fighting,” Pogey said, still leaning in, voice low. “It’s easier.”

Which provoked a laugh. Packer Gordon liked that. “I’m an architect,” he said. “I’m aware of how much easier it is to release force than restrain it.”

Pogey straightened up, blinking. He remembered losing himself in the resumption of gym noise below. Someone rang the bell to start another round. Shoes shuffled on the concrete floors. The heavy bags began to groan on their turnbuckles. The speedbag winding out. All the machinery of fight school reeling again into motion. And, missing the moment for escape cleanly, he heard himself say only, “How’d you ever hear of Nealon’s Gym?”

Gordon blew past that question, on to terms, money and others. He wanted a closed gym. He wanted Pogey’s undivided attention paid to just these two. He wanted to set up a camera and film three rounds, the outcome of which would apparently settle all matters between the ­boys.

“I’m not letting a couple kids in my ring I’ve never even seen before.”

So they would train. So Pogey could assess them for however long he needed. So they would prove ­themselves.
Now a money clip was out. Bills peeled off in a way that suggested impulsive spending, often beyond available means. And Pogey was nodding as the cash whispered into his palm, nodding until Gordon had forked over more than Pogey could have hoped to collect in two months ­running.

“You’re telling me you want to rent my gym for the entire summer?”

––

Thursdays. Eight Thursdays. Pogey remembered they trained hard. He had them skip five rounds, do callisthenics five more, stretch, go for a jog. They didn’t pull on bag gloves until the second week, by which point he’d withheld the true business of boxing for long enough that they wanted nothing more than to curl their hands into fists, to feel canvas under the balls of their feet. All this while hardly a word of argument passed between them, no revealed schism. Only opposing energy that polarized everything within their ­field
From the Hardcover edition.