In Flirt: The Interviews, each story takes the form of a bogus interview with a famous person—athletes, musicians, writers. Each is a pastiche of source material—existing interviews, book-length biographies, and news accounts “that are then woven into the book's main conceit: the interviews are conducted by a woman who would much rather tell her own story and can—t stop talking about herself. Everything is about her, from Richard Ford's feelings about landscape and Bobby Orr's oft-injured knee, to Ian Tyson's lyrics, Alice Munro's motherhood, Janet Gretzky's curves, and Markus Naslund's spirituality. The book might be a long, comic essay on adolescent grief. Or a comic essay on creativity. But mostly it's a collection of comic short fictions: the flirting that takes place in each interview—this is a woman who is ageing and losing herself—is wholly invented and meant to mock real interviews and to question the sort of information we find in them.

Lorna Jackson spent nine years as a musician on the bar circuit in British Columbia before settling on Southern Vancouver Island. She has been a columnist for Quill and Quire magazine, a contributor to the Georgia Straight, and serves on the editorial board of Malahat Review. She is the author of the acclaimed story collection, Dressing for Hope, and her writing has appeared in such magazines as Brick, The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, and Canadian Fiction Magazine. She teaches in the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria and lives in Metchosin.

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