In the surreal world of Buffy Cram's stories, someone or something has slipped beneath the skins of her already beleaguered characters, rearranging the familiar into something strange and even sinister, making off with their emotional and even physical goods.

In Large Garbage: A Radio Belly Single, a smug suburbanite becomes obsessed with the "hybrids," the wandering mob of intellectual vagrants overrunning his complacent little cul de sac, snacking on pate and reciting poetry. Equally repelled by the hybrids' uncleanliness and intrigued by their freedom, Henry draws dangerously close to their secret nighttime life of sloshing claret and Proust quotes that overflow from finger-printed wine glasses and dirt-smudged lips. As the LA Times wrote: this "'new breed of homelessness'...cleverly envisions an alternative to the ever-widening circle of consumption that defines us now."

Buffy Cram is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, an entrepreneur and a farmer. Reviewing her 2012 book of stories, Radio Belly (Douglas & McIntyre), the Globe and Mail pronounced her “a whip-smart storyteller who aims to shake up our reading expectations in ways that delight.” She has been a fiction finalist for the Western Magazine Awards, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has won a National Magazine Award. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and lives on Salt Spring Island, BC.

Buffy Cram's profile page

"That same immediacy infuses Buffy Cram's brilliant "Large Garbage," which, with its "new breed of homeless," cleverly envisions an alternative to the ever-widening circle of consumption that defines us now."

LA Times