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Fiction Short Stories (single Author)

The Eater of Dreams

by (author) Kat Cameron

Publisher
Thistledown Press
Initial publish date
Sep 2019
Category
Short Stories (single author), Literary
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781771871846
    Publish Date
    Sep 2019
    List Price
    $20.00

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Description

P dir=ltr align=justify>The past haunts the characters in The Eater of Dreams. In fifteen interconnected stories, Kat Cameron’s vivid characters — teachers, singers, writers, and misfits — examine the inner fractures in their lives. A woman muses about her miscarried child while watching a friend’s daughter play; an opera singer in Edmonton is stalked by an abusive ex-lover; a student’s story of bullying reminds a woman of her own childhood traumas; a woman cuts out the heart of a faithless man; the ghost of Lafcadio Hearn haunts the bedroom of a grieving teacher in Japan. P dir=ltr align=justify>The title for the collection is taken from a Japanese folktale about the baku, a mythological creature that eats nightmares, and her tales pulsate with this energy. In the darkest moments of her characters, they find or discover the energy they need to survive, but not without breaking down the surface to see clearly who they really are. Her portraits bear witness to the longing, yearning, unspoken desire of her characters’ dreams and to the uncertainty and contemplation of their lives in the flux of travel and change. The Eater of Dreams is at once contemporary but also ancient in its probing; it is a collection that blurs the borders between realism and the magic that lies outside it.

About the author

Kat Cameron was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of New Brunswick and has worked for two years as an ESL teacher in Japan. Her debut collection of poetry, Strange Labyrinth, was published by Oolichan Books in 2015. Her fiction, poetry, and book reviews have appeared in over fifty journals and anthologies in Canada and the United States, including The Antigonish Review, Canadian Literature, Descant, The Fiddlehead, Forage, Grain, Literary Review of Canada, NonBinary Review, Paperplates, Prairie Fire, PRISM international, The New Quarterly, Room, subTerrain, 40 Below: Volume 2, and Beyond Forgetting: Celebrating 100 Years of Al Purdy. Her poems have been shortlisted for the Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for Poetry and FreeFall’s Prose and Poetry contest. She teaches English literature and writing at Concordia University of Edmonton.

Kat Cameron's profile page

Awards

  • Short-listed, The Malahat Review Far Horizons Poetry
  • Short-listed, FreeFall Short Fiction and Poetry Contest

Excerpt: The Eater of Dreams (by (author) Kat Cameron)

“She was most comfortable in transit, on buses, planes, trains, shuttling between points. In constant motion, she didn’t have to solidify into one person. Looking out the train windows, she saw bright-green rice fields. The flat mirror of the window reflected her back. No sign of the fractures within. Past. Present. Her old self from ten years earlier, all those lost dreams.”

 

“I can’t look back. If I had a thousand origami cranes, I would wish for my old life, but now it’s just a dream I once had.”

 

“In a claustrophobic bar with black walls, she listened to fables about gangs of head-hunters, about vampires in the flesh-pits of Bangkok, about haunted houses absorbing lonely seniors. A few smudged columns of type in any newspaper would reveal atrocities as unreal, love stories as strange, dreams as unlikely. Fact and fantasy blended together, a potent brew of ‘this is’ followed by a ‘what if’ chaser. She had dreamed it; therefore, it would come to pass.”

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