Home Waltz
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In Squito Bob, Gordon Grisenthwaite has given us a latter-day Holden Caufield, fighting hormones, toxic friendships, and the general stupidity of others in the fleeting hope of his own brief shot at transcendence. Home Waltz is a tour de force, full of compassion and insight and humour and utterly unflinching in its look at the hard truths of life on the res.
Home Waltz Stories
Biblioasis bookstore manager Tina posing with a display of my novel Home Waltz. (Image ©: Biblioasis. Used with permission.)
Praise for Home Waltz
I was absolutely gobsmacked in terms of how much I was impacted by this amazing story. Squito is one of the most real and visceral characters I’ve encountered in a long time. I not only felt like I was in Squito’s world, I felt like I lived his journey along with him. It was highly charged and hugely emotional. A very personal experience. I felt privileged to live inside this very personal world of Squito’s. It actually felt invasive to share his headspace and raw emotions to this depth. But not in an offensive way; in a way that you want to be absorbed as a reader.
As much as I could relate to many of Squito’s teenage struggles, I also felt that as a white European, there’s things that I could never fully relate to or understand the depth of the struggles of a First Nations teenager. But this felt right as a reader … feeling this alienation added to the alienation that Squito felt.
Some Stories
Aside from ”How Mosquito Got His Name,” the stories featured here are from Gord’s thesis project Tales for Late Night Bonfires. And three have won prizes in recent contests: ”Roadkill” and ”ball lightnin” each earned second prize in contests sponsored by The Antigonish Review and appear in issue 199 (Sheldon Currie Short Story Contest and The Blue Heron Poetry Prize). ”Three Bucks” won the FreeFall Magazine short fiction contest and will appear in a forthcoming issue. ”Spam® Stew and the MALM Minimalist Bedroom Set from IKEA®” will appear in Exile Edition’s anthology The Food of My People.
”How Mosquito Got His Name,” published in Exile 43.1 and Bawaajigan: Stories of Power, Exile Editions, 2019, was a finalist for the 2020 National Magazine Award for short fiction. An earlier version of the story earned third prize in the 2006 Okanagan Short Fiction Contest.
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Three Bucks
Contest judge Gary Barwin said “With language as colourful and full of life as its characters … ‘Three Bucks’ is a vivid evocation of the vitality of stories, how we mediate our lives and relationships through story.”
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SPAM® Stew and the MALM Minimalist Bedroom Set from IKEA®
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Roadkill
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ball lightnin
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How Mosquito Got His Name
How Mosquito Got His NameA finalist for the 2020 National Magazine Award for fiction and an earlier version of the story earned third prize in the Okanagan Short Story contest. It also appears in Bawaajigan: Stories of Power.
Some Photos
About
Gord is Nłeɂkepmx, a member of the Lytton First Nation, and earned an MA in English Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Windsor (2020).
He isn’t the oldest emerging writer in the world, but he’s up there.
“To be clear,” Gord stresses, “I had planned to start writing decades ago. In fact, I started to write in my early 20s but I had a ton of stuff to deal with, none of it good.”
His work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, Our Stories Literary Journal, Prism International, ndncountry, Offset 17, Exile Quarterly, and Bawaajigan: Stories of Power. His work has earned a number of prizes, including the 2014 John Kenneth Galbraith Literary Award. Palimpsest Press published his first novel Home Waltz, on 28 October, 2020. You can get it here.
Recent Publications
- 2020 “Three Bucks,” first prize, FreeFall, 30.2, Fall 2020.
- 2020 Home Waltz, Palimpsest Press.
- 2020 “How Mosquito Got His Name.” Bawaajigan: Stories of Power, Exile Editions, Fall 2019.
- 2020 “Roadkill,” The Antigonish Review, 199.
- 2020 “ball lightnin,” The Antigonish Review, 199.
- 2019 “How Mosquito Got His Name.” Exile Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 2.
- 2018 “yéyeʔ.” ndnCountry, a joint project of Prairie Fire and CV2.
- 2017 “A Poem about Coffee.” Offset 17, (literary journal of Victoria University, Melbourne, Victoria, AUS).
- 2017 “Humour and Coping in Native Writing.” Write, vol. 45, no. 1.
- 2015 “Salmon Song.” The Antigonish Review, 183.