Published: June 1, 2019
My aim as a writer is to thoroughly engage the reader, to offer a complete experience – fiction as reality. I want to bring readers in so close to the characters that they see, hear, think, feel, and empathize with them, for an emotionally charged and engaging reading experience.
I write about “ordinary” lives, the kind of people we are all involved with daily, and I go from the premise that each one of us represents volumes of books. I have a basic idea of where I am headed when I sit down to write a story, but often the characters take me where they want to go as they develop their own personalities, to places I had not anticipated. And, like a reader, I love the element of surprise.
My short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, journals, e-zines and e-chapbooks throughout Canada and the United States, as well as on CBC radio.
In Progress, a short story collection, won the Eludia Award and will be published by Sowilo Press (Hidden River Arts) in the spring of 2019. I am excited!
Comments
The stories that make up Catharine Leggett’s masterly new collection, In Progress, demonstrate the writer’s ability to convey, within the confines of a single narrative, the entirety of the lives of the girls and women who make up her subjects – unlikely narrators who are, nevertheless, heartbreakingly reliable. Just as each part of a hologram contains a particular perspective of the image, it also includes the entire object. So, too, do these stories. Chronic disappointment metastasizes into a bedrock of scar tissue to found a life upon; self-sacrifice goes postal; and no one is who they seem — you may never look at the woman who tops your coffee off at the donut shop the same, or the check-out girl at the grocery store. Meticulously crafted, humane, but never sentimental, and firmly anchored in its time and place, In Progress gives the reader much to ponder and even more to savour.
— Melissa Hardy , author of: Surface Rights, Broken Road, The Geomancer’s Compass Constant Fire, The Uncharted Heart, A Cry of Bees, and others.