Black Teeth is a compelling collection of linked stories that explore growing up in Winnipeg's famously multicultural North End through its 1960s Golden Age and beyond, examining the strange dual legacy of that experience. While urban ethnic mixes and immigrant populations shift over time and place, every city has its foreign part, that transition zone where strangers, freaks, and outsiders -- the Other -- reside. Whether it's called "the East Side," "Cabbage Town," or "Chinatown," the questions remain the same: How do you fit in when you're defined as different, a "dirty DP"? Does the language you speak change the self? How do you become normal? How can you belong? Or can you?
The pieces that make up Black Teeth move from the challenge of penetrating a new language, goofy pangs of first love, beautiful nuns, ugly guns, the dangers of teen ennui, and the quirky pleasures of interpreting culture through food, to a son's struggle for connection with his remote, mysterious father, and the wrenching loss of a parent to madness. Throughout, the doubled vision of those who live and write in a second language pervades this collage-portrait of a unique place, and of the immigrant experience that lies at the dark heart of Canada.
About the Author: Ryszard Dubanski was born to WWII survivors in a displaced persons' camp near Sherwood Forest (yes, of Robin Hood fame). These days he lives in the Commercial Drive neighbourhood of Vancouver, works in the Fraser Valley teaching Communications at UCFV -- and obsessively re-lives Winnipeg, where he grew up from age two to twenty-two. Dubanski's publications are various, including prize-winning creative non-fiction, fiction, radio drama, journalism, criticism -- plus a cookbook featuring his much-coveted Vatican Lasagna recipe. One of the Black Teeth stories, "Fat Girl," which tells a stirring tale of love, saints, and pyrogies, has recently been adapted as a feature screenplay.
