Longlisted for 2022 Dublin Literary Awards
Elizabeth MacKinnon moves to Saint John New Brunswick in 1939 to find inspiration for her poetry in the bohemian life of the city's central peninsula. Swept up in the vibrant society of the city's poets, painters, potters, dancers, and playwrights, she finds herself joining their struggles to make sense of making art in a time of economic depression.
Inhabiting the lives of the artists who find themselves in the port city taking refuge from the Depression, Lay Figures explores relationships between art and lived experience, artist and subject, artist and audience, and between margins and centre, and traces the development of a young female writer against the backdrop of the Depression and early war years in Saint John. In a story that couples bitter despair with exuberant triumphs, Elizabeth and her fellow artists make life-changing discoveries about politics and social responsibility, desire and betrayal.
About the Author: Staring at the outside of William's locked apartment door, its abstract shapes of flaked paint a sharp contrast to the painstakingly drawn figures teeming over the walls inside, I think I should try to find Henry. If anyone knows why William decided to cover the walls of his apartment with indelible images and then leave, Henry will. Everyone tells him everything--and what they don't he finds out anyway.
The cat yowls from behind the door of my flat. I can hear it as I climb from the landing below. It needs to be fed. In a maneuver practiced over thirty months, I unlock my door and sweep with my foot as I enter, to make sure it doesn't escape. William used to tease me about keeping it indoors, made all the predictable jokes about the metaphor of the locked-up kitty. Only he didn't use the word kitty.
I drop a mound of mashed chicken liver on a saucer. William used to badger me about that, too. He said the cat ate better than most people we knew. It didn't matter to him that the butcher slipped me the chicken livers for free on a Saturday when he hadn't found buyers for them that week. You couldn't win that kind of economic argument with William. The inequity he could see in front of him was what troubled him, not the background factors that might actually explain it. I listen to the cat's motor purring as it vacuums up the liver, enjoying it much more than any person I know would. If William were still around, I would descend the stairs and cross the hall to make exactly that point. My typewriter dares me to join it across the room and get some work done. Instead I grab my coat and leave the flat, kicking the cat away with my foot as I close the door.
Princess Street is deserted, probably thanks to the rain. I glimpse the back of the Capitol across the street and consider going to see a film (it doesn't matter what, anything to get lost in), but there is no change in my pockets. And I should be saving every penny. I head west toward the harbour and down the hill to Prince William Street, where I decide to break into William's studio. Seeing his apartment makes me wonder what other bizarre legacies he may have left.
