There is no more unsettling tense shift than the one so often encountered in a Wikipedia entry when it introduces an author with the verb is one day and then was a few days later. But that’s exactly how I learned that K.D. Miller had died at the age of 75 (my age). Before reading any official announcement of this sad fact, I discovered an affectionate and revealing tribute to her in a Biblioasis newsletter, written by Dan Wells, who was both her friend and her editor for three of her last works of fiction (Late Breaking, Brown Dwarf, and All Saints). He first came to know of her as a writer when listening to her comments about her then most recent book, Holy Writ, on CBC’s The Next Chapter. Driving his car at the time, he had to pull over and listen to the entire interview, an experience that led him to invite her to a literary festival he was directing and then to become her editor for many years afterwards.
I was, unfortunately, neither her friend nor her editor but, as is the case with most excellent authors, I like to think I have come to know her through her writing, not only her books but also the work we have published thirteen times in The New Quarterly, fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, starting three decades ago. Her short stories are expertly crafted but uncompromising in characterization and circumstance but not bleak, though “dark” is probably the most frequent adjective to describe her fiction. She once said of her writing, “I have to make it dangerous, dangerous to myself. I realize when I am writing in such a way that I think, ‘if this stuff gets published, no one is going to want to have Christmas dinner with me again.’” However, although her subject matter is often grim, especially in Late Breaking, there is some resiliency in her much-suffering characters and often an arch irony in her narrative voice. What consoles and inspires me about her writing is the simple beauty and variety of its telling. I would have been happy (and felt safe) to be her guest at any dinner.
So, I didn’t know her personally, at least not well enough to call her by her first name, Kathleen, and it was only in that Wikipedia entry that I learned her middle name was Daisy, despite the rather obvious fact that the protagonist in her second collection, Give Me Your Answer, is Daisy Chandler. The title is perfect: it not only refers to a popular song which involves a marriage proposal, a not so stylish marriage, and a bicycle built for two but also speaks to questions Daisy tries to answer in the twelve stories.
However, I do recall meeting her in person once, twenty-six years ago to the month, when we both participated in Wild Writers We Have Known: A Celebration of the Canadian Short Story and Short Story Writers, after which TNQ’s annual festival is named. The idea behind this three-day symposium, a joint project by The Porcupine’s Quill and The New Quarterly, was that nine emerging writers would read a story and then nine mid-career writers would respond with their appreciations of their work. Two poets turned short story writers were also included, as were various editors, John Metcalf being perhaps the most relevant and prominent name. Organized by Kim Jernigan and the late Peter Hinchcliffe, the symposium also featured panels on various topics literary topics in which the participants engaged in in lively and candid conversations. Even though information on the symposium is hard to find online and one AI summary erroneously tells us that Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates were part of that impressive group, I won’t for the sake of brevity list all the names. Needless to say, Kathleen Daisy Miller was one of the mid-career authors asked to participate in the gathering, where she did double duty. First, she championed and critiqued a book by Sandra Sabatini, praising it for an approach to character and style that had some similarities to her own. Second, she also convened a panel discussion, (“The Spirit Moves—or Does It?”) through which she hoped to discover what other writers thought about inspiration, in reference to the ancient notion of the muses, that animating spirit of writing, a “something greater than ourselves,” which for Miller involved another significant reality and preoccupation in her life and writing, spirituality, one which also extended beyond her Christian faith. Apart from the many credibly questing characters in her fiction, I am also intrigued by its narrative form. Each collection is linked by, as she said herself, “theme or recurring characters or situations, an approach that allowed her to “to revisit a personality or circumstance and see it from a different angle.” This is mostly obviously true in in second collection, which involves one character, but is also more indirectly connected in Late Breaking, where the atmosphere of each story is infused by the power and mystery of Alex Colville’s paintings. Her fondness for the linked-story form was sparked by Margaret Laurence’s A Bird in the House, one of my favourite examples of this narrative form in Canadian fiction.
As a poetry editor, I was even more delighted by her relatively late surrender to what proved at long last to be a genre she could not resist. In one of our “Falling in Love with Poetry” essays, she describes her previous reaction to poetry:
“Too often I’d struggle through a poem I’d found in The New Yorker or some other literary magazine, then stare into space, feeling the way I do in an art gallery when I discover that a heap of broken two-by-fours sprinkled with shards of glass and topped with a single rose petal calls itself ‘Untitled # 27’. Thinking it must be me.”
Among the many things revealed in this essay is her extended struggle to write an elegy for a dear friend, “After the Funeral,” a poem she stopped and started many times before it finally released itself. For her, poetry writing offered a pleasant contrast to fiction writing. “It’s so much delicious fun,” she says, “to move stuff around. Poetry, by virtue of its form, offers ample opportunity for this game of cut and paste.”
It seems a shame to me that K. D. Miller did not win one of Canada’s major literary awards, though she was nominated or shortlisted for the Giller, the Rogers Trust, and the Governor General’s Awards. However, she was recognized and admired by fellow writers and a host of editors, including those as discerning and demanding a John Metcalf, who included her in his famous (infamous for some) list of the best 50 short-story writers in Canada since 1900. I suspect that her head was never swollen enough to be outraged by not winning these glamorous and glossy awards; she even has some fun with this fact in the “Late Breaking,” whose main main character is a writer on tour with three other finalists for the comically named Olympia Featherstone Award for Fiction. Also worth noting is her response to a question in the Giller Spotlight, when asked if she follows any ritual after finishing a book: “Yes, I sit down and read Edward Gorey’s tiny comic masterpiece The Unstrung Harp or Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel,” a hilarious satire of all the posing and pretension involved in the “unspeakable horrors of literary life,” which explains the title of this essay.
There is perhaps no better tribute can pay to an excellent writer who has just died than to buy and read one or more of their books or to reread them if they are still on your shelves. Most of her titles are available directly from the publishers, Biblioasis and the Porcupine’s Quill, or through the less than desirable ABE books, owned by omnivorous Amazon. If you are patient, you can wait a while to read her first collection of poems, Household Gods, to be published by David Kent as part of the St. Thomas Poetry Series in 2027 or her last collection of stories, Alice Drive, scheduled for 2028. Of course, you could read her work in TNQ’s archives and online specials, where you will find the poetry essay previously mentioned, which is titled, ironically enough, “The Death of Me.”
