Zsuzsi Gartner was born in Winnipeg, but considers herself from Calgary, where she lived from the age of six and completed high school and a BA in Political Science at the University of Calgary. She later received an Honours degree in Journalism from Carleton University in Ottawa and an MFA from UBC in Vancouver, where she currently resides.

Gartner had established as a journalist before she began to make her mark on the literary scene. Employed in various capacities by the Vancouver Sun, the Globe and Mail, Saturday Night and Canada AM, she has also published articles and reviews in magazines as diverse as Quill and Quire, The Georgia Straight, Western Living and Canadian Business, among many others, and has garnered three Western Magazine awards. Gartner sees this writing as good grounding for her fiction-- the source of her "love of facts, of specifics" which results in a fictional world that involves the real world, rather than "slamming shut the door and creating hermetically sealed fiction". Her stories have appeared in Western Living, Canadian Forum, Prairie Fire, The Malahat Review, Event, New Quarterly and Geist. Most notably, "How to Survive in the Bush" , which became the first story in her collection, took first prize at the Eden Mills Writers Festival's literary awards and was subsequently published in Saturday Night.

All the Anxious Girls on Earth, published by Key Porter Books, burst on the literary scene in the spring of 1999 and received instant and widespread acclaim: CBC radio, Globe and Mail, Vancouver Sun, Canadian Forum, Quill and Quire,, and Books in Canada reviewers, for example, praised the nine stories for their freshness, dark comedy, energy and wit, and compared them to the work of a heterogeneous crew of writers, including Margaret Atwood, Douglas Coupland, David Foster Wallace, Barbara Gowdy and Alice Munro.

Perhaps this favourable response is, in part, an indication of a growing acknowledgement of the short story as a form. Gartner contends that the genre has for too long been viewed as "the poor cousin to the novel, both by the public and the publishing industry's marketing forces". The short story, she insists, functions not as a "warm-up to a novel", but as a demanding, legitimate genre in its own right. Therefore, she applauds the awarding, in 1998, of both the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction and the Giller Prize to story collections.

All the Anxious Girls on Earth anatomizes a dispiriting contemporary Canadian milieu: Vancouver, Toronto and Calgary, the settings for these urban Gothic tales, are rendered as alienating environments inhabited by thirty-something characters who are slaves to short-term contracts, computers, shift work and consumer hedonism. Replete with references to Canadian place names and cultural and literary icons, the stories are also suffused with characteristic Canadian quirkiness as they scrutinize Vancouver clashes between cyclists and drivers, an East Kootenays visit by the CBC, Calgary Labour Day weekends, and Toronto parties among the aspiring artists set. Gartner's major tool is ironic humour ; hers is a McLuhanesque, Atwoodian world conveyed at a staccato-pace that simultaneously jars and entrances the reader. Although the book's title isn't directly derived from any single short story, it both articulates the dominant mood and reflects a Canadian preoccupation; as John MacLachlan Gray, for example, has observed, Canadians thrive on anxiety. The evocativeness of the stories is assured by a tempering of narrative distance with sympathy and a playful experimentation with point of view.

It is a testament to the power of the stories and further evidence of Canada's mounting impact on the international literary scene that All the Anxious Girls on Earth is slated for US publication in the spring of 2000 (by Anchor/Doubleday) and is under consideration for publication in England and Germany. Meanwhile, Zsuzsi Gartner is at work on more stories and a novel, as well as continuing with her literary journalism.

The above profile was written by Ginny Ratsoy. Ginny Ratsoy teaches Canadian literature and co-ordinates the Canadian Studies program at the University College of the Cariboo in Kamloops. Visit our Contribution page to learn how you too can write and author profile for Northwest Passages.

Books by Zsuzsi Gartner available from Northwest Passages

All the Anxious Girls on Earth 9781552630297	$ 18.95	BUY

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