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Creston writer releases short story collection

Vanessa Farnsworth became one of the province’s best-known victims of Lyme Disease after sustaining not one, but two tick bites about a decade ago.
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When reading The Things She’ll Be Leaving Behind, it helps to know that author Vanessa Farnsworth became one of the province’s best-known victims of Lyme Disease after sustaining not one, but two tick bites about a decade ago.

The freelance writer and science journalist wrote a book on her horrific experiences, Rain on a Distant Roof, and has been advocating for research and awareness about the disease ever since. Some of her own experiences during her years-long (now, thankfully, over) illness are reflected in some of the new book’s 22 short stores.

“It’s always about the characters,” Farnsworth said in an interview last week. “Put them in a bad situation and ask, ‘What could happen to this person?’”

The collection starts off with two of her darkest stories, The Plaid Shoes and The Shrug, and they make it easy to understand Farnsworth’s dedication of the book: “For my father, who wouldn’t have understood this book, but would have liked that I wrote it.”

The Plaid Shoes tells of Claire, who has undergone cancer treatment but is coming to terms with her looming death, and The Shrug features Kathy, a dying woman who has conversations with her late grandfather. All of the stories illustrate snippets of women’s lives often seem out their control, as they wrestle one mysterious, but very real, force or another.

Farnsworth shines in her deft handling of conversation

“I love writing dialogue,” she smiles.

All of the stories rely heavily on dialogue and one, the 11-page The Others, consists entirely of a conversation between unidentified people. It is a peculiar experience to read, but one that works, rewarding the reader with a sense of accomplishment and, perhaps more important, gratitude towards a writer who trusts her readers’ abilities to create their own mental images of what is going on.

The book’s title story is at once horrifying and compelling. Brenda, zonked on opiates, lies in bed conversing with her internal demons until her son Jason enters the room. He needs to get to his baseball game and Brenda is his driver. Jason eventually coaxes and prods her from bedroom to car, where she drops her keys, then finds them.

Then she rests her forehead on the steering wheel. “I’m not sure I’m up for this.”

“Of course you are. Besides, all you have to do is operate the pedals. I’ll do the steering for you.”

“Like always.”

“Like always.”

“What would I do without you?”

“Spend a lot of time in jail, would be my guess.”

“Very funny”

“Not really.”

Brenda starts the engine and with her son’s diligent coaching, she manages to successfully back out of the garage and down the driveway before shifting into drive and stepping on the gas. The rest of the journey is a blur, one that Brenda knows will one day come back to haunt her.

Farnsworth does indeed put her characters into bad situations, not always with the intent of getting them out, at least not in a happy ending kind of way. But the stories are invariably thought provoking, creating a sense of wonder about situations that might seem foreign and somehow familiar at the same time.

Readers of Rain on a Distant Roof will be reminded of Farnsworth’s hallucinogenic experiences during the height of her battle with Lyme Disease. And they will be grateful that a superb writer has survived the ordeal, and perhaps even gained from it.

The Things She’ll Be Leaving Behind can be ordered from bookstores or purchased from on-line retailers. It can also be ordered from the publisher, Thisteldown Press.