As a poet, critic, teacher, actor and cancer survivor, Garebian has spent more than half a century helping carve out Canada’s identity, particularly in theatre, while also carving out an identity for himself. Born in Bombay to Anglo-Indian and Armenian parents in 1943, Garebian moved to Montreal in 1961, one month before his eighteenth birthday, when his family chose Canada as a second home in the hopes it would offer them better financial prospects.

His second home was not entirely the promised land it was heralded to be, bringing with it the harsh reality of racism, among other things, but the choice also provided him a lifetime of successes, mixed with frustration on one hand and endless fodder for his poetry, opinions and criticism on the other. (His many poetry awards attest to this, and his recent biography of William Hutt is something of a masterpiece.) As Oscar Wilde said of second marriages, they are “the triumph of hope over experience.” Garebian might well agree with that assessment as it applies to his second home.

While it’s impossible to tie up Garebian’s life neatly in any box, it can be said that his has been a life well lived and well felt, both by himself and those he has influenced in his many capacities. Pieces of My Self is a must-read for fans of identity, acting, Shakespeare, poetry, criticism and Canadian culture in general.

Available from Guernica Editions.

Keith Garebian is a widely published, award-winning freelance literary, theatre, and dance critic, biographer, and poet. Among his many awards are the Scarborough Arts Council Poetry Award (2010), the Canadian Authors Association (Niagara Branch) Poetry Award (2009), the Mississauga Arts Award (2000, 2008 and 2013), a Dan Sullivan Memorial Poetry Award (2006), the Lakeshore Arts/Scarborough Arts Council Award for Poetry (2003), and an Ontario Poetry Society Award for Haiku (2003). He is the author of 7 collections of poetry.

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Starting with Fadeout in 1970 and continuing on up to A Country of Old Men in 1991, Hansen produced twelve titles featuring his openly gay insurance claims investigator. Not your typical private eye, Brandstetter comes after you only if you file a claim for a suspicious death. Fadeout begins when a popular entertainer disappears and his family makes a death claim—only Dave doesn’t believe he’s really dead.

The books are remarkable for two things in particular: their precision in unfolding the mechanics of the mysteries and the casualness with which they present gay life, starting as long ago as the mid-1960s, when Fadeout was set. Hansen doesn’t ever apologize for or over-explain it—it just is. It’s one of the things that gives Brandstetter his moral credibility.

Nor does Hansen have qualms about letting Brandstetter age, unlike, say, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, noted as already being old after World War I and still going strong up until the 1970s. By contrast, Dave is in his 40s—lean and vital—in the early books, but in the later stories his mortality is showing. He rails against the indignities suffered in the course of his profession and the physical and emotional abuse he has experienced. Over the course of the series lovers come and go, his father dies, Dave changes companies and eventually retires—sort of. In other words, he’s real—like us—even if he isn’t.

For my taste, the earlier and later books are best. The middle titles tend to bloat with Hollywoodisms—unrealistic violence and preachiness. It’s as if Hansen had decided to write his own Die Hard series. The fifth book, Skinflick, features a religious zealot who steals hardcore pedophilia from an erotica bookstore (for his own use), all to make a point about religious hypocrisy rather than paint a realistic portrait of a bigot. (For starters, I find it hard to imagine such material being on open display, even in 1970s Los Angeles.) Similarly, the eighth book, The Little Dog Laughed, finds Dave embroiled in a Latin American coup. He all but puts on a cape to fight vice.

Hansen’s prose runs from smooth to overblown. At his best he was an adept poet, creating vivid atmospherics while giving a sense of the moral decay of contemporary California. On the downside, he had a tendency to over-describe Brandstetter’s surroundings in a way that accurately rendered physical detail but without breathing life into the prose. Nevertheless, in his later books he mastered and got beyond that. As a writer, he always seemed to be trying to do better.

An all-too-frequent weakness in Hansen’s plotting was his tendency to rely on coincidence—things happen easily for Dave. Minor characters are far too talkative when he comes calling: “Oh, sure—you want to know everything about my missing roommate? Come in and eat a quinoa salad with me while I spill the beans,” etc. (In the film industry, these are called “California scenes”—for obvious reasons.) As well, he didn’t always wrap up secondary plots. In the tenth book, Obedience, the mystery starts with a marina full of angry boat people facing eviction, but they are nowhere to be found once the killer is unmasked. It’s as if he doesn’t care about them past their use in helping Dave solve the crime.

Despite these qualms, at their best the mysteries are top-notch. Dave’s moral universe is always admirable and Hansen’s treatment of gay life exemplary. Many have said there were no positive gay role models in fiction in the 1970s. These books put the lie to that notion. In the years since their appearance, there has not been a more compelling series in gay literature. And that’s why I’m an unabashed fan of both Dave Brandstetter and his creator, Joseph Hansen.

Joseph Hansen was a renowned short-story writer and the author of more than twenty-five novels, including the Dave Brandstetter series. In 1992 he won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America and a Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Mystery for A Country of Old Men.

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Self-Portrait Embracing a Fabulous Beast is available from Frontenac House.

Jim Nason is the author of seven previous volumes of poetry, a short story collection and three novels. He was a finalist for the CBC Literary Award for both fiction and poetry. His poetry book Rooster, Dog, Crow was shortlisted for the 2019 Raymond Souster Award.

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Publisher’s Synopsis

Twenty-eight-year-old Will, a teacher living in Montreal, has spent the last few months recovering from a breakup with his first serious boyfriend, Max. He has resumed his search for companionship, but has he truly moved on? Will’s mother Katherine – one of the few people, perhaps the only one, who loves him unconditionally – is also in recovery, from a bout with colon cancer that haunts her body and mind with the possibility of relapse. Having experienced heartbreak, and fearful of tragedy, Will must come to terms with the rule of impermanence: to see past lost treasures and unwanted returns, to find hope and solace in the absolute certainty of change. In The Geography of Pluto, DiRaddo perfectly captures the ebb and flow of life through the insightful, exciting, and often playful story of a young man’s day-to-day struggle with uncertainty.

Author Bio

Christopher DiRaddo is a Canadian fiction writer, editor and producer living in Montreal.His first novel, The Geography of Pluto, was published by Cormorant Books in 2014. The book was named one of the Top 20 Bestselling LGBTQ modern classics of 2016 by Toronto’s Glad Day Bookshop. DiRaddo is also the author of several short stories and essays that have appeared in Arsenal Pulp Press anthologies, including the collection First Person Queer: Who We Are (So Far), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ Anthology in 2007.[3]

DiRaddo is also the producer and host of the Violet Hour, a queer reading series that takes place in the off-hours of a strip club in Montreal’s gay village. In 2017, DiRaddo began to work as an associate producer for the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, where he created an LGBTQ series for the festival and, in 2018, the Blue Metropolis Violet Literary Prize, an annual award presented to an established Canadian LGBTQ writer in recognition of a body of work.

DiRaddo is also the current president of the Quebec Writers’ Federation

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In his tenth poetry collection, Keith Garebian writes with savage honesty about love and its discontents, art, travel, disease, and aging. The poems have revealing gestures and situations, all drawn from personal experience. Though pared down, they have edge, and their lyrical fluency, with striking turns of feeling and imagery, never obscure the poet’s beating heart and vulnerabilities.

In a world that has little time for such small acts of grace as poetry offers, this volume illumines the elusive facets of love. (“Stars overhang us in fond silver: / not cosmic tinsel but celestial / music for special ears.”) Divided in six sections, it outlines in flashes of brilliance five relationships that have marked his life, progressing from the first feelings of limerence (“…my love couldn’t afford / a perfect sapphire / on a teacher’s poverty”) through to the forgiveness that comes, if it comes at all, with age as it lies at death’s door. (“Having forgiven each other / for the chaos of our marriage, / I reached for her wrinkled hand …”)

The reflections are deep and often startling. Beginning with his first wife and mother of a son born prematurely (“Michael / could not take a nipple, / Caryl’s scant milk drying. / What leaked from her instead / was love and grief”), it goes on to outline three more heterosexual relationships in the poet’s life: Joan, “actress, divorced, flamboyant”, “Blonde, blue-eyed Marla”, and finally Judith who, “like me, was divorced, / clear-eyed, pragmatic”, and who gardened until “I saw the tangled / roots within her.”

It is with the fifth section, however, that an abrupt transition to same-sex relationships occurs. (“You were supposed to be / a one-time thing. / When did you become / my first male love?“) This revelation leads to the poet’s reawakening to life, like Dante, who “went astray / from the straight road and woke to find myself / alone in a dark wood.” Here he is free to imagine and reinvent his lover as “a capering clown” or “as a geisha / hair lacquered gleaming black, / sharp-toothed abalone comb in place…” while “being beautiful / and brutal, tender and cutting, / Various things true at once…”

Each poem packs an emotional punch, whether it be in the poet’s searching for forgiveness (“I write / hoping to forgive myself / for so often preferring books above / humans, their panoply / of insincerity, their cruelty…”) or seeking closure in a relationship through an act as small as one finger reaching out to touch another (“…trying to do one, just one / last good thing, in a moment / of making, and unmaking.”)

With such acts, the poet becomes his own Virgil, guiding himself through the lower depths all the way to some semblance of Paradise in the book’s final section, which blossoms into what may be his richest relationship of all—his love for life and the world at large: “We are, each of us, / the ocean in a beached shell, / yearning for the song of ourselves…” Here, at last, there is no more searching, only “Intimacy enlarged / this humanness—”

This welcome volume is an elegy to a lifetime of love, spent or misspent, looking back over the road where it lies, tattered and bleeding, and sometimes, in small gestures or moments, where it triumphs. In its honesty and searing intimacy, it ranks Garebian among our finest poets of this or any generation.

Available from Frontenac House

Keith Garebian is a widely published, award-winning freelance literary and theatre critic, biographer, and poet. Among his many awards are being shortlisted for the Freefall Magazine Poetry Award and the Gwendolyn MacEwen-Exile Poetry Award in 2015, and the GritLit Poetry Award in 2016. He won the Canadian Authors Association (Niagara Branch) Poetry Award (2009), the Mississauga Arts Award (2000 and 2008), a Dan Sullivan Memorial Poetry Award (2006), and the Lakeshore Arts & Scarborough Arts Council Award for Poetry (2003).

Keith is the author author of 29 books (ten of poetry), and and two chapbooks to date.  He has been a juror for for both the Gerald Lampert and Raymond Souster Awards for the League. Some of his poetry has been translated into French, Armenian, Hebrew, Romanian, and Bulgarian.

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Available from University of Wisconsin Press

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Available from cyberwit.net

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Available from University of Calgary Press.

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