Vanishing has been shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award for debut short fiction in Canada
Vanishing has been nominated for the BC Book Prize
Jim Bartley picked Vanishing as one of his Top 5 of 2009
The stories in Vanishing show the magic of fiction at its best.
Deborah interviewed in the Blogosphere
DW: I don’t often feel noble when I sit down to write. I just write with the questionable goal of telling a story that interesting and meaningful, and of creating characters that are complex and contradictory. But my feeling about writing and reading is that both are acts of empathy.
An interview on CBC's North by Northwest, Nov 14, 2009:
Deborah has been nominated for the GG for fiction:
Vanishing and Other Stories is a book of rare insight into the complications of the human heart. Light of touch but deep in content, Deborah Willis’s stories startle, exhilarate and radiate with piercing insights. Original and deftly structured, all 14 continue to resonate long after the book is finished.
Review in the Montreal Gazette
Her words feel essential and elemental. She is one of those writers who make fiction feel less of a genre than a language unto itself. (read more)
Oct 14 Interview on All Points West:
Deborah Willis said having Vanishing and Other Short Stories land in the same category as Munro's Too Much Happiness is both “kind of ironic and kind of wonderful,” given that the CanLit icon was both an influence and early cheerleader of Willis's debut collection. (read more)
“I just got a call from my editors, and I was hugely, pleasantly surprised,” Willis said yesterday. “And I think it's strange and wonderful to be nominated alongside Alice Munro ... I've looked up to her for so long.” (read more)
MM: What would you say is the thematic link?
DW: I basically took Vanishing, the story itself, as the title story and the main theme that's happening. So it's all about people going away and people coming back. When I was writing it, I was thinking along the lines of writing stories about people coming to town and people leaving town as the really broad thing to work towards... I definitely wanted to write about loss from different perspectives and I think the book is kind of dark for that reason. (read more)
Listen to an interview on CBC's All Points West:
Review in the Vancouver Sun by Brett Josef Grubisic
Even-tempered, sober and intimate, Willis's debut collection has a gravity that suggests both the conventionality and maturity of an author well into her career. But if echoes of Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro (and, in the hard-luck stories, Raymond Carver) reveal her as an astute apprentice, Willis also illustrates her talent for crafting stories that confidently reflect her distinctive techniques and voice. (read more)
Q&A in the National Post with Mark Medley
MM: What do you want people to take away from your work?
DW: As a reader and writer, I like stories that don't bestow judgment. By that I mean that I like stories that capture the complexity, ambiguity, and unexpectedness of life, without simplifying things. (read more)
Review in the Globe and Mail by Jim Bartley
Willis's overriding theme is the mutability - frequently the malleability - of love.
I later found myself recalling the characters, the streets, the heat, food, clothing, voices, smells, bound up with a sense of them rising from hundreds of pages. It's the best-ever connect with an author: to encounter a fully realized world inseparable from the uncanny fact of it existing as mere words, magnificently strung together. (read more)
Interview in the Danforth Review with Ashley Little
AL: If you could be invisible for one day what would you do?
DW: What does it say about the poverty of my imagination if I have no idea? Remember being a kid, and hanging out with other kids, and having that very serious discussion about which super power you'd most like to have? Some kids wanted to be invisible, some wanted to fly. I always wanted to be able to manipulate time. I wanted to be able to pause it, and move forward and backwards within it. To me, that seemed like the ultimate super power, and it still does.
(read more)
Why Short Fiction Doesn't Get the Respect it Deserves
- Eric Volmers, Calgary Herald
Yvonne Hunter, vice-president of marketing, admits it's rare for a publisher the size of Penguin to take a chance on an unknown writer's collection of short fiction. But editors were taken aback by the quality of Willis's work...( read more)
If I were a betting man, I'd put a sack of cash on Deborah Willis becoming a nationally renowned writer.
The title tale is about a playwright who suddenly disappears from his attic-study one day and never returns. This story, like most of Willis's, concludes in a curious, unpredictable way that suggests the untidiness of real life." (read more)
Copyright © 2010 Deborah Willis