Selected Writings

Poetry, Short Stories, and Articles

Generations

Originally published in the Spring 2023 issue of The New Quarterly

“Those lily pads,” Fee said, startling Mary as she came up behind her. “They cost about fourteen dollars apiece, give or take. Can you believe it? I could have bought fake ones—they were a bit more, but you know…” She shrugged.

Mary understood. Fee wouldn’t be caught dead with phony lily pads. Who would?

She was at Fee’s annual garden party, the fiftieth, standing beside the new ornamental pool. It was ten feet by twelve and shaped like a kidney bean. During a blizzard the previous January Fee had phoned to say that the pool was to be this spring’s project. “It’ll be so easy,” she said, as Mary watched snow blanket the top step of the side porch. “All you have to do is dig a hole and line it with a special PVC thingy. They sell them at Home Depot. Two hundred dollars. Then you fill it with water.”

You are my Sunshine

originally published in new ohio review

Let me start by offering my condolences, I said,

holding out my hand.

She shook out her umbrella and placed it open, just

beside the altar.

They thought it was an ulcer, she said. They

gave him some tablets.

Miss Sally

originally published in event

I hear her before I see her, we all do. We are in the dining room waiting for the breakfast carts to come up, and we can hear the elevator doors clanking open and a deep voice booming out, “You call this service, young man? And where are the carpets on this floor, anyway?”

Then she is wheeled past the dining room, half lying, half sitting up on a gurney. She looks to be about seventy, obese, with silver hair cropped straight across at the ears. The way she sits, her head sinks into the fleshy folds of her neck; the large green ward dress stretches tight across her bosom.

Ray, who does nights on the male ward, tells us later that her name is Miss Sally.

Oldest Female Debut Novelist Tells All

Originally published March 2023 on Bloom

I was twelve when I wrote my first novel. It was four pages long, and in it Martha, the butt of bullying by her eighth grade classmates, graduates top of her class. Not much else happens, but with the novel’s completion I had accomplished a major life goal.

Nearly sixty years later I started another novel. For two years I basically lived in the quiet room of the Ottawa Library, and then another year in the Princeton Library, ignoring cracks from my sons about posthumous publication. That novel was published a year ago.

Writing it, I discovered, was actually the easy part of the publishing process. The next step was finding an agent.

Dear Margaret Atwood, I’d Like my Lucky Hat Back

originally published in the Globe & mail

Dear Margaret Atwood, I think it's time you gave me back my hat. You know the one, it's black, with a wide brim. Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about. Poet Patrick Lane gave you that hat when you asked for it.

You were frequently photographed wearing it in the 1970s and later, in newspapers and magazines. I even recall seeing it on your head on one of your novel's dust jackets.

Writer Mark Abley published an article about you in The Guardian back in 1996, just after Robertson Davies died. One of the first sentences was:

Sing me Anything

A slightly different version of this story won first prize in a cross-Canada fiction competition and was published in the Queen’s alumni Review

Ted, died, finally. I wish they didn’t always tell you when it was going to happen. All night I kept waking up, knowing he was awake, wondering what he was feeling. Putting myself in his position. Every slight noise, every little rustle through the cellblock…

I woke at 7:15, noted the time, and thought, with relief: It’s over. And fell into a deep sleep for 10 minutes more. Then I put on the blue robe Lewis gave me for my birthday and went downstairs. Turned on the TV.

He died at 7:16. Just when I was looking at the clock, rolling over in relief, they were administering the big jolt. 

Back upstairs, my husband was still curled in on himself, but I had no mercy.

Learning Swedish in Secret as a Joke

Originally published in New Ohio Review

All this passing on going on, almost
as if it were contagious. Words you’ve recently learned
spill easily from your lips:
Wenckebach, biliary, Cetuximab, granuloma,
the new bright colors of life. Just when
you were getting bored with the
pinks, purples, and greens on offer
for almost seven decades,

you’d happily now trade blasts and plasma cells for
brown or black or tan. But as surely
and hard as you know how many platelets it takes

Chasing Likes and Loving It

originally published in the globe & mail

Yesterday, driving back from a doctor’s appointment, I found myself craving a hot dog. When I got home I checked my freezer. Packages of frozen vegetables, English muffins, some assorted sausages—both Italian and bangers—but no hot dogs. Everyone knows that a sausage, even one smothered in mustard and sauerkraut and inserted into an appropriate roll, will do nothing to quell a hot dog craving.

So I made myself tuna salad and, in a silly mood, posted on Facebook: Sometimes a girl just wants a hot dog. When I checked back later, there were several “likes”—always good—and, from my writer friend Lauren, a link to a salacious blues song, full of double entendres, called “I Want a Hot Dog for My Roll,” performed in the 1920’s by the Vaudeville husband-and-wife comedy duo Butterbeans and Susie.

What is Bobbie Jean Huff Reading?

From The New Quarterly

I find it risky to read when I’m writing intensely. When I do read, I sometimes find that my writing sounds like Molly McClosky for a few pages, then Sally Rooney for another few before, maybe, Ian McEwan takes over until the end of the chapter. You get the picture.

But often books just sneak their way into my life and demand to be read. This was the case with the novel I just finished reading, Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang, It’s about a struggling novelist who steals the plot of her smashingly successful novelist friend, who has died suddenly. The novel takes a satirical look at current notions of race and cultural appropriation, and provides a scathing—yet, I fear, accurate— critique on the modern day publishing industry.