Much like personal relationships, flowers are vulnerable. And in each story in this new collection, there’s a bouquet.

Louise Dandeneau, Winnipeg author of Bouquets Meurtris, explains the book’s title. “A bruised bouquet is an injured bouquet. The bouquet in each of the stories symbolizes the hurt that the characters inflict on one another as they fight.”

Here are seven stories about dysfunctional human relationships. “In every case, the flowers are mistreated in one way or another,” says Dandeneau.

“One bouquet suffers in the heat, another is stomped on by the protagonist, and yet another is crushed. The state of the flowers represents the state of the relationship in question.”

One bouquet endures, because its flowers are made of plastic.

Dandeneau left her work as a translator in 2017, after her first book was published in 2016, to dedicate herself to her writing.

“I started to write poetry to express my pain and ask questions,” she says.

“I was looking to understand the roots of my pain. I turned to prose because there I found more possibilities to entertain and connect with a larger readership. It’s also a way to dilute my difficult experiences in imagined stories. Today, I write prose, poetry, and haiku. I have published books in each of these three genres.”

She loves to invent stories and has been doing so since she was young.

“I love exploring the psyche of dysfunctional people, especially those who are malicious, because it is a mystery for me to solve, why some chose to be malicious, or again why some become malicious whether they realize it or not,” she says. “This fascinates me.”

All of her characters come to her from details of what she has seen or felt about people she knows or has met, even briefly. “They are a composite of several people, with physical and psychological traits of my own invention of course.”

In writing about dysfunctional relationships, Dandeneau hopes to connect with her readers, hopes that they might identify with these familiar characters and situations.

“In all of my stories, my characters are deeply hurting, and they have much difficulty in communicating it,” she says.

“I hope my readers will realize the importance of open communication. It can scare us and make us feel vulnerable to express our pain, but it’s this openness and honesty that can improve a relationship or end it, if that is what must happen.”