Steven Ross Smith maintains quirky tone while playing with very short fiction pieces

After a decade in Alberta, Steven Ross Smith is back in Saskatchewan. He had good reasons to leave Saskatchewan’s vibrant literary community: he was appointed Director of Literary Arts at the Banff Centre and then Banff’s Poet Laureate.

But the writer and arts administrator didn’t get quite the homecoming he’d expected after moving to Saskatoon.

“Within a month of my arrival, COVID hit, and I’ve had much less ‘real’ contact with my local and provincial community, which is discouraging,” Smith notes. “There have been, though, many opportunities that have come my way, to write and publish in the virtual and 3-D worlds. That has kept me connected and occupied.”

Since relocating, he has published two chapbooks with JackPine Press and is looking forward to the release of Glimmer, a collection of short fiction that ranges widely in style and form – set in bars and on beaches, portraying people falling in love and others just falling – but that maintains a quirky tone.

Glimmer is Smith’s 15th book but only his third book of prose. He is known for his seven-book experimental poetry series fluttertongue, the final volume of which, coda: fluttertongue 7, was released by JackPine in late 2021.

“In the ’80s and ’90s, I published one book of short fiction each decade,” says Smith. “They were departures from my usual practice of poetry. I thought then that I could aim to do one such collection each decade, but fell off that schedule until 2014 when I retired from the Banff Centre.”

In the years since Banff, Smith wrote all 12 of the longer stories in the book. “I wanted to complete a manuscript while I still had some decades left,” he says.

At the same time, Smith started experimenting with a different form.

“A quote I read from Italo Calvino led me to think of writing a series of one-sentence ‘novels,’ ” he says.

“I wrote 50 of them, thinking of that concept and also about how people’s attention spans seemed to be shrinking to Twitter and texting lengths; I titled them Fifty Short Novels for People on the Go. Thirteen are included here. So my stories range from about 125 words to 4,000 words.”

Alternating between short and long, these fictions are often stories about story-making – evidence of Smith’s commitment to challenge his relationship to form and narrative.

“I am drawn to the illusive and allusive, to surrealism, metafiction, layers, anything I can think of to shake up the received ways of telling stories (at least as I’ve observed them),” he says.

Now that Glimmer is making its way to readers and fluttertongue has been brought to a close, Smith has begun work on new projects.

“I’m just fiddling, poking at the odd poem, jotting notes,” he says.

“There’s a story brewing, set near the Broadway Bridge in Saskatoon. Now I need to be reading more than I am, to get that particular fuel. I need to get to my desk more regularly, but I’ve been distracted and scattered by personal and logistical matters and COVID since 2019.

“I’m looking for a new horizon – personal and artistic – and it will be near the ocean.”