Lay Figures by Mark Blagrave

Longlisted for 2022 Dublin Literary Awards

Elizabeth MacKinnon moves to Saint John New Brunswick in 1939 to find inspiration for her poetry in the bohemian life of the city’s central peninsula. Swept up in the vibrant society of the city’s poets, painters, potters, dancers, and playwrights, she finds herself joining their struggles to make sense of making art in a time of economic depression.

Inhabiting the lives of the artists who find themselves in the port city taking refuge from the Depression, Lay Figuresexplores relationships between art and lived experience, artist and subject, artist and audience, and between margins and centre, and traces the development of a young female writer against the backdrop of the Depression and early war years in Saint John. In a story that couples bitter despair with exuberant triumphs, Elizabeth and her fellow artists make life-changing discoveries about politics and social responsibility, desire and betrayal.

Mark Blagrave's short fiction has appeared in several Canadian literary journals and in a collection of interlinked stories entitled Salt in the Wounds (2014). His novel Silver Salts (2008) was shortlisted for the Commonwealth First Novel Award (Canada and Caribbean) and for the John and Margaret Savage Award for First Novel. After a 35-year teaching career in universities in New Brunswick and Ontario, Mark lives and writes in Saint Andrews, New Brunswick.

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