To read more, search for: TLS In This Faulty Machine Kathy Page Deborah Campbell

The Body Intervenes

Charlotte Gray review of In this Faulty Machine for Literary Review of Canada:

https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2025/12/the-body-intervenes-review-in-this-faulty-machine/

Deborah Campbell review of In This Faulty Machine for the Times Literary Supplement:

Make a sentence work

https://www.trishtalksbooks.com/2025/10/author-chat-kathy-page-on-in-this.html

“The talk and reading on 21st September packed the Salt Spring Island Library. This being my home island and likewise that of several others whose stories feature in the book, the audience was fully engaged. As was I. There were family and friends close by and Adina, my bookstore friend as moderator, so my anxieties as to being distracted and subverted by symptoms such as dyskinesia (repetitive, restless movements/ writhing) faded and I could enjoy presenting my work to the audience and appreciate both the laughter and the tears (including my own). Many thanks to all who attended, to Karen and Sophia at the library who set things up so well and to the Writers’ Union of Canada/Canada Council for financial support.

“An eye-opening, often lyrical and very funny report from that “other kingdom” of illness, from an observant, wise, and honest involuntary resident. The author’s acute yet welcoming voice draws us into the erratic, intimate, and troubling effects of the disease and its impact on her relationships alongside the pleasures of family, friends, reading, writing, and the natural world….”

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/788772/in-this-faulty-machine-by-kathy-page/9781037800894

Publisher Viking/Penguin Canada

Publication Sept 9 2025

Always a versatile writer, perhaps best known for her fiction (titles include Dear Evelyn, a Writers’ Trust Prize winner, and two Giller–nominated short fiction collections, Paradise & Elsewhere and The Two of Us), Kathy Page now faces the challenge of living with Parkinson’s Disease. The ability to create fictional predicaments has abandoned her (or she it), replaced by a desire to explore and chronicle the physical realities, philosophical perplexities and many ironies of her new situation. “Which is,” she dryly remarks, “more interesting than you might expect. “The Exquisite Cyclops” is the second part of that ongoing project to be published, following “That Other Place,” which first appeared TNQ https://tnq.ca/ and was selected by Mireille Silicoff as a Best Canadian Essay of 2023, Biblioasis 2023.

“Metcalf’s latest project, the anthology OFF THE RECORD brings together six of the writers with whom Metcalf has worked, in what becomes a dazzling collection of memoir and fiction. If Caroline Adderson, Kristyn Dunnion, Cynthia Flood, Shaena Lambert, Elise Levine, and Kathy Page aren’t quite household names, OFF THE RECORD is a powerful argument for just what a mistake that oversight is.

John Metcalf, who celebrated his 85th birthday on November 12, is the rarest of commodities: an editor who has gained fame in a position which, usually, goes unremarked and unheralded. Also a noted writer in his own right, Metcalf worked for more than fifteen years at publishers Porcupine’s Quill, and twenty years at Biblioasis; in that time he has helped shape Canadian literature for successive generations.

Metcalf’s latest project, the anthology “Off the Record,” brings together six of the writers with whom Metcalf has worked, in what becomes a dazzling collection of memoir and fiction. If Caroline Adderson, Kristyn Dunnion, Cynthia Flood, Shaena Lambert, Elise Levine, and Kathy Page aren’t quite household names, “Off the Record” is a powerful argument for just what a mistake that oversight is.

Each section begins with an autobiographical essay, of sorts, from the featured writer. Shaped by Metcalf’s “continuing questions,” the editor has stepped in to remove any evidence of those interviews. “To leave in the questions once they’d been answered,” he writes in the book’s foreword, “seemed to me rather like leaving up unsightly scaffolding when the building was finished so I removed them all enabling the responses to flow as seemingly unprompted narrative.

That decision, to strip away the artifice and leave the author’s voice to stand on its own, is a hallmark of Metcalf’s editorial approach. Here, it results in a succession of powerful personal narratives, ranging from each writer’s childhood experiences (generally unhappy, often powerfully conflicted, which likely doesn’t come as too much of a surprise) to their early successes (often with a nod to Metcalf’s role as editor), and including insights into their processes, their perspectives on writing, and their interpretation of their role as writers.

The experience of reading each of these stories after reading their paired essay offers a uniquely insightful experience, as one can trace the impact of each writer’s recounted histories and insights within the fiction itself (“death of the author” be damned). Kathy Page’s unprepared immigration from England to Canada, for example, accounts for what she refers to, in her essay, as why it has taken her “a while to get to the point of tackling Canadian settings and characters” in her fiction. “Low Tide,” the story which follows, demonstrates a bridging of those two worlds: it’s a story set, largely, on the sea and in a light-keeper’s cottage, its setting bringing to mind Canada’s west coast while its concerns and voice resonate with Page’s English upbringing…”

Full text https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/in-their-own-voices-six-canadian-woman-writers-on-the-stories-that-shaped-them/article_aacc8e12-906c-11ee-801e-9f7b581abe3d.html

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