Skin

Sometimes, it is not how we navigate the world from the outside that matters, the skin we carry or how we perceive the world through it, what we have to do is extend beyond it. This idea is the core meaning of what I took away from Catherine Bush’s collection of 13 stories in “Skin.”

Relationships that forge us, that push us beyond our pre-set limitations and boundaries, the stories in “Skin” show us where we need to extend to, how we need to evolve past our predisposed physical entombment. At the end of the day, intimacy, desire, and our fraught existences seek connection. We fear abandonment too.

Bush’s writing style is thread through from the realistic to the speculative, exposing and lifting us from our places in a world tortured by personal and global issues. Betrayal and propriety, to virus and climate change, ecological crises are juxtaposed with the domestic and public space.

Published on April 22, 2025 by Goose Lane Editions, “Skin” makes for a captivating and puzzling reading experience fluctuating between flash fiction and longer pieces. Goose Lane Editions, based in Fredericton, New Brunswick, showcases fiction, poetry, art, and works on pressing social and political issues while championing Queer, First Nations, and Inuit voices.

Catherine Bush is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. She lives in Toronto and in Eastern Ontario. She has published five novels and has earned respectable accolades for this writing. Her most recent novel, “Blaze Island,” was a Globe and Mail and Writers’ Trust of Canada Best Book of the Year and achieved the Hamilton Reads 2021 Selection. She has earned the Canada Reads longlisted Accusation, the Trillium Award shortlist, and was named a New York Times Notable Book and a L.A. Times Best Book of the Year. She has also been shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Award. Her novels include, “Skin” (2025), “Blaze Island” (2020), and “The Rules of Engagement” (2000). Bush was the 2024 Writer-in-Residence at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society. She can be found at: www.catherinebush.com.

I was pulled into the collection from the first story that is shy from being a novella in length. Titled, “Benevolence: An East Village Story,” the story follows the co-habitation and relationship of a supply teacher from the 1980s who takes in a student in need of stability and a caring adult in their lives. I anticipated the eventual fall-from-grace of Ellen, a 30-year-old teacher who shows constant control of desire for Chris, an 18-year-old student, but Bush perseveres with a narrative of benevolence and integrity. This story was crafted effortlessly and there were times I forgot I was even reading as the unfolding and tightening up of events felt more as if I was watching a T.V. show. In an interview with 49th Shelf, Bush gives context to the writing process for “Benevolence: An East Village Story,” that the story was originally written in the late 1980s and Bush let it sit for forty years. Bush explains, “to re-enter the story forty years later I had, first of all, to construct a retrospective narrative, someone my age looking back on their twenties, on the cusp of turning thirty, and the tumult of that turning point.” I further did not pick up on the parallel between Bush’s story and that of Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Bush gives context, “I was also thinking about Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, and the weird relationship between the lawyer and Bartleby, who moves into, then refuses to leave the lawyer’s office.” Above all, I enjoyed the seamless immersion into the setting of New York City in the 1980s for this story and it stays with me as an impression from the collection.

In finishing this story, it was almost jarring to switch to flows of flash fiction throughout the collection with one other longer piece. I wondered over the decision for the layout of the collection and if there would be cohesion, or an underlying theme or symbol that would subtly be braided through the stories. I understood the direction of the flash fiction in this collection from Bush’s interview in giving context to the pandemic and the style of writing that grew out of the lifestyle of lockdown. “Before the pandemic I found myself turning to flash fiction, the most compressed form, the opposite of a novel. I was drawn to this completely different formal challenge. Ideas came to me this way. I pursued them. I relished the shortness of stories, their leaps, swerves, compressed breath, a different way of moving through time.” There was purpose in positioning longer stories amongst the flash fiction. “I’ve loved being able to expand my formal range with the collection: to write flash, stories, and novellas, then bring them together into an ensemble that, I hope, takes the reader on a journey.” I did go on a journey, and the overarching push was to extend beyond my skin.

Another story that stood out to me was titled, “Glacial.” This story pushed me beyond traditional and colonial concepts of nature in literature which deepened the richness of the collection. In “Glacial,” a woman develops a relationship with a glacier above the Arctic Circle during an arts residency. “How does one address a glacier, so ancient, such a miracle of compressed time, time turned to ice?” In speaking to the glacier, she receives a response. “Take off your skin, the voice says, the voice that may or may not belong to the glacier.” In a chilling turn of events, the woman becomes trapped and abandoned at the end of the story, in order to evolve or push to the next level of existence, the reader understands that death is impending. Pushed out of her physical body entrapped, she does learn how to take off her skin and let her soul pool into the earth.

“There is no other way to move. She is moving, finding the depths of the rocks, the texture of water, the shifting border where water meets ice, salt water meets fresh, grief meets tenderness. She is taking off her skin, and it may be that, soon, there will be nothing left of her, but she is doing it, becoming skinless, expansive, she has no choice but to continue, no other way onward than to abandon all that was for all that is.”

To become skinless, to feel that out in whatever contour of our lives that entraps us, that is the key.

Thank you to Catherine Bush, Goose Lane Editions and River Street Writing for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!