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All the Pretty Girls April 2008
In each of these short stories, set against a finely-crafted backdrop of poverty and violence, abuse and hope, Chandra Mayor provides a glimpse into the lives of girls and young women, allowing each to speak in her own voice. These are young women who roll pennies to buy toilet paper and roll their own cigarettes, who watch the mail for the welfare cheque and watch their boyfriends and lovers out of the corners of their eyes. But they also watch their own children play in wading pools, and watch the horizon for other women and other possibilities. Outsiders looking in and insiders looking out, these stories are wreathed in cigarette smoke and blurry with beer. Mayor insists that all girls are pretty girls, and that even amid squalor and chaos, true beauty is achieved through the simple act of reaching for something, anything, more. Praise for Mayor’s novel Cherry: "Her remarkable version of Winnipeg is nothing short of prairie gothic.... If this run-down city doesn’t break your heart, its characters will." — Toronto Star "With poetic economy, Mayor spins a tale of misplaced love and harrowing abuse." — Globe & Mail
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Chandra Mayor is the author of Cherry, a novel about the Winnipeg skinhead scene in the 1990s, which won the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award in 2005. Her writing also won the 2004 Manitoba Book Award for Most Promising Writer, and her book of poetry, August Witch, was nominated for four Manitoba Book Awards, and won the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for best first book. She was the writer in residence at the Winnipeg Millennium Library last year and was the regional winner of the CBC Poetry Face-Off in 2006 and 2007. Her writing has appeared in the anthologies Between Interruptions: 30 Women Tell the Truth About Motherhood, Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets, and Post-Prairie. She thinks that knitting is entirely sensible and achingly boring, and not particularly radical.
