Alison Gresik :: Writings

Lucid Fiction

I thought that getting control in my dreams would stop the nightmares. But it wasn’t that easy.

At first things were better because I could wake myself up. I dreamed I was in a classroom trying to finish my math worksheet. But I kept writing down the wrong answer and having to erase it. The paper was getting thin from all the rubbing. Suddenly someone reached over my shoulder and grabbed my pencil. I knew it must be Kelly but I didn’t want to turn around, so I looked in my desk for another one. Only it was stuffed full of pens and I was afraid of writing down the wrong answer and having to scribble it out.

My children's story "The Same Stupid Dream" appears in the world's first anthology of lucid fiction, edited by Rebecca Turner of World of Lucid Dreaming.

The Lucid Fiction e-book is available for a mere $7. You should buy a copy here if you like reading about alternate realities. Or if you want a sneak peek at my novel-in-progress!

Brick and Mortar

A minister's nose begins to bleed when she takes the pulpit on her first Sunday. The minister's nosebleed establishes the tone of this whole group of stories from Alison Gresik. Each story turns on a revealing moment in the daily experience of the people who live their lives here. It might be something as unimportant as lighting a cigarette or putting on perfume. But these are the moments when the natural and the spiritual intersect, the point where the ordinary puts on the extraordinary and everything becomes what it really is.

Ottawa, Ontario: Oberon Press, 2000

ISBN 0778011534 hardcover
ISBN 0778011542 softcover

Brick and Mortar is currently out of print. Try abebooks.com or your local library.

Reviews of Brick and Mortar

... touching portrayals of lives beset by the ordinary slings and arrows, but centred on a community of faith. … Gresik's devout stories hover pleasingly between earth and heaven."
-Jim Bartley, The Globe and Mail

"[Brick and Mortar is] An unusual and engaging collection that focuses with humour and compassion on a Presbyterian congregation-an old woman who frets when she can't get a weekly bulletin, a child who plays on the floor under the pew, admiring the whorls in the wooden seat, the baker who makes the communion bread."
-Ottawa Citizen

"In Brick and Mortar, Alison Gresik allows her fiction to follow the collective and disparate minds of a single faith community into both expected and unexpected corners of the church (and of her characters’ interior worlds). As a result, she kneads a nourishing mix of well-crafted, character driven fiction. Readers of faith will be challenged. Those seeking will be intrigued."
-David Wright, Nimble Spirit

"Contemporary Canadian authors have been criticized for producing novels with strong images but weak characters. However, in the tradition of Margaret Laurence, Brick and Mortar introduces us to flawed-but-fascinating human beings. … Gresik's eye for narrative detail and subtle use of biblical imagery press home a message that Christian readers will instantly recognize: our sin is great, but grace is irresistible."
-Lloyd Rang, The Banner

Brick and Mortar was shortlisted for the 2001 Ottawa Book Award. The award went to Giller nominee Alan Cumyn for his book Burridge Unbound. Brick and Mortar also received honourable mention in the fiction category for books published in 2000 from Faith Today magazine.

Stories

"Play Dead", The Company We Keep, Ottawa, Ontario: Buschek Books, 2004

"His parents gave him a dog to keep him quiet. He was always asking for a pet, he didn't care what. A rabbit, a gerbil, anything. "Go play outside," they said when he complained of being bored after dinner, moping around the house and bothering them as they tried to watch television. "There's no one to play with," he said."

The Company We Keep

"The Beckoning Door", Grain Magazine, Vol. 31 No. 1, Summer 2003, pp. 120-130

Grain 31, 1

"That summer you are a girl in curlers, reading a book to forget that your mother won't be coming for the weekend. You hide inside the velvet yellow pages of Elsie Dinsmore while John and Stella splash in the lake and your grandmother sits in a lawn chair in the shallows with the two-year-old crawling on and off her lap. Your stepfather has a tin bucket with ice and beer bottles stashed in the boathouse to last him the afternoon."

"Broken Water", Descant 110, Fall 2000

"When I came home from swimming lessons my mother was in labour. I found her in the basement, pacing, beads of sweat like blisters on her upper lip. She wore her lightest dress, a layered yellow cotton that gaped under the arms, and you could see through the thin cotton, especially where it billowed over her belly, showing the dark spot of her navel standing out like the swollen valve of an inner tube."

Descant 110