Maggie Burton, a temporary grace: short stories

Brent is at the corner of Prescott and Duckworth. The pin hasn’t moved since around one, when Brent said he’d arrived at the noodle place. Sheryl, let him get off the phone, flushed the toilet, and went back to her cubicle.
            Last night they’d had one of their worst fights ever. Sheryl had thrown a citrus squeezer at Brent’s head, getting lemon juice in his eye. An hour late getting home from work, he’d had the nerve to say it was because his co-worker Nadine wanted to talk about her mom’s cancer. But Sheryl wasn’t stupid. No one cheated on her. While Brent put a cold cloth on his burning eye, Sheryl made him give her his phone so she could turn on location sharing. After all, he said he had nothing to hide. (“location sharing”)

Is there anything that St. John’s, Newfoundland “writer, professional violinist, former municipal politician, and medical student” Maggie Burton can’t do? Following her debut poetry title, Chores (St. John’s NL: Breakwater Books, 2023), a collection awarded the 2024 Canadian First Book Prize by the Griffin Poetry Prize, comes a temporary grace: short stories (Breakwater Books, 2026). What first appear to be rather straightforward narrative stories clearly aren’t, fourteen narratives that each follow a main characters who don’t seem to understand how lost they are. “Outside the coffee shop, Steve is sitting in his car, a vintage Subaru Outback. Wasting time until the last possible minute before going inside to meet a new client.” begins the story “a dog for jennifer,” “In between meetings, he shares a funny video with Corinne, the girl he’s been seeing. She doesn’t respond. He sends it again.” Each of these stories articulate characters that desperately seek connection, but manage to make a mess of things, through a sequence of poor choices, refusal to see what the reader might see, or simply ignoring their own self-preservation for the sake of some kind of grace. Even, one might suggest, a temporary one.

Through clean, sharp prose that knows to hold its own music while propelled by and through narrative action, Burton is very good at establishing characters that don’t know what they don’t know, and perhaps never will (until, perhaps, it is far, far too late), through a collection that, as the back cover offers, “weaves together a series of interconnected stories that navigate the complexities of dating in the post-#MeToo era and through the oppressive forces that trap us in outdated patterns.” She understands conflict really well, and perspective, writing around abusive partners and lost marriages, betting all your chips on the wrong horse, desperately reaching out into the dark. Her stories weave their ways through characters who are abusive but refuse to see it, or are manipulative, completely lacking in self-awareness for their actions. She writes characters and situations remarkably well, articulating characters that often feel trapped, whether through circumstance or the inability to understand their own agency. This is a sharp collection focused not just on character, but on the messiness of relationships, whether through the beginnings of something that doesn’t go far, explodes in a ball of flame, or slowly simmers across years until it finally falls cold. This is a very good collection.