Durcan, Liam

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Durcan, Liam

PERSONAL: Born in Winnipeg, Ontario, Canada; married; wife's name Florence (a veterinarian); children: two. Education: Attended medical school at the University of Manitoba.

ADDRESSES: Home—Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Office—Montreal Neurological Hospital and Institute, 3801 University Ave., Montreal, Quebec H3A 2B4, Canada. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Véhicule Press, P.O. Box 125, Place du Parc Station, Montreal, Quebec H2X 4A3, Canada. E-mail—[email protected];[email protected].

CAREER: Writer, educator, and neurologist. Montreal Neurological Hospital and Institute, neurologist; McGill University, assistant professor.

AWARDS, HONORS: Quebec Writers' Federation/CBC Quebec short story competition winner, 2004, for "Kick."

WRITINGS:

A Short Journey by Car (short stories), Véhicule Press (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 2004.

Contributor to periodicals, including Antigonish Review, Fiddlehead, Zoetrope and the Paumanok Review.

SIDELIGHTS: Canadian Liam Durcan is a practicing neurologist and professor who writes fiction on the side. He started writing before going to medical school, but during his medical training and residency he had to put writing aside. After establishing a neurological practice, the urge to write returned, nurtured by a 2001 workshop presented by the Quebec Writer's Federation. After learning to edit and revise his work, Durcan successfully submitted numerous short stories to literary journals.

In his debut short story collection, A Short Journey by Car, "Durcan operates successfully on both the brain and the heart," remarked Library Journal reviewer Jim Dwyer. The sixteen stories in the collection tell of "ordinary people thrust into extraordinary situations," noted Martin Levin and H.J. Kirchhoff in the Globe and Mail. In the title story, Moscow dentist Yevgeny Mikailovich is whisked away in the night by the secret police. Arriving at his dental office, he is surprised to see Stalin himself wracked with pain from a toothache and requesting that the dentist use a new type of anesthetic. Yevgeny becomes Stalin's de facto personal dentist, though he is terrified that a mistake will lead to a sentence to the Gulag or worse. Yevgeny begins to believe that the now-friendly Stalin will help his academic career, but his newfound success is short-lived.

Gerald, the protagonist of "Control," volunteers for an experimental drug trial, hoping it will pull him out of the doldrums at his insurance company job. The pills he is given evoke a blissful state of near-Nirvana so delightful that Gerald is hesitant to even record his experiences in his treatment journal. Beyond the drug-induced euphoria, however, the hard-edged world of reality waits to reclaim Gerald. In "Nightflight," a contentious cab driver and his passenger get lost in the dark in rural Vermont; they abandon their antagonism toward each other in order to find their way out of an unfamiliar and menacing rural countryside. "Lumier" chronicles the amazement of the Parisian crowd that witnessed the technological marvel of the century: the debut of the first motion picture. In "American Standard" a trucker trying to cross the U.S./Canada border stakes his financial solvency on the illegal U.S. sale of two hundred toilets that use more water than allowed by federal standards. "For a tale turning on litres per flush, it's strangely solemn," observed reviewer Jim Bartley in the Globe and Mail. "Durcan's greatest gift is for imagining his way into worlds he can't possibly have known," commented Bartley. "Where he soars, in full flight with his muse, is in stories that vault us out of the contemporary."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), October 23, 2004, Jim Bartley, "No First-Book Nerves Here," review of A Short Journey by Car, p. D23; November 27, 2004, Martin Levin and H.J. Kirchhoff, "The Globe 100: Of All the Year's Writings, Few Meet the Test," review of A Short Journey by Car, p. D3.

JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association, May 18, 2005, Peter W. Graham, review of A Short Journey by Car, p. 2414.

Library Journal, June 15, 2005, Jim Dwyer, review of A Short Journey by Car, p. 62.

Medical Post (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), February 8, 2005, Kylie Taggart, "Not the Stories of His Life," review of A Short Journey by Car, p. 21.