Dance, Gladys, Dance
- Publisher
- NeWest Press
- Initial publish date
- May 2012
- Subjects
- Contemporary Women, Literary
- Categories
- Author lives in Saskatchewan
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781927063583
- Publish Date
- May 2012
- List Price
- $11.99
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Description
Winner of the 2013 Leacock Memorial Medal for Canadian Humour Writing!
Long Listed for Canada Reads 2018!
Nominated for the First Book Award at the 2013 Saskatchewan Book Awards!
Twenty-seven-year-old Frieda Zweig is at an impasse. Behind her is a string of failed relationships and half-forgotten ambitions of being a painter; in front of her lies the dreary task of finding a real job and figuring out what “normal” people do with their lives. Then, a classified ad in the local paper introduces Frieda to Gladys, an elderly woman who long ago gave up on her dreams of being a dancer.
The catch? Gladys is a ghost.
In Dance, Gladys, Dance, Cassie Stocks tells the uplifting story of a woman whose uncanny connection with a kindred spirit causes her to see her life in a new way—as anything but ordinary.
About the author
Cassie Stocks was born in Edmonton, Alberta. She’s been a biker chick, a university student, an actress, and a rich man’s gardener; she’s worked as a waitress, an office clerk, an aircraft cleaner, has raised chickens, and has even been the caretaker of a hydroponic pot factory. In 2002, she was accepted to the Writing with Style workshop at the Banff Centre, where she received support and encouragement from Sharon Butala and the late Gloria Sawai. Upon her return to Edmonton, she quit her job at a steel fabrication plant and applied to the Grant MacEwan Bachelor of Applied Communications in Professional Writing. Cassie currently lives in Eston, SK, with her son Julian. Dance, Gladys, Dance is her first novel.
Awards
- Long-listed, Canada Reads
- Winner, LEACOCK MEMORIAL MEDAL FOR CANADIAN HUMOUR WRITING
Excerpt: Dance, Gladys, Dance (by (author) Cassie Stocks)
Chapter One
She Needs The Room To Bake
I had no point of navigation but I was hell-bent on finding my way to Ordinary. I didn’t know what I hoped to find on that voyage or, God forbid, at the end of it, but I knew there was nothing but bilge rats and bullshit on the course I’d been following.
I still awoke at night as if in midthought. That copy of Emerson’s Essays … did Norman keep it? I’d be compelled to run downstairs to the storage room and root through the boxes I brought back from Kentucky with me. First, though, I had to rouse Ginny to find the key. Ginny tolerated these wakings only twice, and then, griping about delusional roommates, she had a copy of the key made and hung it by the condo’s front door.
It’s a physical deficiency you feel in the middle of the night after a breakup. Oh shit, you lie there thinking. It’s not the books or the brassieres—I’ve left my thighs in his spare closet.
Along with my ex, Norman, and possibly some missing-inaction body parts, I’d abandoned my creative spirit in Kentucky too, left it disintegrating underneath a tree beside the Barren River (symbolically enough), buried alongside the last paintings I swore I would ever do.
Ginny had left the newspaper on the kitchen table folded open to the employment section, alongside a conspicuously placed red pen. I sat down at the table and wriggled in the chair. Ginny’s condo is the Shrine to Design: titanium white walls, ebony floors, leather furniture, and none of the clocks had numbers. I could never tell what time it was, not that I had anything to be late for. The two kitchen chairs were Bertoia Wire Chairs, sans cushions. The wire frame was incredibly uncomfortable and my butt would be dented like a reverse waffle when I stood up. If the other items in the room and I were featured in a certain Sesame Street game, I’d be one of the things that’s not like the others.
I unfolded the paper and turned past the help-wanted ads to the furniture-for-sale column. I’d be getting my own place again, someday. It didn’t cost anything to look and I wanted to feast my eyes on the cost of a nice flat-bottomed kitchen chair.
Underneath the amazing queen mattress & box, cost over $1100, sell $495, there it was:
B E A U T I F U L old phonograph for sale. 78 record player.
Excellent condition. Gladys doesn’t dance anymore.
She needs the room to bake. Bring offer. Ph. 254-9885.
Editorial Reviews
"I loved hanging out with the characters in this book."
~ Joy Fisher, The Coastal Spectator
"Dance, Gladys, Dance is a lovely demonstration of the importance of creating, whether it’s art, friends or food. Connection—reaching out to others—is the ultimate value of this charming and thoughtful novel."
~ The Globe and Mail
"[a]n entertaining blend of humour and pathos, friends and families, the living and the dead."
~ Anjana Balakrishnan, Herizons Magazine
"[t]he characters are zany and interesting, and, while Stocks has a witty tone, she deals with very serious, sometimes downright devastating, themes."
~ Caroline Barlott, Avenue Edmonton