Brandon W. Teigland’s My Child is a Stranger is the author’s fourth book, but his first collection of short stories. The stories cover a broad range of topics, from environmentalism to refugee rights and systemic racism to religion and Canadian politics. A few of the stories are linked by recurring characters, locations, or objects, and the author explains they all work to challenge contemporary anthropocentrism. In an interview with XRAY Literary Magazine, he also reveals that these stories were in fact written over the course of ten years. This explains much about the disparity in style, themes, and even calibre of writing across the collection. Another possible explanation for the clash in quality is his choice to work with a hybrid (traditional and self-) publisher, who requires the author to share the costs of publication with them. I suspect the author’s financial contribution to the project gives them, rather than their editor, greater leverage over the final product.

The absence of editorial authority is unfortunately evident in the book’s overall presentation and quality of writing. The formatting choices are inconsistent, with some internal monologues appearing in italics while others appear in single quotes, as is the punctuation, with en dashes appearing in the place of em dashes, for instance. Teigland’s prose would also benefit from more thorough revision: his writing proliferates with lists of adjectives upon adverbs in long sentences, making it difficult for the reader to focus on the images he wishes to paint. This makes his wide array of themes and styles seem scattered and imprecise, something one assumes was not intended given his seemingly careful word choice throughout: “Where, in the ataraxy of the apse, with its monstrance altar of golden molten fire and its suffering statuary solemnly representing the mediatrix in melancholy decay, obscure mutilations stripped away the holy secret fear of impersonal fecundity from the faceless generous mother.”

Semantically confusing sentences such as these are only made worse by the monotonous structure of his paragraphs, an over-reliance on repetition, and an abundance of clichés, revealing a lack of depth in the consideration given to the serious topics he wishes to cover. For the self-avowed nihilist Teigland, “life is a disease, sexually transmitted, ending in death” (from “Cathedral of Spiders”), and activism seems to involve either escaping society entirely or posting about it on the internet. Someone should also have perhaps warned him not to identify his former university professor by name, calling him “a paradox: a Jew who taught Heidegger.”

The author’s virtues as a writer do, however, come through in some of his philosophical musings about the place of humans in the natural world and his vivid descriptions of the mundane. Teigland wonderfully conveys that humans and the environment are one and the same. In a visceral manner, he draws parallels between spines and trees; bones and boulders; toes, mushrooms, and cheese. His climate-conscious characters never pollute the forest they disappear into, but are subsumed by it. Teigland’s most compelling characters are an accountant working at a textile company (in “Empty Comforts”) and a Canadian federal enumerator on a business trip in Alberta (“Shadow Population”). In these stories monotony and repetition have their place, allowing Teigland to make blind manufacturing and driving down a deserted highway seem downright fascinating. These stories, where the focus is sharp and the images exact, stand in stark contrast to the rest of the book. 

Despite the many problems in this collection, one has to laud Teigland for his readiness to slip into the skin of an assortment of characters: a Canadian poet laureate, a mixed-race investigative journalist, a Proud Boys apologist, a Russian refugee. One hopes that Teigland’s future readers will encourage him to commit to his metaphors and tighten his writing style so that its strengths can shine.mRb