Eva Crocker grew up in Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland) and lives in Tiohti:áke (Montreal). Her debut novel All I Ask was long-listed for the 2020 Giller Prize and won the 2020 BMO Winterset Award. Her short story collection Barreling Forward was shortlisted for Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBTQS2 Writers and won the Alistair MacLeod Award for Short Fiction and the CAA Emerging Author’s Award. Her forthcoming novel ‘Back in the Land of the Living’ was published in August 2023 by House of Anansi Press. She is a PhD student in Concordia University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities program where she is researching visual art from Ktaqmkuk.
Marcy is running away from a previous life in St. John’s, Newfoundland, coming to Montreal following a bad breakup, with nothing but her volition to start anew. Crocker, also born in St. John, now living and writing in Montreal, explores the experiences of Marcy as a queer person trying to reinvent herself in Montreal – a city where a diaspora of people come seeking to reinvent themselves. Marcy moves into a ramshackle loft in Little Italy occupied by zany artists, where she meets Hannah, who gets Marcy a job teaching AI to recognize hate speech. Marcy works odd-end gigs, enrolling in medical trials, volunteering to trim a neighbour’s Cannabis plants, and getting to know the cast of dreamy people who she can never seem to get close to fully. Roaming down the Plateau’s sweeping empty boulevards, going to movie theatres to watch French movies in English subtitles, she is alone in a wilderness of unfamiliarity. Still, there’s a sense of urgent possibility. When the only thing conventionalized is revolt, Marcy begins to feel pride in her resistance to stay afloat despite her inability to speak French.
This way of subsisting is all new to Marcy; some may call it struggling to get by, but despite her lust for self-reinvention, Marcy is confronted with the bitter truth she tried to avoid. Reliving moments of life in St. John’s, experiencing flashbacks to the hardships of growing up as queer, Marcy is beset with an invoking sense of déjà vu in which the reader begins to stitch together pieces of the past. Marcy starts to fill her free time with internet dates in hopes of meeting somebody who may be less lost than she. When Marcy meets Leanne, things escalate faster than anticipated; she’s swept up in a whirlpool of romance. Leanne becomes Marcy’s only tether to this otherwise inhospitable place where she still doesn’t entirely feel at home. Their codependency unveils an aberration of character, as Leanne becomes increasingly capricious in her behaviour as her angry side is revealed. Knowing all the while, that is, that there can’t be terror without the premonition of love’s defeat.
Crocker rewrites the everyday experiences into the literary experience, referring to contemporary queer literature, the mass police brutality protests, and the looming pandemic. It is a risky endeavour, referring to the pandemic, when even the mere utterance of the word; pandemic, invokes a superstitious sense of terror. It is, in that space left between the word and the flashback, an eerily familiar uncertainty takes over, where one begins to become unsure of one’s surroundings, questioning every point of contact. Yet Crocker manages to spotlight this tumultuous time in the not-so-distant past when things seemed to be at a tipping point. In a time when most people feared loneliness, Marcy rehashed her craving for spiritual and subjective freedom. Montreal is a perilous pursuit, but for this reason, Marcy begins to feel free from compulsion within her isolation. Though Marcy’s loneliness becomes challenging to maintain, with her feelings of alienation, she wonders if Montreal is the promised land she made it out to be.
