The Ever-Growing Village

Cover by the brilliant Inkspiral Design.

Given “Village Fool” released on the Bold Strokes Books website yesterday it occurred to me it might be a good time to revisit the entirety of the Village series of shorts and novellas in one place, in chronological order.

Now, I worked hard to make sure you can read the various Village tales in whatever order you’d like, but I also know saying “you can read them out of order” causes actual pain to fire in the nerves of many, many readers (you’re my people), and so, this blog post.

The last time I sat down to think about this, “Faux Ho Ho” had just come out and I realized just how long I’d been dipping in and out of the Village and the answer turned out to be: since the very first story I had published. But, to put this into some sense of order that might make sense for a reader trying to find their way through the Village, I’ll aim for something chronological from within the narratives themselves.

Now, because I also know posts like this are TL;DRs in text form, I’m going to start at the end. Here’s the current chronological order of the various Village stories and novellas:

1. “There & Then” (short story) in Of Echoes Born.
2. “Heart” (short story) in Fool for Love, and reprinted in Of Echoes Born.
3. A Little Village Magic (novelette) in Of Echoes Born.
4. “Vanilla” (short story)* in Threesome: Him, Him, and Me.
5. “Pentimento” (short story) in Of Echoes Born.
6. Handmade Holidays (novella).
7. Saving the Date (novella)*.
8. “Negative Space” (short story) in Of Echoes Born.
9. “Elsewhen” (short story)* in Riding the Rails, and reprinted in Of Echoes Born.
10. “Here & Now” (short story) in Of Echoes Born.
11. Faux Ho Ho (novella).
12. Village Fool (novella).
13. A Little Village Blend (novella).

(* Note, the asterisks up there are for the stories and novellas containing erotic content—the vast majority of the Village tales do not, but those three do. So, y’know, be aware.)

Now, I should probably explain what the Village even is, no?

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A Dash of Magic (Sometimes)

My fictionalized Village is a version of Ottawa the way it sort-of is, with our small “Golden Triangle” that sits on Bank Street for a few blocks and is a short piece of queerness and queer history you can quite literally walk through with a few spare minutes. It’s heavily adjusted for some of my own nostalgia of what it was like in the days where the queer businesses thrived, and I should note there’s a wonderful movement, The Village Legacy Project, highlighting this past and making sure it’s there for future generations, especially as those small businesses fade in light of the net and social change—but not necessarily the education of queer history—makes forward motion.

In my version of the Village, there’s a dash of magic running through the world, and that all starts with a young man named Gabriel, and from there, the population of the Village began to grow. Some of it magic, some of it less so, but all of it queer.

But first, even before Gabriel, there was Ian (or Christian, as his parents named him, before he dropped the first six letters from his name). We meet sixteen year old Christian Simon in “There & Then,” the opening story of my first collection, Of Echoes Born, but the story takes place before he moves to Ottawa, so it’s almost a prelude to the Village stories. Then Ian shows up for half-a-second in my first-ever published short story, “Heart,” included in Fool for Love, which does take place in Ottawa, and by virtue of the main character, Aiden, having a gift for healing, becomes the first real story with that dash of magic set in Ottawa.

And then we get back to Gabriel, and the real birth of the Village occurs.

The Village Starts with a Symbol

Cover by the wonderful Inkspiral Design.

Gabriel works part-time at one of the small businesses in the Village, Third Eye, which is run by Bailey Haliburton (more on her later). Third Eye is a new age and occult store, and Gabriel, a student of religion and philosophy working toward a degree, finds it all fascinating, but doesn’t really believe in anything himself, least of all magic. He considers Bailey’s discussions of which crystals can help people with whatever problem a harmless bit of amusement, and mostly he just keeps his head down and his grades up and hopes for the best. Instead, in the novelette “A Little Village Magic” (included in Of Echoes Born), Gabriel discovers it doesn’t matter if you believe in magic when magic believes in you. A side-effect of Gabriel’s realization is a kind of revitalization of a spark in the Village in the form of a memorial mural, and that carries forward through the rest of the stories set there.

A little while later, Avery comes to the Village after the death of his grandmother, and decides to take a shot at re-opening his grandmother’s chocolate and fine gourmet candy store, Sweet Temptations. Avery has a gift of his own: when he makes art with his bare hands, the pieces tend to get a kind of “boost” that nudges them into magical territory, and it turns out this is no different when he makes chocolates. That short story, “Vanilla,” appears in Threesome: Him, Him, and Me. (This is one of the only Village stories I wrote with erotic content, as for the most part they’re G-rated. This one is absolutely not G-rated.) You also meet Pete Marlin here, the manager of the small chain of fair-trade coffee shops known as Bittersweets.

After that, a fellow named Michel, who owns the gallery in the Village, FunkArt, inherits something beautiful (but sad) when a mentor passes away, and his skill for artistic mimicry that sends change both forward and back throughout the Village in “Pentimento” (which appears in Of Echoes Born).

We Need a Little Christmas

What’s that? ANOTHER brilliant cover from Inkspiral Design?

Then we hit my first real deep-dive into the Village in the form of a novella, Handmade Holidays. Handmade Holidays is a contemporary queer chosen-family holiday romance, and it takes place over fifteen years in the Village, and follows Nicholas Wilson as he navigates being disowned for the holidays alongside some wonderful chosen family: “The Misfit Toys.” This is the first of these stories to not contain any specific magic, but there’s magic happening all around Nick and his friends of a different sort.

Now, since Handmade Holidays takes place over fifteen years, a couple of the other Village stories are kind-of/sort-of tucked inside that timeline, but Handmade Holidays starts before them, so it makes more sense to put them after in a chronology. Next comes Saving the Date, which I co-wrote with Angela S. Stone, and introduces Morgan, a young man who has reached a point in his life where the anniversary of a night of violence is something he wants to try and change. He signs up for a date through a matchmaking service, and ends up with more than a one night stand (and you get to visit with some of the Misfit Toys here, too).

The next two visits to the Village happen back in Of Echoes Born again, with “Negative Space” and “Elsewhen” spinning stories around two people in the Village who are new for their own particular stories. “Negative Space” introduces André, an artist who has access to information that could solve murders thanks to a hard-gained gift; and “Elsewhen” (originally printed in Riding the Rails, and the other Village story with erotic content) introduces two men named Julian, one of whom can interact with the past of the other, who has an opportunity to set things to a right that couldn’t be when they first happened.

Ian Arrives

Then we get back to Ian, who is now living in Ottawa, managing his second-hand bookstore The Second Page in the Village, and who has come mostly to terms with his gift for seeing auras and glimpsing the past or future. The final story in Of Echoes Born, “Here & Now,” belongs to Ian and brings the collection to a whole greater than the sum of its parts in a very Village way.

You guessed it, another fabulous cover from Inkspiral Design.

And after that? After that we get back to a holiday season with Faux Ho Ho, which not only revisits many of the Misfit Toys, but name-drops quite a few people who live in the Village during the course of Silas and Dino’s misadventures with their fake relationship and Silas’s sister’s Christmas Wedding and the nine months that lead up to them deciding they can totally pretend to be boyfriends for a few days.

That brings you up to speed on the who, and the when, of the Village stories that came before Village Fool if you want to be completely completionist about the whole thing.  There are stories I’d call Village-adjacent (most centrally all the other tales I’ve not mentioned in Of Echoes Born) which absolutely take place in the same shared present, usually with a dash of magic, but they’re not set in the Village, or they have characters who have yet to make an appearance in the Village (or who do appear in the Village, but are just mentioned in passing in the story without appearing, which brings me back to Bailey Haliburton, who does just that in “The Psychometry of Snow”).

So whether you’d prefer something chocolately from Sweet Temptations, or something caffeinated from Bittersweets, or maybe something a bit healthier from NiceTeas, I hope you enjoy a visit to the Village.

But wait, you might say. There was another title on that list up at the top there. Something called “A Little Village Blend.”

Huh.

So there was.

Looks like I’ll be heading back to the Village again soon, then, doesn’t it?