There are short stories, and then there are Corwin Fox short stories – and those don’t get much shorter.
The B.C. musician and music producer has added ‘published author’ to his portfolio, with Kill Love – a book of one-sentence stories.
Fox said the idea for a book of one-sentence stories came by happenstance.
“I started writing one-sentence stories by accident – I was just trying to crack up my bandmate, Laurel,” he said. “I was replying to an email and I just wrote this funny once-sentence response that turned into a story – which is in the book, incidentally… I cracked myself up; it was just funny. But then that night I started thinking… I wondered what else I could do?
“So I just started writing more to see what I could do. Could I write sad ones, funny ones, dark ones? What can I do with a one-sentence story. I was writing them every night until I had dozens of them. Then I realized there was a theme tying a whole bunch of these together, so I just cleaned it up, grouped them, and made Kill Love.”
The Vancouver Island-based artist’s one-sentence stories are akin to extremely free verse poetry. There is no consistent pattern or word count from one story to the next. Some stories are 20 lines long; others are five words long.
“It’s almost a literary form – or it could be a literary form,” said Fox.
Corwinisms, if you will.
Fox said some of the stories are autobiographical, while others are pure fiction. There are even stories of invented words, such as ‘ampersymphonialocity’ – the rate of speed at which two or more musical ideas merge. ‘Fox said the book is ‘not really for kids – there is some dark and weird stuff in it, along with some cuss words and stuff. I wanted it to be really unfettered and experimental, but also to make it very personal.”
As much as anything, Fox figures once he starts doing music gigs again, Kill Love will be a nice addition to his merch table.
“The state of the music industry has changed so much,” he said. “Nowadays people buy computers that don’t even come with a CD drive, so some people still buy CDs, but not a lot of people; some people by vinyl, but not a lot of people; some people are even buying cassettes again, but most people consume their music these days through streaming.
“So I started thinking, what am I going to sell, once I go back on tour, because I will do gigs again, and it will be great, because you need your merch money. No one has CD players anymore… I already supplement my merch tables with hats or shirts, but I’m not super into clothing, so…
“That makes it sound like the impetus of writing this book was an economic one, but it wasn’t. That’s just a secondary thing. I was already creating this stuff and I just felt compelled to make the book – the same as writing a song.”
Kill Love is available at Moon’s Records in his hometown of Cumberland, or order online at Fox’s website, corwinfoxmusic.com
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terry.farrell@comoxvalleyrecord.com
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