Dwight Eliot was born on a baseball diamond in the small town of Seep during a dugout-clearing brawl between his hometown team, The Seep Selects, and a visiting team of barnstorming Cuban All-Stars.
Decades later, Dwight returns to town only to witness his childhood home being moved down the highway on the back of a huge flatbed truck. Seep is being dismantled, and the land is being redeveloped as a master-planned recreational townsite to complement a nearby First Nations casino. In the face of the town’s erasure, Dwight tries to preserve its stories, and in so doing, comes to question his own. And then his wayward brother, Darcy, arrives on his doorstep with the force of a bus crash.
Seep limns the tension between land development and landscape, trauma and nostalgia, dysfunction and intimacy in a narrative of twenty-first century Canada.
Praise for Seep:
“Mark Giles’ Seep is a wickedly wonderful account of how our senses of self and of place can be interrelated, with the swirl of emotions involved in each part of the equation making for a complicated world and illuminating fiction. Giles assuredly steps in the footsteps of his predecessors who so engagingly limned the Alberta prairie: W.O. Mitchell, Henry Kreisel, W.P. Kinsella and Robert Kroetsch. But Giles’ novel brings us firmly into the present era of rampant real estate speculation and the conflicts that ensue when people seek to protect what they value about a locale.”
— Tom Wayman, author of Dirty Snow and My Father’s Cup
After many years mired in the middle-management muddle of transnational corporations, Mark is now a writer and an educator. His first book Knucklehead & Other Stories (Anvil) was honoured with the W.O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Award. His writing — fiction, poetry, and non-fiction — has appeared in magazines in both Canada and the U.S.A. Saskatchewan-born, Edmonton-raised, with stops in Victoria, Kelowna, Montreal, and Halifax, W. Mark Giles now calls Calgary home.
