VMI Success Story: Leanne Dunic’s Book of Lyric Prose Out in Spring ’17

Written in lyric prose that  is “experimental yet playful,” Leanne Dunic’s To Love the Coming End is a unique book composed of 100 chapters, each a single page in length.

“This structure gives the language potency while providing space for reflection,” says the book’s synopsis.

Pieced together, the chapters tell the story of  “an unnamed narrator, a disillusioned author obsessed with natural disasters and ‘the curse of 11’” (Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011). Meanwhile they “reflect on their own personal earthquake – the loss of a loved one.”

Leanne credits Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, which she completed in 2015, with providing the kind of positive support and encouragement that boosted her confidence.

Leanne grew up on Vancouver Island. She has published fiction, poetry and non-fiction in various magazines and anthologies in Asia, North America, and the UK, as well as chapbooks by Leaf Press, Onzieme, and Bitterzoet.

In 2015, Leanne was shortlisted for the Asian-Canadian Emerging Writer Award. She also won the Alice Munro Short Story Contest, judged by Lisa Moore, who wrote “Dunic’s prose is spare, and at the same time, lush and vivid… [she] packs the space between what the narrator tells us and what the reader perceives with a situational irony that makes the hairs on the back of the neck stand at attention… a bold and exciting new voice.”

In addition to writing, Leanne sings and plays guitar for the band The Deep Cove, and is the Artistic Director of the Powell Street Festival Society. She is also a visual artist. Find out more about Leanne by going to her website.

And do check out her book, To Love the Coming End, when it comes out in Spring 2017 with BookThug!