The jury of the Guernica Prize called Borrowed Memories, Mark Foss’s third novel, “an evocative and nuanced story.” Borrowed Memories (8th House Publishing, 2024) juxtaposes a Canadian couple in their winter years against the rage and hope of the Arab Spring. In this tale of shifting identities, Ivan Pyefinch—a divorced translator—cares for his aging parents in the Thousand Islands while trying to find room in his heart for Mia Hakim, an immigrant filmmaker exploring her lost childhood in Tunisia. When Mia turns up unexpectedly at the Pyefinch home on the eve of Remembrance Day, a family health crisis puts all their stories on a collision course.
This poignant novel is about memories in all their forms—the ones slipping through our grasp, the ones we hold onto for others, the ones we never had but are trying to find, the ones we are trying to create.
Welcome, Mark!
Borrowed Memories by Mark Foss.
Q: Much of your novel Borrowed Memories revolves around the narrator caring for his mother who has Alzheimer’s and his father who has lost his driver’s licence and eventually has a small stroke. How many of these memories, if any, did you “borrow” from your own life, and how many did you invent?
A: I would say the main plot lines, including the details you mention, closely mirror my own life, but only up to a point. Ivan’s parents are very much based on my own. But while they talk and act like them, not everything happened in my life the way it does in the novel. That said, I use details from my life like my mother’s interest in decoupage. In my childhood, she would make these gorgeous jewel boxes with images of butterflies and flowers. Towards the end of her life, she would spend hours painstakingly cutting out images but could never get to the next stage of pasting, sanding and varnishing.
One of Mark’s mother’s creations.
As another example, I borrowed from my mother’s travel diary to explore how memory loss might have affected her. I elaborate on some of these elements in a series of essays I’ve been writing. My flash piece “For People Who Like to Draw”, for example, looks at my mother’s mental decline through the lens of arts and crafts.
Author Mark Foss.
More About Mark Foss:
Mark Foss, born and raised in Ottawa, has lived in Montreal since 2012. He holds two undergraduate degrees from Carleton University: Bachelor of Journalism (Highest Honours) in 1985 and Bachelor of Arts in Film Studies (With Distinction) in 1986.
Apart from his books, his short stories and creative non-fiction have appeared in more than two dozen Canadian and American journals and anthologies. In Canada, these include The New Quarterly, Prism International, sub-Terrain, untethered, Existere, and This Will Only Take a Minute: 100 Canadian Flashes. His creative non-fiction, which has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, was supported by an artist residency at The Marble House Project in Vermont in 2023. Meanwhile, his arts journalism has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Ottawa Magazine and other publications. Apart from his own writing, he is the co-editor of The Book of Judith (New Village Press, 2022), an homage to the life of American poet, writer, and teaching artist Judith Tannenbaum and her impact on incarcerated and marginalized students.
Outside print media, Foss hosted and produced When the Lights Go Down, a one-hour program on CKCU-FM featuring interviews, reviews and documentaries related to the film industry. His radio drama Higher Ground, which inspired his first novel, was broadcast on CBC New Voices. In the 2010s, he researched and hosted 12 podcasts for Progzilla Radio on progressive rock, a musical genre he playfully skewered in his novel Molly O.