On Sophie's writing
"Walking Leonard and Other Stories by Sophie Stocking is a pristine story collection filled with the wonder of everyday moments in the lives of its characters. Stocking has placed a magnifying glass on the briefest flashes of life in order to both provoke and celebrate aspects of human frailty and love. Tender descriptions of family, growing-up, parenting and neighbourhood communities are wrought with a gentle and skilled hand as Stocking illuminates ephemeral epiphanies. The prose is filled with visual passages evoking an emotional response in the reader, even as we recognize in such scenes aspects of our own experience:
Across the breakfast table she watches his hands, long, square tipped fingers, wasting now, dark with age spots. His spoon vibrates a few inches above the table. Mollie picks up her egg in her own arthritic claw, small and pale but steady enough. She whacks off the top of the egg with a knife…
A masterful and moving collection. Recommended."
- Lucy EM Black (Stella's Carpet, Now Or Never Publishing)
LATEST RELEASE
Walking Leonard
and Other Stories
From a technical standpoint and from the point of pure enjoyment, this collection of stories is moving and incredibly powerful. The writing is beautiful and the stories carry you along effortlessly, giving you intimate and touching glimpses into the tender and scoured lives of everyday people.”
Hollay Ghadery | Goodreads
"Sophie Stocking's Corridor Nine is a brilliant exploration of guilt and remorse, the conflicted emotions elicited by the death of a father who was both angel and gorgon. Blackly comic and hilariously revelatory, this story faces head-on the challenges of parental nourishment and neglect. Combining domestic conflagration with powerful enlightenment, it performs a song of generous forgiveness. A mesmerizing novel." - Aritha van Herk
Corridor Nine
For Sophie Stocking, stories don’t only happen “over there” in some exotic locale, but right here in our own unique everyday neighborhoods. Mystery resides beneath the mundane however, coming to light through the cracks in character’s lives, and how the natural world infiltrates the urban spaces where they live. Sophie writes literary fiction seasoned with a dash of magic realism. She delves into dark themes of family dysfunction, maternity and career, addiction and suicide. Yet humour, and hope are not exempt from these pivot points in the lives of ordinary people, the uncharted spaces between parent and child, and the protective force of nature.
Sophie Stocking can be found digging in her garden, driving her children around, cooking a lot, and walking her two bad dogs. But when not juggling all the details typical of a human life, in the quiet space of early morning, or while waiting in the car, or when they all go fishing, she writes.
-
Walking Leonard and Other Stories was published by Guernica Editions in 2021.
-
Her debut novel Corridor Nine was published by Thistledown Press in 2019.
-
Sophie's pursuit of fiction writing has been supported at the Alexandra Writer’s Centre, the Humber School for Writers, and by Aritha van Herk at the University of Calgary.
