The closets of time

"Wherever I go, when away from home, I always have a notebook with me so that I can capture phrases or ideas which I’ll possibly use later in my fiction or poetry. One such phrase came to me on a streetcar on my way home from work – “the closets of time”– and it resonated with what I was reading – the works of H.P. Lovecraft. The phrase stayed with me for the rest of the day, until late evening, when it gave birth to the idea behind this anthology.

“What would happen, I thought to myself, if I invited a group of writers to each create a short fiction entitled 'The Closets of Time'? The works then would be assembled into an anthology entitled The Closets of Time, but the individual works would, of necessity, not be individually titled within the book. The interest and excitement was in how each writer would manifest the ideas of 'closets' and 'time' in his or her writing, and what kind of echoes or resonances would be evident across all the works.

“I wanted the anthology to span genres, from speculative fiction to experimental work to surrealism, for instance; I wanted imaginative writers whose command of their craft meant they felt comfortable taking risks with their writing, dangerous perhaps in their language and structure. Beverley Daurio and I determined a list of writers consultatively, and invitations to contribute went out, to writers in Canada and the United States, some of whom we knew, and some total strangers. The seventeen writers herein took up the challenge of creating a new work specifically for this book; and together they have formed The Closets of Time.”—Richard Truhlar