A poignant, joyous legacy: beloved writer, poet musician Steven Heighton’s final book ‘Instructions for the Drowning’

It is best, perhaps, to be candid from the start: it is virtually impossible to read — or review — “Instructions for the Drowning,” the new collection of short fiction from Kingston writer Steven Heighton, as just a book. Published almost exactly one year after Heighton’s death at age 60, the book — which was in the planning stages at the time of the author’s death — is not so much overshadowed by the loss, but an aspect of it: the last book from one of the foremost Canadian writers of his generation.

“Instructions for the Drowning,” however, also serves as a lens through which to examine not only Heighton’s death, but the nature of loss and grief on a broader scale. It succeeds at this role not because it is a departure for Heighton, but because of how representative it is of his work, how true it is both to his voice, and to the remembrances of those whose lives he touched.

A renowned poet, fiction writer, and essayist, Heighton published more than twenty books in his career, including the classic essay collection “The Admen Move on Lhasa”; “The Waking Comes Late,” which was awarded the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2016; and the short story collection “The Dead Are More Visible,” which was shortlisted for the Trillium Prize. “Reaching Mithymna,” his account of working as an aid worker on the island of Lesbos during the Syrian refugee crisis, was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers Trust Prize for Non-fiction. His most recent releases were a collection of Selected Poems and his first album — he was also an accomplished musician — “The Devil’s Share,” both in 2021. (On a personal note, I was thrilled last week to introduce another group of students to Heighton’s Workbook, “a writer’s pointed, cutting take on his own work and the work of writing.” Legacies take many forms.)

The stories in “Instructions for the Drowning” are suffused with death, or the possibility of death, including the fatherly advice of the title story: “A drowning man would have to be knocked out cold. For his own good. A short, clean punch to the side of the jaw — that would be the preferred blow. After which you could easily complete the rescue, towing the victim to shore.” Or the death of Harry Houdini, which incites “The Stages of J. Gordon Whitehead” and the puzzling backyard suicide of “Everything Turns Away.”

Unlike real life, however, death is not the end in these stories. In “Who Now Lies Sleeping,” for example, the question of whether family patriarch Duncan will allow his son Jem to bury “the ashes of his husband” in the family plot forces a confrontation which has been building for decades, and a re-examination of the past. “I’m taller than he is and have been for years, but I always seem to forget it until I come back, and even then, at first, I don’t see. At first I see him as he appears in my mind’s eye, bulking over me. Then, at some point, I find myself looking slightly down at him and a sort of vertigo grips me, as if I’m up on skates for the first time and will fall.”

Despite the dark shadowing of mortality, one shouldn’t assume that “Instructions for the Drowning” is a heavy or austere read; the book is, at times, wildly (and often cringingly) funny. The advice of the title story, for example, leads to a rescue scene in which an estranged husband and wife take turns punching each other while nearly drowning, “thrashing forms, bubbles swarming, her skinny white legs hooked around his waist.” The result is a perfect blend of tension and hilarity, all in service to the story. The humour is more cringing in “Professions of Love,” in which a plastic surgeon (“Some will attest, many, in fact, that I am one of the finest in the field.”) is unable to understand why his wife is leaving him, despite all he has done for her. The voice in this story is so outlandish, yet rings so true, it should probably come with a trigger warning for anyone who has ever had to deal with a pompous, narcissistic, white man in his mid-fifties. (So, everyone.)

“Instructions for the Drowning” stands not just as a testament to Heighton’s life and work, but as a sharp representation, or distillation, of both. As he explored over the course of multiple poems, stories, and essays, the world is a far more confusing and wondrous place than we often acknowledge. As these stories demonstrate, human life is a means of exploration and celebration, threaded through with darkness and loss. In the midst of death, Heighton seems to say, we are in life: it should be savoured.

What a joyous and tragic legacy.

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