Photo by Marc Tessier

Mark Paterson is the author of the short story collections Dreamers and Misfits of Montclair, A Finely Tuned Apathy Machine, and Other People’s Showers, all from Exile Editions. His work has won the 3Macs carte blanche Prize, Geist magazine’s Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest, and the Atwater Library’s 150 Words for 150 Years contest. In 2020, Mark’s story “To Disappear Around Here” was named runner up for the Ex-Puritan‘s Thomas Morton Prize (now known as the Austin Clarke Prize). In his citation, prize judge Pasha Malla wrote, “‘To Disappear Around Here’ is a luxuriously written, brilliantly compact story that falls somewhere between the rural gothic of William Faulkner and Isaac Babel’s sensitive explorations of human cruelty. Despite the pall of menace that hangs over these characters, every image, rendered in exquisite and precise language, feels not just vivid but resolutely hopeful—a ‘little light’ amid all the darkness.”

Mark was born in northern California in 1971 and spent his childhood in the North Shore Montreal suburb of Rosemere, which, along with the neighbouring town of Lorraine, serve as inspiration for Mark’s fictional Montclair. His teenage years were days of wandering, living over a four-year period in Noblesville, Indiana; suburban Boston; and Santa Cruz, California. A few weeks before beginning his final year of high school, Mark returned to the Montreal area where he has lived ever since, currently in Lorraine.