For much of her adult life, author K.D. Miller had a writing ritual.
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Miller → have → ritual
She would rise at 5 a.m., brew a pot of coffee, and head to her desk for two hours before she had to get ready for what she euphemistically referred to as her “day job.”
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she → rise → job
Fellow writer and good friend Mike Barnes describes Ms. Miller’s writing habit as “monastic,” an appropriate term that hints at the overlap, so central to her identity, between writing and religion.
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that → describe → writing
Raised Presbyterian, Ms. Miller was baptized and confirmed in the Anglican Church in 1990, following a period of self-described atheism.
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Miller → raise → atheism
On several occasions Ms. Miller, who died in Toronto on Sept. 14 of complications from cancer at the age of 75, described herself as a “default” or “accidental” Christian.
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who → die → Christian
It’s the same way her character Robbie describes himself to his friend, the writer Raymond Mayhugh, in the early story A Litany in Time of Plague – a testament to the way Ms. Miller covertly insinuated material from her own life into her fiction.
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Miller → ’ → fiction
carries religious connotations that are unavoidable.
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that → carry → connotations
And while she eschewed proselytizing about her beliefs – “She was very undogmatic in her approach to spirituality,” Mr. Barnes said – they were an inextricable part of who she was as a person and, importantly, a writer.
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she → eschew → person
“Writing stories is the way I pray,” she insisted in her 2001 essay collection Holy Writ, about the confluence between artistic creation and spirituality.
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she → write → creation
One of her later collections, 2014’s All Saints, is a series of linked stories featuring characters associated with the title church.
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One → link → church
Trained as an actor, she received a BA in drama from the University of Guelph and a master’s in directing from the University of British Columbia, where her thesis was a production analysis of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie.
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thesis → train → Menagerie
In a biographical essay included in the 2003 anthology Writers Talking, she described her mother, the late Isabel Milne Barclay, as “a talented artist and a frustrated actress”; she went on to compare the writing process to Rosalind Russell’s observation that “[g]ood acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly.”
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acting → include → observation
Writing, for Ms. Miller, involved a similar combination of risk and abandon, something admirers frequently compare to a theatrical performance.
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admirers → involve → performance
“I think it all went back to that early training that she had on stage,” said John Metcalf, who edited her early work.
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who → think → work
“You had to immerse yourself in [her writing], you had to join the performance.
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you → have → performance
That was what made her so different from many writers in recent years who are firmly outside what they are presenting.”
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they → make → what
Novelist Russell Smith also finds aspects of the theatre in Ms. Miller’s work.
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Smith → find → work
“She writes these wonderful, humorous but dark monologues.
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She → write → monologues
That obviously is the theatrical influence,” he said.
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he → say → ?
It was an influence that was equally apparent in her live readings, which often resembled theatrical performances.
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which → resemble → performances
This, perhaps, made her the perfect person for that necessary day job: training volunteers at the CNIB in reading books for the blind.
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her → make → blind
Ms. Miller could be blazingly funny in print: The title story from 2018’s Late Breaking features a pair of competing literary awards – the Biggar Prize and the Olympia Featherstone Award for Fiction – that repeatedly try to one-up each other on the size of their purse.
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that → break → purse
But she was also, as Mr. Smith attests, unafraid to present bleak and dark material.
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Smith → attest → material
In one of her best stories, Magnificat from All Saints, an aged religious spinster witnesses a covert public sex act that crosses the boundary into assault.
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that → witness → assault
“It gets quite gothic and creepy sometimes,” Mr. Smith said about this aspect of Ms. Miller’s fiction.
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Smith → get → fiction
“Who does that remind you of?
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that → remind → you
It’s a sentiment with which literary critic Jeet Heer agrees.
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Heer → ’ → which
“There’s the tradition of the Canadian short story where Alice Munro looms very large.
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Munro → ’ → story
K.D. Miller is part of that tradition,” Mr. Heer said.
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Heer → say → tradition
I think she was more gothic than most.
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she → think → most
She did have a sensibility that was partially shaped by things like horror writing.”
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that → have → writing
He points specifically to the 2011 collection The Other Voice as a book that reflects her affinity for writers like Poe and Hawthorne, as well as the uncanny realism of Alex Colville, who served as the inspiration for the stories in Late Breaking.
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who → point → Breaking
“It’s the idea of realism that’s also a bit unsettling,” Mr. Heer said.
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Heer → ’ → realism
Kathleen Daisy Miller was born on March 6, 1951 in Hamilton, where she lived with her parents and her older brother, Robert Miller.
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she → bear → parents
“There was a large family in Hamilton,” says Leah Wallace, Ms. Miller’s sister-in-law.
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Wallace → be → law
They actually all lived within walking distance of each other.”
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They → live → other
The acting bug bit early.
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bug → bite → ?
At age 12, Ms. Miller was cast as Annie Sullivan in a school production of The Miracle Worker, and she won the 1967 Hamilton District Collegiate Drama Festival’s award for best actress in Impromptu.
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she → cast → Impromptu
She left for Guelph in 1969, graduating with a BA in drama in 1973.
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She → leave → 1973
She finished her master’s in 1978, “more out of spite than anything else,” she wrote.
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she → finish → anything
…and 21 more, not listed.
The Aporia
