Introduce Yourself: Jen Rawlinson Reviews Damian Tarnopolsky’s Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster
October 7, 2024
Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster. Damian Tarnopolsky. Freehand Books. $22.95, 272 pp., ISBN: 9781990601804
My grandmother has a saying that used to confound her millennial grandchildren. Whenever we talk about someone she hasn’t heard of before, she asks, “And who is he when he’s at home?” We often wondered, why did it matter if he was at home? Was he someone different at the grocery store or school? If that’s true, which him should we introduce her to?
Damian Tarnopolsky would acquaint her with each of them. In Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster, he allows protagonist Mark Ferguson to introduce himself at home, in the past, at school, in the present, on the street, in the future, in dreams, and in other people’s memories. An introspective writer, Mark explores his own psyche through story, the form of which varies depending on time, place, and perspective. But like all human minds grappling with the presentation of a whole self, Mark’s struggles through the jumbled mess of thoughts, opinions, family history, dreams, triumphs, and disasters prove to be not such a straightforward task.
Throughout the collection, you’ll encounter traditional short stories, stories written by characters in other stories, stories adjacent to Mark’s journey that nevertheless inform it, screenplays, one-sided conversations, interjections from other characters, vignettes of a broken mind, and even school writing assignments. Collected, these fragments describe the life of Mark Ferguson, “whoever the fuck that is.”
Fans of deep continuity will delight in tracing the ways the stories speak to each other. A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it line in one story will be elaborated on in another, inviting a second or third close reading just to catch all the Easter eggs. The clearest example of this is a moment that connects to the collection’s title. In “Like Triumph,” Mark, in hospital after a close encounter with oblivion, is led in prayer by his family’s nanny, Milinda. Amidst the prayer are two lines: “Every night I dream I’m a monk. Every night I dream I’m a monster.” These lines sit ambiguously without quotation marks, like all thought and dialogue in this story, creating a pause as we try to determine whether Milinda said the words, whether Mark thought them, or whether it matters at all.
The monk and monster feature prominently in the collection’s next story, “Hucket’s Technic.” Though this dreamy story is set in faraway sixteenth-century France, Mark’s present-day internal struggles play out across a clandestine love triangle between the College’s Procurator, Lamark, their newest member, Robideaux, and an atheist philosopher who lives just off campus, Hucket. Holiness and monstrosity are embodied by each man in his own way. Their loyalties to each other and their own values are tested, sometimes with devastating results. They, like Mark, are people in flux, different from moment to moment. As Lamark notes during a terrifying encounter with a wendigo, “It was made from pieces, like all of us.”
With a scope that spans centuries and a fluidity of form, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster could easily alienate its readers, losing us to the swirling experimentation that the book conducts. But Tarnopolsky grounds the narrative emotionally in Mark, who is just a man struggling to find his way through the world like the rest of us, dealing with his complicated family in “Turtles” and “Big Fuzzy Sweater,” suffering heartbreak and grief in “A Whole Fresh Carapace” and “In Spain,” and losing his grip on reality in “Like Triumph” “With Milinda,” and “Laud We the Gods.” The collection concludes with a truly heartbreaking piece from Mark’s sister, Laura, in “My Idea of Perfection,” as she writes toward a better understanding of both Mark and their beloved younger sister, Bella.
Wistful, dark, and complex, Damian Tarnopolsky’s Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster is an idiosyncratic journey through all the messy, disparate, and contradictory parts of being, or becoming, a person.
Jen Rawlinson’s love of stories began with ghosts. She carried this passion for exploring personal and cultural anxieties via stories through her Professional Writing program at York University and Publishing program at Toronto Metropolitan University. After landing in Hamilton, she interned with Wolsak and Wynn where she continues to work as Production Coordinator and Co-editor for the speculative fiction imprint Poplar Press. She also works with gritLIT: Hamilton’s Readers and Writers Festival as Director of Operations. In her free time, Jen can be found writing her own spooky stories and investigating things that go bump in the night.