Clark Blaise

Early life and education

Blaise was born in Fargo, North Dakota to Canadian parents who lived in the United States. His mother, Anne Marion Vanstone, was English-Canadian and from Wawanesa, Manitoba, and his father, Leo Romeo Blaise, was of French-Canadian descent and was a furniture salesman and long-distance traveller. Later on, his father would inspire the father characters in Blaise's fiction. Growing up, his family moved constantly throughout the U.S. The first move took place when he was six months old. Before the eighth grade, he had already moved 30 times; ultimately, he attended 25 different schools. From ages six to ten, he lived in Florida. Throughout his childhood, Blaise also lived in Alabama, Georgia, communities in the American Midwest, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Winnipeg. When Blaise was nineteen, his parents divorced.

He attended Denison University and the University of Iowa, graduating in 1961 and 1964 respectively. While at Denison University, he initially intended to pursue a major in geology but switched to English after taking a writing course in which he studied under Paul Bennett. While studying at Denison, he decided to read a book per day, began writing book reviews for the weekly newspaper, helped edit campus literary magazines, and received several campus writing awards.

Career

While living in Canada, Blaise published his first two short fiction collections, A North American Education (1973) and Tribal Justice (1974).

Blaise was the director of the International Writing Program. While living in Montreal in the early 1970s, he joined with authors Raymond Fraser, Hugh Hood, John Metcalf and Ray Smith to form the celebrated Montreal Story Tellers Fiction Performance Group. In the late 1970s, Blaise was a professor of Creative Writing at York University.

Honours and awards

In 2009, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada "for his contributions to Canadian letters as an author, essayist, teacher, and founder of the post-graduate program in creative writing at Concordia University".

Personal life

In 1966, Blaise moved to Montreal and obtained Canadian citizenship.

He was married to writer Bharati Mukherjee, from 1963 to her death in 2017. They met as students at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and have two sons.

In 1978, Blaise and Mukherjee moved to Toronto. However, Mukherjee felt excluded in Canada, attributing it to racism and publishing an essay in Saturday Night. In 1980, the couple decided to return to the United States, moving to San Francisco.