Grant A. Tracey |
| Associate Professor |
| Baker Hall 128 |
| 319.273.3782 |
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| Areas of Specialty: Film studies, creative writing, popular culture |
| |
| North American Review Editor |
| Baker Hall 25 |
| 319-273-6455 |
| nar@uni.edu |
| Favorite links: Pocol Press | Greenwood Press |
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Grant was born in Toronto, Ontario and from an early age was brought up
in a hockey culture. Every Wednesday and Saturday night his family
watched Hockey Night in Canada and cheered on the Leafs. “You
can come over this Saturday, but I want you to know one thing, the hockey
game will be on,” his father often told friends and family who
wanted to visit. In 1972, Grant watched his boyhood heroes,
Canada’s greatest players including Frank Mahovlich, Phil Esposito, and Yvan
Cournoyer, tackle the awesome Soviet juggernaut in an eight-game Summit
series. This series was a turning point in the formation of Canadian
identity. Grant fondly recalls watching three of the four games from
Moscow at school. Classes were dismissed to the library and gym, as
young Canadian boys and girls cheered Canada to victory. Grant writes
about this experience in his short story, “Hockey Canada.”
Grant has written film articles on James Cagney and ethnicity for The Journal
of Film and Video and the tabloid aesthetics of director Samuel Fuller for Film Noir Reader 2. He has also written a film resource guide, A Filmography of American History (Greenwood Press, 2002)
for high school and college students, and a collection of short stories, Parallel Lines and the Hockey Universe (Pocol Press, 2003).
G. W. Clift writes: “Parallel Lines and the Hockey Universe marks
Grant Tracey as natural heir to Sherwood Anderson. But, unlike Winesburg,
Ohio residents, Tracey’s characters, all associates of the Traicheff brothers,
are sociable and devoted to pop culture. Likable without being roguish,
these guys live in worlds of asphalt and brick under a low winter sky.
They worry over parental divorces, talk with great passion about Iggy Stooge
(wonderful, sly comedy there) and Lenny Bruce and Humphrey Bogart, play junior
league hockey in the upper Midwest, date strippers in small town Ontario, fall
innocently in love, and understand that their grandparents’ emigration
has made the honest, grinding work of the new world theirs and has made that
‘Euro’ speed skating and finesse foreign to them. The book
is massively complicated without being pretentious or difficult, in fact, Parallel Lines is a hoot to read – a hoot and several loud choruses of
‘All Right Now’ after a last-second goal slapped in from the blue
line. Score!”
Currently, Grant is Editor (Fiction) for the North American Review and
Coordinator of Creative Writing at UNI.
He is working on an article on The Best Years of Our Lives and the
reintegration of the post-war veteran, and a second story-
cycle collection entitled, Playing Mac and Other Stories.
He lives in Cedar Falls with his wife Karen and their three daughters, Caitlin,
Elizabeth, and Devin, and every Saturday at the Tracey household, like it was
for a generation before, is still hockey night! |
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