PERFECT WORLD

Tom Brackett has created the perfect world for himself: he has a good job, a perpetually supportive wife, two kids, a mini-van, and even a golden retriever.

But then, his mental instability causes him to commit a terrifying act of violence. Tom's story, which is at once tragic and hopeful, shows how quickly familiar structures can crumble and raises the question of how we can possibly prepare ourselves for the loss of everything we hold dear. It dramatizes a man's struggle to maintain control over his own life under horrific circumstances.

Ian Colford is a fiction writer living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His stories, reviews, and commentary have appeared in Canadian literary publications from coast to coast and in journals published online. From 1995 to 1998 he was editor of the literary journal Pottersfield Portfolio, and from 1994 to 2000 served on the executive board of the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia. He has completed residencies at the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers and Yaddo, the artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Evidence, his first collection of short fiction, was published in 2008 by Porcupine's Quill, and won the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award; Evidence was also shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, The Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize, and the ReLit Award.