With titles that include Fish Bones and Broken Glass, Worms in My Guts and How to Paint a Kentucky Fried Kelowna Song, the collection called How to Paint (New Star $14) is Chris Harris' first work of fiction. "I am an artist raised by my grandmother, a native Cree Indian from Manitoba, uprooted to Western Canada," says Harris, a Vancouver-based painter and sculptor. "I have been a fisherman, sand castle champion, lighthouse keeper, Inuit carver, millworker, gargoyle builder. I started working at Fraser Mills in Maillardville at the age of fifteen, at the same mill on the same chains my father worked on for forty-one years. I escaped from this, and a life spent in studios painting on Skid Row, for the Lower East Side of Manhattan where for seven years I built waterfalls and painted. Four years ago I left New York by driving west over the George Washington Bridge and haven't returned."

How to Paint (New Star, 1999) $14 0-921586-65-5

[BCBW 1999]