• Age: 11 to 14
• Grade: 6 to 9

A Litany in Time of Plague is K.D. Miller's first collection of short fiction. The 'plague' of the title story is a reference not only to AIDS but to its ironic companion, loneliness.

Miller's child characters are like little aliens dropped into a world that wavers from incomprehensible to bewildering, and yet, there is a knowing in them, an attunement to the 'voice under the voice' that is disquieting. In 'This Is Important' in Litany in Time of Plague, Arley is being questioned by her mother and a policeman about the man who followed her home from Brownies in his car. As she listens to them, she remembers the man 'who came out of the dark. He was like a piece of the dark' and, unlike the policeman and her mother, talked to her 'in his real voice,' and treated her with respect and courtesy. 'Nobody ever talked to me like that before.... It was harder to say no thank you that time.' The dark stranger comes to represent the answer to all the mysteries the grownups withhold from her, the knowledge of good and evil, like the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Only when she hears through to the need and fear beneath his voice, does she turn away.

Each of the characters in the ten linked stories comes to the end of his or her spiritual rope. Kelly attends a Requiem Mass where she adds her and her ex-husband's names to a list of the dead. Arley pursues a dangerous fantasy down one dark alley after another. Raymond learns that his inability to love is exactly matched by his need to do just that.

K.D. Miller's stories and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and have been nominated for the Journey Prize and the National Magazine Award for fiction (1997). In 1999 she was a runner-up in the PRISM international short fiction contest. Two collections of her stories have been published -- A Litany in Time of Plague (PQL 1994), and Give Me Your Answer (PQL 1999) -- with the latter being short-listed for the Upper Canada Brewing Company's inaugural Writers` Craft Award. A collection of personal essays, Holy Writ: A Writer Reflects on Creation and Imagination was published in 2001, and nominated for the sixteenth annual TORGI Talking Book of the Year Award. In 2010, K.D. Miller published her first novel, Brown Dwarf, with Biblioasis. K.D. Miller lives and teaches writing courses in Toronto.

K.D. Miller's profile page

'Keep an eye out for K.D. Miller: this is a new writer worth watching.'

Ottawa Citizen

'Miller has created a mesmerizing core of characters for her stories ... it is a testament to Miller's emerging genius that she makes us care so much about her characters and their fates, their courage, and their compromises.'

Quill & Quire

'... I found myself laughing frequently.... Miller takes the right turns and sustains her narratives without tricks or complications ... if K.D. Miller can evoke such feelings in a first collection, I am certainly looking forward to her second.'

Malahat Review