Description: Dear Reader, Welcome to sunny South Africa. You've reached the website of Cornelia Smith Fick also known as Colleen Lynn. I live in a place where the sun shines during winter. It is warm during the day and only cold at night and in the early morning. We have a variety of plants and animals that could…
Writer, Poet, Editor
From its first line, Bark On draws you into the world of the most intense physical endurance sport: the triathlon, consisting of swimming, cycling, and long distance running. Athletes are prepared to do anything to build their endurance, so they attract the type of coach who can get them there. In Bark On, Benji Newton is such a coach for Erza, the novel’s protagonist. Benji is addicted to the pliant obedience of young men and women desperate to win. Bark On, Boyles’s debut novel, is a critique of what can
In an author’s note, Boyles labels the novel, written during the COVID-19 quarantine as “the intersection between superstition, trauma and compulsion.” Bark On tells the story of twenty-five-year-old Ezra Fogerty who falls while participating in the Chapel Hill Ironman. On waking in the medical tent he meets Benji, an ex-trainer with a shady past. Troubled by his performance and his fall which has resulted in a humiliating photograph, Ezra is elated when Benji offers to become his coach.