It seems strange to refer to the writing of Vancouver-based performer and author Ivan E. Coyote as old-fashioned storytelling, but there’s really no other way to put it. Her latest story collection, One Man’s Trash, follows in the footsteps of her debut, Close to Spider Man, as an expansive rejoinder to the pinched mannerisms and petty post-modernism of so much recent short fiction. It’s simply a small treasure of storytelling excellence.

Coyote’s subject matter is both contemporary and quirky. Set largely against the backdrops of the Vancouver queer community and the various roads into the rural heart of British Columbia and the United States, One Man’s Trash is populated with a spectrum of such eccentric characters as a hair-obsessed lover, a beaver-eating family with a beer-guzzling, trash-talking matriarch, and the denizens of several Las Vegas marriage chapels. Coyote treats these characters with a careful attention to their brazen individuality.

One Man’s Trash is also a compelling coming-of-age narrative that follows the narrator from childhood incidents and influences to her most unusual wedding day. Central to the collection is Coyote’s narrative voice. With a judicious restraint and a generous hinting at autobiographical content, the narrative presence becomes the book’s most fully realized character. The book as a whole, balanced between short vignettes – almost mood pieces or self-contained epiphanies – and more fully realized stories, eventually merges into a singular work while occupying an awkward space between a set of linked stories and a novel.

The single disappointment of One Man’s Trash is that it is too short. The collection’s 136 pages seem to contain as much margin as text and can easily be read in a single sitting. It is a testament to Coyote’s talents that the book lingers far longer in the mind, and that readers will find themselves wishing for more.