Mining the Mundane and Finding Gold: Reality, Imagination and the Magical in Jackie Kay’s Short Fiction

Many of the stories in Jackie Kay’s three short story collections engage with the lives of ordinary people on the margins of society, such as the elderly, the obese, the sick, the unloved, the mentally unstable, the exploited and victimized. In her stories, Kay explores themes of reality, memory, love and loss, among others. Often, imagination is shown to offer escape from unbearable reality for Kay’s characters. In the process, the boundaries between the real and the unreal, the physical and the spectral, the rational and the magical, are destabilized and blurred. This essay discusses Kay’s exploration of the above-mentioned themes and how her use of magical realism plays into the transposition of the ordinary and banal into realms of the extraordinary and fantastical.