ORPHEA AND EURYDICUS
BY QUINN TYLER JACKSON
ars ipsa loquitur
Before Veronica Rockford became an editor, critic, and formidable reader of other people’s stories, she was a bookish girl trying to understand why people so rarely behaved as neatly as characters did on the page. From childhood in British Columbia through university, Oxford, and the beginnings of adult life, she learns that knowing something about another person does not make it yours, understanding someone does not give you authority over them, and the stories we tell about others can reveal as much about the teller as the person described.
Across friendships, scholarship, love affairs, artistic circles, and the literary world of San Francisco, Veronica builds both a life and a philosophy of reading. She encounters writers and artists whose work unsettles what she thinks she knows, relationships in which incompatible truths can remain true at once, and moments when explanation clarifies experience only by making it smaller. As her judgment sharpens, the line between interpretation and possession becomes increasingly difficult to hold.
Orphea and Eurydicus is about a woman becoming the person capable of making those distinctions—and discovering that becoming never really ends. Moving across decades, it explores identity, friendship, desire, grief, authorship, and the ethics of speaking for others. At its centre is a deceptively simple question: when another person’s life, work, or meaning comes into our hands, what are we entitled to do with it—and what must we leave for them, or for the reader, to decide?
FORTHCOMING 10 NOVEMBER 2026
About Jackson’s Fiction
“The sheer brilliance and sprezzatura of Jackson’s ideas, and his ability to articulate these in fluid, gorgeous, and startlingly original prose and poetry, will capture and hold your attention.” —Dania Sheldon, from the foreword ofTouched by Fortune's Shadow
“Through arduous life experience the author provides a glimpse at his changing perspective, his growth, and the environment that forever changed him…. This meditative culmination of the author’s work is rarely seen in literature.” — TJP, Amazon review of Midnight at the Arcanum: a monograph
“The danger of reading [Lament] is that you might not understand it. The danger of understanding [it] is that it might drive you insane.... The great thing ... is that one does not have to understand all of it to enjoy it.” — E. Clay, Goodreads review of Lament of an Architect of Babel
“What impresses me about Jackson’s work is that he recognizes the role of work in art and seriously works at it with thought and sensitivity. It is also scholarly: like a mathematician, addressing all the possibilities critically.” — Fred Candelaria, Poet, Founder/Editor of West Coast Review, on Hiroshima in Stained Glass
“With great precision and attention to detail, [Jackson] makes this complex area of the world come alive in the reader’s imagination - but this is merely one amongst several strokes of authorial genius which fall between the covers of this fine book; there [are also] ... beautifully-rendered sidelong shifts and actual reversals of time, space, and perspective, many of which allow for different interpretations of the main characters’ thoughts and deeds, and all of which defy easy description but are consummately achieved. [Jackson] is particularly adept at conveying the strangely altered and slippery nature of a person’s conception of Time during periods of psychological and social upheaval.” — Drop the Buddha on Hiroshima in Stained Glass
Quinn Tyler Jackson has been a bookseller’s assistant, a freelance editor, a literary agent, an independent publisher, and a mathematician. Jackson is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada. His award-winning work spans nearly four decades and includes novels, short story collections, poetry, and short fiction published in literary magazines and online journals.
He lives on Gabriola Island in British Columbia with his beloved, where they make their home a cat sanctuary. He continues to write fiction and poetry, paint, compose and perform music, and conduct scientific research.
