In a Greek restaurant in Kingston, Ontario, with the owners conversing loudly at the bar in Heighton's mother's first language, which he himself does not speak, he freely confesses to being a romantic -- both in his art and in his life. But what use could romanticism possibly have in 1995, in this most unromantic age? "It's the same as it ever was," says Heighton. "Romanticism started out as a reaction against the Industrial Revolution. Now it's a reaction against the domination of the cerebral way of looking at the world."

Heighton has two weapons at his disposal in his war against cerebral postmodernism. The first is good, old-fashioned storytelling, which he believes fulfils a need as old as humankind. The second is the human body itself. He's on a campaign to bring its physicality back into writing; "the centre of psychic gravity" is a phrase that runs through his conversation. Heighton's crusade is to transfer that centre from the head back to the heart, and to write from a sense of physicality. So when it's time for a break from the typewriter, Heighton's choice of music is obvious: Johnny Cash or Tom Waits. A couple of big voices, thick with pain. No techno-pop for him.

In "Apollo I and the Flight from Emotion," an essay published in Brick, he quotes Pablo Neruda: "The word / was born in the blood." Here he lays it all out: this is an exuberant plea for emotion, for an end to mind-body duality, a complete utopian program that no one could argue with -- though following it would be no easy task for most of us.

But what Canadian writers display this kind of moral generosity in their work? Heighton grasps for an answer, but it does not come.

HOW DID a young man of such antiquated tastes get his start? Steven Heighton was born in Toronto of a Greek mother and a father whom he affectionately calls "a righteous Scot," a Navy man who was both father and soldier, teacher and preacher. Heighton grew up in Red Lake, Ontario, in the north, where his father took a teaching job. By his high school years he was back in the Toronto suburbs, but not for long. He took to the road, heading through western Canada, then continuing on to Australia and Japan. Along the way, he managed to pick up two degrees from Queen's University in Kingston. As for Japan, the country starred in his first book of stories, Flight Paths of the Emperor, published in 1992 by The Porcupine's Quill.

To hear Heighton tell it, Kingston is a good place to write because of the surrounding landscape's resistance to human incursions. "By now it's a cliche, I suppose, to say that we do not belong on the land -- but it's true! I like the Shield landscape but it scares me; it's so inhospitable, so incurious. I think there's that sense of lostness and not belonging in a story like 'Townsmen."'

The manic humour of this story is awe] - come new direction for Heighton, who has a tendency to wax high-lyrical -- "my gushiness," he calls it. But it will have to keep company in the same collection with "To everything a season," an elegy to three pairs of lovers that first appeared in Alberto Manguel's anthology of erotic literature, The Second Gates of Paradise. The miracle of carnal attraction is the story's theme, and Heighton is at his strongest when he conjures up not today's ambiguous styles of romance, which he presumably knows better, but those of the past, both in this century and its predecessor. Perhaps stories from another time leave greater room for his natural lyricism.

"It's true I have a bardic streak, like Wait Whitman or Dylan Thomas," he says. "But since I'm not a genius like they were, I can't get away with it -- and even they don't sometimes. So, draft after draft, I have to keep reining myself in. That's where I depend on John Metcalf, my editor. He helps me put the brakes on."

In Heighton's work, the past is never very distant. He is a writer of historical fiction, something there is precious little of in this country. The stories in Flight Paths of the Emperor play upon the befuddlement of a Westerner living in Japan, with advertising signs on an Osaka street that feature lines like "English language made not exactly easy but helpful for your better life." But instead of building the stories in that book on the easy, self-conscious humour of an innocent abroad, Heighton exploits the crisscrossing versions of history that arise whenever cultures collide,

whether in war or peace. The Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese army's 1937 sacking of Nanking, the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima are all present at the table when the culturally confused narrator of the stories in Flight Paths sits down to engage in exchange with his Japanese friends.

OFTEN, Heighton's young male narrators are first exposed to the mechanics of making moral decisions through family stories from the past. In "The dead and the missing," also part of the new collection, a boy learns the value of courage, not from his father, but from the preceding generation: his grandfather, who once spent a night alone in the darkness in a mined tunnel, during the First World War battle of Vimy Ridge. The phenomenon is familiar. While our parents are busy with the daily business of bringing up the children, our grandparents can be gateways to experiences that go beyond the alternating pattern of censure and praise that children and their parents fall into. Knowledge is always close by, but the child has to escape the parental cocoon to get it.

And so the young narrator in "The dead and the missing" begins building his moral vision of the world from his grandfather's tales. Heighton himself turned to a less obvious source: Thomas Hardy. Yes, Hardy, whom everyone read at university and most of us forgot. "I loved Jude the Obscure. It was an important book for me. You feel that Hardy really cares about the characters, and the very obscure Jude, even if they aren't perfect the way he, the writer, is. There's an unhappy ending, but it's given dignity."

Issues of judgement always arise when Heighton talks about writing. He likes to quote Ibsen's line: "To write is to sit in judgement of oneself." He admires Mavis Gallant, despite her coolness, and praises her by saying, "She doesn't judge her characters in any way that she wouldn't judge herself."

MENTIONING Steven Heighton's name, at least in the eastern half of the country, can elicit some pretty odd reactions. "He's too ambitious," I was told by other writers. "He's too successful at too young an age. He's too good-looking."

Good-looking men aren't my specialty, but I do know it's hard to blame someone for their facial features; in some quarters, that's known as prejudice. At the same time, Heighton does have an instinctive sense of how performance works. At a reading at the National Library last November in Ottawa to celebrate the publication of his poetry book The Ecstasy of Skeptics (Anansi), he was a picture of dramatic concentration as he recited from memory, eyes closed, fists clenched. Some in the audience found this kind of presentation over-rich, but what writer is truly himself on stage, in front of the microphone, in the spotlight? When he steps off the boards, Heighton is humble and humorous about his work, and quick to deflect praise away from his own efforts.