Blaise was born in Fargo, North Dakota to Canadian parents who lived in the United States. His mother, Anne Marion Vanstone, was English-Canadian and from Wawanesa, Manitoba, and his father, Leo Romeo Blaise, was of French-Canadian descent and was a furniture salesman and long-distance traveller. Later on, his father would inspire the father characters in Blaise's fiction. Growing up, his family moved constantly throughout the U.S. Before the eighth grade, he had already moved 30 times; ultimately, he attended 25 different schools. From ages six to ten, he lived in Florida. Throughout his childhood, Blaise also lived in Alabama, Georgia, communities in the American Midwest, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Winnipeg. When Blaise was nineteen, his parents divorced. He attended Denison University and the University of Iowa, graduating in 1961 and 1964 respectively. While at Denison University, he initially intended to pursue a major in geology but switched to English after taking a writing course in which he studied under Paul Bennett. While studying at Denison, he read extensively, began writing book reviews for the weekly newspaper, helped edit campus literary magazines, and received several campus writing awards.
Career
In 1966, Blaise moved to Montreal and obtained Canadian citizenship. While living in Canada, Blaise published his first two short fiction collections, A North American Education and Tribal Justice. Blaise was the director of the International Writing Program. While living in Montreal in the early 1970s, he taught creative writing at Concordia University; he also joined with authors Raymond Fraser, Hugh Hood, John Metcalf and Ray Smith to form the Montreal Story Tellers Fiction Performance Group. Blaise and Mukherjee collaborated on a memoir of experiences in India which was published in 1978. In 1978, Blaise and Mukherjee moved to Toronto. Blaise became a professor of Creative Writing at York University, and wrote his first novel. Mukherjee felt excluded in Canada, attributing it to racism and publishing an essay in Saturday Night. In 1980, the couple decided to return to the United States, moving to San Francisco. Both continued their literary careers, including a collaborative analysis of the 1985 bombing of Air India flight 182, known in India as the Kanishka bombing. Blaise wrote two more novels and a number of short stories.
In 2009, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada "for his contributions to Canadian letters as an author, essayist, teacher, and founder of the post-graduate program in creative writing at Concordia University".
