[2] 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.
[3] Throughout his childhood, Blaise also lived in Alabama, Georgia, communities in the American Midwest, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Winnipeg.
[2] While at Denison University, he initially intended to pursue a major in geology but switched to English[4] after taking a writing course in which he studied under Paul Bennett.
[2] While living in Canada, Blaise published his first two short fiction collections, A North American Education (1973)[5] and Tribal Justice (1974).
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.
[11] 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".