WINNERS OF THE $10,000 JOURNEY PRIZE
1989
Holley Rubinsky for
“Rapid Transits”
1990
Cynthia Flood for “My Father
Took a Cake to France”
1991
Yann Martel for “The Facts
Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios”
1992
Rozena Maart for “No Rosa,
No District Six”
1993
Gayla Reid for
“Sister Doyle’s Men”
1994
Melissa Hardy for
“Long Man the River”
1995
Kathryn Woodward for “Of
Marranos and Gilded Angels”
1996
Elyse Gasco for “Can You Wave
Bye Bye, Baby?”
1997 (shared)
Gabriella Goliger for
“Maladies of the Inner Ear”
Anne Simpson for
“Dreaming Snow”
1998
John Brooke for
“The Finer Points of Apples”
1999
Alissa York for “The Back of the
Bear’s Mouth”
2000
Timothy Taylor for
“Doves of Townsend”
2001
Kevin Armstrong for
“The Cane Field”
2002
Jocelyn Brown for
“Miss Canada”
2003
Jessica Grant for
“My Husband’s Jump”
2004
Devin Krukoff for
“The Last Spark”
2005
Matt Shaw for “Matchbook for a
Mother’s Hair”
2006
Heather Birrell for
“BriannaSusannaAlana”
2007
Craig Boyko for
“OZY”
2008
Saleema Nawaz for
“My Three Girls”
2009
Yasuko Thanh for
“Floating Like the Dead”
2010
Devon Code for
“Uncle Oscar”
Copyright © 2011 by McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
Emblem is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
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All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
A cataloguing record for this publication is available from Library and Archives Canada.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
“The Girl from the War” © Jay Browm; “The Extra” © Michael Christie; “The Fur Trader’s Daughter” © Seyward Goodhand; “Petitions to Saint Chronic” © Miranda Hill; “Laundry Day” © Fran Kimmel; “First-Calf Heifer” © Ross Klatte; “My Eyes are Dim” © Michelle Serwatuk; “What I Would Say” © Jessica Westhead; “The Dead Roads” © D.W. Wilson; “Toupée” © Michelle Winters.
Published simultaneously in the United States of America by McClelland & Stewart Ltd., P.O. Box 1030, Plattsburgh, New York 12901
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011932523
eISBN: 978-0-7710-9563-4
Cover art: Dreamstime
Cover design: Leah Springate
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
75 Sherbourne Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9
www.mcclelland.com
v3.1
ABOUT THE JOURNEY PRIZE STORIES
The $10,000 Journey Prize is awarded annually to an emerging writer of distinction. This award, now in its twenty-third year, and given for the eleventh time in association with the Writers’ Trust of Canada as the Writers’ Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize, is made possible by James A. Michener’s generous donation of his Canadian royalty earnings from his novel Journey, published by McClelland & Stewart in 1988. The Journey Prize itself is the most significant monetary award given in Canada to a developing writer for a short story or excerpt from a fiction work in progress. The winner of this year’s Journey Prize will be selected from among the ten stories in this book.
The Journey Prize Stories has established itself as the most prestigious annual fiction anthology in the country, introducing readers to the finest new literary writers from coast to coast for more than two decades. It has become a who’s who of up-and-coming writers, and many of the authors who have appeared in the anthology’s pages have gone on to distinguish themselves with collections of short stories, novels, and literary awards. The anthology comprises a selection from submissions made by the editors of literary journals from across the country, who have chosen what, in their view, is the most exciting writing in English that they have published in the previous year. In recognition of the vital role journals play in fostering literary voices, McClelland & Stewart makes its own award of $2,000 to the journal that originally published and submitted the winning entry.
This year the selection jury comprised three acclaimed writers:
Alexander MacLeod’s debut collection, Light Lifting, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Danuta Gleed Award, two Atlantic Book Awards, a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. A previous contributor to The Journey Prize Stories, Alexander holds degrees from the University of Windsor, the University of Notre Dame, and McGill University. He lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, and teaches at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.
Alison Pick is the author of two novels, The Sweet Edge and Far to Go, winner of the 2010 Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction, and two books of poetry. She was the winner of the 2005 CBC Literary Award for Poetry and the 2002 Bronwen Wallace for most promising writer under the age of thirty-five. Currently on Faculty at the Humber School for Writers Correspondence Program, she lives with her family in Toronto. For more information, please visit www.alisonpick.com.
Sarah Selecky’s debut collection, This Cake Is for the Party, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. A previous contributor to The Journey Prize Stories, Sarah earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia and has been teaching creative writing in her living room for the past ten years. She lives in Toronto. For more information, please visit www.sarahselecky.ca.
The jury read a total of eighty-five submissions without knowing the names of the authors or those of the journals in which the stories originally appeared. McClelland & Stewart would like to thank the jury for their efforts in selecting this year’s anthology and, ultimately, the winner of this year’s Journey Prize.
McClelland & Stewart would also like to acknowledge the continuing enthusiastic support of writers, literary journal editors, and the public in the common celebration of new voices in Canadian fiction.
For more informati
on about The Journey Prize Stories, please consult our website: www.mcclelland.com/jps.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Alexander MacLeod, Alison Pick,
and Sarah Selecky
MICHAEL CHRISTIE
The Extra
(from Vancouver Review)
MIRANDA HILL
Petitions to Saint Chronic
(from The Dalhousie Review)
ROSS KLATTE
First-Calf Heifer
(from The New Orphic Review)
JESSICA WESTHEAD
What I Would Say
(from This Magazine)
JAY BROWN
The Girl from the War
(from Prairie Fire)
FRAN KIMMEL
Laundry Day
(from Room)
SEYWARD GOODHAND
The Fur Trader’s Daughter
(from PRISM international)
MICHELE SERWATUK
My Eyes are Dim
(from Room)
MICHELLE WINTERS
Toupée
(from This Magazine)
D.W. WILSON
The Dead Roads
(from PRISM international)
About the Authors
About the Contributing Journals
Previous Contributing Authors
INTRODUCTION
This is a short book. A harmless-looking thing. Feel the easy weight of it in your hands, its modest heft. What could such a slim volume possibly contain? A book this small could slip into the back pocket of your jeans and still leave room for gum. It could bang around at the bottom of your knapsack and you’d never notice. Or it could just sit there for a few weeks, quiet and still, in the stack beside your bed. But don’t get too comfortable with it. This little book holds ten of the best short stories published in Canada this year, and it introduces you to ten of the most exciting new writers in this country. You can almost feel the potential trembling inside. Where are these new artists going to take us? Who are we going to meet along the way? How much can they achieve with the short story form? Crack the spine of this skinny little book if you want to find out.
Although we enjoyed putting this collection together, it didn’t turn out exactly the way we planned. When we first started this process, we thought we’d be making a bigger book: something … busier. We thought it might work like one of those British roundabouts, a circular point of intersection where many different vehicles travelling along many different routes converge at the same time. We thought our anthology might be able to bring a variety of elements together, coordinate them, and synchronize all this wildly varied movement into one perfect loop where each story maintains its own autonomy while simultaneously contributing to the efficient function and form of the whole.
Think of it: such happy comingling, such coordination and interdependence. Wouldn’t it have been great if our book emerged with that kind of balance and precision? Wouldn’t it have been great if we could have made everything fit together without any conflict or tension, without any sharp edges jutting out? Maybe, but that’s not what happened here.
“Forget about good,” wrote the designer Bruce Mau. “Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. As long as you stick to good, you’ll never have real growth.” In our deliberations, we searched for new growth in Canadian writing. Instead of the safest, smoothest work, we sought out arresting pieces that defied expectations and interrupted the flow, stories that made us stop and wonder, stories that showed us new ways of the seeing the world. We wanted to find sentences that excited us and stories that moved us. We wanted to feel changed in some way. And then we all had to agree on what that felt like.1 Was that asking too much?
In the beginning, we independently read through a stack of almost one hundred stories – more online journal submissions than ever before, we were told – and then we emailed each other with our long lists of contenders. Overall, we were a compatible group of jurors. For the most part, our opinions overlapped. And yet! Despite our general agreement, there were some careful quarrels. In the end, it turns out that editing a literary anthology is not a job for peacekeepers. In this business, where every aesthetic choice really matters, a testy scrap is always more valuable and interesting than tepid consensus. As we hope these selections will demonstrate, a good story needs conflict and tension and commitment. It needs to make us think and feel in powerful ways.
Several stories appeared on all three of our long lists, and though we often appreciated them for different reasons, not all of those first selections made it through to the book. On the other hand, there were some stories that appeared on only one or two of the opening lists. When we looked at them again, though, they gained more support as we moved through our deliberations, and some of those initial outliers eventually made the final cut.
Often we felt that a story was close, almost perfect, but lacking in one essential element or another. And so many of the submitted stories felt the same. So it was tempting to choose the innovative stories first. We wanted to reward these audacious, deviant stories. We loved that they were brave enough to find new ground, that they broke out of that claustrophobic Canadian Prose terrarium. “But the author tried something different,” we’d say as we presented our case. The response, inevitably, was: “Okay, but did they succeed?” Then we’d put on our teaching glasses, peer at the page, and talk about how we’d have edited it if given the chance.
It was also tempting to choose stories that were competent and well-delivered. They didn’t give off light, perhaps, but they had been edited and polished to a satisfactory shine. Most of the stories in the stack were solid in this way. But when we were pressed to defend them, to really get behind them and explain why we loved them, we had to admit we had chosen them because we couldn’t find anything wrong with them. And that was not good enough.
When it came time to make our lists, we agreed on almost everything. Almost. On the toughest choices, we stated our cases and argued for and against. For the stalemates, we agreed to disagree, and then we voted and stood behind those decisions. Nobody got everything they wanted, and nobody got completely shut out. It worked the way it should, and we produced a book that accurately reflects the shared and sometimes conflicted vision of our group. Ultimately, there were only a small number of stories that lifted us out of our world and kept us there, aloft. So we agreed that we’d rather be more selective in choosing the contents of the anthology this year, and showcase those standout stories. That was the biggest surprise, the end result of all our reading. Out of the whole stack, out of almost one hundred stories from all across the country, we could only find and agree on ten.
There are advantages to being this selective, though. In previous introductions to The Journey Prize Stories, the jurors could usually only gesture toward the book that follows. When space is tight, they have to pick and choose, and be strategic about which stories will get a little extra attention, a few intriguing lines to whet the reader’s appetite. In our case, we have plenty of room, and since we stand behind all these pieces, we decided to give each one a few precise words of praise.
Seyward Goodhand’s “The Fur Trader’s Daughter” is a good place to start. This story bewitched us with its weird steampunk magic and sentences to swoon over. It is a kind of postmodern fairy tale we’ve never quite seen before. Goodhand has written a world studded with incongruities and anachronisms, a time that is neither entirely the past nor entirely the present, a story that captivates us because it is both utterly weird and dangerously familiar.
Moving from the postmodern to the ancient, Ross Klatte’s “First-Calf Heifer” reads initially like a story plucked from deep in the archives of Canadian fiction. Klatte works with some powerful raw materials in this piece: light and dark, life and death, innocence and experience, fathers and sons. This story of one day and night on a cattle farm brings us through opposing rites of tenderness an
d terror, and is structured around one pure and visceral scene that sticks in the reader’s mind and refuses to go away.
We appreciated the subtle restraint of Michele Serwatuk’s “My Eyes Are Dim.” Her detailed description of the days after an earthquake is clear and unmediated, conspicuously precise and composed. When you read it, you feel that the sentences themselves have become the very consciousness of the narrator: she is in shock.
When we read Jay Brown’s description of making ice on cobblestone laneways – “The ice accumulated like tree rings, each blanketing the other with surety and fastness – a molecular perfection” – we knew we had stumbled upon gold. “The Girl from the War” is written with skilful and striking narration. It is also paced exceptionally, right up to its astonishing finish.
Beautiful pacing and writing also characterize “Toupée” by Michelle Winters. The first sentence alerted us that we had found something fresh: “I saw him on the subway for the first time the day I brought the meat bomb to work.” But the most moving part of this story about a disgruntled employee is the exquisite and powerful turn in the last line of dialogue; the deft use of a sad refrain made us wince (in a good way).
Similarly, the narrator in “What I Would Say,” a sassy, clever monologue by Jessica Westhead, produced both laughter and cringing. In six short pages, Westhead manages to draw her protagonist in her flawed entirety. She seems eerily familiar, reminding us of other people we’ve known and of the darker, unacknowledged side of ourselves.
The protagonist in Fran Kimmel’s “Laundry Day” had us rooting for her as she struggled against difficult odds. An evocative and deceptively simple story, “Laundry Day” is packed with vivid, visceral details. The pacing and tension are also excellent, culminating in a big exhale at the story’s conclusion.
The main character in “The Extra” by Michael Christie is likewise disenfranchised. An unreliable narrator who is inevitably done wrong, he draws us immediately into his world. This story is heartbreaking and compelling all the way through: the ending packs a huge emotional punch. We expect to see more great things from Michael Christie in the future.
“The Dead Roads” by D.W. Wilson presents a cast of three vividly drawn characters hurtling through the Rocky Mountains at eighty miles an hour in a ’67 Camaro. Their story teeters on the edge of those chasms that stretch between loyalty, friendship, and desire. Carried by the sometimes sad, sometimes elated voice of its narrator, this piece grapples with change and desperation and the ultimate selfishness of love.
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