The Journey Prize Stories 21 The Best of Canada's New

Writers

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 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”
 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-first year, and
given for the ninth 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 twelve 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 emerging 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 comprises three acclaimed writers:
Camilla Gibb is the award-winning author of three novels,
Mouthing the Words, The Petty Details of So-and-so’s Life, and
Sweetness in the Belly, as well as numerous short stories, articles,
and reviews. Her work has been shortlisted for The Giller Prize
and won the Trillium Book Award, the City of Toronto Book
Award, and the CBC Canadian Literary Award for short fiction.
She was named by the jury of the prestigious Orange Prize as
“one of 21 writers to watch in the new century.” Camilla’s new
novel, The Beauty of Humanity Movement, is forthcoming from
Doubleday in 2010. She lives in Toronto.
Lee Henderson is the author of the award-winning short story
collection The Broken Record Technique and the novel The Man
Game, a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and
winner of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. A two-time nominee for
the Journey Prize, he is a contributing editor to the arts
magazines Border Crossings in Canada and Contemporary in the
U.K. He lives in Vancouver.
Rebecca Rosenblum’s short fiction has been shortlisted for the
Journey Prize, the National Magazine Award, and the Danuta
Gleed Award. Her first collection of short fiction, Once, won the
Metcalf-Rooke Award and was named one of Quill & Quire’s “15
Books that Mattered in 2008.” Her stories have been seen recently
in The Fiddlehead, Earlit Shorts, and Best Canadian Short Stories,
among other places. Rebecca lives, works, and writes in Toronto.
The jury read a total of seventy-two 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 information about The Journey Prize Stories, please
consult our website: www.mcclelland.com/jps.
 CONTENTS

Introduction
Camilla Gibb, Lee Henderson, and Rebecca Rosenblum

ADRIAN MICHAEL KELLY

Lure
(from Prairie Fire)

LYNNE KUTSUKAKE
Away
(from Grain Magazine)

JESUS HARDWELL
Easy Living
(from Exile: The Literary Quarterly)

PAUL HEADRICK
Highlife
(from Event)

DAVE MARGOSHES
The Wisdom of Solomon
(from The Dalhousie Review)

ALEXANDER MACLEOD
Miracle Mile
(from The New Quarterly)

YASUKO THANH
Floating Like the Dead
(from Vancouver Review)

SARAH L. TAGGART
Deaf
(from The Malahat Review)

SARAH KEEVIL
Pyro
(from Event)

SHAWN SYMS
On the Line
(from PRISM international)

FRAN KIMMEL
Picturing God’s Ocean
(from Grain Magazine)

DANIEL GRIFFIN
The Last Great Works of Alvin Cale
(from The Dalhousie Review)

About the Authors

About the Contributing Journals
Previous Contributing Authors
 INTRODUCTION

W
riters select their most polished short stories to submit to
journals. From what they receive, the journals’ editors
choose what they feel are the most surprising and
gripping stories to publish, then winnow those published stories
again to find those they consider most worthy of inclusion in a
national anthology. That’s when the packages show up in the
Journey Prize jury’s mailboxes – this year, filled with seventy-two
nuanced, deeply imagined, and sharply written pieces of short
fiction.
What a pleasure to read so many stellar explorations of a
challenging literary form. What an education, too. And what a
terrifying challenge to look at what the best literary editors in
Canada consider the best stories, and to try to choose the best of
those. The pleasure and education far outweighed the terror, but
still it was daunting. Brilliant short stories can be brilliant along
any number of metrics – realism or strangeness, elegance or blunt
simplicity, tight plotting or sprawling authenticity. Comparison is
fraught and dubious at best. All we can do, whether in the role of
judge, teacher, or simply happy reader, is to consider what the
writer was trying to achieve, how well he or she succeeded in that
goal, and how excited the reader is about that success.
One terribly exciting success, in our opinion, is “The Last Great
Works of Alvin Cale” by Daniel Griffin. This subtle and
complicated story of art, love, and lust moves forward on the grim
trajectory of death, but also draws haunting life from its central
character, Skylar, and his admission to himself of all he truly
feels, and longs for. His son’s illness renews their relationship and
their uneasy intimacy, full of envy, rivalry, and fierce affection for
beauty. Griffin has taken on considerable challenges in portraying
the working lives of artists, and has done so with amazing, and
heartbreaking, force.
Adrian Michael Kelly’s “Lure” is also a story about a father and
a son, but Kelly’s is an altogether different art, full of the simple
intensity of a child’s observation. Kelly doesn’t trouble the reader
with anything but the moment as the boy sees it. The drama
inheres in a child’s anxiety over pleasing his father, over the life
of a frog, and the taste of a sandwich. Although “Lure” does have
a climax of adult pain, it is the boy’s perceptions and tensions that
dominate, and it is to Kelly’s infinite credit that this seems not a
limitation but an illumination.
To continue with family stories, Sarah L. Taggart’s “Deaf” is
told from alternating perspectives of a mother and her young
daughter, both missing a sense of so many things in their lives.
The glittering percision of Taggart’s language allows for both the
humour of children bickering over ketchup and the quotidian
tragedy of adults ground down by both hope and disappointment.
Taggart never diminishes her characters’ lives of canned tomatoes
and Hungry Hungry Hippos, nor does she lionize them or excuse
their bad behaviour. She just achieves that incredible literary
summit of bringing them to life.
The gift in all of these stories lies in the adage of showing
rather than telling. Particularly rich in this regard are those
stories that immerse us in specific histories or geographies,
making setting integral to and inseparable from the events and
emotions of the characters.
Yasuko Thanh’s “Floating Like the Dead” takes us into a little-
known and painful chapter in Canadian history. Here, the few
remaining inhabitants of a turn-of-the-century colony of Chinese
lepers off the coast of B.C. spend the last of their days clinging to
something as futile as hope. The limits of language, racism, and
poverty have already defined their immigrant lives. Their
alienation becomes complete as their bodies rebel and repel, and
they are exiled to die in isolation. They must use their declining
strength to battle a rugged geography they cannot beat. The forest
is primeval and eternal and the western breezes across the Pacific
can only remind them of the China of their youths. Thanh strikes
that difficult balance between depicting bigger worlds and worlds
within, and uses the resonances between the internal and external
to subtle and graceful effect. This is a story of brittle beauty,
which gives as much room to the unspoken as the spoken.
In “Highlife,” Paul Headrick similarly addresses imminent
death, the silences that precede it, and the sounds that surround
it. A husband and wife, together for twenty-six years, become
unglued from each other in the face of the husband’s illness and
the anger that consequently possesses him. He is a lover of music
– an academic, a radio host, and a critic – making a pilgrimage of
sorts to Ghana with his wife. He is looking to hear highlife music
in its original context – buoyant life-affirming sounds – but he and
his wife are largely silent companions on this trip; there is little
he is compelled to voice aloud. Against the heat and confusion,
the dancing bodies and the music, his life – and her life in relation
to him – are coming to a painful end. In this case it is the contrast
between internal and external worlds, the disconnect between
them, that gives the story its poignancy, isolating the characters
from each other and the world around them.
What isolates the main character in Lynne Kutsukake’s “Away”
is the arrival of sudden news that casts her out of her day-to-day
life. As in “Floating Like the Dead,” “Away” brings a little-known
piece of history to light – in this case, the abduction of several
young Japanese by North Koreans in the late-1970s to serve as
Japanese language teachers for the North Korean Intelligence
Service. When this is discovered decades later, the main character
is stunned to see a picture of a girl she once knew among the
abductees. They had been classmates, volleyball teammates, and
had once shared an intimate, if confusing, moment. But then
Sayuri had disappeared. Photos of her were plastered throughout
the town, rumours about her abounded, and the police
investigation brought no answers. In the aftermath of Sayuri’s
disappearance, the main character had felt drawn to the sea in a
way she could not explain. She would stare at the waves and the
horizon and think of floating and fish, which connected her to the
missing Sayuri in some disconcerting way. Thirty years pass
before Sayuri’s whereabouts are revealed. But there remain
silences and vast unknowns and no real answers. There is only the
seashore where the narrator used to stand, perhaps intuiting
somehow that Sayuri lived on the other side.
The stories in this anthology are written by authors from across
Canada, about people from all around the world, and told from
the point of view of people living vastly different lives. Some are
set in a Canada few of us are familiar with, notably Jesus
Hardwell’s “Easy Living” and Shawn Syms’s “On the Line,” which
takes us on a rare and intimate tour of meatpacking and
slaughterhouse culture. Reading is an act of empathy. A reader
wants to believe and to feel and to share in the memories and
condition of another person, however unfamiliar or unreliable the
person is, and the writer’s responsibility is simply to make this
possible.
Memory, with its narrativizing techniques of emphasis and
elision, is a fiction writer’s third hand. It scrambles just as hard as
the left and right to make sense of disconnected things. And a
great deal of fiction is taken up with an exploration of this unseen
hand’s dexterity. Memory is a common theme. While a writer’s
ten fingers type, the third hand caresses the keys of synapses and
shifts faraway-driven thoughts to the front of the mind. Memory,
drawing from life, grasps what the technology of language tries to
articulate – experience. Memory prompts the other hands to work,
and sometimes makes its imperfect self the subject of the story, as
it does in Fran Kimmel’s “Picturing God’s Ocean” and in Dave
Margoshes’s “The Wisdom of Solomon,” in which the narrator’s
humble, ever-worried father finds himself writing an advice
column for a Jewish newspaper in Cleveland after the First World
War. For its voice, “The Wisdom of Solomon” is an astonishing
work of memory guided by the very different voices of two
generations. Stirred by thoughts of the narrator’s father, the story
at once inhabits the melancholy and reflective voice of the son
and the eager, worried voice of the father, so that he, the Jewish
Diaspora, and the glory days of newsprint are rendered with such
unerring clarity that the narrator and his father will both endure
in the reader’s own memory in great detail.
A great story, by this metaphor’s definition, has got superb
third-hand coordination, but a story is also more commonly said
to have legs. When the premise and the language, and especially
the characters, are all so exciting to read that you re-read, and tell
your friends to read, then a story has legs. It will endure. Included
in this selection are two very different stories that have
remarkable legs and that also happen to be about characters on
the run, physically and psychologically. Alexander MacLeod’s
“Miracle Mile” is about a runner on his last race in a tragicomic
tale of jockdom gone awry. “Miracle Mile” shows us that in life
there can be fitness without health, and commitment without
honour. Sarah Keevil’s story “Pyro” is about a dishonourable
young woman running from one bad relationship to another – out
of the frying pan and into the fire, as it were – as she finds herself
involved with a fire-starter. “Pyro” depicts a narrator fleeing from
responsibility who would rather burn away memories and start
fresh than face herself and her mistakes.

How many great short stories were published in Canada this past
year? Twelve? No way, far more than a bundle of twelve.
Journals are still the best first place to fish for examples from our
burgeoning literary talent pool. These twelve pieces are highlights
from the many discoveries made by Canadian literary journals
during the previous year. Readers of Grain and PRISM, Vancouver
Review and The Dalhousie Review, Exile and other literary
magazines already know that the country’s literary efforts are well
beyond the meniscus; this is only a sample. The three of us spent
all day talking about our choices, and once the selection was
made, it felt like the conversation ended too soon. Short stories
have a contemporary urgency to them that makes you want to
talk about their implications. That’s why once you fall in love
with the form, with all that a short story offers in a too-brief
amount of space, the possibilities for characters and premises,
from then on all you can do is read them as they come, and tell
others, “Here, check out this.”
Camilla Gibb
Lee Henderson
Rebecca Rosenblum
June 2009