The Journey Prize Stories 28
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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”
2011: Miranda Hill for “Petitions to Saint Chronic”
2012: Alex Pugsley for “Crisis on Earth-X”
2013: Naben Ruthnum for “Cinema Rex”
2014: Tyler Keevil for “Sealskin”
2015: Deirdre Dore for “The Wise Baby”
Copyright © 2016 by McClelland & Stewart
“Chins and Elbows” © Carleigh Baker; “If I Ever See the Sun” © Charlie Fiset; “The Origin of Jaanvi” © Mahak Jain; “The Emigrants” © Colette Langlois; “The Person You Want to See” © Alex Leslie; “Progress on a Genetic Level” © Andrew Macdonald; “Home Range” © J.R. McConvey; “How the Grizzly Came to Hang in the Royal Oak Hotel” © J.R. McConvey; “The Roar” © Paige Cooper; “Mani Pedi” © Souvankham Thammavongsa; “Paris” © Souvankham Thammavongsa.
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.
Library and Archives of Canada Cataloguing in Publication is available upon request
Published simultaneously in the United States of America by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
Library of Congress Control Number available upon request
ISBN 9780771050862
Ebook ISBN 9780771050879
The quotation on this page is taken from the academic paper “Past, present & future scenario of thalassaemic care & control in India” by Ishwar C. Verma, Renu Saxena, and Sudha Kohli, published in Indian Journal of Medical Research (October 2011; 134(4): 507–521).
The quotation in the last line of this page is from The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.
Cover design: Leah Springate
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a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,
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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-eighth year, and given for the sixteenth 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 eleven 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 short story collections, 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:
Kate Cayley’s first collection of short fiction, How You Were Born, won the 2015 Trillium Book Award and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. She has also published a collection of poetry, When This World Comes to an End. She is currently a playwright-in-residence at Tarragon Theatre, and has written two plays for Tarragon, After Akhmatova and The Bakelite Masterpiece. Her second collection of poetry, Other Houses, is forthcoming from Brick Books. She lives in Toronto.
Brian Francis is the author of two novels. His most recent, Natural Order, was selected by the Toronto Star, Kobo, and Georgia Straight as a Best Book of 2011. His first novel, Fruit, was a 2009 Canada Reads finalist and was selected as a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers title. He lives in Toronto.
Madeleine Thien is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes, and the novels Certainty and Dogs at the Perimeter, which was shortlisted for Berlin’s 2014 International Literature Award and won the Frankfurt Book Fair’s 2015 Liberaturpreis. Her books and stories have been translated into twenty-five languages. Her essays have appeared in Granta, the Guardian, the Financial Times, Five Dials, Brick, and elsewhere, and her story “The Wedding Cake” was shortlisted for the 2015 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. A new novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, will be published in 2016. She lives in Montreal.
The jury read a total of eighty-seven 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 visit www.facebook.com/TheJourneyPrize.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Reading the 2016 Journey Prize Stories
Kate Cayley, Brian Francis, and Madeleine Thien
SOUVANKHAM THAMMAVONGSA
Paris
(from Ricepaper)
ALEX LESLIE
The Person You Want to See
(from The Rusty Toque)
J.R. McCONVEY
Home Range
(from The Malahat Review)
CARLEIGH BAKER
Chin
s and Elbows
(from subTerrain Magazine)
CHARLIE FISET
If I Ever See the Sun
(from The Fiddlehead)
MAHAK JAIN
The Origin of Jaanvi
(from Joyland Magazine)
PAIGE COOPER
The Roar
(from The Fiddlehead)
SOUVANKHAM THAMMAVONGSA
Mani Pedi
(from The Puritan)
COLETTE LANGLOIS
The Emigrants
(from PRISM international)
ANDREW MACDONALD
Progress on a Genetic Level
(from Taddle Creek)
J.R. McCONVEY
How the Grizzly Came to Hang in the Royal Oak Hotel
(from EVENT)
About the Contributors
About the Contributing Publications
Previous Contributing Authors
READING THE 2016 JOURNEY PRIZE STORIES
BRIAN FRANCIS
I remember hearing once that a short story should be short enough to read in one sitting. (Or one standing, if you’re on the subway, which is where I do most of my reading.) I get the sentiment as far as length, but what are the general rules when it comes to short stories? What makes a short story good? What makes it exceptional? What makes you miss your subway stop?
I can’t speak for my fellow jurors, but I was hesitant when I was asked to be a Journey Prize juror. As a writer, I’m not entirely comfortable judging the work of other writers. I know what goes into writing. The energy. The emotion. The time. But as I worked my way through these stories, and when Madeleine, Kate, and I met to discuss them, I realized that it wasn’t so much about judging other people’s work as it was about honouring excellence.
Ultimately, the stories in this collection are here because they’re spectacular in their own ways, bright constellations of imagination, conflict, and depth. But they’re also here because of the choices each writer made. Writing, after all, is a playground of choice: choices of words, of scenes, of characters, of tone, of subject matter. All of these writers have made very wise choices. Most of all, they invite you, the reader, into their work. The door is open. Step in. Wander around. Immerse yourself in the talents of eleven exceptional writers and their stories.
Keep an eye out for your subway stop.
KATE CAYLEY
A woman obsessively visits the gym after breaking up with her girlfriend. A veteran of the war in Afghanistan finds himself shooting a bear in the ballroom of an upscale hotel. A woman who works in a plant that processes chickens warily observes her co-workers’ desperate attempts at escape. A miner may or may not be pursued by the devil in the dark. Missives are sent from Mars to an unresponsive Earth, as hundreds of years earlier, a man writes letters to a homeland he will never see again. As this year’s jury carefully, and sometimes with difficulty, selected the stories for this anthology, I felt blessed and invigorated by the sheer variety of voices we encountered and was reminded of the John Berger quotation, “Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.” These were stories told in many styles, from delicate to brash to deeply strange, in voices that were sometimes baroque and sometimes heartbreakingly simple. I was buoyed up by the quality of each one, but even more by how wide-ranging the collection was as a whole.
In selecting the stories for the Journey Prize anthology, we found some patterns emerged. Some writers were far along in their craft, others less so. Interestingly, the experiences of clever people in cities or hoping to be in cities seems to be replacing stories of life in small towns as the cliché of choice. Some stories toppled under the weight of their conceptual frameworks. Others didn’t have enough meat on the bones. Others showed promise in the evidence of a brilliant eye, but were too profuse in their details. But in the end, we had to set aside many good stories, stories that were beautiful, funny, sharp, and full of feeling, stories that, just as much as the ones in this collection, represented a wide range of both style and experience. To the writers in this collection: thank you. To the writers who very nearly were, whose stories we set aside with regret and admiration: thank you also.
MADELEINE THIEN
A description of the gym in Alex Leslie’s “The Person You Want to See” describes perfectly, for me, the experience of reading these stories—descending into the “aquarium intimacy” of overlapping private worlds. One moment we’re a male manicurist, then we’re abandoned on a planetary outpost, or we’re hip deep in a river as salmon blaze past to their end. The tensions between these stories are visceral and moving and sometimes disturbing.
Together they reveal a network of defended privacies and unusual hauntings: ghosts, refugees, forgotten wars, hunted animals, deleted Facebook posts, embryos, genes, history, and even the memory of salvation. The stories describe our contemporary world, but they confront us with our own alienness, all the things we never noticed or thought worthy of noticing. How do they do this? By committing entirely—word and sentence, feeling and intellect—to their imagined realities. When someone believes in something, it makes me pay attention. My antennae lift. There’s energy here, between me and the writer, a necessary, though often challenging, friction.
Leslie quotes a trainer’s advice, “The ultimate test of strength is to be able to hold up your own weight. Hold yourself aloft.” This is a mesmerizing way to think about each story. Can it hold up its own weight? Does it attempt to carry too much, and in so doing, manage to hoist—briefly, impossibly—another weight entirely? The reader, too, becomes another person inside that brevity, “close to it and out of sight,” as Souvankham Thammavongsa memorably observes in “Mani Pedi.” What I love about these stories is that each, in its own perilous way, chooses the uneasy path. My heartfelt admiration to the writers. I wish them all the best with the literature yet to come.
SOUVANKHAM THAMMAVONGSA
PARIS
The sky was black like the middle of an eye. Red revved the engine, impatient, having to wait for the truck to warm up. It was an old thing. A thing she saw on someone’s front lawn. The make was nothing special. They call it a pickup truck, but she never picked anything up in it. Just herself. It might have been the colour that drew Red to it. And the thing was big. It took up most of the lane on the road. It might have been the thought of that big red thing in the parking lot at the plant. It would be the best-looking thing. And it was hers. She wanted that. Especially.
Red worked at the plant like most of the others in town. It was her job to pluck the feathers, make sure the chickens were smooth when they left her. By the time the chickens got to her they were already dead. Their eyes closed tight like they were sleeping. It was almost like what happened in the other room didn’t happen at all. Sometimes she could swear she heard the chickens in the other room—that sudden desperate flap of wing, as if flight could really take place there.
Red looked at her face in the rear-view mirror. It didn’t show her whole face, just the eyes. She lifted herself from the driver’s seat, turned her head to the right side, looked at her profile, and imagined what she would look like with a different nose. How maybe if she looked different, things would be different at the plant. Especially with Tommy. Tommy was her boss, her supervisor, married with two young boys. He was nice to her. Gave her more shifts than anyone else and complimented her work.
“You did good, Red. Keep it up. We’ve got plans for you.” What those plans were, she never knew. Just that they had them for her. Sometimes Tommy would buy her a cola from the machine or sit at her table during her lunch breaks. They talked mostly about his boys and how he was planning a trip to Paris with his wife for Valentine’s Day. His wife, Nicole, had a nose Red wished she could have. It was a thin nose that stuck out from her face and pointed upward. Anyone who worked in the front office had that kind of nose. His wife always came to the plant’s annual Christmas party, wearing something fashionable, with fabric no one else’s clothes were made out of. The fabric was thick
and fit her tightly, smoothed out and pressed, not a wrinkle in sight. At the party, she stood the whole time in a group with the other wives whose husbands ran or owned the company. They would all come say hello to each person who worked there, introduce themselves, and then go stand huddled in a corner with each other, like they did some great charity work, conversing.
Every year, at the party, it was fried chicken. It never bothered Red that the pieces she ate could have been one of those dead chickens that came to her to get plucked. Cut up into pieces like that, there wasn’t a face to think of. And every year, she looked forward to this party, wore her best clothes to it: a pair of jeans, a blue-and-white checkered shirt, and thick black boots from Canadian Tire. It wasn’t fancy like the other girls, and it didn’t show much, but there wasn’t much Red wanted to show. It had become a trend a few years ago when one of the girls who worked there got a nose job. Her glasses didn’t have to be held up with an elastic band at the back of the head. The girl got her hair done after that, every week. She already had a small thin body. Cute, was what Tommy called it. Then, she started getting more shifts and eventually got a job at the front office. The front office! It was hard to believe someone like them could get a job there. In this town, a girl either worked at the chicken plant or the Boobie Bungalow. At least at the Boobie Bungalow, you could make some quick cash and get the hell out of town, never look back, or you could get someone who could love you just long enough to take you out of the town. A man you met there was single or on his way to being single. At the plant, most of the men were married and if they weren’t they would be eventually, to someone else who didn’t work at the plant. You made enough money to pay for what you needed, but the big things in life, the things that could make you happy, well, you just never made enough to get those. Red knew, for her, it was going to be the chicken plant. She didn’t have much in the chest area, and couldn’t dance to music even if it had a beat. The way men never looked at her gave her the sense the Boobie Bungalow just wasn’t for her.