How much attention does a $10,000 dollar prize get a beginning writer nowadays? That's what the Writers' Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize means to one contender among the best of Canada's latest writers featured in The Journey Prize Stories 21. Selected this year by award-winning authors Camilla Gibb, Lee Henderson and Rebecca Rosenblum (from nominations made by literary journal editors nationwide), the Journey Prize has become a proving ground for Canada's upcoming authors.
A number of former winners have become recognized names and recipients of other prestigious Canadian awards more frequently given to established authors: the Governor-General's Award, the Trillium Award or the Giller Prize.
The Journey Prize Stories 21, Selected by Camilla Gibb, Lee Henderson, and Rebecca Rosenblum, McClelland & Stewart, 272 pages, $17.95
According to Timothy Taylor, nothing previous in his career had convinced him that he could be a real writer. Yann Martel has pointed out that for young writers, it's the Journey Prize or nothing. “After that, letters from editors get a lot more polite, even if they're rejections.” In Mark Anthony Jarman's case, it left him “tickled pink as your map of Canada.” David Bergen has called the anthology “a windfall for both writer and reader.”
It's a bonus for the winning writer, certainly (though the ten grand will probably work out to three bucks an hour for the work involved). But how many readers will notice?
Although billed as Canada's most popular anthology, the lamentable fact remains: Collections of short stories don't sell. That's in spite of the fact that accomplished and respected writers continue to work in the genre, an art form that, when compared to the novel, might well be likened to a well-aged single malt against a pitcher of sangria.
You'd think they'd be hot in an age of Tweets
You'd think they'd be hot in an age of Tweets. Brief episodes consumed in a single sitting should fit readers increasingly pressed for time. According to Canadian Heritage data, reading levels have not dropped off in the past 15 years. In spite of the Internet, other audio-visual options and time constraints, 54 per cent of Canadians read, on average, close to five hours a week. They do it for fun, to relax and to learn, and they rank it on par with socializing with friends and entertainment for which they leave home. Then why not short stories? Especially these.
Adrian Michael Kelly's Lure takes readers into the mind of a child fishing with his father. The boy's anxiety, sensitivity and humour as he realizes the big one got away – and that he got away with a big one – are revelatory and touching.
A high-school classmate, one of several Japanese girls abducted to North Korea, who suddenly reappears in a news story 30 years after haunts Lynne Kutsukake's narrator in Away.
Jesus Hardwell offers raw, powerful prose in Easy Living, which is anything but. Instead, when “everything is yours, right in your hands the whole deal, then its yanked and nothing.”
In Highlife, Paul Headrick charts the journey of Christopher, a dying man accompanied to Ghana by his wife. His goal is to find highlife music in its pure, original form. In doing so, both discover that the defiance in the music not only eases the oppression, humiliation and indignity of life, but also death.
David Margoshes portrays an idealistic writer who translates yesterday's new into Yiddish for a small Cleveland daily, writes obits and sometimes fabricates letters for his advice column in The Wisdom of Solomon. Life's dilemmas lead him to droll and dark answers.
Alexander MacLeod's Miracle Mile explores the circumstances of two runners still looking for the big comeback. They, like the rest of humanity, scrounge for meaning wherever they can find it. Nothing can separate their faith from their desperation.
