Journey, p.2
Journey, page 2
Alissa York
Copyright © 2024 by McClelland & Stewart
“Despair: Five Stories of Ottawa” © André Alexis; “Is Alive and Can Move” © Kris Bertin; “Maps of the Known World” © Mary Borsky; “Miss Canada” © Jocelyn Brown; “The Extra” © Michael Christie; “The Roar” © Paige Cooper; “Hashtag Maggie Vandermeer” © Nancy Jo Cullen; “Tracks” © Alicia Elliott; “Can You Wave Bye Bye, Baby?” © Elyse Gasco; “My Husband’s Jump” © Jessica Grant; “Old Man Marchuk” © Kevin Hardcastle; “Manning” © Andrew Hood; “Righteous Speedboat” © Mark Anthony Jarman; “One Good Story, That One” © Thomas King; “A Boy of Good Breeding” © Ben Ladouceur; “Pooka” © Angélique Lalonde; “How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun?” © Doretta Lau; “Fishes” © Annabel Lyon; “Sunrise Till Dark” © K.D. Miller; “The Photographer’s Wife” © Téa Mutonji; “My Three Girls” © Saleema Nawaz; “The Difference Between Me and Goldstein” © Heather O’Neill; “I Swallow Creatures Whole” © Lue Palmer; “Traplines” © Eden Robinson; “Cinema Rex” © Naben Ruthnum; “Winter Baby” © Jean Rysstad; “Throwing Cotton” © Sarah Selecky; “Simple Recipes” © Madeleine Thien; “Monsters” © Leanne Toshiko Simpson; “My Daughter of the Dead Reeds” © Martin West; “Toupée” © Michelle Winters.
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About the Journey Prize
In the spring of 1988, as McClelland & Stewart was preparing to publish the Canadian edition of James A. Michener’s novel Journey, Michener approached us with an unusual request. He wanted his Canadian royalty earnings from the book sales of Journey to be used to support talented Canadian writers in the early stages of their careers. This act of generosity led to the creation of the $10,000 Journey Prize for emerging Canadian writers, which, for decades, was the most significant monetary award in Canada given to a developing writer for a single short story.
As a statement of our own support for new writers, McClelland & Stewart undertook to publish The Journey Prize Stories, an annual anthology comprising a selection of the best stories submitted to the prize. Each year, editors of literary magazines from across the country were invited to submit what, in their view, were the best stories their publications had published by up-and-coming Canadian writers in the previous year. The submissions were read by a jury of writers (and, occasionally, other members of the literary community, such as booksellers and literary critics) who selected the contents of the anthology, a shortlist of three stories, and a winner, without knowing the names of the writers or those of the nominating publications. In recognition of the vital role literary magazines play in fostering literary voices, McClelland & Stewart made its own award of $2,000 to the publication that originally published the winning story.
Both the presentation of the inaugural prize and the publication of the anthology’s first volume occurred in 1989. Since then, over the course of thirty-three volumes, the Journey Prize anthology has showcased the year’s best stories by more than three hundred and fifty writers, many of whom have gone on to distinguish themselves with acclaimed books of fiction and literary awards. As of 2023, Journey Prize contributors have been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction twenty-eight times and won three times, shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize twenty-five times and won five times, and shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize twenty-eight times and won seven times. We encourage you to peruse the list of Previous Contributing Authors you will find at the back of this volume, as this gathering of talent is the Journey Prize’s proud legacy.
As we celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Journey Prize, McClelland & Stewart would like to offer our gratitude to James A. Michener for his visionary donation, and to Avie Bennett, former chairman and president of McClelland & Stewart, for the essential support and endowment that allowed the prize and the anthology to leave such an astonishing legacy.
In 2001, we were honoured to begin our decades-long association with the Writers’ Trust of Canada, which saw the prize presented as part of their impressive roster of literary awards as the Writers’ Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. Our thanks to the team at the Writers’ Trust of Canada for their enthusiastic support of Journey Prize writers, finalists, and winners over the years.
We acknowledge and thank the editors and staff of the literary magazines, journals, and anthologies who continue to do the invaluable work of discovering, nurturing, and supporting new writers. We are lucky to have such a robust ecosystem of literary publications in Canada, and we encourage readers to seek out and support them.
Our thanks to our jurors, who always offered a masterclass in how to read, discuss, and champion the short story form. We are especially grateful to the esteemed editors of this anniversary edition, Alexander MacLeod and Souvankham Thammavongsa, for engaging with the entire Journey Prize library and selecting the thirty-one glittering stories in this volume.
And our deepest appreciation to the brilliant writers of the Journey Prize community, whose work has become so integral to the fabric of modern Canadian literature. As the Journey Prize manager for the past twenty-three volumes, it has been a true privilege to watch the careers of so many Journey Prize writers take flight, year after year.
And, of course, thank you to the readers for joining us in the ongoing celebration of new voices and the protean power of the short story form.
While future iterations of the Journey Prize and the anthology will evolve to more proactively and thoughtfully meet the prize’s mandate to identify and support emerging literary talent, the Journey Prize series will always be guided by its core mission to introduce readers to the next generation of great Canadian writers. The stories in this special anniversary edition are a tribute to the remarkable journey we have taken so far, and we look forward to all the exceptional stories and writers still to come.
Anita Chong
Editorial Director, Fiction
McClelland & Stewart
Contents
Copyright
About the Journey Prize
Alexander MacLeod and Souvankham Thammavongsa
Introduction
Jessica Grant
My Husband’s Jump
Thomas King
One Good Story, That One
Martin West
My Daughter of the Dead Reeds
Téa Mutonji
The Photographer’s Wife
André Alexis
Despair: Five Stories of Ottawa
Paige Cooper
The Roar
Sarah Selecky
Throwing Cotton
Mark Anthony Jarman
Righteous Speedboat
Madeleine Thien
Simple Recipes
Jean Rysstad
Winter Baby
Michelle Winters
Toupée
Heather O’Neill
The Difference Between Me and Goldstein
Saleema Nawaz
My Three Girls
Michael Christie
The Extra
Lue Palmer
I Swallow Creatures Whole
Eden Robinson
Traplines
Nancy Jo Cullen
Hashtag Maggie Vandermeer
Andrew Hood
Manning
K.D. Miller
Sunrise Till Dark
Angélique Lalonde
Pooka
Naben Ruthnum
Cinema Rex
Mary Borsky
Maps of the Known World
Kevin Hardcastle
Old Man Marchuk
Alicia Elliott
Tracks
Annabel Lyon
Fishes
Ben Ladouceur
A Boy of Good Breeding
Jocelyn Brown
Miss Canada
Doretta Lau
How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun?
Leanne Toshiko Simpson
Monsters
Elyse Gasco
Can You Wave Bye Bye, Baby?
Kris Bertin
Is Alive and Can Move
About the Contributors
Permissions Acknowledgements
Previous Contributing Authors
Introduction
Every country has its literature, but not every nation has a Journey Prize. Why should this matter? What difference does it make? How could one annual fiction anthology, dedicated to “The Best of Canada’s New Writers,” have any substantial impact on the way a culture imagines itself? A dozen short stories every year, written by mostly emerging voices? It doesn’t seem like such a fragile endeavour should have been able to sustain a whole generation of artists or remake the entire canon of contemporary Canadian fiction.
And yet.
Go to the end of this book and start there. Check the list of people who have contributed to the Journey Prize series: thirty-three years of names and titles. Then do what we did. Read backwards through time and watch the current shape of Canadian Fiction emerging, the new becoming now. Think again about what this one little anthology series has accomplished, the way it predicted a literary future that is now the present. Picture all these writers together in one room, the JP alumni, talking about their first publication, their first recognition, the difference it made. Ask them about what it meant to be included in this book, what it still means, in the arc of their writing journeys. They will tell you.
Or, if you prefer, go the opposite way. Imagine Canadian Literature without the Journey Prize. Subtract the names at the end of this book. Take away their first big break and much of what followed. We are not suggesting that the Journey Prize exclusively “made” these writers or that they wouldn’t have been discovered without it, but it certainly helped. It helped in a substantial way. Many say their careers started in these pages. And they know what might have been lost if such a venue never existed.
We came through here too. And like all the other contributors, the Journey Prize changed our writing careers. It let us in. This series matters to us, and we understand why so many people want to be part of the anniversary celebration. That’s why it was not easy to make the selections that built this volume. In hindsight, it might have been wiser to stick to the hits and focus only on the most famous voices from the past. Just the people who went on to win all the other prizes and publish all over the world. There is no risk in joining the chorus and singing the praises of what everyone else already likes, what everyone already knows. Critical consensus might have been a better guide.
But that has never been how the Journey Prize works. Uncertainty and discovery are the twin engines that drive this enterprise. And when everything is unknown, there is no possibility for critical consensus. When we made our choices, we tried to hold on to that original sense of wonder and surprise. We saw ourselves like the stories’ first readers, the essential editors who have worked for decades in Canada’s tremendous network of small literary magazines. We pictured staff going through the slush pile late at night, searching through thousands and thousands of pages, and we tried to feel what they must have felt the first time “this” turned out to be “THIS!” When you look back, you can see how that one wild moment of alchemy started a chain reaction that carried the story forward all the way up to where we are now.
It’s important to remember that nothing was for sure when these writers got their first stories into the anthology, just as nothing is for sure now. The Journey Prize was never designed to re-recognize Alice or Mavis or Margaret, but like them, it valued the unique craft of the short story form, and it saw and appreciated all the smallest aesthetic choices, what was really happening down there at the level of the sentence, then the paragraph, then the whole impossibly coordinated thing.
In our selections, we wanted to honour this special brand of care, the way the Journey Prize has always held space to celebrate a quiet voice long before it booms to others. It’s a lot like that person who brings something smaller yet remarkable to the market. A little bag of pickled greens that serves only one. A fistful of sticky rice lovingly packed with one fried chicken wing. Two-coin purses woven with straw because you cannot make more than two in twenty-four hours before the market opens. Between the stalls, everyone already has what others are selling, but this one person has this one unique thing. It is precious, built out of love and loss and craft, and it has the power to make the whole market quiet. This one loved object—the food, the purse, the story—allows the maker to hear their own heartbeat. There is a boom in their chest, and every beat tells them they are alive in this world too. No matter how loud it gets outside, this internal sound carries on. This is what the Journey Prize celebrates, what we’re trying to draw attention to: the private boom that comes before the public echo.
Now flip back to the first pages of this book, to the table of contents we have constructed. What exactly is in here? Or who? Why this story? Why that writer? Where are the big names we all expected? Some of them are here, of course, but not all. And what about the always-overlooked genius who wrote that tender masterpiece in the late 80s? How could they have missed them again?
There are no answers to such questions. Like all the other unpredictable Journey Prize anthologies that have come before, this one is also full of chance encounters, random associations, and combinations we never saw coming. There was too much to choose from. Hundreds of stories, thousands of ways to pull them together, a million different possible orders, but no formal logic to guide us in the process. We were limited by space, by time, by the choices of others who came before us, and of course, ultimately, by the narrow limitations we face within ourselves.
In the absence of any principles, we did what readers always do. Feel around in the dark, sniff for clues, trust our hunches, go with our collective gut instincts. Surprise was important to us. You could say we were looking for what we did not know we were looking for. This is the work of art, we agreed: It finds you in your certainty, your complacency, and shakes you out of it.
To capture the defining energy of the Journey Prize stories, we drew pieces that were willing to take some risks. We saw every writer up on the same tightrope, trying to get from one side to the other. To make it across, they require talent, skill, and discipline, but more than anything, they need faith. That’s what the prize ultimately celebrates, that first step into the void, working without a net. That wonderful moment when you make your own name. That wonderful moment when you can turn around and know you got yourself there. And now, others are seeing it too. You could say we looked for stories that made us feel damn. Damn, I wish I wrote this. Damn, why can’t I forget this. Damn, that one was so, so good.
Because uncertainty is the only certainty in the short story business, this book is a record of how fragile a hope and its future can turn out to be. We revisited many author biographies from earlier volumes. Some authors wrote only one story, then nothing else. Some told us of books that were forthcoming, but never came or went on to become great successes. Some listed jobs and education and family—things that may no longer be there. On the other hand, some of these pieces are now extremely well-known, part of the permanent record, taught in the high schools. For this exercise, however, we tried to read them as though they’d never been read before.
At its core, the Journey Prize is also a celebration of Canada’s literary magazines and journals. These first venues for publication are as delicate as they are essential. They run on shoe-string budgets or none at all; some make calls to the public for donations to keep them going; some exist for just a few issues before folding; some live only online; and some even have the money to pay a short story writer what feels like a million bucks. We encourage every reader of this anthology to support the magazines and journals that first found these stories and sent them forward. And we encourage you to go back, too; read every volume of The Journey Prize Stories if you can, then watch for the ones to come.
We know different editors would have made different choices; this could be a different book. And that’s how it should be. For now, though, these stories are their own power. They quietly boom in the crowded market, they walk the tightrope, and damn, they are very, very good.
