The Journey Prize Stories 22

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”

The $10,000 Journey Prize is awarded annually to an emerging writer of distinction. This award, now in its twenty-second year, and given for the tenth 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 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 award-winning writers:

Pasha Malla
's debut collection of stories,
The Withdrawal Method
, won the Trillium Book Award and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (Canada/Caribbean), and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. He is also the author of a collection of poetry,
All our grandfathers are ghosts
. A two-time Journey Prize finalist, he lives in Toronto and teaches in the University of Toronto's Department of Continuing Studies. His first novel,
People Park
, will be published in 2011.

Joan Thomas
's first novel,
Reading by Lightning
, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (Canada/Caribbean) and the Amazon First Novel Award. Her second novel is
Curiosity
. Joan was a long time contributing reviewer for the
Globe and Mail
and co-edited the anthology
Turn of the Story: Canadian Short Fiction on the Eve of the Millennium
. She lives in Winnipeg. For more information, please visit
www.joanthomas.ca
.

Alissa York
's novels include
Mercy, Effigy
, which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and, most recently,
Fauna
. She is also the author of a collection of short fiction,
Any Given Power
. Her stories have won the Bronwen Wallace Award and the Journey Prize, and have appeared in various literary journals and anthologies. She has lived all over Canada, and now makes her home in Toronto. For more information, please visit
www.alissayork.com
.

The jury read a total of seventy-four 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
.

ALISSA YORK
: There's so much to say about the jurying process. It was an intense, immersive experience, reading and evaluating all those diverse narratives; at times my mind swam with characters and settings, images and events. In the end, though, I believe we all zeroed in on those stories that really stayed with us – the ones that not only moved into our hearts and minds, but stuck around to unpack.

JOAN THOMAS
: When you think about it, all we read was the equivalent in pages of two or three novels – and yet there were all those separate imagined worlds to enter. The writer of a short story has so few pages to set up the rules of the game and then play it out. I found I had to do my reading in short sessions to really savour the concentrated force of each story.

PASHA MALLA
: One thing I think we were all looking for was to be surprised. And I hope readers of this anthology will find surprises – whether in language, structure, voice, emotional oomph, or in the unexpected twists and turns of a well-told story.

AY
: Absolutely – good fiction surprises us the way life does, which is odd, given how easily a story can fail by sticking to “what really happened.” I find the sweetest surprises are often the small ones, such as the moment in Lynne Kutsukake's
“Mating” when the protagonist focuses on the whorl of greying hair at the crown of his wife's head and feels “an inexplicable tenderness for this secret spot, a sudden urge to protect it with the palm of his hand.” Nothing like getting swept up in a character's unexpected rush of love.

JT
: It was remarkable to see what different stories two writers could produce on similar subjects – in the case of “Mating” and Carolyn Black's “Serial Love,” a subject as specific as
speed dating
. “Mating” beautifully juxtaposes traditional Japanese cultural attitudes with contemporary dating practices, and “Serial Love” listens in on a first encounter between a man and woman and reveals menace in every word and gesture. It's a story of such precisely balanced ambiguity that its possibilities surprise you with every reading.

PM
: And then there were those stories that grab you by the throat from the first line. From their cracking openings on, every sentence of Damian Tarnopolsky's “Laud We the Gods” and Mike Spry's “Five Pounds Short and Apologies to Nelson Algren” is visceral, unsettling, uncompromising, and astonishing. Both are told in the sort of voice that needles its way into your brain and stays with you long after the story is over.

JT
: I've come around to thinking that point of view is everything, how fully you inhabit it. Devon Code's “Uncle Oscar,” for example, pleased me with every detail that fell under the alert eye of the thirteen-year-old protagonist: the upside-down milk crate that served as a footstool in the basement
TV
room, a Sepultura T-shirt and an Ibanez guitar, the smell of
the unbathed uncle (“a sweet smell like brown bananas”) – it's Leo's eye on ordinary stuff that aligns us entirely with his experience.