A Storied Legacy

Your favourite Canadian writer’s favourite Canadian story prize got its start thanks to a Yankee making bank off Canadian history. James A. Michener donated the royalties from the Canadian edition of Journey, his 1988 novel about the Klondike gold rush, to support emerging writers in this country. The result was the $10,000 Journey Prize, awarded annually to a short story by an early-career writer. Literary magazines were enlisted to participate by nominating the best fiction they’d published in the previous twelve months. Since the prize was first awarded in 1989, McClelland & Stewart has also published a yearly anthology of the nominees.

After thirty-five years, the list of over 350 writers whose stories have appeared in those books is a formidable literary who’s who — one that demonstrates how the title of Norman Levine’s “We All Begin in a Little Magazine,” from 1972, still holds true. Many of those writers treasure the Journey Prize, not least because the inclusion of their work in one of the anthologies was a crucial early vote of confidence. As one such writer, Yasuko Thanh, puts it, “The Journey Prize is a light, a lifeline, a voice saying, ‘We see you. We hear you. Keep coming.’ ”

To mark the coral anniversary, Alexander MacLeod and Souvankham Thammavongsa, whose own fiction has appeared in previous editions, have selected thirty-one past stories for publication in a commemorative volume, Journey. A less conscientious duo might simply have chosen those that won the prize. Instead, MacLeod and Thammavongsa took on the mammoth task of essentially rerunning years of adjudication to see which pieces have stood the test of time. Their criteria, they explain in their introduction, included a story’s ability to provoke “wonder and surprise.” With no guiding principles, they searched for art that “finds you in your certainty, your complacency, and shakes you out of it.”

Replaying the evaluation process in this way has fascinating results. You’d think that older stories would be at a disadvantage — after all, what surprised readers three decades ago may well now seem passé — but the first ten years of the prize are amply represented with nine selections. Although a few stories that have made it into Journey are now staples of CanLit syllabuses — among them, Thomas King’s “One Good Story, That One,” from 1989, and Madeleine Thien’s “Simple Recipes,” from 1998 — many present-day luminaries whose early work appeared in the anthologies haven’t made the cut. Perhaps most surprisingly, only six past winners of the Journey Prize appear in Journey.

Among the stories that are included, there is, indeed, much to provoke wonder. There’s the moment in Jessica Grant’s “My Husband’s Jump,” from 2003, in which a ski jumper flies into the air and, instead of landing, keeps on going, never to be seen again. There’s the middle-aged protagonist of Nancy Jo Cullen’s “Hashtag Maggie Vandermeer,” from 2014, doing upper-body exercises with the hope of “staving off scrotarms.” There’s the breathtaking passage in Angélique Lalonde’s “Pooka,” from 2019, in which the narrator, after a meandering account of a period in the life of the protagonist, steps on the gas and describes his next five years in a handful of sentences. The footnotes in Naben Ruthnum’s “Cinema Rex,” from 2013, audaciously reveal the adult fates of the two young protagonists. André Alexis’s “Despair: Five Stories of Ottawa,” from 1990, features a corpse that grants wishes and a worm that gives those who consume it the ability to write marvellous poetry. And then there’s Mark Anthony Jarman’s “Righteous Speedboat,” from 1997, which uses its almost comically Canadian conceit — a hockey prospect watching the NHL draft on TV and desperately hoping for his name to be called — as an excuse to exhibit the character’s lyrically gymnastic diction. In one moment, he’s describing a scored goal with the cliché “bury it top shelf.” Not long afterwards, he’s declaring that he’s “starting to feel like saussurite, like schist, like stone.” Such a story is low‑key speculative fiction, imagining a reality that is, joyously, just a few degrees off course from ours.

If you squint, you can tell at various points that the stories in Journey are, for all their prodigiousness, early-career efforts. But then, while a great allure of this form is that you can imagine a perfect one — a narrative that anyone might read without wanting to change a word — the truth is that even the most extraordinary short fiction usually has a bit of wobble, be it a theme overemphasized, an implausible line of dialogue, a creaky transition between scenes, or an under-sketched depiction of time and place. Although the stories in Journey don’t often manifest such technical shortcomings, there are a few recurring failures of invention: from defaulting to the minimalist slice-of-life realism of the Raymond Carver school to building a plot solely on the revelation of a character’s traumatic past. Familiar as this type of storyline has become, it can still be put to worthy ends. It rarely carries its former potency, however.

The challenge of weighing a story’s strengths against its less wondrous elements to determine how “good” it is helps to explain why there’s so often disagreement in making such calls, even among people who assess fiction for a living. The fact that their judgments can seem intensely subjective, even arbitrary, underscores the value of reassessing work that has previously been adjudicated many times over — by the various magazine editors, by the prize judges, and, in diverse ways, by the readers. There’s too much writing in the world for any of us to imagine tackling it all, so we rely on publishers, literary award juries, and critics to populate our reading lists with their recommendations. Still, even expert appraisals are always partial and provisional, liable to be revised, retracted, overturned. Ask MacLeod and Thammavongsa to evaluate all the same stories again in a few years, and they might choose a completely different list.

In the meantime, we can be grateful to them for returning to our view many fine short stories that history might otherwise have left behind. We can be grateful that the Journey Prize anthologies have celebrated them, too. And we can be grateful for the literary devotees who first brought these stories before the public eye: all the people working at the little magazines who, now as then, see the wunderkinds, hear them, and keep them coming.