Grand Prize: ”Ice Diaries: a climate change memoir” by Jean McNeil
1st runner up: “Something as Big as a Mountain” by Jane Cawthorne
2nd runner up: “Rules of Play” by Katie Fritz

After our editorial board narrowed the huge number of entries down to eleven for the shortlist, our judge Amber Dawn selected the winners. Watch for our nonfiction contest issue in the spring — PRISM 50.3.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this year’s contest and congratulations to our winners!

Last year, Victoria writer Erin Fisher won first place in PRISM’s fiction contest for her story “Bridges.” This year, Fisher repeated that success by taking the top spot in The Malahat Review’s fiction contest. PRISM caught up with Erin recently, to discuss her recent successes and her plans for the future.

PRISM: Your piece “Apiculture” just won The Malahat Review’s Open Season Awards. Congratulations! This is your second win in a year, after your piece “Bridges” won PRISM’s fiction contest. You’re having quite the year – how does it feel?

ERIN FISHER: Pretty great. It doesn’t change any of the work that must be done, but it provides a boost to energy.

P: Tell us about “Apiculture”. What was your process while writing it, and what were you hoping to accomplish with this story?

EF: “Apiculture” underwent many, many rewrites. I wanted a child narrator who was being built by the events that occur in the story, as well as the depth that is added by the retrospective, but I didn’t want the future time/place/situation of the narrator mattering. I knew the layers and plot of the story before I started writing, but it took a lot of tinkering to get it working properly.

P: Your writing is very experimental/edgy. Why do you feel drawn to non-traditional styles of story-telling?

EF: I’m not sure. I enjoy reading all types of stories, and have tried a less ornamental style of writing, but it came off wrong. Every story (so far) has had a different way of forming in rough draft, but in the end each one comes down to me and it and scissors and a lot of floorspace. Being flexible with structure allows the story’s form to help solve problems. On content: it can be more fun to get to the core of the piece through a little weirdness.

P: Both your prize-winning stories have a strong theme of childhood in them. Is this a coincidence, or is this a theme that you’re interested in continuing to explore?

EF: I’m interested in child narrators because they are in the process of becoming people, and (like I said above) instead of having a wealth of experience behind them, children are being built by the events that occur in the story. Although I have a few drafts of stories without kids, I think that (with or without intent) there will be some aspect of childhood in most of my pieces.

P: You also published a story in Granta this year. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

EF: Sure. Granta published my piece “Suite in Dark Matter” last November. It was published online alongside issue 117 Horror, which (after the shock of acceptance) surprised/amused me. The story is structured after a baroque keyboard suite, and the main character is a pianist who, while digging through compost at night, discovers an angel. In writing this piece I tried to work the Rococo style of a traditional suite into the writing. The choice in using the suite structure came down to the content (lapsed pianist) and the POV switch at the end.

P: How long have you been a writer? When did you start submitting your work to literary journals?

EF: I became attached to writing about five years ago. I went to UVic intending to further study composition (music) and took “Form and Structure of Short Fiction” to compare structural styles. After that, I just kept writing.

P: Who are some Canadian authors you admire?

EF: Annabel Lyon, of course Alice Munro, Miriam Toews, William Gibson’s Burning Chrome, and too many more. I just finished reading The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt–this is one of those books I wish I wrote.

P: I understand you’re currently trying to get into an MFA program for Creative Writing. What else is on the horizon for your writing career? And what are you currently working on?

EF: I’ve been teaching at the Victoria Conservatory of Music for the last six years, and will be continuing on there. I’m planning on doing an MFA either distance or in Victoria, but besides that – just keep writing. In the works: I’ve just finished a novella, and have started the early map of a novel.

On Dettmer’s website, he describes how he sculpts old books into works of art:

“I begin with an existing book and seal its edges, creating an enclosed vessel full of unearthed potential. I cut into the surface of the book and dissect through it from the front. I work with knives, tweezers and surgical tools to carve one page at a time, exposing each layer while cutting around ideas and images of interest. Nothing inside the books is relocated or implanted, only removed. Images and ideas are revealed to expose alternate histories and memories.”

In collaboration with the authors of the original works, he interacts with words and pictures as they slowly emerge from the interior of the books. This interaction produces book sculptures that are striking and evocative.

I am particularly drawn to the pieces carved from books on medicine and anatomy. For example:

The Household Physicians, 2008, Altered Books, 10-1/2" x 8" x 12" - Image Courtesy of Brian Dettmer and Kinz + Tillou Fine Art

Effect of Sensory may also be detected, 2008, Altered Book, 9-1/2" x 9" x 2-3/4" - Image Courtesy of Brian Dettmer and Packer Schopf

More pictures of Dettmer’s work can be found here.

Brian Dettmer – Remixed Media from Alfredo Aponte on Vimeo.

PRISM: In your short story collection “Making Light of Tragedy”, the stories vary a lot in length. How do you know when a story is finished?

JG: I think if you can put a story aside for a few days, then come back to it, read it as if you didn’t write it, and find it satisfying, then it is finished.

PRISM: Can you think of an example of a story where you were really stuck and what got you unstuck?

JG: Yes, there are times when the writing is no longer fun, and then you get stuck. Or you get stuck, and the writing stops being fun. I’m not sure which comes first. In any case, if I’m not enjoying what I’m writing, then a reader will probably not enjoy reading it, so I stop and take the story in a different direction. Or I scrap it entirely and start something new. I try to write what is fun for me to write, and I keep my fingers crossed it will be fun for a reader, too.

PRISM: Best piece of writing advice?

JG: Be fearless. Remember the story is yours and you can do whatever you want. Have fun. Be honest. Write quickly and edit later.

Reviewed by Sigal Samuel

“Are you attracted to women more feminine than you? Then you’re butch. Are you attracted to women more masculine than you? Then you’re femme. Simple, except when it’s not.” These words, from Nairne Holtz’s essay in Persistence, get at the heart of the anthology’s mandate: to explore the two most popular lesbian identities – the “masculine” butch and the “feminine” femme – while resisting easy dichotomies and reductive stereotypes.

Like the predecessor for which it was named – Joan Nestle’s 1992 landmark anthology, The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader – this book is diverse in many ways. It includes work by some of Canada’s most celebrated queer writers (Zoe Whittall, Amber Dawn, and Ivan Coyote come to mind) alongside less well-known voices from a variety of race and class backgrounds. Consisting mostly of essays, the book also features manifestos, interviews, poetry, fiction, and open letters to long-gone lovers. The tone ranges from academic to anecdotal, from heart-bendingly vulnerable to playfully rhetorical, ensuring that the anthology will charm professors, activists, and general readers alike.

The book grapples with some extremely tricky questions: How does being disabled, or trans, or pregnant, or Jewish, impact one’s relationship to being butch? How does being lower-class, or an academic, or a former sex worker, or a woman of colour, impact one’s relationship to being femme? How are the butch and femme identities of today different from their 1960’s counterparts? Is the dichotomous view of lesbian sexuality still relevant, or should it be relegated to the annals of history? Perhaps most challengingly, does embracing a butch/femme identity reinforce the gender binary that decades of feminism have worked so hard to erase?

While some of the memoirs in this anthology shy away from tackling such difficult questions, an intellectual heavy-hitter like Elaine Miller’s “Futch” is a great example of the determination, on the part of many queer women, to complicate the butch-femme binary. In her essay, Miller explains that a futch is a queer woman “who possesses or displays qualities and social identifiers of both butch and femme.” Rather than try to stuff her complex self into a single box, the author alternates between her favourite pair of shit-kicking boots and her best push-up bra, depending on whether she wants to reap the thrill of being butch or femme that day. She acknowledges the paradox inherent in “upholding the butch-femme dynamic while deconstructing it” and in “refuting the idea that gender matters while metaphorically stitching oneself a hyper-gendered skin,” yet insists that by remixing sexualized gender archetypes, we can “queer the hell out of the ancient pull between masculine and feminine.”

Persistence deals especially well with the phenomenon of femme invisibility, whereby a femme’s conventionally feminine appearance causes her to be misread as straight by both queer and straight society. Zena Sharman’s “Looking Straight at You” and Elizabeth Marston’s “Rogue Femininity” offer an excellent reappraisal of this oft-bemoaned experience. They suggest that invisibility isn’t necessarily bad; in fact, used mindfully, it’s a powerful political tool. Since a femme can pass as straight, she has access to privileged spaces that a butch may have difficulty entering. Once a femme has gained access to the women’s washroom or the fourteenth-flour boardroom, she can strategically choose to out herself, and literally or metaphorically hold the door open for her queer compatriots. A femme’s invisibility, Sharman and Marston remind us, is precisely what makes her “a hidden weapon” in the fight against homophobia.

This anthology’s strength – like the strength of the lives it chronicles – lies in its complexity and polyphony, in the range of perspectives it represents. Required reading for anyone interested in women’s and gender studies (profs, put it on your syllabi, stat!), it will be an indispensable resource for the queer community and its allies, and for anyone who has ever been curious about the meaning of the words “butch” and “femme.”

• “Something as Big as a Mountain” by Jane Cawthorne
• “Rules of Play” by Katie Fritz
• “You Want a Social Life with Friends” by Courtney Gillette
• “Eviction Day” by Eryn Hiscock
• “Home Field” by T.W. Laing
• “Ice Diaries: a climate change memoir” by Jean McNeil
• “The Skeleton Coast” by Jean McNeil
• “End of the Rope” by Jan Redford
• “Pick” by Jenna Spearing
• “Kerosene: a Love Story” by Ayelet Tsabari
• “Snapshots” by Sarah Turner

Congratulations to the shortlisted writers! And a huge thanks to all of you who shared your writing with us.

The winner will be announced next week.

Pretty
By Greg Kearney
Exile, 2011

Reviewed by Veronique West

Awkward, overweight, washed-up, sexually-frustrated, disenchanted: the incredibly average misfits who people Greg Kearney’s set of short stories are anything but pretty – and therein lies their appeal. Kearney’s narratives are delivered in bite-sized slice-of-life narratives. His voice, clever, irreverent and unabashed, captures the reader’s attention. His ability to ridicule and make theatrical the very unglamorous nature of modern domestic life, sometimes to the point of parody, truly engages. It is this ability which fuels Pretty, making it an undeniably entertaining read – though the witty criticism it presents of contemporary living and the sympathy it stirs for those unsuited to its expectations falls somewhat short of thought-provoking insight and profundity.

Kearney is not shy about portraying the uncomfortable and at times decidedly ugly truths about marriages, relationships, family and sex. For him, in fact, these truths take centre stage. Kearney’s first story, “Mary Steenburgen,” begins: “So, right after her husband came in the cleaning woman’s eye…” Denise, the story’s protagonist, has promised her husband to try having a threesome if he survived his heart attack – which he did. Denise describes, with a long-married woman’s refreshing sexual disillusionment, how she comes to terms with and eventually comes to enjoy her and her husband’s newfound erotic adventurousness.

Many of Kearney’s other protagonists compel with their brutal honesty. The heroine of “Scoodly! Doo! Wop! Wow!”, a retired pop star, is hilariously down-to-earth compared to the melodramatic documentary filmmakers seeking to make her the star of their next feature. In “Jeanette, the Heretical Homemaker,” a housewife plots to defy her fundamentalist husband’s attempts to turn their house into “an airless rectory” by teaching their children the straight and sometimes sacrilegious facts about life. “The Tinker” illustrates to great comic effect how Trace navigates the difficulties of her new intergendered identity with considerable level-headedness, despite outrageous warnings from a self-proclaimed medium. These characters face the challenges and absurdities of their very modern circumstances with a frankness which may startle and provoke, yet never fails to charm.

Pretty’s misfits may have no illusions about the troubles they find themselves in, but they certainly still suffer. These exiles are aware, often painfully, of the modern aesthetic which they are not a part of: an aesthetic in which domestic life is neat, clean, uncomplicated. Pretty. Feelings of alienation loom large in Kearney’s narratives, and though these are perhaps feelings we can all relate to, many of Kearney’s characters and situations seem too outrageous to arouse much more than a detached sympathy. In “What to Wear,” Ron, a gay AIDS survivor, helps calm his sister and an elderly woman after a car accident, in what is perhaps meant to be an act of moving altruism. This gesture borders instead on clichéd, however, as it is contrasted with his aspiring-movie-star sister’s overblown and obnoxious superficiality.

The loneliness of manic blogger Helene Savant in “Do You Want to Burn to Death and Look Like a Steak with Hair” and the past trauma of mother and former-convict Cheryl in “She Was a Little Teapot” are both too heavily parodied to provoke great compassion. When Kearney tries to make a wise and empowering heroine out of an ex-model mother in “Ellipses,” this rings false given his own clever criticism of Hollywood’s shallowness. While the super-mom of “Ellipses” asserts that modelling “is sacred. It’s a sacred greeting to all the women in the world,” Kearney himself comments wryly that a modelling career can lead to becoming a “coke addict with an eating disorder.” Finally, in “The Tinker in Love,” the anguish of an overweight and fraudulent spiritual medium is somewhat cheapened by the shadow her psychic mother’s melodramatic prophecy has cast over her life.

Kearney’s outcasts are altogether too frumpy, too mordantly witty, too larger-than-life. Their struggle to make sense of themselves in the face of a world preoccupied with “prettiness” hardly plumbs the depths of human experience—though it entertains uproariously.

Ultimately Pretty can make for an engaging read. If you’re searching for fast, funny and clever anecdotes which illustrate just how ugly marriages, relationships, sex and family can be, then Kearney will be sure to delight. If you are seeking subtle and complex character renderings or more weighty meditations on the human condition, these stories may fail to deliver.