SHASHI BHAT’s short fiction has appeared in several journals, including PRISM international, Event, The Threepenny Review, The Missouri Review, and Nimrod International. She was a finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award, and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her first novel, The Family Took Shape, is forthcoming in summer 2012 from Cormorant Books. She received her MFA in fiction from the Johns Hopkins University, and is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at Dalhousie University.

More exciting PRISM-related Journey Prize news to come…

Marilyn will be speaking at the upcoming Write! Vancouver Festival, which takes place on May 26^th, 2012. For more information visit: www.writevancouver.com.

Tariq Hussain: First of all, I’m amazed by all the many “roles” you have in the arts such as writer, actor, director, teacher—is there a role that you feel most comfortable in or are they all connected for you?

Marilyn Norry: I don’t know if I move from one thing to the next because I get bored or if it’s economic necessity. Sometimes it’s just curiosity.

TH: One of your many roles is being a “teacher” and you’ll be presenting a workshop at the Write! Vancouver Festival this month called “Telling Mom’s Story.” What have you got have planned for this workshop?

MN: With memoir writing, people are overwhelmed by the amount of things they could put down and they don’t know how to start. I encourage people to get the big picture of their mother’s life first because then they can figure out what they want to focus in on. Part of the exercise I’m encouraging everyone to do is to force themselves to think: “Okay, what was the beginning? What do I remember next and what happened after that?” We never do it. We’ve got memories scattered all over our brains and it’s a real process to just sit down and write it all out.

TH: The workshop ties in with your website “My Mother’s Story” that you started in 2004 in which people submit a 2000-word piece about their mothers. Are there some memorable stories that have come out of that?

MN: There were two women in our group whose mothers died when they were ten or eleven and they said, “Well I can’t do this because I don’t remember her.” And I said, “Well, write down what you do remember.” It was a big experience for them. One woman wrote about her investigation to find out more about her mum and the other one decided that she was going to have the assignment be just what she remembered and to really plumb the depths of that. Also, in that initial group, we had three women who were in their late eighties and one of them was saying that she hadn’t thought of her mother in sixty years. She had to do this assignment, and she started remembering more and feeling that affinity and kinship with her mother again.

TH: There are a number of challenges with writing memoir, like when the story doesn’t cast a flattering light on the subject. What do you tell your writers who are faced with this challenge?

MN: What I recommend to anyone is to write the whole story out just for yourself. Don’t show anybody. Just write it all out in chronological order and gather those memories and then look at it. There are ways, when you’re going public, of phrasing things so that the facts are stated without undue emphasis. If we’re looking at the decisions that a mother made in the face of the circumstances of her life and making those the important turning points—in the same way that you would have a character in a script—if she was a drug addict and that influenced all the choices that she made, that probably should be in the story. If she had an affair with her boss and only you and your sister know, that doesn’t need to be in there. It didn’t change things. It does reflect on her on her personality, it does say things about a woman’s history and things like that, but I think it’s not worth it.

TH: At Write! Vancouver, you’ll also be involved in a workshop session called “Blue Pencil” in which writers bring a piece to you for one-on-one feedback. Do you have a specific approach to the workshop process?

MN: I have no idea what’s going to happen! (laughs) People can ask for anyone to do their work so I don’t know what they’re going to be bringing in. It’s going to depend on what it is and what they need to do next with the work.

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Stay tuned for more exciting PRISM-related Journey Prize news.

ANDREW HOOD is the author of the short story collections Pardon Our Monsters (Véhicule Press) and, most recently, The Cloaca (Invisible Publishing). He has lived in Guelph, Montreal, and Halifax, and may currently be living in any one of these places.

Related links:
http://www.facebook.com/TheJourneyPrize
 

Read Jen’s winning story, ‘Elk-headed Man’ by downloading it here.

Pick up your copy at our online store here!

We’re excited to share Jessica Grant’s picks for the top stories in the Short Fiction Contest 2012:

Grand Prize: ”Ms. Pacman” by Josie Sigler
1st runner up: ”The Lights on Canada Day” by Susan Mersereau
2nd runner up: ”In the Foothills” by Andrew Forbes

And Jen Currin’s selections for the Poetry Contest for 2012:

Grand Prize: ”Self-Portrait” by Susan Steudel
1st runner up: ”Ghazal of Perpetual Motion” by Kyeren Regehr
2nd runner up: ”Toward a List of Definitions According to my Scottish Mother” by Patricia Young

Congratulations to the winners! And thank you to Jessica Grant and Jen Currin. Look for these poems and stories plus the judges’ essays in PRISM 50.4 (summer issue).

Here are the complete shortlists for all contests for 2012.

Our tummies are rumbling. It’s loud and distracting: Anna and Leah can’t concentrate on the slush pile (for dreamy thoughts of slushies), Jen can’t process subscriptions with her shaky hands, and Sierra is refusing to pay a single invoice until she’s fed. We caught her trying to ingest fibre from a 1960’s back issue yesterday.

Our theme issue this Fall is FOOD, and we need you to feed us. Feed us now.

We’re looking for your stories/poems/creative non-fiction/translation involving family meals, diners, beverages, snacks, indulgences, breakfast, malnourishment, and hamburgers. Whatever. Food. Drink. We’ll leave it up to your brains and stomachs to decide.

Our deadline for the issue is August 28. Let us know on your cover letter or envelope that your submission is intended for the theme issue. Our submission guidelines are here.

Indulge us.

In 1997, PRISM published a story, called “Young Lion Across the Water,” by Thomas Kennedy. A week ago, we received a request from Thomas for a copy of issue 36.1, in which the piece appears. In exchange for the issue (we had just one spare!) Thomas agreed to tell us the story of why he needed it.

Sixteen Years After:
The Story Behind the “Young Lion Across the Water” Story
by Thomas E. Kennedy

In October 1996, I invited my teenaged children on a safari outside of Kreuger Park in South Africa. Our first day there, I was requested to sign a waiver of liability in case any of the animals got rough with us. Privately I smirked, thinking that the management were seeking to lend an air of danger with this detail. How wrong I was!

Our guides on the safari were a tall, 21-year-old ranger named Brendan Cuthbertson from Johannesburg, and a short black tracker named Alfus, in his thirties perhaps. Our first day out was in a jeep. The big animals – lion, rhino, hippo, elephant, giraffe and water buffalo – apparently consider the jeep another big animal and as such accord it the respect of not coming too close. But if you separate from the jeep, even just stand up in it or stick your arm out, they recognize what you are.

Brendan noticed that I was taking copious notes on everything he told us about the local fauna and flora – and he knew a lot. When I explained that was because I am a writer, he told me that his parents had named him after a writer – Brendan Behan. He determined to give me and Daniel (17) and Isabel (15) as exciting a week as possible so that I had plenty to write about.

Next day we parked the jeep by a dam with bathing hippos and set out on foot through the bush – we three with Brendan and Alfus at the lead, another large man behind them, a friend named Jesper, then Dan and Bel, with myself taking up the rear. We were instructed to walk single file and if anything happened or was in danger of happening, Brendan would flap his hands backward and we were to retreat rapidly, moving backward in single file. We were not to turn tail and run because that was the quickest way to provoke an attack.
Brendan had a rifle, but he confessed to us that if he fired it, he would lose his job. We began to walk through the thigh-high grass of the bush. Suddenly Brendan’s hands were flapping, and we were stepping rapidly backward. He had nearly stumbled on two young lions – skinny (read hungry) young lions. Over his shoulder, Brendan whispered, “Just watch there aren’t any hippo behind you, Mr. Kennedy!”

The lions began to stalk us. Quickly they cut off our path to the jeep. Brendan and Alfus looked concerned. The lions were crawling, belly low to the ground, through the bush around us. Brendan levered a bullet into the chamber of his rifle, hoping the sound might frighten the lions away. It didn’t, but I could no longer see them. One was somewhere behind us, the other between us and the jeep. We were huddled in a knot. Then suddenly Brendan whispered , “The path to the jeep is clear. Hurry, but don’t run and don’t turn your back.”
In the jeep again, Brendan and Alfus looked at one another and began to laugh. Hard, deep laughter which I recognized as the laughter of having survived a close call.

Next day we left the jeep on foot again. Brendan wanted us to see leopards. He had seen a leopard’s claw marks in a leadwood tree on the edge of a clearing and had an idea we might find the cats on the other side of the clearing, which spanned a diameter of a couple of hundred meters. When we had crossed perhaps fifty meters of the clearing, moving in single file, two white rhinos stepped out of the bush on the other side.

Brendan signaled us to stop, stand still, whispering, “They have very poor eyesight, and the wind is in our favor. If it doesn’t switch direction, they won’t be able to smell us.” We were in the open, nothing to climb or hide behind. At just that moment the wind shifted, and the heads of both rhinos turned toward us. They had caught our scent. Big as a rhino is, its top speed is about 28 mph and it reaches top speed in three or four strides. They were moving toward us at top speed. No one said a word but my daughter, and she said only one to say: “Shit!”

Brendan was making noise with his rifle, trying to scare the two-ton, meter-and-a-half tall, 4-meter long animals away. Even if he fired, I doubted that the .450 soft nose bullet would do anything but annoy them even more. Meanwhile, Alfus had taken out his catapult and was firing pebbles at the lead rhino, one pebble after another. When they were about thirty meters away from us, Alfus apparently hit the soft spot he had been aiming for because the two huge animals abruptly turned ninety degrees and crashed off in the other direction. There was a great deal of laughing when we were safely back in the jeep.

In short I got plenty of material to write about and was able to fill in all the details Brendan gave me about the birds and insects and trees and animals of the South African bush. Shortly after I got home, I wrote a story from the point of view of Alfus – a much older Alfus – entitled “Young Lion Across the Water,” and sent it to PRISM. The story was published in the Fall of 1997, Volume 36, Issue 1.

Before it was published I sent a copy of the manuscript to Brendan as well as a couple of pieces of the Berlin Wall which he had expressed keen interest in.

Sixteen years later, last week, I received an email from Brendan, now in his late 30s, a successful businessman and a father himself. He asked if we remembered him. He told that he often brings out the pieces of the Berlin Wall when he and his wife are entertaining guests and that he still has the manuscript of the story and wonders if it was ever published. If it was, he wonders if he could buy a copy of the publication.

I assure him that our safari had been one of the most memorable experiences of our lives, and I had not only written the short story about it, but a nonfiction travel piece as well, still available online. I had only one copy of the issue where the short fiction appeared and one copy of an anthology in which it was reprinted and didn’t want to part with them, so I wrote an email to the editors of PRISM, explaining the background for my request and wondering if I could have a copy of the issue to send to Brendan. A week later, the editors responded that they had found a copy of the issue in question and would send it to me for a price. The price was this account of the story behind the story for their website. I gladly paid the price.

Thomas E. Kennedy is the author of thirty books, most recently the first two novels of his Copenhagen Quartet from Bloomsbury USA and UK (Falling Sideways, 2011, and In the Company of Angels, 2010). In 2012, New American Press will publish his Getting Lucky: 20 New & Selected Stories, 1982-2012. His stories, essays and translations appear regularly in American and European periodicals and on line, and he teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

In alphabetical order, here is PRISM’s Poetry Contest 2012 Shortlist:

“Endometriosis” by Ashley-Elizabeth Best
“In Last Chance, California” by Rochelle Hurt
“here” by Cynthia Oka
“how to explain pictures to a dead simulacra” by Sandy Pool
“the answer” by Sandy Pool
“Ghazal of Perpetual Motion” by Kyeren Regehr
“Love after the Pepsi Generation Ad” by Daniel Renton
“Self-Portrait” by Susan Steudel
“Toward a List of Definitions According to my Scottish Mother” by Patricia Young

Congratulations to the shortlisted writers and a very warm thank you to all of you for sharing your poetry with us! Jen Currin—our poetry judge this year—selects the winner and two runners up from these poems. Look for the announcement here in the next couple of weeks!