PRISM international is proud to announce the winning pieces from our 2024 Jacob Zilber Prize along with Jackie Ess’s judge’s essay.
Jackie Ess is a novelist, a teacher, and a person figuring it out. So far this has meant publishing a novel, Darryl, in 2021, and a few stories, which have appeared in the Recluse and the Chicago Review.
Judge’s Essay
Judging the Jacob Wilber Prize for Short Fiction has been an honour and something nearly impossible to do. The submissions, which were excellent, had little in common with one another, and it seemed unnatural and rather arbitrary to establish a ranking. I found myself a bit jealous of Pitchfork reviewers and Olympic diving judges, who solve this problem of arbitrariness by averaging.
The second runner-up, Shakti, by Elina Kumra, might have been the most formally interesting of all the submissions. It is told largely from a toddler-ish small child’s point of view, a toddler that might be a Goddess, caught between languages, cultures, and places, but escaping the pitfalls of a literature often obsessed with those differences, in the child’s world where there is nothing stranger or more motivating than a cat, or the thought of noodles. In a world where so much is hard boiled, it can be hard to remember that somehow, we are the children who grew up. How much really changed?
The first runner-up, Maury’s Lake, by Jason Barton, takes us from the beginning of life to its end, exploring dementia, we seem to be in a swirl of families and places and having to step up. A silence seems to be opening, always threatening to break through.
The winning story, Ambrosia, by Nolan Natasha, situates us in our own time. It’s a story of the pandemic, but just as much a story of rurality, and of queerness, a real attempt to live autonomously and differently. But we get out there, back to the land, or to ourselves, and find for the most part language, these characters sit under a heavy weight of typified references and internal cliches. One has finally the books and dolls of childhood without the culture or even world that had given them meaning. We see these characters trying and failing to invest these objects (Hatchet, the Princess Bride, a strain of apple), and recognizing just in time that they are the carriers of that meaning and can choose how much they’ve got to carry, how much to pass on. This is a story about people who are trying.
Please join us in congratulating these writers!
Grand Prize
“Ambrosia” by Nolan Natasha
Nolan Natasha is a queer and trans writer and artist. He has been a finalist for the CBC poetry prize, the Ralph Gustafson Poetry prize, the Geist postcard contest, and the Thomas Morton fiction prize. Nolan’s debut poetry collection, I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me? was released with Invisible publishing in 2019. He is currently working on a collection of short stories.
Runner-Up
“Maury’s Lake” by Jason JS Barton
Second Runner-Up
“Shakti” by Elina Kumra
Thank you to Jackie Ess and all who submitted. Stay tuned for the winners of our Grouse Grind Lit. Prize for V. Short Forms!