We had so many wonderful submissions and would like to thank all writers who submitted to the the contest. We loved reading your work! Selecting just 16 pieces for the longlist was no easy task and as always all...
Review of There There by Tommy Orange
Review by Cody Caetano
No need to worry if you haven’t read the dust jacket, because I got the unblinking one sentence pitch of Cheyenne writer Tommy Orange’s There There to hitch the most disinterested readers: twelve exhausted Native folks reeling from one cross-cultural massacre come home to powwow at the Big Oakland Powwow, inside a big metal dome. Continue reading Power of the Powwow: A Review of Tommy Orange’s There There
We’re extremely excited to announce that the following stories have been shortlisted for the 2018 Grouse Grind Lit Prize for V. Short Forms!
Narrowing the longlist to just six was extremely hard, so many congratulations to the shortlisted writers.
Check back soon for the winners announcement, as chosen by our PRISM editorial board.
Review by Mormei Zanke
Chelene Knight’s new memoir Dear Current Occupant, defies traditional genres of writing through its inherent hybridity and fragmentation. The book delves into Knight’s childhood past, exploring her experience of growing up while moving in and out of twenty homes in East Vancouver. Knight weaves poetry, essays, letters, and photographs together to create a work that is halting and profoundly moving. Knight’s fragmented approach succeeds in exploring the truths of her past more than any conventional, linear method could.
Continue reading Redefining Home: A Review of Chelene Knight’s Dear Current Occupant
Fates and Furies
Lauren Groff
Riverhead Books
Review by Claudia Wilde
Lauren Groff’s novel, Fates and Furies, is the first novel I was compelled to finish based almost solely off my fondness for the language. Never mind the story. (Which, by the way, is brilliant in its own right. I will get to this shortly.) Groff’s prose reads like poetry and the diction is precise, sticking to the tongue when spoken aloud: Continue reading Magnified and Shrunk: A Review of Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies
Olga Holin sat down with our PRISM international Creative Non-fiction Contest judge Jonathan Kemp and spoke to him about his writings and what he is looking for amongst the entries.
Review by Taryn Grant To the Back Of Beyond by Peter Stamm, translated by Michael Hoffman Other Press, 2017 At first pass the title reads with a satisfying punch and clarity: To the Back of Beyond. On further scrutiny,...
We are happy to announce that our annual PRISM international Non-Fiction Contest is now open for submissions. We are absolutely delighted to introduce our judge from across the pond: Jonathan Kemp! Jonathan Kemp’s debut novel London Triptych (Myriad, 2010) was acclaimed...
Heart Berries
Terese Marie Mailhot
Doubleday Canada
Review by Cody Caetano
Often when I’m reading memoir, I’ll remember a quote from a misguided Neil Genzlinger, who penned “The Problem With Memoirs” for The New York Times in 2011: “There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir… Sure, [Amazon] has authors who would be memoir-eligible under the old rules. But they are lost in a sea of people you’ve never heard of” (italics mine). It is important to note that marginalized memoirists, especially early-career Indigenous women, Two-Spirit, and queer folks, have fraught histories with Genzlinger-types, their “old rules” and antiquated tastes that mar the merit of writing, publishing, and participating in the predominantly white spaces of the literary world. And then along comes Terese Marie Mailhot, a Salish First Nation woman from Seabird Island Indian Reservation with the assertion that memoir “functions as something vulnerable in a sea of posturing” (137). And it is in vulnerability that Mailhot effectively rejects the moth-eaten straightjacket that would otherwise restrict the inventive, decolonial confession of Heart Berries.
Continue reading Decolonial Confession: A Review of Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries