We are absolutely delighted to announce the winners of the Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction Contest, as selected by our contest judge Thalia Field! We received so many wonderful stories this year, so thank you to everyone who submitted. Read the three winning stories in our forthcoming summer issue 56.4!
Continue reading Winners of the 2018 Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction Contest!
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
Interview by Matthew Kok
Beni Xiao is a nanny and writer based in Vancouver, BC. They are tired all the time, so they would appreciate if you’d let them sleep. Bad Egg, Beni’s new chapbook, is full of quiet, important things. There is a garden of variety in these poems, and the chapbook is drawn together by the strength of Beni’s voice. The effect is a lot like having a small bug perched in your ear, joking, encouraging, asking. They are willing to go with you into storms. They will not lie and tell you your impact on the world is going to be anything other than what it is. They will tell you about the hard, strong thing we all need to be sometimes, and as they describe it you may believe it is you—it may depend on the day, or whose limbs you’ve found crossed over your own, but the bug will say it for you if you can’t. There is a whole world of people who will speak around the important things rather than to them, or ignore the strange and the wonderful, but none of them are in this chapbook. You should start listening to Beni Xiao—I promise it will be worth it.
Selecting the shortlist for the 2018 Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction was a difficult and competitive process this year, so congratulations to the writers of the five stories below!
Thank you again to everyone who submitted, and to those who placed on this year’s longlist! Check back soon for the winners announcement, chosen by this year’s contest judge, Thalia Field!
Continue reading 2018 Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction Shortlist
The Boat People
Sharon Bala
Penguin Random House
Review by Anjalika Samarasekera
In the second half of The Boat People, a Sri Lankan immigrant—and former Tamil Tiger—poses a question to his Canadian-born niece: “What do you think happens when you terrorize a people, force them to flee, take away their options then put them in a cage all together?” (230).
The question is the ravaged heart of Sharon Bala’s remarkable debut novel, which chronicles the arrival of around 400 Tamil refugees on the coast of British Columbia in 2010. The refugees have fled persecution in Sri Lanka following the end of the twenty-six-year civil war and have come to Canada hoping for a warm welcome. These hopes are dashed when the Canadian government detains the refugees on the suspicion that some of them belong to the LTTE, also known as the Tamil Tigers, a listed terrorist organization. Eventually, some refugees are released and deemed “admissible” to Canada while others are deported back to Sri Lanka.
Continue reading The Survival of Arrival: A Review of Sharon Bala’s The Boat People
Chelene Knight’s debut poetry collection, Braided Skin, was celebrated as a vibrant telling of mixed ethnicity and urban childhood poverty. Her sophomore book Dear Current Occupant, a creative nonfiction memoir, is a nuanced account of growing up in Vancouver’s Downtown...
We’re excited to announce that the following stories have been longlisted for the 2018 Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction!
Thank you to everyone who submitted. Check back soon for the shortlist announcement, followed by the winners chosen by this year’s contest judge, Thalia Field!
Continue reading 2018 Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction Longlist
While we await the “BAD”-themed issue of PRISM international to return from the printer, our poetry editor, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, shares a poem from the forthcoming issue, 56.3. Read “Ball Twins” by Billeh Nickerson, just in time for that perplexing and funny time of the month: National Poetry Month.
Continue reading Featured Poem: “Ball Twins” by Billeh Nickerson | PRISM 56.3: “BAD”
Interview by Kyla Jamieson
Anita Cheung is a Vancouver-based entrepreneur and creative who recently launched one of our new favourite websites, whereareyoureallyfrom.org (WAYRF), which features the portraits of twenty-one women of colour alongside interview clips and insights. The project evolved from Cheung’s personal investigation into what it means to be a woman of colour, particularly in our current political climate. “We are just as diverse and complex as our white counterparts,” Cheung says, and she wanted to hear “how others saw and experienced their own coloured-ness.”
