How to: Run a Review-a-Thon
Buying books looked a lot different thirty years ago. If you wanted to know how good a book was, you read a newspaper, or asked your friends for recommendations. Then you had to find the physical copy on a...
Candor, Grit, and the Unexpected: A Review of Cason Sharpe’s Our Lady of Perpetual Realness & Other Stories
Review by Rachel Jansen It would be a mistake to assume Cason Sharpe’s slim debut, Our Lady of Perpetual Realness & Other Stories, is a quick read. These stories are dense and complex, deserving of a slow eye and...
Despite the Odds: a Review of Project Compass
Project Compass
Lizzie Derksen, Matthew Stepanic, Kristina Vyskocil, Robert Strong
Monto Books, 2017
Review by Peter Takach
What do you get when you take four emerging Edmonton writers and give them each a quadrant of their city to explore? In Project Compass, publisher and editor Jason Lee Norman has assembled a crack crew to take readers on an odyssey through a city that, despite producing its fair share of writers, is rarely the explicit setting of their stories. The result is an engaging and emotionally-arresting collection of four concurrent novellas that all unwind on June 21, 2016. Starting from the north, south, east, and west, we follow four Edmontonians as they wander their way through the longest day of the year and reflect on the paths they have taken.
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2017 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize Winners!
We received so many amazing poems for this year’s contest. We’re excited and honoured to announce the winners of this year’s Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize, as selected by Aisha Sasha John! You can read all three pieces in our Spring issue 56.3, so make sure to order a copy!
The Story Behind The Story: The Decedent by Yuly Restrepo Garcés
Our winter issue will be arriving soon, and includes a story by Yuly Restrepo Garcés, a writer and professor at the University of Tampa. A MacDowell Fellow, Yuly is also the recipient of a VONA/Voices Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in Zone 3 and is forthcoming in Natural Bridge. Of her story, “The Decedent,” Yuly says:
I started to write “The Decedent” in May 2015, at the Ft. Lauderdale airport, during a seven-hour layover, though I had been thinking about it for at least a year before that. I wrote about twelve pages while I waited for my flight to Medellín, where I would spend the summer months visiting family and working on a rough draft of my novel-in-progress. The story itself is a convergence of several things I had been preoccupied with in the months before I started writing.
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2017 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize Shortlist!
Congratulations to the writers shortlisted for the 2017 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize contest! Check back soon for the winners announcement, chosen by this year’s contest judge, Aisha Sasha John!
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2017 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize Longlist!
We’re excited to announce that the following poems have been longlisted for the 2017 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize contest!
Thank you to everyone who submitted. Check back soon for the shortlist announcement, followed by the winners chosen by this year’s contest judge, Aisha Sasha John!
Free Entries for Indigenous Writers to the Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction
Reminder! PRISM international is offering free entries for self-identifying Indigenous writers for our Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction contest! This contest is being judged by the amazing Thalia Field, and closes on January 15, 2018. Indigenous writers are invited to submit by emailing assistant@prismmagazine.ca by...
Search for the Humour: An Interview with Jessica Westhead
Interview by Sonal Champsee.
Jessica Westhead’s fiction has been shortlisted for the CBC Literary Awards, selected for the Journey Prize anthology, and nominated for a National Magazine Award. She is the author of the novel Pulpy & Midge (Coach House Books, 2007) and the critically acclaimed short story collection And Also Sharks (Cormorant Books, 2011), which was a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book and a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Short Fiction Prize. Her new short story collection is called Things Not to Do.
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