The Journey Prize Anthology, 4

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia in Prince
George.

This is a very good collection of stories, with not a weak one in the
bunch. Whoever chose them (no editor is cited in the text) has done an
excellent job. By the time you read this, one of the stories will have
won the $10,000 Journey Prize. I am glad I didn’t have to pick the
winner.

All of the stories are written in what one could call “readerly”
prose. They are aimed at a wide audience: the common reader of the old
days. They tell a story and render emotion and action in a realistic and
vivid manner. There is not much in the way of experiment,
self-referentiality, discontinuity, or other tricks of the postmodern
trade as plied by our older prose writers. The authors in this
collection—they are, I believe, typical of most Canadian writers under
35—are bent on consolidation rather than advancement over new
experimental territory.

The stories are mostly about families and loss and pain. In “By the
Big River,” by Judith Cowan, an elderly woman learns to go on when her
husband dies; Diane Juttner Perrault’s “Bella’s Story” is about
a woman whose mad, drunken husband murders their son; and an abused
Native boy growing up in a family of alcoholics is the narrator of Eden
Robinson’s “Traplines.” I suspect there is some sociological
significance to all this attention to the family. It seems that we are
in a period of realization about how important families are, and about
how many of them are not working in the proper way.

That such an excellent collection can be made from the work of 12
relatively unknown writers is truly encouraging.