The Journey Prize Stories, 18.

Beverly Rasporich is a professor in the Faculty of Communication and
Culture at the University of Calgary. She is the author of Dance of the
Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro and Magic Off Main:
The Art of Esther Warkov.

The $10,000 Journey Prize, partly funded by James A. Michener’s royalty earnings from his novel Journey, is awarded annually to new, emerging writers in Canada. The thirteen stories here are the contenders for the prize, having been published in Canadian literary journals and magazines. The judges, recognizing the subjectivity of the judging process, admit to favouring the “offbeat, the witty, the knowing. … We were suckers for balls-out-bravado.” One such entry is Lee Henderson’s “Conjunctions,” the story of a man who wakes up from dreaming to find himself back in grade four. Craig Boyko’s “The Baby” is a clever satirical view of fatherhood in conjunction with a structure that foregrounds the art of storytelling. First-person narration, creative language, and innovative structure are strong feature of these entries. In “The Lonesome Death of Joseph Frey,” Matthew Rader has two brothers reflect on the drowning of another brother in discrete passages with titles. The ultimate winner, Heather Birrell for “Brianna Susanna Alana,” pleases the judges for “the world’s tallest free-standing structure” in a story about three sisters who try to reconstruct what they were doing when a murder is discovered. A close second for the prize was Nadia Bozak’s “Heavy Metal Housekeeping,” a linguistic tour de force by a mother on her son’s preoccupation with heavy metal and, through the prism of this metaphor, a window into their relationship. It is simply brilliant, as are many of these stories that push the boundaries of fiction in original ways.