The Journey Prize Anthology, Vol. 10

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Over a decade ago, the American author James Michener donated the
royalties from the Canadian edition of his novel The Journey to create a
unique prize designed to encourage short fiction writing in Canada. Each
year, the country’s top literary magazines are invited to submit one
short story each to The Journey Prize Anthology. From those submissions,
a panel of judges selects a dozen or more stories to appear in an annual
anthology. From all the stories printed in each anthology, one is
further honored with a $10,000 prize. Many of the winning short-story
authors have been relative newcomers to the writing scene. Some, like
Holley Rubinsky and Cynthia Flood, have gone on to establish successful
careers as Canadian fiction writers.

This year’s anthology brings together 14 stories from magazines like
Kairos, Event, PRISM international, The New Quarterly, Grain, Prairie
Fire, The Malahat Review, and TickleAce. Among the contributors are an
English-French translator, a publisher’s promotions assistant, a
children’s author, a creative-writing instructor, and a handful of
semiprofessional writers.

The good news is that with so many contributors already working in the
publishing field, the quality of this anthology is first-rate. These are
not “gems in the rough” but highly trained, extremely skilled
writers who are long overdue for their first decent break. The bad news
is that there is a certain sameness to the content. Virtually all the
stories have the unmistakable lugubrious lit-crit tone that has pervaded
most Canadian fiction magazines in this decade. The one exception is a
marvelous story by John Brooke, a hilarious social satire about two
ex-patriate Bretons who find their extramarital love affair complicated
by Quebec separatism and apple vinegar. The “lugubrious” problem
lies not with the authors or the anthology but with the current writing
scene in Canada: virtually no fiction is published in this country
except in limited-run, university-supported magazines that pay $50 or
less for a short story. Given this environment, Canadians should be
grateful for any short fiction, however lugubrious.