Canadian Fiction Magazine: Silver Anniversary Anthology

Martha Wilson is Canadian correspondent for the Japan Times (Tokyo) and
a Toronto-based freelance editor and writer.

This 25th anniversary edition of the best of Canadian Fiction magazine
marks Geoff Hancock’s departure as editor-in-chief. The stories
included here are all winners of the annual CFM Contributor’s Prize
for the journal’s best story of the year, beginning with Leon
Rooke’s “Wintering in Victoria” (1974), which follows a wounded
wanderer, as he hares off through the woods with a naked child in tow.

Guy Vanderhaeghe has a boy practising manipulativeness the way he has
experienced it; a chicken and a badly beaten man both suffer the
consequences. Anne Bernard writes of near-murder in a convent yard, and
its implications for two nuns. Barbara Gowdy, in the erotic
“Ninety-Three-Million Miles Away,” and Keath Fraser, in “This Is
What You Were Born For,” explore the perimeters of lustful or loving
relationships. (Fraser’s voice is particularly compelling, and he is
more accessible than usual here: “Brad was a man of action, led a life
of adventure, with sirens from the galley bringing coffee to his cockpit
on transoceanic flights.”) Rohinton Mistry writes lovingly of a widow
who refuses to tailor her grief to fit conventional rules.

Stories by Jane Urquhart (1981) and Douglas Glover (1983), lovely as
they are, demonstrate how much stronger these writers have grown over
time. Solid stories from W.P. Kinsella, Mavis Gallant, Matt Cohen,
Patrick Roscoe, Frances Itani, Sharon Butala, Chatan Rajani, T.F.
Rigelhof, Greg Stephenson, and Thomas Wharton round out a collection
that deserved better from its copy editor.