The Journey Prize Anthology 11: Short Fiction from the Best of Canada's New Writers

Peter Babiak teaches English at the University of British Columbia.

This anthology offers 12 of the best short stories submitted for the
annual Journey Prize by literary journals across the country.

Given this genre’s tendency to unfold central incidents within a
tightly defined community, it is predictable that many of the
submissions come from the East Coast. In Cape Breton native Mike
Finigan’s “Passion Sunday,” two men are sitting through Mass in a
Glace Bay church. Elic, a non-Catholic who spends too many Saturdays at
the Legion, is telling Colin, a serious and humorless Catholic, that he
wants to join the church because the crucifixes and plastic Jesuses and
Mary lamps “seemed a way to keep God on your mind all the time.”
When Mass—and the story—is finished, we are left with the image of a
third man kneeling down before this seemingly unfit initiate anointing
his trousers with holy water.

Newfoundland writer Libby Creelman’s “Sunken Island” is the story
of two girls (the narrator, Lucy, and her sister, Harriet) who spend
time at their grandmother’s cottage while their mother has a
mastectomy. Whereas every detail in Finigan’s story is subordinate to
the Catholic plot and setting, here there is the lingering sense of
something secret—a 16-year-old named Lizzie who takes to exposing her
body to the girls and “describing details of what she and her
boyfriend [have] done”; a revelation that their grandmother once
slipped on some ice and went strange—although these oddities are
ultimately contained in a quaint coming-of-age tale.

The most intriguing story is “Travels into Several Remote Nations of
the World,” an autobiographical work by Mark Jarman. Traveling south
to California to take care of his recently widowed mother, Jarman
fancies himself a latter-day Hamlet out for revenge on “the ugly
postmodern avenues and cinderblock 7-Elevens” that are America, but
the fact of his father’s death gradually settles, in effect becoming
an ironic allegory for his own rebirth. Listening to the funeral
oration, Jarman admits that he loves “to torture loss, squeeze it like
a green packet of shampoo,” but that evening, while sitting in the
family living room, he understands, ever so predictably but still
poignantly, that “the smallest detail is now rich and significant.”