Month: August 2020

Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, or, Sometimes You Win A Thing

So, my 2019 story “The Fourth Trimester is the Strangest” has won the Sunburst Award– a Canadian prize for speculative fiction. This is a surprise. It first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction‘s May/June issue last year, and it will also be in Paula Guran’s The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror.

Like everyone else, I write alone, and ninety percent (or ninety-nine? or ninety-nine-point-nine?) of my work is invisible: private, excised from a draft, or just a dead-end kind of story that’s best left on my hard drive. Of the stories that eventually make it to publication, most surface for a few moments, then disappear again. This is as it should be– there is always something new to read, and we are in a moment that’s rich with wonderful stories.

But every once in a while a story catches with people. An editor like CC Finlay at F&SF decides to publish it, and maybe a few readers take time to read it and respond to the strange thing I’ve made. It’s rewarding to see it happen because it means I’ve found a way to talk about something important or unusual, or maybe I’ve found a new(ish) way to say something familiar. I wrote this particular story to capture the disorientation of childbirth and newborns. That’s important to me, and it’s good to know it’s important to other people, too. And given the isolation of writing in general, and of our terrifying, exhausting moment in particular, I am so very very grateful to hear that someone, somewhere read the story and heard what I was trying to say. And valued it, too. That’s about the best I can hope for as a writer.

Well, and being on a list with Amal El-Mohtar and Richard van Camp, winning a prize that’s also been won by A.C. Wise and Nalo Hopkinson. That, also, is pretty wonderful.

(oh, and I get a medal. A MEDAL. Guys. I’m going to have a medal. Not since I got a silver Canada Fitness Badge in seventh grade have I had anything like a MEDAL)

“An Important Failure” in Clarkesworld.

While posting on facebook about my Sunburst nomination, I noticed that the two short stories I had forthcoming– “An Important Failure” and “The Bletted Woman” which will be in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction-– are both sad stories about the BC coast. Then a friend pointed out that “The Glad Hosts” falls into this category. As does “Such Thoughts Are Unproductive” and “Lares Familiares, 1981” and “Unearthly Landscape by a Lady.” Basically, I have a genre, wherein sad, weird, unpleasant things (magical, dystopian, alien) happen to people on the west coast. Or to people in some way related to the west coast. In this case, it’s about a luthier who’s collecting wood to build a violin in a poor, beat-down near-future version of Vancouver and Vancouver island.

So “An Important Failure” is another one of these sad stories about the coast. I started writing it while watching the bushfires in Australia back in January, and finished it in June, while in lockdown. The world seemed to transform several times in those months, and the story reflects my disorientation. It’s a story about processing change– how we do it, how we fail to do it. It’s also about the giant trees of BC– the “Champion Trees” of UBC’s big tree registry. The miraculous old growth they show you on fifth grade field trips to Cathedral Grove, or just off the road between Lake Cowichan and Port Renfrew. They’re vulnerable, of course: logging, poaching, climate change, wildfires. They’re so old, they belong, quite literally, to a different world.

Finally, it’s about what’s leftover when the world changes and what we do with trees after they’ve fallen. And it’s about making a violin, sort of, because though I love forests, I also love the things that come out of the forests: the people, the houses, the shakes, the paper, the stories, the colour of red cedar, the feeling you have walking into a wood-heated house in January, when it’s raining outside, the smell of fire fills all the rooms. I love the lives and afterlives of trees. I love the violin my main character is trying to make, and even the lengths he must go to to make it.

“An Important Failure” is available to read at Clarkesworld.