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)
Where is Here? 