The 2024 Short Story Contest Winners

Paige Maylott:

Hello and welcome to gritLIT's official 2024 Short Story Contest launch. My name is Paige Maylott and I am the Hamilton-based author of the recently released book, My Body is Distant: A Memoir. And for the past couple of years, I've served as gritLIT's contest manager. I'm happy to announce that the 2024 submission window for our increasingly popular short story contest is now open. Our deadline is January 31st, 2024, and we're looking for your unpublished fiction or creative nonfiction entries of 2,000 words or less. Full submission details are on gritLIT's website and I suspect you'll find a link to the contest details wherever you are viewing this video. Please follow all submission directions carefully. Joining me today, it is also my pleasure to welcome this year's contest judge, Neil Smith. Neil is a writer and literary translator from Montreal. He's written three books of fiction and won the Hugh MacLellan Prize and the Quebec Writers' Federation First Book Prize. He's also been nominated for the Governor General's Award, the Journey Prize, and a Sunburst Award. His books have appeared in nine languages. Welcome, Neil.

Neil Smith:

Welcome, thank you.

PM:

Wonderful. Well, I'm wondering if I can ask you a few questions to help our viewers and potential contestants to learn a little bit more about their judge today. Is that okay with you?

NS:

Yes, that's perfectly fine.

PM:

Great, great. Well, let's just jump into it then, shall we? How do you make your time for your writing projects?

NS:

Well, nowadays I devote every day to a writing project since I have no other job anymore. I used to do commercial translation and work freelance for places like the CBC and the City of Montreal, but I stopped a few years ago. So every day I'm either working on my own novel or translating somebody else's novel. And I work at home and I work at coffee shops. I can work any hour of the day, morning, afternoon, night. I sometimes stay at Café Olympico in Montreal's Mile End till midnight writing, editing, translating, or reading.

PM:

Oh, that sounds amazing. Sounds amazing. Sounds like something I would love to do, actually. Great. So, would you say then you've flourished more in writing in solitude, or do you bloom more as part of a writing group? You mentioned writing in coffee shops, so I'm not detecting too much of a solitude vibe here, but correct me if I'm wrong.

NS:

Well, I do work in coffee shops, but I work pretty much alone. I've never been part of a writing group per se. However, I do share my writing with two friends in particular. One of them lives in Paris, and for the novel I'm working on now, I send the chapters as I finish them to him, and he's been like a huge cheerleader. And the other friend I share my work with is the writer Jessica Grant, who lives in St. John, Newfoundland, and she was especially supportive for my novels Boo and Jones. I basically just need someone to pat me on the back and say I don't suck.

PM:

Don't we all?

NS:

Yeah, don't we all? I also have literary agents to bounce ideas off, and of course I have my editor at Random House Canada. Her name is Pembla Murray.

PM:

That's fantastic. Thank you. Maybe you could give us a little glimpse of something you're currently working on?

NS:

Sure. I have two projects on the go. The first is a short novel set in 1965, and it's hugely inspired by the fiction of the American writer Shirley Jackson, who died that year in '65. She wrote The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, among other books. And I'm incorporating into my novel various objects and clothing and food and places she mentions in her own novels and stories, and then putting them through like a big blender to create something new, aiming for the same uncanny, eerie, mysterious tone as her fiction. And the working title for that book is Red Rover, Red Rover. Now, the second project is the translation of a Quebecois novel of stand-up comics. So very different. It's by Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard, and I'm calling it You Crushed It in English, and because comics often say that when they get off stage, if they've done well, they say, "You crushed it." The publisher is Book*hug, and I think they're putting it out next fall. And it's been a big challenge for me because it contains a lot of jokes and puns and plays on words, and they're all notoriously hard to translate.

PM:

Well, it's fantastic. I love the atmosphere in the first books you were mentioning there, so I'm really looking forward to that.

NS:

Thank you.

PM:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, speaking on behalf of some of our, you know, hopeful entries for this contest, what do you think is the benefit of entering a writing contest?

NS:

Well, before I had an agent and a book deal, I wrote a very compact, strange short story called "Bang Crunch," about a little girl who ages very, very quickly, like a month a day, and then de-ages just as quickly. So she goes from like the age of 10 to 87 and then back to 10. And I sent her to a contest run by another literary festival that you probably know of called the Eden Mills Festival. And it won first place. And the judge was a Toronto writer, Susan Swan, whom I later met. And she was just so, so encouraging, and she gave me confidence in my work. So, you know, that confidence is definitely a benefit if you win, but also entering these contests, it gives you a deadline to work toward. The CBC has a fiction contest whose deadline fell a few weeks ago, I think, and I saw a few young writers at my local coffee shop working on pieces the night before that they intended to submit. And they were working late into the evening, and it was really inspiring to see them do that.

PM:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, having that deadline is so important. And not only that, but I really find that working with the short story form is particularly exciting as well, because you really have to pay attention to every single word you use, right? It all matters so much.

NS:

Definitely.

PM:

So some of our viewers here might not know that we like to theme our, you know, each year's entries. And we pass along the honour of theming the contest to our contest judge. And I was curious if you could talk a little bit about this year's submission theme.

NS:

Yeah, it's milestones. And Jennifer and I came up with it together, I would say. It's actually her idea. She wanted to know if I would go along with it. And weirdly enough, the day before we talked about it, I've been talking about the word milestones with a friend of mine, a Francophone, and we're trying to come up with the best translation of milestones in French. And for your listeners who speak French, jalon is the term that I use. And a milestone is originally along a highway, there were actually stones or posts that indicated the distance of a mile as you went by each mile. You often see those in Europe still, those posts. So, of course, in all our lives, we have these milestones that we drive towards and then surpass. So I think it's a theme that is open to interpretation. So I thought it was perfect. I just love the word milestone. I just love thinking stones along a highway each mile. So I was gung-ho about that theme.

PM:

Yeah, yeah. I think that our budding writers out there are going to really latch on that one. You could interpret that so many ways. A lot of it. So maybe digging a little deeper, what would you be looking for in a winning short story?

NS:

Well, this morning I was looking through my stack of short story collections to see what I'm drawn to. And my favorite short story writers are authors like A.M. Holmes, Atesha Mosvig, Stephen Mellhauser, George Saunders, Amy Bender, Juji Gartner. And they all often write in a very surreal, fantastic vein. So that's what I love. But I'm also attracted to the minimalist, like Lydia Davis and Amy Hemphill, two writers who create gems of stories within 2,000 words, which is the contest limit. I like stories that surprise me or or unsettle me that use humour, that contain no flab and make every word count, as you mentioned, that use interesting language or plays on word, that aren't overly earnest, and that demonstrate the author's vivid imagination.

PM:

Love that. Yeah, I can really get behind the vivid imagination part. I really like to, you know, get into another world with my stories. That's what I'm typically looking for. Get out of my head for a little bit. And so just one last question then. Do you have any final nuggets of advice for this year's contest entrants?

NS:

Well, remember that contests are subjective. If gritLIT had chosen another writer as a judge this year, you would very likely have different winners from the ones I will choose. We all like what we like, so write what you like, write what you love. In my case, I have to be obsessed with a piece of writing, otherwise it really stalls. So write what obsesses you so that your obsessions rub off on others and rub off on me.

PM:

Wow, that is fantastic advice. That is really great, Neil. Thank you so much for taking a few minutes today.

NS:

Thank you. It's an honour to judge a contest. Thank you for having me.

PM:

Oh, absolutely. So happy to have you. Well, that's it, everyone. Please send in those entries, and we hope to be reading them soon. Thank you.

NS:

Thanks. Bye. Thanks. Bye.

PM:

Bye.

Transcribed with Cockatoo