2006

Creative Nonfiction

First Prize - English
Leona Theis – The Occupations of Muriel Thompson
Leona Theis’s recently published novel, The Art of Salvage, is a funny, sad and hopeful book about resilience, something she sees evidence of every day. Excerpts from The Art of Salvage were short-listed for fiction awards on both the East Coast and the West Coast of Canada. Her first book, Sightlines, a collection of interlocking stories, won two Saskatchewan Book Awards. Leona was born and raised in Saskatchewan, and has lived for periods of time in Australia, Europe and British Columbia. She presently lives in Saskatoon with her husband and son. Her favourite place to write is a cabin nestled in the boreal forest on the shore of Christopher Lake.

Jury’s comment about The Occupation of Muriel Thompson
“A beautifully crafted, mordantly comic, compassionate portrait of a woman who has spent her life at the typewriter, writing other people’s words. There was unanimous agreement among the jury members that this was the best written submission.”

Click here to read the text, published in the March 2007 issue of enRoute Magazine.

Second Prize - English
Josée Owen – Making the Cut
Despite her family’s desperate pleas to find a real career in the arts, Josée Owen obtained an M.Sc. in Plant Science, became an agrologist, and worked with farmers toward agro-environmental sustainability. She later became a scientific writer, before settling into her current position as a researcher of sustainable vegetable cropping systems for the Maritimes. While she has waxed on for a decade about the finer points of manure and nitrogen cycling, Josée has only recently begun to discover the other stories that live inside her. She is delighted to find that when she lends them her voice, they write themselves.

Jury’s comment about Making the Cut
“If your arm hurts, all the time, why not cut it off? The writer takes this nervy premise and spins a story with a strong, original voice and impressive narrative control.”

Click here to read the text, published in the April 2007 issue of enRoute Magazine.

Poetry

First Prize - English
Méira Cook - A Walker in the City
Méira Cook was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she worked as an arts and theatre reviewer, before moving to Canada. She currently resides in Winnipeg with her lovely family. She completed a Ph.D. in English at the University of Manitoba, and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia. She has been twice nominated for the Pat Lowther Award as well as being nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award and the Manitoba Book of the Year. She has published three books of poetry, A Fine Grammar of Bones, Toward a Catalogue of Falling, and Slovenly Love, and one novel, The Blood Girls, and has served as the poetry editor for Prairie Fire magazine. She has also published a critical study of love poetry by Canadian women, Writing Lovers, and has recently edited a selection of Don McKay’s poetry, Field Marks. The poems in this selection were written with the aid of a Canada Council Writing grant.

Jury’s comment about A Walker in the City
“With its bounding imagination, “A Walker in the City” is a poem that not only walks, but saunters, jogs, skips and surges, changing gaits as it changes rhythms. It embraces neighbourhoods, cultures, ages, and moods without ever losing the internal muse. With every line this poet turns the world inside out and makes it fresh. The language of “A Walker in the City” is at once whimsical, classical, hip, romantic – always candid and alive.”

Click here to read the text, published in the May 2007 issue of enRoute Magazine.

Second Prize – English
Kelly Norah Drukker - Still Lives
Kelly Norah Drukker was born in Montreal and grew up amid the mountains and pine-trees of the Laurentians. At seventeen she moved to Montreal, and in 1999 she obtained her Honours degree in English Literature and Creative Writing from Concordia University. Soon afterwards, she began teaching English as a Second Language to adults in Montreal, and in 2001 she left Canada to teach at an international school in Switzerland. Since then, Kelly’s travels have taken her through Holland, where she researched the life of Dutch writer Etty Hillesum, to a small village in the Pyrenees where she taught English to children, and on to Ireland.
Having briefly visited Inishmore, an island on the west coast of Ireland, in 2001, Kelly remained captivated by the raw beauty of the landscape. Two years later, she returned bearing an open ticket and the promise of a three-week job. She stayed for eight months, alternately managing a hostel, house-sitting, working in a sweater market and living with a community of volunteers on an organic farm. Her travels and her time on Inishmore have had a profound influence on her work. In her poetry, she aims to capture the wildness of the land and how the cycles of nature resonate within the body as lived experience. Her work has been published in literary journals in Canada and New Zealand and is soon to appear in A Room of One’s Own. Kelly would like to thank Karen Connelly for her mentorship during her studies at the Humber School for Writers. She is currently at work on a collection of travel essays and is completing her first collection of poems.

Jury’s comments about Still Lives
“The long poems in Still Lives constitute haunting historical ballads, songs of innocence and experience bridging old world and new. Rhythmically elegant, and emotionally eloquent in their juxtaposition of violence and beauty, hope and despair, these poems linger in the consciousness with the staying power of myth.”

Click here to read the text, published in the June 2007 issue of enRoute Magazine.

Short story

First Prize - English
Amy Jones – The People Who Love Her
Amy Jones was born and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and has lived in Toronto, Vancouver and Scotland. She received a BA from Dalhousie University and an MA from the University of Toronto. She is currently completing her second year of the Optional Residency MFA program at the University of British Columbia. Her short fiction has appeared in several Canadian literary journals, and in 2006 she was awarded one of two honourable mentions in the Writers' Trust of Canada Bronwen Wallace Award. She currently resides in Halifax, where she is at work on a collection of short stories.

Jury’s comment about The People Who Love Her
“A vivid, piercing story about friendship, substance abuse, obsessive relationships, and the lacerating damage wrought when there is too much love, or not enough. Here is a story shot through with bright wisdom, striking imagery and a compelling emotional complexity. Here are authentic, unexpected, brave and broken characters masterfully rendered and winningly demanding of our compassion.”

Click here to read the text, published in the July 2007 issue of enRoute Magazine.

Second Prize - English
Carrie Snyder – Red Rover, Red Rover
Carrie Snyder’s first book, Hair Hat, was published by Penguin Canada in 2004. She grew up in the United States and Nicaragua, and moved to Canada at age ten. Carrie received her MA in English from the University of Toronto and worked in the books section of the National Post, moving to Guelph in 2001 to start her family. She now lives in Waterloo with her husband and three children, and is a full-time mother and writer in constant awe that she gets to do these two things she most loves. The family recently returned from Nicaragua where Carrie was researching toward her next book. Find out more at www.carriesnyder.com

Jury’s comment about Red Rover, Red Rover
“An elegantly written and subtly funny story about an adulterous dinner party on a Canadian winter night. Its sophisticated style combines arresting images, true-to-life dialogue and quietly poignant moments. The author evokes, casually yet with precise poetic detail, the tense interplay of love, mortality and sexual yearning that lies below the veneer of social compromise, which holds together her characters' fragile world.”

Click here to read the text, published in the August 2007 issue of enRoute Magazine.