2007

Creative Nonfiction

First Prize - English
Shelagh Plunkett –In a Garden
Pet monkeys, large dogs, wild parrots and trips upriver informed Shelagh Plunkett’s childhood where she and her siblings swam with piranhas, crocodiles and cayman. Not a bad start for a writer who now lives in Montreal.

Jury’s Comments:
“There is a lovely rhythm and push in this piece of writing. It is recollection muted by distance, both cultural and temporal as a woman looks back on a brief but awakening moment in her past. Although the awakening touches on age, place, race and class, everything is described through tone. "In Guyana a dried stick driven into the ground will sprout leaves and grow roots." The writer carries us into her recollection with absolute confidence by repeating patterns of announcement throughout the essay. While creating a story that is clarified and intense, she allows us to reminisce with her and to breath at her dreamy, nostalgic pace.”

Click here to read the text, published in the March 2008 issue of enRoute Magazine.

Second Prize - English
Phyllis Nakonechny –Vidh
Phyllis Nakonechny (nee Gamracy) has been a daughter, a wife, a mother, and a high school English teacher. Since the death of her husband she has had to reinvent herself.  She has recently begun to pursue seriously her own writing and is working on a collection of prints, art books, and constructions exploring the connection between language and seeing.  She lives in Swift Current, Saskatchewan.

Jury’s Comments:
“Vidh” is an eloquent and moving meditation on grief at the death of a husband from cancer. Intimate and sometimes lyrical, yet firmly rooted in mundane details and images -- lawn tools, deodorant, a robin -- it rises above familiar treatments of the subject. Deft shifts in time, voice, and tone create a space in which the writer’s distinct personality merges with the universal struggle over loss, how we all get hollowed out by death.  The result is quietly powerful, a sweet-spot wallop of emotion.

Click here to read the text, published in the April 2008 issue of enRoute Magazine

Poetry

First Prize - English
Jeramy Dodds -Sundress, Fortress
Jeramy Dodds lives in Orono, Ontario. His poems have appeared in several Canadian and European journals. He is the winner of the 2006 Bronwen Wallace Award. Coach House Books will publish his first collection of poems in the fall of 2008.

Jury’s comments:
“Strange, densely-layered, ruthless and funny by turns, these poems (with nods to Tranströmer, Lou Reed, Linnaeus, Heimlich, and Emily Dickinson) force us to go slow at their sudden ingrown turns. They are full of creature music surprises.”

Click here to read the text, published in the May 2008 issue of enRoute Magazine

Second Prize – English
Harold Rhenisch -Catching a Snare Drum at the Fraser’s Mouth
Harold Rhenisch has written from British Columbia’s grasslands for thirty-five years, exploring their spirit and history in poetry, fiction, and memoir. His most recent book is Return to Open Water: Poems Selected and New, 1979-2007. He lives in Campbell River, on northern Vancouver Island.

Jury’s comments:
These poems evoke ceremony, people circling in a communal dance, the drum drumming its magic pulse. The poems take us on the long journey from First Nations traditional life, through the heartbreak of colonization and enforced modernization, to the colourful pluralism of contemporary urban Vancouver. There is a strong elegiac note in these poems, grief-laced for the demise of the joyful salmon, the song-filled natural world vanishing into “the aspirated grace of asphalt and chrome and cigarettes.” Darkly apocalyptic, yet infused with “praise,” hypnotic, ecstatic, twirling us into “Dance beyond dance. Song beyond song.”

The text will be published in the June 2008 issue of enRoute Magazine.

Short story

First Prize - English
Lee Kvern –White
Lee Kvern’s first novella, Afterall was nominated for Trade Fiction in the Alberta Book Awards in 2006. She is a two-time short story winner of the CBC Alberta Anthology 2006/07. She lives in Okotoks, Alberta and is at work on her second novel.

Jury’s Comments:
“A group of people —young and old, strangers and family—are gathered one frigid, sunless afternoon at a frozen lake.  Teenage boys play hockey, silent unshaven men drink beer around a bonfire, and a husband and wife and their two small children try ice fishing.  In confident, intelligent strokes “White” describes an hour or so of this afternoon from the point of view of the mother, whose barely realized fears for her children make for an atmosphere of claustrophobic menace.  Finely calibrated descriptions of animals and landscape both contribute to and contain the tension.  Subtle narrative shifts wholly upend the reader’s expectations.  Here is a writer who understands not only what to include but, more importantly and more impressively, what to leave out.”

The text will be published in the July 2008 issue of enRoute Magazine.

Second Prize - English
Alex Leslie –Preservation
Alex Leslie was born in Vancouver. She has a short story forthcoming from Descant and is at work on her first collection. She is this year's winner of Prairie Fire's creative non-fiction contest and her piece will be published in that journal's summer issue.

Jury’s Comments:
“Preservation” is a story of obsession and love told with a compelling sense of urgency and of looming threat.  Two young women defy the conventions and prejudices of their small-town world to give into a passion that is ultimately as much about what divides them as what brings them together.  Beautifully crafted and closely observed, the story draws us in with its immediacy and its breadth, setting itself against the backdrop of a natural world that stands both in judgement over the small lives that pass before it, and in consolation. 

The text will be published in the August 2008 issue of enRoute Magazine.