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Introduction
Every country has its literature, but not every nation has a Journey Prize. Why should this matter? What difference does it make? How could one annual fiction anthology, dedicated to “The Best of Canada’s New Writers,” have any substantial impact on the way a culture imagines itself? A dozen short stories every year, written by mostly emerging voices? It doesn’t seem like such a fragile endeavour should have been able to sustain a whole generation of artists or remake the entire canon of contemporary Canadian fiction.
And yet.
Go to the end of this book and start there. Check the list of people who have contributed to the Journey Prize series: thirty-three years of names and titles. Then do what we did. Read backwards through time and watch the current shape of Canadian Fiction emerging, the new becoming now. Think again about what this one little anthology series has accomplished, the way it predicted a literary future that is now the present. Picture all these writers together in one room, the JP alumni, talking about their first publication, their first recognition, the difference it made. Ask them about what it meant to be included in this book, what it still means, in the arc of their writing journeys. They will tell you.
Or, if you prefer, go the opposite way. Imagine Canadian Literature without the Journey Prize. Subtract the names at the end of this book. Take away their first big break and much of what followed. We are not suggesting that the Journey Prize exclusively “made” these writers or that they wouldn’t have been discovered without it, but it certainly helped. It helped in a substantial way. Many say their careers started in these pages. And they know what might have been lost if such a venue never existed.
We came through here too. And like all the other contributors, the Journey Prize changed our writing careers. It let us in. This series matters to us, and we understand why so many people want to be part of the anniversary celebration. That’s why it was not easy to make the selections that built this volume. In hindsight, it might have been wiser to stick to the hits and focus only on the most famous voices from the past. Just the people who went on to win all the other prizes and publish all over the world. There is no risk in joining the chorus and singing the praises of what everyone else already likes, what everyone already knows. Critical consensus might have been a better guide.
But that has never been how the Journey Prize works. Uncertainty and discovery are the twin engines that drive this enterprise. And when everything is unknown, there is no possibility for critical consensus. When we made our choices, we tried to hold on to that original sense of wonder and surprise. We saw ourselves like the stories’ first readers, the essential editors who have worked for decades in Canada’s tremendous network of small literary magazines. We pictured staff going through the slush pile late at night, searching through thousands and thousands of pages, and we tried to feel what they must have felt the first time “this” turned out to be “THIS!” When you look back, you can see how that one wild moment of alchemy started a chain reaction that carried the story forward all the way up to where we are now.
It’s important to remember that nothing was for sure when these writers got their first stories into the anthology, just as nothing is for sure now. The Journey Prize was never designed to re-recognize Alice or Mavis or Margaret, but like them, it valued the unique craft of the short story form, and it saw and appreciated all the smallest aesthetic choices, what was really happening down there at the level of the sentence, then the paragraph, then the whole impossibly coordinated thing.
In our selections, we wanted to honour this special brand of care, the way the Journey Prize has always held space to celebrate a quiet voice long before it booms to others. It’s a lot like that person who brings something smaller yet remarkable to the market. A little bag of pickled greens that serves only one. A fistful of sticky rice lovingly packed with one fried chicken wing. Two-coin purses woven with straw because you cannot make more than two in twenty-four hours before the market opens. Between the stalls, everyone already has what others are selling, but this one person has this one unique thing. It is precious, built out of love and loss and craft, and it has the power to make the whole market quiet. This one loved object—the food, the purse, the story—allows the maker to hear their own heartbeat. There is a boom in their chest, and every beat tells them they are alive in this world too. No matter how loud it gets outside, this internal sound carries on. This is what the Journey Prize celebrates, what we’re trying to draw attention to: the private boom that comes before the public echo.