Left to right: Umar Turaki, contest organizer; Steven Lattey, 2nd place; Wendell Zylstra, 3rd place; J.J. Hills, 1st place; Nancy Holmes, contest judge
The finalists of the 27th annual Okanagan Short Story Contest were announced at a public event by creative writing emeritus professor, Nancy Holmes, who also initiated the contest in 1997. The event was held on March 19th at the Alternator for Contemporary Art with each of the writers reading a part of their story.
After reading all of the shortlisted stories, Holmes notes that this was such a difficult process in choosing the winners.
“Both the high school and adult categories contained absolute gems of short fiction,” she says. “I felt myself in a nearly impossible position—in the adult category, the top five stories in my opinion were all so good I could hardly bring myself to rank them.”
J.J. Hills took the first prize with his story, Clinical Care, about an elderly woman taking her step-granddaughter to a clinic was simply dazzling in characterization and dialogue.
“From the first page I fully believed in the reality of these two people and a few pages later in the staff person at the clinic. These three women struggle to do their very best in a situation sabotaged by a horrible past and troubling human failings. The story concerns just an hour or two in the lives of these characters but exposes in painful detail how nearly every decision they (and by sympathetic relatability – we) make. The story also skillfully unrolls the mystery of the visit to the clinic and keeps the story heavy with conflict and tension.”
Steven Lattey placed second with the story He Died Laughing.
“This story is a depiction of the banality of human evil, to quote Hannah Arendt. The story verges on allegory and gestures towards the politically infused magic realist school of writing while it unpeels the layers of horror of how ordinary people become perpetrators of crimes against humanity.”
Third place went to Wendell Zylstra for Garbage, a story that takes place in a possible near future that points towards a crumbling society and a frightening future of machine-human fusion.
“This story is told from the point of view of a nearly feral boy who lives on or near a giant garbage dump, a setting that takes on superb and unrelenting symbolic presence in the story. Just as the young protagonist, a violent, angry, and vulnerable young man, lives on the edge of a dumping ground, the reader gets a dark feeling that the culture itself—our culture—is on the edge of apocalypse and impending post-humanism. This story is chilling and mysterious.”
Holmes also acknowledged two other stories in the adulty category that she says she could barely let go of.
“Their themes matched the winning stories for resonance and significance, and their writing was superb,” she adds. Honorable mentions went to Philip Seagram (Nelson) for The Way You Say It, and Miracle Adebayo (Kelowna) for Treasures from Daycare
The young writers in the high school category tackled themes perennial to young people— such as journeys into frighteningly unknown futures- but tinged, I suspect by the complicated times in which we live, explains Holmes.
“So many of these stories dealt with fear of the loss of friends and loved ones, awareness of a life saturated with loneliness and a kind of hopeless or destructive longing, as well as conveying a very dark view of the state of the natural world,” she adds. “The winner of this category was a stand-out however. From the moment I read it, I knew it was a winner.”
Briar Fagan from Selkirk Secondary School took the top prize for their story, Angels Don’t Smoke Earwigs.
Holmes says that many things make this story outstanding- the writing first of all. Imagery that never lets up on delivering a sense of decay, disintegration- each phrase contributes to the feeling of despair and hopelessness.
“This was an astonishing story, sophisticated, beautifully written about a young man being sent off to some mysterious war— the story presents a feeling of a not-too distant future or some other country in the current geopolitical now. The story takes place over a few short hours as the young man and his lover take their leave from each other.”
The annual contest, organized by the Creative Writing program in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies (FCCS), is a writing competition open to fiction writers in British Columbia’s Southern Interior. Writers submit their stories, which are then read, anonymously, by faculty, and the shortlisted stories are sent to a guest judge to choose the winners in the adult and high school categories.
The first-place writer received $1,000; second-place winner received $400 and third-place received $200. The top high school student received a $200 prize. Co-sponsors of the contest are FCCS and the Central Okanagan Foundation.