11/13/2005: "Rotten Review"

Hi All,

Here's a review I got from the Toronto Star. It's not about RUST AND BONE, but the JOURNEY PRIZE anthology. The JOURNEY anthology culls "the best"---it's entirely subjective---stories published in Canadian venues each year. I think of it as the Canadian equivalent of the O. Henry Awards, or maybe the Pushcart---who knows? Anyway, we're talking big money; winner gets $10,000. That could buy a LOT of candy.

But, as the title of this entry details, the review itself is not very good. I actually come off okay in it, but the first time I read it I thought I was being singled out for a spectacular ragging (this wouldn't have been the first time a reviewer set me aside for this dubious honor). The review advocates ripping out sections of the book deemed inappropriate or shoddy, and at first I got the impression my whole story ought to be ripped out---and as I read on, chagrined, I got the impression the story wasn't as good as a high schooler's. Now, perhaps it OUGHT to have been ripped out, and perhaps it WAS high school level reading...but man, what a wicked rag! Sad to say, my first instinctual feeling was, "Well, at least my name got mentioned in the review." What a press-hungry little monkey I've become! But after carefully reading the review, I came to realize my fears were unfounded, and I was one of a very few writers who made it out of the review okay.

Now I haven't read all the stories yet so I can't really comment, but I know some of the writers in there---Barbara Romanik is a wonderful writer, and I've read Edward O'Connor's contribution, which is excellent---and I can't believe it's as bleak as this reviewer contests. He seems to have an issue with the jurors, and the criteria under which they've chosen to select their stories. I myself would probably tend to agree with the jurors' opinions---if only selfishly, as my story (this dude who works at a retirement home becomes obsessively addicted to snuff films) wouldn't be in there were they looking for Alice Munro-type stories---and I've said recently I think Canadian fiction could use a little bit of a shake-up. But that's an entry for another day, so I'll leave you with the review, and you can draw your own conclusions.

Follow the "more" link to the review

All best, Craig.

No Prize for this Year's Roundup
FICTION: The annual Journey Prize anthology deserves better
Nov. 13, 2005. 01:00 AM
BERT ARCHER

The Journey Prize Stories

Selected by James Grainger and Nancy Lee

McClelland & Stewart,

204 pages, $17.99

Instructions for reading this year's Journey Prize anthology of short stories:

Tear the front of the book off, everything up to page xiv, the last page of the polemical introduction by this year's jury members — Quill & Quire review editor James Grainger, winner of last year's ReLit Award for short fiction, and Vancouver story writer Nancy Lee — which sets out the pair's notions of what makes for good writing and good stories. It's a recipe for everything that's boringly, predictably, familiarly wrong with the sort of fiction this nation's literature is coming to be characterized by. Whether the stories are weird or kitchen-sink, a disinclination to try anything that hasn't already been done better by Alice Munro has resulted in an unbearable fictional flatness.

It is laudable for a jury to make its criteria public. Yet it is sad when a jury making decisions about the still prestigious Journey Prize thinks, unironically, that there can be seven rules to good writing. George Orwell at least had a necessary escape hatch, his own final rule — better to break the rules than commit barbarisms.

Place a finger at page 165, then turn to page 175, and violently remove this even more misguided chunk for which, as author Craig Davidson reveals in his contribution to it, the writers have been asked for pieces on where their inspiration for the selected stories came from. This would be unacceptable even if the Journey anthology were a high school textbook. The fact that it's a premier showcase for new Canadian short stories makes this callow attempt at contextualization an outrage.

Writers say what they have to say about their stories in their stories. If they haven't, they should rewrite them. Under no circumstances should they be asked to provide synoptic non-fictional accounts of it in the same volume in which they first appear. If such write-ups help you to understand the story more than the story does, they're not very good stories and we shouldn't be wasting our time on them. If they don't, then there's no point to them beyond some misguided attempt at a behind-the-music sort of appeal that doesn't exist for unknown writers.

Read Craig Davidson's "Failure to Thrive," Krista Bridge's "A Matter of Firsts" and Pasha Malla's "The Past Composed" — they're the successful ones. But don't under any circumstances condone this sort of behaviour by buying this book. Go to your library and get the appropriate copies of sub-Terrain, Descant and Grain, respectively. Or better still, order the back issues from their websites (subterrain.ca, descant.on.ca, grainmagazine.ca). They do deserve your money.

Toronto writer and editor Bert Archer is a former review editor of Quill & Quire.

Yeeeeeoooouuuuch!