Canadian stories offer vivid variety

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/12/2023 (665 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The annual Best Canadian Stories collection used to mean “best Canadian short stories from the previous year.” As of last year, publisher Biblioasis chose to use the coming year in the title of their annual collection; hence the latest is called Best Canadian Stories 2024 — possibly meaning that you have all of next year to read it.

This year’s editor, author Lisa Moore of St. John’s, N.L., consulted over 50 literary publications, but chose stories from only seven; she solicited the other nine stories directly from the authors.

A reader usually approaches a short story expecting at least one full-fledged character to experience some kind of challenge or change. One of the best collections of such stories came a few months ago from Biblioasis — Cocktail, by Lisa Alward — but she is not represented here.

Editor Moore explains in the introduction what mattered to her in making her choices: “Voice and… the way a character is always in flux, the culmination of what they noticed/didn’t notice. Characters coalescing, simultaneously from the outside in and the inside out.”

One of the best stories is Interloper, by Sharon Bala. Vanessa, complacent and happy with her new baby, shows no interest at all in the father, her husband, Clive. He is drawn to Virginia, Vanessa’s sister, who has come to visit. Bala’s building of suspense is gripping, especially when Virginia leaves and Clive follows her to the train.

In One Woman’s Memories, author Billy-Ray Belcourt tells of Louise, an Indigenous woman living on a northern reserve and missing her husband, who has died within the last year. She’s feeling lonely and calls her only son, who lives in the city. With insight into Indigenous life, Belcourt is impressive in clearly showing a person adjusting to loneliness.

Love Cream Heat, by Corinna Chong, presents the natural details of the middle of a life. Clarity of narrative prevails as Louisa is shown at the time of her father’s death, juxtaposed with her brother Cole’s baby and her mother’s lack of emotion.

In Elise Levine’s Cooler, Samantha tells, in her lively and slangy chatter, all about her job in a casino and the women she falls for. In Joel Thomas Hynes’s Nothing But a Legacy, a boy named John talks about his beer-loving dad, his ne’er-do-well brother Lukey and his grown-up brother Mark, whom John catches being rather intimate with girlfriend Marissa.

Giller Prize winner Ian Williams (for his novel Reproduction) offers Bro, a humorous story about a white guy, Greg, who wants to befriend a Black guy, “but there weren’t many, any, Black people where he lived.” What makes the story so entertaining are the reactions of Greg’s pragmatic wife.

The story Long Haul, by Sourayan Mookerjea, is intricate and serious, with sentences such as the following: “The great lunar pox scars of the tar sands and their vast reservoirs and flood plains of toxic tailing slurry had been finally scabbed over and buried by the very funerary medicine that had long been clawed out and stripped from the living forest soil.” One feels that something important is taking place, but perhaps the language needs to be simplified.

Much more accessible is Ghosts, by Ryan Turner. This totally absorbing story presents intriguing and real characters such as narrator Mark, a lovely plot, flashbacks and some great scenes in the present, with a good old surprise ending. At one stage Mark is visiting his widowed mother in Vancouver; she tells him of her new man, Douglas, who has promised her a big gift and she hopes it isn’t a ring. “I’m not going to be one of those women who’s always having to distinguish between her first and second husband,” she says. “Your father was my husband. Douglas is… well, Douglas.”

Best Canadian Stories 2024 is remarkable for its variety. One could say that there is something for everyone here, but really it’s fun to read all the stories and compare them.

Dave Williamson is a Winnipeg author after whom the Manitoba Writers’ Guild has named their annual national short story competition.