One week left to submit!
Emerging writers—this contest is for you. If you have yet to publish a book of short stories or a novel, send in your work for a chance to win $1,250 and publication in our fall issue #232.
This year's judge: Sara Power
Entry fee (includes a one-year print subscription):
CAD $25 for each entry from Canada
CAD $35 for each entry from elsewhere
CAD $15 for each additional entry, no limit
Head over to our contest page to learn more.
Georgio Russell,
2025 Open Season
Poetry Award winner
 Volunteer Chimedum Ohaegbu talks with the Open Season Poetry Award winner about his poem, "Anxiety Attack."
CO: I loved this poem from its start to its conclusion, how it begins in the aftermath of the titular attack and moves forward by going into the past. How does time factor into your work?
GR:
First, I want to say that I am elated that the poem met you so well, and that I am grateful to The Malahat Review staff and to the judge, Matthew Hollett, for this honour, one of the highlights of my early career. To answer your question, I will have to reveal that I am working on the manuscript for my debut collection, and one of the running themes—which I discovered rather than initially intended—is the relationship we as individuals (and as peoples) have with memory and, therefore, with time. “Anxiety Attack” is one of a few pieces I've written where the central persona is physically displaced within his own memories, such that the remembered event or place infiltrates the present scene—or vice versa—the way the “crows” of this poem become his brothers. The anxiety in the poem is never actually revealed to have sent the persona to the hospital. The reader does not know when the guinep memory actually happened—it could have been that morning or several years prior. Time is blurred because the emotions of “then” and “now” cannot be separated at the core of the persona. Because of all its triggers, trauma itself is anachronistic; it refuses any temporal confinement. I have consciously engaged with this idea in my work.
Read the rest of Georgio Russell's interview as well as his full poem.
Catherine St. Denis,
2025 Open Season
Fiction Award winner
 Past contributor Janine Alyson Young talks with the Open Season Fiction Award winner about her story, "Bubble Bath and the Ecstasy of Diminishing."
JAY: There’s such a visceral tension between the body and food in this story. I appreciated that we didn’t see a teenage girl struggling with diet as one might expect, but rather there is the squeamish negotiation between what makes food insanitary in relation to the body. There is the Subway boss who fires Lilith because her cutting marks are “not sanitary”; the piss in the pickles; the molar in the Coke; and “a hamburger-sized patch of blood” on Lilith’s sleeve. It’s like a twist on the wellness culture’s icky concept of “clean” versus “unclean” food, and it’s so surprising and effective. How did these details develop in your writing and why?
CS:
What is wonderful about your question is that I hadn’t realized I had done that. But, yes, of course—there it is! My first thought is that I may have done this because it is unsettling to be presented with the contrasts between food and the less sanitary aspects of the body. We like to think of bodies as contained and operating within clean boundaries, but really they are so messy and unmanageable, and we are so often taught to keep these messy and unmanageable aspects to ourselves. And characters are messy, too, particularly ones who are as stigmatized as self-harming teenage girls and unhoused addicts. While I didn’t consciously include the clean/unclean food motif, I do like the idea of putting stigmatized bodies adjacent to or in food that readers can imagine themselves eating. It is an opportunity for readers to reckon with their own disgust.
Read the rest of Catherine St. Denis' interview as well as an excerpt from her story.
Tanis MacDonald,
2025 Open Season
CNF Award winner
 Volunteer Janice Vis talks with the Open Season CNF Award winner about her piece, "Singularity Packet."
JV: “Singularity Packet” is addressed to your ancestors, and so it could be described as a letter, but I can also imagine it as meditation, an essay, a journal entry, or even a kind of poem. How do you understand this piece in relation to genre? Did you always imagine this piece as a (one-way) conversation with your ancestors?
TM:
I love working with genre slippage; that opportunity to slide between received forms is one of the most attractive aspects of writing creative nonfiction.
Living as an adult who was an infant adoptee can be kind of an echo chamber, and I wanted to consider what a limited dialogue with my unknown biological ancestors could sound like. It’s a dialogue for one and is necessarily single-voiced but I also wanted to play with silence as its own stubborn position, so the piece is not quite a monologue either.
Direct address gives this piece an epistolary tone, while the aphoristic notes sprang from my search for ways to articulate the reality of living with biological mystery in a culture where biological inheritance holds the key to meaning for millions of people. I am by no means the only person living that way, but the cultural centrality of knowing-your-genetics tends to make adoptees circumspect about how and when we tell the people around us that we don’t quite glom onto that way of being in the world. I thank my lucky stars for writers like Jeanette Winterson and Jackie Kay for their books Why Be Happy When You Can be Normal? and Red Dust Road, respectively; reading them helped me develop a vocabulary for adult adoptee questions.
I’ve been feeling my way along the edges of poetry and nonfiction in recent years, challenging myself to write more argument into my lyrical prose, and more rhetoric into my poetry. I don’t think there’s a single answer to when prose becomes too poetic (and too poetic for what? for whom?) or poetry too prose-like. Like most genre transgressors, I like to run back and forth along an electrified continuum and see what possibilities I can wire up.
Read the rest of Tanis MacDonald's interview as well as an excerpt from her piece.
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