Nanaimo Short Fiction Winners

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Nanaimo Short Fiction Contest 

Award Winners 2011

The Nanaimo Arts Council held the award ceremony for the 7th annual Nanaimo Short Fiction Contest. This event took place at the NAC gallery in conjunction with the Spring Showcase awards. A special thank you goes out to Frank Moher, co-coordinator for this program and Chair of the Creative Writing and Journalism Department at Vancouver Island University. We would also like to acknowledge Arts and Culture week event sponsors the Government of BC and the Assembly of BC Arts Councils

Judge, Harold Rhenisch, has been with the instructional team at Vancouver Island University for a number of years. His astute and encouraging comments on the selected works are most appreciated.

Award Winners: Junior: Holly Dean for Willy the Cloud

The author's love of the story shines through every word, making this version of a creation myth into a joyful experience. The strong image of the raindrops in the story's ending gives an astonishing depth of character and symbolism. It's impossible to feel blue after reading this playful piece  

Youth: Anna Mckenzie-Sasges for The Longest Night

This story is distinguished for having a perfect sense of story-telling and conflict, and for being beautifully understated. The author uses this understatement to quickly create deep characters, making vital, life-altering choices, in a complex moment of crisis and conflict. In this author's hands, it all looks so easy. It isn't.

Adult: 3rd Place: David Essig for The Cello Lesson

The structure of this story displays an imagination working at the highest level. Every piece fits with every other piece, like a sophisticated musical composition, and the writer plays them all, together, with hardly a flaw. Particularly admirable are the characters, the way the tone and structure of the piece matches that of a cello and music written for it, and the fully-integrated symbolic level.

Adult 2nd Place: Caitlin Patricia Johnston for Forgotten Hands

This study of character and conflict is flooded with social insight, a riveting sense of place, a haunting portrayal of confusions, and a sense of rediscovery of bodies, at their strongest and their most frail. The writing is luminous, and the characters matter, and the writing, for all its plainsong presentation, is consistently sophisticated and fresh.

Adult 1st Place: Rayn Gryphon for Paradise Was

In imagining a speculative future with the finesse of high literature and the punch of philosophy, this compelling and sophisticated story creates in the reader a heightened ability for reading the world and the present. The set-up is haunting, the contemplations are extraordinary, and the world is our own, made more real than we commonly accept it as.