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One To Watch

The results of the CBC Quebec Short Story Competition 2005-2006 were announced at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival in Montreal last weekend. The competition, now in its seventh year, plays a vital role inthe English language literary community in Quebec. Each year the three winning stories are broadcast on CBC Radio One, and every three years VĂ©hicule Press publishes an anthology of winners and honourable mentions.

Among this year's winners is Montreal-based poet, fiction writer and webartist J. R. Carpenter (pictured above) whose work I have published recently at Nthposition, and also in the anthologies Future Welcome and 100 Poets Against The War. Her winning story, "Air Holes", weighs in at a sparse 921 words, yet, with the help of eight or nine characters somehow manages to be both sad and funny.

Here's the opening paragraph: "The tide will go out at two today. The kids and I will go down to the beach. Between the tidemarks, beneath our feet, tight-lipped steamerclams will burrow sandy deep. But we will find them. Their air holes will give them away."

Carpenter is - strikingly - a previous winner of the CBC Quebec Short story competition (2003-2004) for her story "Precipice" which was recently anthologized in Short Stuff (VĂ©hicule, 2005).
She is also a Web Art Finalist in the DrunkenBoat PanLiterary Awards 2006. Her web art/poetry project "How I Loved theBroken Things of Rome" is launching at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto April 13, 2006; and her web art/poetry project Entre Ville is launching at the Musée des beaux-arts in Montreal April 27, 2006. More information can be found on her website at: http://luckysoap.com/

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