Salty Ink’s Short Fiction Contest

The Finalists:

Michael Collins – “Mythmaker”
Eva Crocker – “Swans”
Mary M. Davies – “The Wrong Way”
Al Geehan – “Feathers and Fur”
Pat Leech – “Joan List”
Samuel Thomas Martin – “Resettlement”
Elaine McCluskey – “The Favourite Nephew”
Syr Ruus – “Hazard”
Jill Sooley – “The Meeting”
Lee D. Thompson – “North of Fury”
Melissa Tucker Barbeau – “Oranges”
Steve Vernon – “Time Out”

Salty Ink took in eighty-one short stories over the summer for its first annual short fiction contest, and this year’s contest winner wins two-fold.

Winner wins the contest and $250, but more excitingly — in my opinion — a place in an exciting pending anthology of short fiction, Salty Ink: An Anthology, alongside some of the country’s finest writers.

Shortlist to be announced in the last week of October.

Longlist selection process: Salty Ink weeded submissions down to a top 30 and handed those off to two judges.

This longlist will be handed off to three new judges, who will rank their top 6 picks, and Salty Ink will mathematically determine the winner.
a 1st pick = 6 points
a 2nd pick = 5 points
a 3rd pick = 4 points
and so on …

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Salty Ink’s Three Favourite Short Fictioneers of 2009

Blind Judged the Competition

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AMY JONES won the hip-assuring Mecalf-Rooke award and is currently on the 2010 ReLit Shortlist for short fiction. She’s widely published in all of Canada’s finest literary journals, and has been anthologized in some pretty great places already, including Mind’s Eye, because she’s also won a coveted CBC Literary Award. She also has a very great all-lists blog.

WHAT BOYS LIKE is  as vibrant as the book’s cover. It is fresh, fearless, exciting writing with innovative enrapturing — and often mindblowing –  explorations in narrative structure and POV. She quite simply understands how to best tell a story. Jim Bartley at the Globe and Mail said, “Her writing reads like understanding – as if there’s no gap between the words and what they make you perceive.”

RYAN TURNER was shortlisted for both the 2008 Metcalf-Rooke award and the 2010 ReLit award. His writing has earned more comparisons to early Michael Winter than anyone’s, and I’m guilty of perpetuating the comparison (hoping he doesn’t mind): he’s probably the most exciting voice bourne in response to the impact of the famous Burning Rock fiction collective on the new writing out of Atlantic Canada. The contemporary urban lit. His fiction has appeared in several leading literary journals.

The stories in WHAT WE’RE MADE OF share the same protagonist. His top-notch attention to detail make him,  in my mind,  one of the best sentence-level writers in Atlantic Canada. His one-liners give us more insight into a story — its characters and their relationships — than most writers could give us in a paragraph. This economy of words, his spare style, is what makes his writing remarkable, and a pleasure to read. That and how some of his more aphoristic lines beg to be read twice. I’m big on the catchy cadence and rhythm to the writing too.

LESLIE VRYENHOEK’s multi-award-winning fiction and poetry have appeared in anthologies and journals both nationally and internationally. She won the 2007 Eden Mills Festival Literary Competition, the inaugural Cahoots fiction competition, and the 2003 Dalton Camp Award, among several other literary accomplishments. Most recently, Vryenhoek won the 2010 Winston Collins/Descant Prize for Best Canadian Poem.

SCRABBLE LESSONS had the Globe and Mail’s Jim Bartley haul out the word perfect, “It all works and leaves an uneasy smile. Perfect.” Scrabble Lessons is deeply affecting and gorgeously written. No detail is left blandly described. Example: “The tears started, big fat drops cutting inside her cheekbones and taking the easier nose-side route.” You know she sat back in her chair and saw all her scenes and never missed a thing in describing them; it’s like she’s writing from the inside out. Punchy, top-notch creative writing that makes you feel something.

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2010 Shortlist: Al Geehan, Pat Leech, and Samuel Thomas Martin

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The Shortlist (comprised of a 9-point winner and a two-way 8-point tie)

Al Geehan’s “Feather and Fur”
Pat Leech’s “Joan List”
Samuel Thomas Martin’s “Resettlement”

Honourable mention: Eva Crocker’s “Swans” and Elaine McCluskey’s “The Favourite Nephew” tied for fourth place.

Al Geehan’s writing has appeared in journals like The Antigonish Review, and he is also currently shortlisted for the 2010 Cuffer Prize.

Pat Leech’s work has been published in The New Quarterly, The Nashwaak Review, Dandelion, and Existere, and is forthcoming in Rattling books’ EarLit Shorts series.

Samuel Thomas Martin is the author of This Ramshackle Tabernacle (Breakwater, 2010). He is a graduate of University of Toronto’s MA in Creative Writing program, where he worked with David Adams Richards.

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Winner of Salty Ink’s 2010 Short Fiction Contest: Al Geehan!

Click Here to read the winning story. “Feathers and Fur.”

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