My First Writing Prize

Memory cares not a whit for chronology though it seems to follow the call of associative connections. It was snowing yesterday and that led me to my first snowwoman post.

But now I realize I overlooked two very significant events in my writing life that happened during my first year in Winnipeg, while we still lived on Wellington Crescent.

One was that I won the Lady Eaton short-story contest of spring 1967. There was a newspaper announcement from the local branch of Canadian Authors Association about a contest calling for a short story, and I set to work.

I had just bought a typewriter. It was a Smith-Corona Super Sterling bought at Eaton’s on the 9^th of February 1967 for $99.50. (It is still somewhere in the basement, waiting to be sold as a RETRO on Kijiji.) But in those days my Muse needed the feel of pen on paper, and I wrote in long hand.

My short story, The Door I Shut Behind Me was about a young postdoctoral guy who comes to Winnipeg from India. I got a call one day from a female voice. I don’t know who was more surprised, I for having won the first prize or she on finding out the writer was not a man but a woman.

The story came easily enough but it was about seven thousand words, written in long hand, and I worked harder on condensing it to 5000 words than I had on writing it. Prune, snip, count, prune, snip, count,(remember there was no computer to do the counting) at last it was 4999 words and I typed it and sent it off.

A couple of years later, when I had started teaching at the University of Winnipeg, I was asked to be a judge of the same annual contest along with a colleague, Dr. Marta Kruuner. One of the entries was very much better than all others but it was well over 5000 words. We decided to give it the prize anyway. Is it right or wrong to bend rules?

My story has been published several times, each time with a change here and there, more pruning actually!       Here is one version of the Door I Shut Behind Me.

As I read the story again in the present context, I am pleasantly surprised to note that though the story is total fiction, I seem to have foreseen the smug attitudes that would develop in the community during the 1970s, the decade of crowded community parties.