Best Canadian Stories 2020

Introduction Paige Cooper

Once, eight years ago, late on a breezy spring afternoon, I was in the bath reading an anthology not unlike this one. This was during the brief period in my personal history where I owed several hundred thousand dollars on a clapboard house beside a freight railyard. The house, recently renovated in a dim, pretty, heritage-adjacent sort of way, was near the city centre and had a lilac bush in its yard, but was unlivable by local standards because it lacked a garage. The bathroom was the house’s sunniest room—the walls blue, the sky blue, the clawfoot tub new and plastic—and I’d tied back the curtains my mother had proudly sewn in order to better feel like I was happy.

I’d been infectious with an acute and inscrutable misery for several years, by that point, the onset traceable pretty much to the morning after signing the mortgage. “Only thirty-three more years of this,” I’d promise myself, as I walked the rescue dog through the gentrifying industrial park, spritzed diluted vinegar at baseboards, vacuumed gravel out of the car. The dog ate organic meat patties and rightly preferred my partner, who tenderly prepared them for her, to me.

That afternoon in the bath—perhaps it was a weekend, or perhaps this was after I’d been laid off, and the mortgage was becoming not just oppressive but alarming—the short story I read was written in a measured, mournfully wry third person. It involved a dog, a divorce, and a relocation to an ill-lit, polar place. It was wistful, maybe a little escapist—in the way of stories, like this one, where the comforts are secure and the financial concerns are theoretical—and I proceeded gamely along until, at the very end, at the very last word, the writer of the story switched from third into a brutal, wondering second—you.

I splashed in my plastic tub, affronted and exposed. The story had nothing to do with me, until it did. I flipped to the note at the back of the book: it had been written during the writer’s month-long residence in Riga, Latvia; a place I doubt I’d ever actively imagined until that moment. By fall, the garageless house with its sunny bath and lilac bush was someone else’s, my ex-partner and ex-dog had a new place of their own, and I was alone with a rook-gutted pigeon carcass on my snowy windowsill in darkling Riga, where I belonged.

I’m not sure whether this anecdote—sterilized of certain distracting but relevant factors that I’d be likelier to include if this were fiction—is meant to horrify, annoy, caution, or inspire. But what is pertinent is that an annual short story anthology “changed my life.” Not in the sense of enabling some personal seasonal foliage swap, or an acceleration of the inevitable, but in the sense that it added an entirely new constellation to the firmament, with resultant mid-course navigational chaos. Did I tell the people of my life, as I dismantled what had up to then seemed geologically scaled, that a short story was responsible for the upset? Did I tell them I’d been moved—moved thousands of miles out of a life and into a new one that would be scarier, lonelier, poorer for quite a long while—by an interesting formal choice made by a stranger? Did I give them the story to read for themselves? No. It was too strange, and I was new to strangeness, or at least to admitting it.

I tell you this because over the past few months, as I read for this volume and chose the stories included here, I approached the task with all the caution of someone who could be responsible, at least partially, for someone’s imminent and irremediable personal cataclysm—for yours.

Selecting these stories I visited the usual stations: print magazines; online magazines; a public call in the form of a tweet; the occasional private solicitation. It was not a scientific or objective system, but I read as widely as I was able. Locating recent French short stories translated even more recently (the rule here being that these stories ought not to have appeared in book form in 2019) required help from several translators, writers, and publishers in Quebec, to whom I’m grateful. I am grateful as well to the editors and readers of the literary magazines I reviewed, whose labour does not generate profit for shareholders, and is therefore unquantifiably generous.

I’d also note that my approach to the definition of “Canadian” was embarrassed, given that—at least up until the borders started closing in March—I’d smugly enjoyed filing Canada’s nationhood in the back stacks alongside craft beer, reality television, household firearms, the Crusades, and public yoga: a source of great comfort and catharsis to some, but needless suffering for everyone else. In the spreadsheet where I tracked my reading, I typed: I make a shitty border guard.

Obviously I am interested in writing about place; setting, landscape, the ultra-detailed and irreducible local. This seems more primary and difficult to me than many other abstractions, including whatever we mean when we say “character.” But thoughtless, constant access to the internet means I spend a lot of time thinking in an anonymous, globalized un-place. For instance, if I spend enough time on Twitter, an unwieldy notion like “Canada” starts to look more and more like an arbitrary collection of highways, opinions, atrocities, and resource extraction companies adorned with a lumpy healthcare system and competent branding. Landscape, in this mode, falls under branding, of course; borders fall under opinion or atrocity. But, on the other hand, this is the year the prime minister shuffled out of his isolation cottage to gaze into the camera and intone, “Canadians, it’s time to come home,”—and I did, despite myself. I waited with my passport at the gate, and I eyed the jittery crowd lining up for JFK next door; instead of my usual mild envy, I pitied them. I feared what their country might do to them.

By virtue of timing, the stories in this anthology illuminate some of what writers in, or around, or peripherally tied to Canada, or the notion of Canada, were thinking about before this moment stumbled us. These stories are concerned with the opioid crisis, climate crisis, police violence, patriarchy, intolerance, family, money, sex, mortality, hypocrisy, ancestry, aesthetics, art. These concerns haven’t disappeared; if anything they’ve been compressed and made explosive. But what remains true, as it does every year, is that what we imagined yesterday is different than what we’ll imagine henceforth.

Reading through these stories on my first pass—during a series of windowless, late-night winter baths in a different cheap, plasticky tub—I thought I knew what I didn’t want. I had my suspicions about taste; certainly my own seemed vain and fleeting, borderline astrological, somewhat fatal. (Spare me the sick parent story, I typed into my spreadsheet the day before my father called to tell me about the tumour in his throat.) But whatever my desires for content or subject—interpellate me, transport me, etc.—I honoured my gut when it came to execution. I looked, ideally, for sentences that had been starved down and built back up into golems that obey and resist their makers. I generally wanted, in terms of language, a sense of what had been excluded and suppressed: maximalism can’t afford to be any less picky than minimalism. Because no matter what a story is on its surface, we are here to gander at its subconscious. (In my spreadsheet I also typed, equally prophetic and stupid: I am so sick of knowing what’s happening.)

My primary requirement for the stories I selected was that they possess a secret capacity or consciousness—be it emotional, intellectual, political, linguistic, whatever—like when the grocer touches the back of your hand because you are weeping again, or the painting over the fireplace remains turned to face the wall for the duration of your visit. Yes, I love to be consoled or cajoled with the sound of my own name, by which I mean the pleasure of seeing my very own special self in a stranger’s prose, but that capacity must be surprising enough that it stutters me to a halt, or I am unsatisfied. Defamiliarization—the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovksy’s term—describes what I would want done to me, if someone were to ask: a sunny day for a pandemic; a metaphor that turns back to bite itself; a wrong aphorism; a love letter read over the phone by a messenger; a heartbreak; a hangover; jetlag; jargon.

Today, as I write to you from vernal isolation, it’s not unlikely that you are reading this in one species of defamiliarization, or another. We are learning to describe a world that most realists (American, Canadian, perhaps even Socialist) would’ve waved off as fantastical, histrionic, a tad genre, a month or two ago. You line up outside the grocery store. Police officers lean into your car and ask how you’re feeling. A woman gets arrested for going for a walk. A man sneers at your mask and swerves across the sidewalk to cough on you.

But it must also be evident, at this point, that defamiliarization—narrative or linguistic—was not my only selection criteria, as noble as it is. Because, as I progressed, it turned out there are too many good short story writers in this country: writers with a high tolerance for ambiguity, that not only accept gaps but revel in them, and have the generosity to let something chthonic crawl in.

So I narrowed the vise further, added a selfish requirement that interests me as a writer but might be inconsequential to many readers. I wanted stories that were difficult to write. That demonstrate what Christa Wolf called “moral courage on the part of the author—the courage to risk self-knowledge.” I wanted the stories that my soul said could not have been made without exacting some toll from their maker. Labour; pain; deep thinking; Sisyphean imaginative muscle; a mothly instinct towards explicit, immolating honesty. I wanted blood to be spent; evidence of collapse, of that grating, unwilling metamorphosis that occurs when time passes in mortal lives.

As I’ve drafted this essay, the world has been made progressively stranger, which is another way of saying our sense of reality has been expanded. The ways in which people resist reality—using denial, or delusion; or else lovingly, humanely, with sweetness and honest rage—indicates to me that reading fiction isn’t just a rarified aesthetic affectation, but an act of imaginative malleability that feeds resilience. What do I mean? That there are those of us who are frozen, holding still until the familiar carapace returns to us unchanged—waiting for our daughter to come back to us from the far end of the empty parkette—but there are also those of us who are paying careful, stunned attention to how she is never the same, moment to moment, how our daughter is and has always been a sussuration of unpredictable sparks. Of course, I am describing a false binary: we are all both waiting and watching; we are all always both invested in the surface and the core. But, since paying attention is the process whereby fiction describes reality’s various layers, no matter the constrictions or unreliability of such, I am suggesting we err on the side of constant witnessing.

The more evident the expanding depth and breadth of our realities, the more rigorous the duties of our imaginations: first, we have to imagine our new reality in order to understand how to be in it, and then we have to do that for every person we know, and every person we don’t know, and the nonhuman natural world, and maybe some objects and hyperobjects and systems, and then, after all that, we must also imagine the future of this new reality without, hopefully, feeding the collective’s ambient anxiety. It’s exhausting work, and provoking. But you, the reader of an introductory essay in an annual anthology of short fiction, have been equipped for this, somehow. I’d venture that it is possible that the defamiliarizing aspects of fiction—not the tranquilizing escapism, not the personal identification (you), or the didactic “humanizing,” or the empathetic universality of the closely-observed detail in our daughter’s sentimental playground—have given us a capacity to expand our notion of reality to include ourselves as we are, not just as we thought we were. And all this while we remember that a knowable person, like a knowable world, is the unbelievable thing.

Like meeting a stranger, much of the pleasure of a story is its unknown power. The right story, at the right time, if you happen to be open to it, if you have a need, maybe a desperate one, to be moved outside yourself, can perhaps move you so far outside of yourself that you will not consider going back to who you were thirty minutes ago, before you started following this line of narrative with its inexplicable relevance and corollary power. Because, also like meeting a stranger, a story contains the risk that you may be touched, that you may suffer or feel pleasure, that the effects might play out over the course of years, a decade, and also that, by the end (if there is one), you might have become unrecognizable to the person who read the story to begin with. This is what I mean when I say a story can be a cataclysm. And if a cataclysm is a particularly terrifying prospect, right now, have courage. Because there are other possibilities; they are nearly infinite. And sometimes when you meet a stranger all that happens is you fall in love.