BEST CANADIAN STORIES 2020
Edited by Paige Cooper
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.