As newly-minted author Janine Alyson Young sits at the gelato place in Gibsons looking out over the busy five corners, she talks about setting the scene in her stories.
“Landscape is so important,” she says. “I always make sure I’m confident of it because it sets the tone for the characters.”
The scenery in her collection of short stories, Hideout Hotel, jumps from a coastal town much like Gibsons to Australia to the Yukon. It has been short-listed along with four other books for a prestigious national prize for the best collection of short fiction, the 18th annual Danuta Gleed Literary Award, to be awarded by the Writers’ Union of Canada at their annual meeting on May 30. It was chosen from 37 other books submitted to the jurors, and the book is the only one of the finalists to come from a small publisher, Halfmoon Bay’s Caitlin Press.
Young’s stories — long, short stories and one novella — are about young women in a modern world, a gritty, emotional world in which readers follow a day in the life of a bar rat in Australia or the journey of a boat-dwelling mother who struggles with a friend’s cancer and a failing marriage. The novella, Sung Spit, chronicles a character’s adolescence and young adulthood as she is paralyzed by an unwanted pregnancy and faces the disappearance of family members.
The judges wrote: “Young’s tender and ironic stories about disaffected girlhood deliver surprising punches.”
Young has an innocent, dreamy look about her; it’s hard to believe that these are stories from her experience. Now at age 29 she’s back in Gibsons, the town of her youth, after graduating with a Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing from University of British Columbia. She grew up here, went to Elphinstone Secondary and had a teacher who encouraged her to write. By the time she was 11, she had read all the kids’ books in the Gibsons library and a supportive librarian brought out more adult ones, even suggesting Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The transition from reader to writer started at an early age for Young, yet this is her first published collection. She submitted the work to Caitlin Press after a chance meeting with a staff member in a line-up at the Festival of the Written Arts. The publishers loved it. It won’t be the last that readers hear of her. Expect a novel from her soon; she recently acquired a Canada Council grant to work on it.
A few years ago Gibsons writer Sarah Roberts won the Danuta Gleed Award with her short story collection, Wax Boats. It was also published by Caitlin Press. Could award lightning strike in the same place again? Fingers are crossed, since besides the honour, the award carries a first prize of $10,000 and two additional prizes of $500.
Hideout Hotel is available in paperback for $18.95.
