Adam Harris

Today on the Scroll: Taking one for the home team as the winners of the EYE WEEKLY Short Story Contest soak up their 14th minute of fame.

Once upon a time, an event billed as the "EYE WEEKLY Emerging Writers Night" would suggest a socially inept music critic, a film writer speaking in obscure references and a humour columnist drunk on their own ego. Mercifully, things have evolved for the better, as last night the Gladstone Hotel ballroom played host to the winner and two runners-up of the Short Story Contest, as part of the This Is Not a Reading Series.

Grand prize winner Daniel Scott Tysdal’s "What Is Missing" was read from the stage, along with runner-up Alexander Cole's "The Kali Yuga" and Grace O’Connell’s "Annie, You Foolish Girl, I Love You." The three writers, all under age 30, then indulged in a panel discussion led by Coach House Books editor Alana Wilcox. Somewhat surprisingly for fiction-contest winners, there wasn’t a shrinking violet in the bunch.

Stories were plucked from 150 submissions, a slush pile that included a number of failed genre exercises, clumsy use of language, and at least two stories starring characters named “Monday.” Quirky science fiction in the style of Kurt Vonnegut was also a recurring genre, allegedly entertaining when it’s done well, and annoying when it’s not. The judges who volunteered these exact details will remain just as unnamed as the writers responsible — but it looked like they bet on the right horses.

Daniel Scott Tysdal, 29, got his story about the social anatomy of a kidnapping published in the print edition of EYE WEEKLY, along with $500 — a princely sum by free fish-wrap standards. Turns out that he’s not much of a short-story writer at all, though, rather a well-published poet from Moose Jaw who landed here in September 2006 to pursue his M.A. in creative writing at the University of Toronto.

“The whole reason I became a writer was because, like so many others, around age 14 I started exploring my own interiority and got accustomed to the solitude,” says Tysdal. “In fact, I think that’s the reason that people who are crummy writers continue to pursue it, anyway, just to continue to spend that time with themselves.”

The eccentric side is further projected by Tysdal’s hairstyle, Samson-style curls that maybe bring to mind the mane once sported by his past thesis subject, David Foster Wallace. “I started growing the hair when I was living in Calgary, where everything is so thoroughly cleansed, and so overly trimmed,” explains Tysdal. “Life there is so clinical, so maybe this was my unconscious reaction to all that. Plus, I figure I only have five years left with this hair, anyway, so I might as well exploit it.”

Tysdal has won poetry contests before, making him notable enough to earn a Wikipedia entry that he didn’t write himself, with acclaim including a National Magazine Award and finalist status in the CBC National Poetry Face-Off. He’s stumbled across his name on a 16-year-old’s MySpace page, claiming she’d like to meet him, William Blake (if he wasn’t dead), Margaret Atwood, and “any random vampire.”

But the level of fame attached to being a poet comes with its share of humbling moments, too. Tysdal was informed that his collection, Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough, could be bought locally at This Ain’t the Rosedale Library, only to learn that they sent the copies back to the publisher because they didn’t sell. However, as he won the contest by constructing a narrative between bookended ideas developed with a work of poetry in mind, the judges were apparently buying.

Grace O’Connell, 23, is another inveterate contest winner, taking the grand prize in This Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt along with finalist status in the BC Bronwen Wallace Prize for Emerging Writers. It's a favourable turn of events for someone who recently graduated from the publishing program at Humber College, imagining herself as part of the book business more than a professional writer.

Now she’s earned enough encouragement to give it a try, earning her third-place EYE WEEKLY status for her description of what it’s like to be in love with someone, regardless of whether any sexual or romantic feelings are involved in that process.

“I don’t think there’s room for me to be a prima donna,” she says. “For me, writing is best treated as a job, rather than the illusion of hiding in a garret, living on cigarettes and coffee. If there’s an image that evolves around me, I don’t want it to be a bad one that gets in the way of looking at the page as a blank canvas each time. Plus, the main reason I got into writing is that I was pretty much a wallflower.”

Young female writers can’t avoid being judged by the mood of their jacket photos, though, and a bit of gratuitous controversy never hurts, either. O’Connell has mixed feelings about local novelist Stephen Marche trying to sell books through a Toronto Star-published polemic raging against the tyranny of CanLit, suggesting that all the old writers and reviewers should wither and die so that he can get his turn in the limelight.

“It’s the classic Canadian chip on the shoulder,” she says. “And the slagging of established writers is a national pastime. I just don’t think you can judge the quality of someone’s writing by the number of skateboard rides they take in a week.”

Alexander Cole, 26, moved here from Cleveland to attend York University. His second-place entry in the EYE WEEKLY contest was about the right to rebel even when all circumstances were perfectly fine. Getting onstage to talk about his story was most natural for him, since he writes and performs for comedy troupe Radio Vault. Short fiction has been a passion since being seduced by J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories.

“I just hated Catcher in the Rye,” he says. “So I couldn’t believe that someone who wrote something I couldn’t stand could be responsible for something so eloquent.”

Cole was quickly inspired by the experimental side of the local literary scene, beyond the fact that it’s livelier than anything Cleveland has to offer. Working as an intern at legendary literary magazine Descant armed him with a sense of what was possible, and the determination to reach as many potential readers as possible.

“I don’t like the process of writing as a solitary pursuit,” says Cole. “The blank white page, the grueling seclusion — after a while you can no longer look at your own work objectively. I need a sounding board to learn if my work has affected anyone, or is even worthy of feedback to begin with, even if the response is that it sucked. I can impress myself all I want, but it’s more important to have someone else react — rather than just throwing a coin into the well and not knowing what became of it.”

And out of the three writers on the Gladstone stage, Cole seemed to have developed the most thorough philosophy about his writing process, explaining his fondness for the short story because the final product tends to most closely reflect the way in which people remember things. Was this a theory he thought of before?

“No, I just made it up on the spot, actually,” he reveals. “But if you think it’s brilliant, put it in there, especially if it’s something that can help me get some grant money.”

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