Redefining north.

PN announces Waasnode Short Fiction Prize winners!

PN announces Waasnode Short Fiction Prize winners!

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Passages North is delighted to announce the results of our biannual Waasnode Short Fiction prize, judged this year by Jonathan Escoffery. We have included his praise for the winning stories below.

WINNER
Martial Artists by Roland Jackson

I was immediately drawn in by the strength of the narrative voice in "Martial Artists" and kept fully immersed in the world of the story, in part for its spare language and its precise details. Fueled by news of the murder of a black motorcyclist by white policemen in Indiana, a black sawyer living in small-town Arizona joins an unconventional school for martial arts. This is no self-defense course that prizes restraint--rather, operating as a kind of fight club (bar fights encouraged), it serves as a vehicle for our narrator to explore and exercise his black rage, and to do so selectively enough that readers might feel a tinge of satisfaction as he doles out beatings and climbs in rank. But the violence and physical action is understated enough that we never lose sight of the emotional journey, however subtly rendered. Our protagonist learns to heal, as well as destroy, and as one of two black people in town, and partially estranged from his parents, he leaves his self-imposed isolation to demonstrate through his new community his desire to care for and protect others. The story is strange, insightful, and atmospheric, and I look forward to reading more from its author.

HONORABLE MENTION
Ghost Story by Ananda Lima

“Ghost Story” is ambitious, with its metafictional aspects and its sweeping scope: time traveling ghosts, Brazilian and U.S. politics, gender expectations, religious fundamentalism, familial expectations and favoritism, the housing crisis, the coming apocalypse, and even some frustrating workshop feedback. Most compelling, perhaps, is the question of what we give up when we move away to make a life. Our fiction writer narrator returns from New York to Brazil to her parents' newly finished dream home and discovers it's been decided that her brother--the forever favorite--will inherit the house. While the present-day narrator handles the news gracefully, her ghost has traveled back from a gloomy future to haunt her mother for this decision. Or maybe her mother is so haunted by her guilt that she is seeing things? The story suggests that perception might just be reality, as again and again the most obvious of lies become truth by consensus. For all of its moving parts, what I find most haunting about this story is the candid and difficult conversations between the mother and daughter about what it is we owe each other.

FINALISTS
Erased by Catherine Boyd
The Beautiful Girl From Sanshin by Emma Eun-joo Choi
Chameleon by Frankie Concepcion
The Bug-out by Sarah Harshbarger
Yok, I Swear by Tammy Heejae Lee
El pan de cada día by Thomas Maya
Wild Gods by Michael McClelland
An Aftermath in Gold and Red by Sarp Sozdinler

The winning story and honorable mention will be published in the upcoming issue. Thanks to everyone who entered!

Grief Hot Dog by Gabrielle Grace Hogan

Grief Hot Dog by Gabrielle Grace Hogan

PN announces Neutrino Short-Short Prize winners!

PN announces Neutrino Short-Short Prize winners!

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