Alhamdulillah, I am a finalist for the 2024 PEN Canada New Voices Award.*
I tend to not submit my work to contests because the competition feels fierce and I know so many good stories don’t win, because, how to choose what stands out from hundreds of submissions? But I pushed myself this year to submit a story. I figured I had nothing to lose, so why not.
When I was notified that my story made the shortlist for this competition, to be honest I didn’t feel as excited as I thought I would feel. The last time I was a finalist for an award was five years ago, and when I received the news for that award, I was ecstatic. Like, ‘Omg is this really happening, someone pinch me!’ ecstatic. This time, I was more like, ‘Oh cool. That’s nice.’
So I’ve been thinking a lot about why there’s been this big shift in my response. This award isn’t as prominent as the award that I was a finalist for in 2019. But still, to be shortlisted for anything is huge, Alhamdulillah, and I am grateful for it. But it still left me curious about my response and I’ve been trying to sort out why I’m feeling the way that I am.
I think the biggest reason has been growing as a writer, being more certain than ever of the fact that my ‘talent’ isn’t anything special, that so many writers have so many amazing stories inside of them, and they just need the right environment and the right support and guidance in learning craft in order to get these stories out.
I’ve also become more confident in my abilities as a writer. I went through this phase where it felt like every story that I wrote made me unlearn something that I had been taught about writing. I was able to see clearly how harmful some of these ideas I had picked up about writing were, some of which were directly taught in writing programs that I’ve taken. I held on to these ideas, believed in them, and passed them on to my students and writers I’ve worked with, until I saw through my own writing, that these ideas weren’t entirely true.
With the story that I submitted for this contest, I broke a writing rule. I switched the point of view (POV) at the end of the story. You can break writing rules if you know why you’re breaking them, and if doing so serves the story. So I wasn’t doing anything unheard of. But I did question myself many times — Does it work that the POV switch happens towards the end of the story? Does it feel gimmicky, like I was trying something just to be clever? Was I being too ambitious? Even if the POV switch worked, was I reaching for too much with such a short story?
At one point, I felt like I should share the story with another writer get their feedback. I’m grateful that I have a few writers who are my go-to for critique. They ask thoughtful questions about my work and their feedback always leaves me feeling hopeful. But whenever I would reread my story, and my gut response was always, ‘I like this. This story is working and it wouldn’t be what it is without the POV switch.’ I decided to submit the story without getting anyone’s feedback on it.
Five years ago, with that first story that was a finalist for the bigger award, I got several critiques on it before I even considered submitting the story anywhere for publication. I needed to hear someone tell me, “Your story is ready. You should submit it.” And it was only when a writer-friend who had critiqued that story told me those words that I began submitting my work.
Part of this is natural. When we’re new to something, we’re unsure of ourselves. It takes a great amount of courage to say to yourself, ‘Yes, I’m going to do this. I’m going to take this scary step and embark on this scary unknown adventure. I don’t feel ready, but I’m going to do it anyway.’ I’m glad I had people in my life who helped me cross that threshold.
But setting aside those first-time nerves, I felt this way was because everything I had learnt about writing, everything that writing programs taught me, made me believe that I wasn’t ready. That until I had some external validation that my story was good, I couldn’t do anything with it. I couldn’t trust my own judgement, despite learning craft and knowing enough about it to write a good story. And this was because I was too close to my story. I would never be able to see the flaws in it that others would be able to spot.
As I write this, it reminds me so much of the way our white-supremacist world operates: Palestinians are unreliable narrators of the injustice their people have been enduring for decades. Independent journalists are needed in Gaza to report on what the Israeli military is doing there. The work of Palestinian journalists is important, but it is not enough. Everything needs to be corroborated by ‘independent’ journalists. I see so many people on my social media share posts about the genocide by groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, but rarely share anything by people in Gaza talking about what the Israeli military is doing to them or Palestinians in the diaspora explaining how the occupation has affected them. It’s almost as if the same news is more trustworthy when it’s shared by non-Palestinians, by those who are ‘objective’. The more proximity to whiteness the person/group sharing the news has, the more reliable it is.
But I digress. Returning back to my story, I pushed away the urge to get it critiqued, to have someone else corroborate what I already knew to be true — this was a good story and the POV switch was working. And so when I got shortlisted for this award, and the jury acknowledged the POV switch in their citation for my story, they were simply confirming what I already knew.
Jury Citation
“This story drew us in with its quiet, taut tension. The writing is clear and not flashy; the quality of the craft is evident throughout, and particularly in the shading of the supporting characters, each of whom is negotiating in her own way the presence of the father. The jurors all appreciated the surprise of the ending and the sudden resulting shift in point of view. The rupture is not where we imagined it to be, and this story turns out to not be a story about the father. We are forced to read the events in a new light, with some questions about the narrator’s own part in the family system, all of which add richness.”
To find readers who connect with your work, more so when they are authors whose works you admire, is always rewarding and a feeling that I don’t take for granted. I’m grateful that they saw what I was doing with the POV switch and that it landed for them the way that I had intended. I’m grateful that this story stood out to the jury, so much so that they chose it to be a finalist out of more than 500 submissions. My non-euphoric response to the news doesn’t negate my gratitude.
But I’m more grateful of the fact that I’ve arrived here, at a place where a win like this makes me say Alhamdulillah for my writing abilities. If I hadn’t been shortlisted, it wouldn’t have made me change my mind about the story. In fact, I had submitted this same story to other contests and my story didn’t even get long-listed for those awards. But those two non-wins didn’t make me think any less of my story. They didn’t make me think, ‘I’m wrong about my instincts; this story isn’t working.’ And I’d like to think that if it was the same outcome for this award, my response would have been the same — to trust my instincts, to keep sending it out until it landed with someone who connected with it.
*You can read more about the award and an excerpt from my shortlisted story here.