Toronto writer places first in Star’s Short Story Contest with millennial tale of landlords and dollhouses

Toronto-based writer and consultant Alice Gauntley came out on top in the Star’s 45th annual short story contest with a tale that captured the anxieties and struggles of modern living.

The 29-year-old learned her story, “Free to a Good Home” — a tale about today’s housing woes and the financial instability foisted upon the younger generation — placed first in one of Canada’s largest short story contests Tuesday evening.

“I’m incredibly excited,” Gauntley told the Star. “I grew up seeing this contest in the paper and reading various stories over the years, and being like, ‘Oh, maybe someday that’s going to be me.’”

Gauntley wins $5,000 cash, print publication of her story on May 6 and a scholarship for two programs at the Humber School for Writers, a sponsor of the contest.

A consultant for LGBTQ inclusion by day, Gauntley says she’s been a lifelong writer. Her works have been featured in numerous publications, including the 2021 edition of “Best Canadian Stories” by Biblioasis.

Gauntley’s true love are stories with a “literary speculative edge,” a genre that “Free to a Good Home” encapsulates with its unique blend of magical realism. Gauntley’s story follows a young woman with the ability to shrink her body. Facing eviction from her apartment, the protagonist finds a discarded dollhouse and, on a whim, decides to bring it home.

“It was very much about those millennial anxieties that I think we all have, especially living in a city like Toronto,” Gauntley said. She hoped her tale captured that prevalent sense of worry around housing and affordability, especially among young people looking to build a life for themselves.

Although Gauntley’s personal housing situation is more secure than her protagonist’s, she said much of the character’s inspiration came from her and her friends’ lived experiences.

“On the lighter side, I feel like I have always been fascinated by miniatures,” Gauntley continued. “I think there’s something like so charming about a miniature scene, but also something just a little bit uncanny about it.”

After placing second, Toronto’s 24-year-old Jasmine Ng said she can finally call herself a “real” writer. Her story, “Fish and Forgiveness,” a raw, feminist tale exploring what it means to create what she calls a “labour of love,” netted Ng a $2,000 cheque and a print byline on April 29.

A third-year medical school student with a lifelong love of writing, Ng said her storytelling has played a major role in broadening her perspective of health care: “I don’t think that you can be a doctor without being a human being first,” she said. “… If you’re attuned to other people’s stories, people tell you more about themselves, which I think is one of the most meaningful parts of medicine.”

“Fish and Forgiveness” follows a wife and her bloodied attempts to provide fish for her husband, to appease the man following a violent incident the previous night.

“My family is Cantonese, we’re from Hong Kong, and one of the things I remember most is that we love to eat fish,” Ng said. When preparing dinner, her mom once described the unseen labour that went into cleaning and cooking the fish — something Ng hadn’t fully appreciated until that moment.

“I realized that this was a labour of love,” she said. “And I thought, you know, let’s explore this concept of a labour of love. And that was the root of the story.”

While Ng has been published in some University of Toronto publications, “Fish and Forgiveness” will be the first of her works to run in a major paper. She’s currently querying agents about a novel she wrote.

“I can now say that I’m a writer more securely, but I shouldn’t forget that I also was a writer before this,” she said. “I just didn’t have, I guess, the courage to claim it as my own title.”

Freelance journalist Natalya Anderson placed third with her story “Two Cadavers Seek Witnesses at Shoppers Drug Mart,” a humanistic exploration of childhood sexual assault and the unseen experiences of the strangers around us. The piece won $1,000 and will be published in print on April 22.

Anderson’s journalism can mostly be found in the Financial Post and Canadian Family Offices. Her poetry has been featured in publications across Canada, Ireland and England.

A survivor of childhood sexual abuse and currently recovering from anorexia, Anderson said her story was about “finding moments of humanity or moments of childhood in an almost impossible childhood and adolescence.

Anderson’s story follows two teen survivors of sexual assault on day leave from their hospital ward. The girls lean on each other as they fight for some semblance of normalcy, while unknowing strangers look on.

While not based around her real life, Anderson said her lived experience helped “ground” the piece in reality. She hopes it will inspire readers to support and stand up for victims of sexual assault.

“Abuse is bad in all forms and it’s horrible to experience,” Anderson said. “But what’s worse is surviving it, having the courage to tell someone about it and have them not react.”

On the lighter side, she also hopes “People would just have a laugh and remember that everybody’s going through something.”

All stories submitted were under 2,500 words, and can be of any genre. The three finalists were decided by a panel of five judges out of 25 top entrants.

SHARE: