Dear Number Seventeen,
If you only knew how close you had come. How many friends you had in that room, and how valiantly they fought for you – and how it was just luck, at that point, which prevented you from placing in the top sixteen. We took our job seriously, we men and women of the Ontario Arts Council jury, purses clenched close to our hearts, stuffed with just enough to money to feed and clothe sixteen promising writers while they laboured over their novels. You fell into seventeenth place; for that reason, and that cruel reason alone, you will starve.
When I agreed to be on the jury, and when all 140 manuscript samples landed on my doorstop (waking up the whole neighborhood), I was glowing inside out with self-righteousness and illusions of great, heaping generosity. My instructions were to read each sample and rank it on a scale of Yes-No-Maybe, as though each were a note from a twelve-year-old boy sitting opposite me in homeroom (a fantasy: I was far more often the author of these notes than the recipient, and as such I empathize with you, Seventeen, all the more). On the appointed date in February, I presented myself at the OAC office in
.JPG)
