Concordia alumna Chanel M. Sutherland wins CBC Nonfiction Prize

Sutherland began working at an e-commerce company following graduation. While at Concordia, she found staff supportive of her writing. She credits “tough but fair” English professor Tess Fragoulis, MA 99, for pushing her out of her comfort zone.

"She set me up," Sutherland says of Fragoulis, who held writing workshops, sitting among students like a writer among equals. “She had no time for BS. She was so confident and I wanted to be like her."

Students had to exchange their stories, which, for Sutherland, was a nerve-wracking experience. “I was a shy, introverted person," she explains. From Fragoulis she learned how to give — and take — criticism with grace, to distinguish between constructive feedback and its opposite, and to feel free to dismiss critics’ suggestions.

"She said, 'it’s okay to get feedback but you don’t have to apply all of it.’"

‘I learned a lot about the writing process’

Sutherland wrote Umbrella during the COVID-19 lockdown and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 against racially motivated police brutality.

"It was triggering and I was finding it hard to adjust," she says. She kept thinking of an incident from her childhood.

Sutherland was already part of a writing group, exchanging stories about trespassing. The notes about micro-aggressions simmering for months on her phone began to coalesce into a story.

“It was hard to separate the me as an adolescent from me as an adult,” she recalls. “I learned a lot about my writing process.”

She tried writing in 25-minute bursts, and finished Umbrella in a matter of days. Writing in short spurts was a relief, Sutherland says. “I always thought writers had to sit at their desks all day, which is frustrating for someone with a full-time job.”

As the CBC contest entry deadline approached in February, Sutherland’s beloved grandmother Rosa passed away from natural causes. She’d stayed in the Caribbean because she found Montreal freezing, even in July, Sutherland recalls.

“She always supported me. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to enter the contest,” she adds.

At the software company where she works as a product marketing director, Sutherland weaves stories that build on characters. "I love to research buyers’ personas; it is like story construction, and there are a lot of similarities,” she says of the connection to her personal writing.

She’s also writing a collection of interconnected short stories that explore the experiences in a small Caribbean village, and the immigrant experience of those who leave to live in Canada.

The CBC Nonfiction Prize comes with a $6,000 award from the Canada Council for the Arts, and Sutherland will attend a two-week writing residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity.