Each year, Concordia’s Department of English hands out prizes for excellence in the studies of English literature and creative writing. Those include the Irving Layton Awards for Creative Writing, each worth $500 and given to undergraduate students for works of poetry and fiction.
To qualify for the poetry award, students must submit a portfolio of one or several poems.
Emma Healy
The 2013 Irving Layton Award for Creative Writing for poetry went to Emma Healey, BA (English lit. & creative writing) 13. Healey, who’s now working as a writer/editor in Toronto, says she began to write poetry in a first-year course at Concordia. In 2012, she published a book of poetry, Begin With the End in Mind (Arbeiter Ring Publishing).
Here is Healey’s award-winning work, selected poems from her Loan Suite.
By Emma Healey
Jan. 31, 2013
Ms Healey:
Per your letter of the 28th we have noted your assertion that your school has already sent us your Confirmation of Enrolment documentation and will be contacting their Financial Aid & Awards office to confirm. Please allow up to 3 business weeks for processing. In the meantime we have made the necessary adjustments to your personal file, however, we still require your signed declaration & consent forms as well as your parents’ signed declaration & consent forms in order to complete the processing of your 2012-13 application for full-time financial aid (federal and provincial loans and grants).
RE: your other questions, the smell of toner is nothing like the taste of human blood. Revenue Canada requires that you send us original copies of your T4s and not photocopies, which is why we have not yet been able to complete our assessment and verification of your yearly income. We bear no grudge against you personally. “Processing” refers to a series of internal administrative actions the details of which we cannot of course go into here and not whatever that thing is you said. Freshly shredded paper does not sing like a bonfire does and we while we are on the subject have never held an orgy or any kind of ritual/sacrifice in the staff kitchen especially not on this government’s time or payroll and plus for your information there are in fact four large and near-bottomless pits located at the centre of our Incoming Accounts & Mail department which actually we don’t even refer to as pits but now you have got us doing it look the point is only one of them is an incinerator which is something that nearly every important federal financial institution has these days which is a fact they do not teach you in Liberal Arts we’d imagine and the other three are more just like lightless chambers where the facts of your total gross income and rent are lowered gently (not thrown) down to marinate in the gasoline-swell of our ignorance and eventually within up to 3 business weeks are exposed to low heat and turned gracefully particulate before being sucked back into the ducts and eventually settling in a thin layer along the surface of our afternoon. Plural. Or blinds.
All this to say we have looked at your forms; they come in with the light. At this time however we are unfortunately unable to release the estimated details of your potential funding at this time and request that you consult with your school’s financial aid officer if you require further clarification on this or any other matter.
Sincerely,
Notes from the National Student Loans Service Centre staff meeting, 11/5/12
+ Palpitations, pounding heart, or accelerated heart rate
+ Sweating
+ Trembling or shaking
+ Sensations of shortness of breath or smothering
+ Hyperventilation
+ Sensation of choking
+ There are truly people in this world who believe that poetry is as worthy an object of study as business, or refrigeration technology. Why shouldn’t, we encourage each other to ask, we provide some measure of caution against this? If not us then who? The Centre’s floors’ near-imperceptible grade was calculated to let consensus roll swiftly from one side of the building to the other; the ventilation system is notoriously porous. We picture our sons years from now, given only the options of critics, drop ceilings, several women with weak eyes, walled hearts. What becomes, we all wonder, of souls in a world such as ours?and return, newly charged, to the work
+ Nausea or abdominal distress
+ Feelings of dizziness, unsteadiness, lightheadedness
+ Derealization/depersonalization
+ Thanatophobia
+ Paresthesias
+ Chest pain or discomfort
D9. What is the cost of a round trip from your school to your parents’ home, by the most economical means possible?
A year ago my mother mailed me a newspaper clipping about a Megabus in the U.S. whose driver, sleep-deprived and running late, had attempted to deviate from his usual route in order to save time. The bus was too tall to fit under an overpass. Everyone died. There was a picture — spectacular flames, shattered glass glittering across the blacktop like teeth knocked out. Spilled luggage pluming. Like a shipwreck but sharper. Last summer a sinkhole opened up downtown and swallowed a car whole; outside of town, on the highway, half a tunnel collapsed onto a schoolbus and pinned the kids inside for days. One went feral just waiting. Two days ago near school a major pipe burst and flooded everything before it froze and now half of McGill’s cryogenic until the spring thaw. Students and everything. I saw them trying to chip a car out of the ice. The last apartment I lived in leaned into itself until it collapsed. There are a few different kinds of love in this world. When you cross in a vehicle from this province into the next you can feel the soft highway sighing into your knees. There are different kinds of love, and in exchange for each we promise a new kind of risk to ourselves. And to others.
Notes from the National Student Loans Service Centre general staff meeting, 11/25/12
+ Carbon: 900 pencils
+ Iron: 1 (one) 3-inch nail
+ Potassium: 1 (one) small clock radio for several hours
+ Fat: 7 (seven) bars of soap
+ Intestine: ~25 ft. (?)
+ Of course we wonder. We have children of our own. We have fielded our share of tearful phone calls, felt their fear echo through parts of our selves we had long thought cordoned off, disused. Some of us, separately and without consultation, have developed a theory concerning the work: that it most closely resembles the act of being given a severed limb by the person to whom it once belonged. We have no use for the arm, or the leg, of a stranger in this way — are, in fact, possessed of our own, of a surplus — but etiquette and common sense all dictate we must accept it nonetheless, and gracefully set it atop of the pile with the others, send its owner limping out into the treacherous sunset still only half free. Our children, to clarify, do not ever call us at work. In the idler moments — choking our lukewarm coffee, searching for holes in the protective glass — we find ourselves thinking about the people we decided, lifetimes ago, we would belong to. How we watch them recede, further with each passing day, as we do our best to bring these strangers closer in. We wonder. Of course we wonder. Of course we do.
+ Phosphorous: 2,000 match heads
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