Colette Langlois accepts the prestigious Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize for her short story “The Emigrants.”
The prize, made possible after James A. Michener donated his Canadian royalty earnings from his 1998 novel Journey, is for new and developing writers for the best short story first published in a Canadian literary journal during the previous year.
A native of Yellowknife, N.W.T., Langlois is now pursuing a master of science degree at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
15-year break from writing
While Langlois’s interests at Concordia were mainly in screenwriting and playwriting — she recalls professor Henry Beissel as being very inspiring — she only came to novel and short-story writing following a 15-year hiatus from the craft.
After graduating from Concordia, she earned a law degree from McGill University and then worked in public service in the Northwest Territories. Langlois admits she accidentally returned to writing while on a one-year travel leave from work, when she wrote a blog to keep friends and family back home apprised of her journey.
“I enjoyed the process of keeping that blog. I realized how much I enjoyed writing and of course I had a lot more time to do it. Towards the end of that year, I got the idea for a novel,” Langlois says.
“Of course, I had to go back to work, but I did keep working on it, and started going to writers’ workshops again and started writing some short stories as well.”
“The Emigrants” is the combination of two story ideas Langlois had brought to a writing workshop two years ago in Crestone, CO. One character is based loosely on what she discovered about her family while researching her ancestry and the other about is the last survivor of an experimental colony on Mars.
“All I had for that was a glimmer of someone breathing on a carrot — and that was it,” Langlois says. “I thought they would be two separate stories but when I started writing about them in the workshop, I realized the two characters had quite a bit in common.”
While Langlois has no ambitions to write fulltime, she would love to have a few solitary hours a day to work on her craft.
Her master’s degree studies are in rehabilitation science, focusing on speech therapy. That interest was also sparked while taking a linguistics course during her time at Concordia yet lay dormant for the past several years.
Langlois hopes to see a resurgence in demand for the short-story genre, given how little free time people have these days. “That’s maybe where the growth could be, as opposed to the long Tolstoy novels.”