The Union will submit the winning story and the eleven other shortlisted stories to three Canadian magazine publishers for their consideration.
By profession, Heather Tucker works in the health sciences. By passion, she writes fiction. She is a three-time winner of the Writers Community of Durham Region Short Story Competition, and was a finalist in the 2009 Writers Union of Canada Short Prose Competition. Presently she is working on a full-length manuscript.
The Union initiated the Short Prose Competition in 1993 in honour of its twentieth anniversary. The Competition aims to discover, encourage, and promote new writers of short prose who are not yet published in book format, in order to provide opportunity and exposure to developing writers. This year, twenty-five Union members donated their time and expertise to read 525 outstanding submissions and distill them into a longlist of one hundred fourteen stories. These stories went on to a second round of twenty-four readers who selected the finalists to pass on to the jury: Tarek Fatah, K.V. Johansen, and Sharon Pollock.
The jury noted that Tucker’s ‘With All The Trouble Jesus Went Through …’ is a well-written story, focussed and balanced, coming close but not veering into absurdity. It captures the ambiance of the narrator’s life with humour and without angst, creating a credible world and characters. It leaves the reader with both a sense of having witnessed the satisfying completion of a story, and the expectation that for the characters, it is not over.

WordWeaver: How did you come to writing?
Heather Tucker: I.ve come lately to it. It’s been a bit of a journey. Thirteen years ago, my youngest daughter died. A year later, I started writing children’s stories and discovered that, for the first time since her death, I was able to breathe again. I wasn’t sure I wanted to breathe, so I put it away. Ten years after that, I thought, maybe I do want to breathe. I started to do some creative writing, stories about my experiences.
Frank McCourt said, in Angela’s Ashes, that ‘happy childhoods don’t make interesting stories.’ That sparked in me that there’s something redemptive about writing. And I found that there’s oxygen in writing. Suddenly, Elisabeth’s death and her absence became a presence on a page; it became a story. It’s probably been the most healing thing in my life.
WW: What advice would you give an aspiring writer?
HT: It was my belief that I had waited too long to start, but it’s never too late. It could be, perhaps, too early. At 20, maybe I could have written something; I’m not sure I’d have had the voice.
And that nothing’s a waste unless we waste it. We turn what we see as waste and loss into our stories, into gold.
WW: Have you found any mentors?
HT: I’ve discovered friends as well as mentors in the Works in Progress Group (WIP).
That spiritual, creative connection, the honesty you get from other writers looking at your work and giving you constructive feedback. It’s amazing.
WW: Your WIP colleague Sherry Hinman says you critique very thoroughly; not in a negative way but in an extremely positive.
HT: It’s okay to say, ‘This isn’t working for me,. or ‘I’d like to know more about this character.’ In a course I took at U of T, I really learned to critique. The rule [the professor] set down was that people should hear positive things, but they also need honest reflection. As other people speak, you find new and fresh perspectives. Every time I was critiqued, it felt like Christmas: it was a gift.
WW: In what unanticipated direction has WIP critique taken your work?
HT: It was the first time I’d ever heard the phrase show, don’t tell. In technical writing, you tell; you don’t show. You’re very specific: you give instructions, you outline policy. People would say, ‘Show me what happening
here.’ Suddenly my writing came alive.
WW: What was your reaction when they announced that you’d essentially won both first and second place in the contest?
HT: There was a ringing in my ears. I thought, Am I standing up here, but it wasn’t really my name that was called?
WW: A friend of mine calls that imposter syndrome, when you don’t believe you deserve a place among ‘real’ writers.
HT: I feel that all the time. I’m at the Humber School for Writers, working with Joan Barfoot. I read her novels and I think, this is good writing. Then I look at my work and think, this is crap. But she’ll come back and say, ‘This is great!’ and I think, she’s just saying that because I paid to take the course. I think there’s a part of that in all of us.
WW: What comes first for you, setting, characters, plot?
HT: My book is set in Ethiopia; I was a nurse there. Initially, I just wanted to get some of those memories down. Then I read a book by Anne Lamott [Bird by Bird]. She said let your characters tell the story. Suddenly the plot wasn’t very important anymore; I just wanted to see where the characters went. For me that’s been the most amazing part of this whole process: letting the character tell the story, letting him or her grow and change and evolve. They’re becoming who I wish I could be. And that’s the beauty. Interview by Heather M. O’Connor