CURRENT ISSUE

Uplift the Craft: Stephen Leckie in Conversation with Francine Cunningham

Your stories have won awards and made shortlists in literary writing contests. What is your process for submitting your work?

First thing I don’t do is write a new story for a contest, because that would mean for me that I am writing in a panic and it probably won’t be my best work. I instead look for the word length of a story contest and look to see if I have any stories in my completed edited file that fit that length, then I go look who the judges are and get a feel for their writing style. Contest submissions can add up really fast money-wise so I want to be smart in where I submit.

In terms of general submitting I read the magazine or journal to determine if my writing would fit what I think they’re looking for. Then it’s just luck of the slush pile. I also don’t send out brand new work, I instead always give a story a few years to simmer and be revised over and over before it gets into my completed edited file of stories. Once it’s in there though, I am very confident in the story and I like to have a bunch of ready-to-go stories at my disposal.  

As a judge, what are you looking for in a winning story?

I am looking for a story that excels at the craft level, one that plays with structure and form, and as cliché as it may sound, is exciting. I want something that plays and bends reality in a way that uplifts the craft of the story.

In ON/Me (Caitlin Press 2019) you speak to readers who may struggle with identity. How does your fiction interrogate challenges with other/self? Do you look for stories that reveal the author as their own subject?

Not particularly, I’ve never really considered it. My fiction may have elements of my lived experience in it, in the small details, like the cracked peeling pink linoleum in my mother’s house, but a lot of the times my fiction is just that, fiction. My ideas come from my dreams, from conversations I overhear in the world, from the weirdest places on the internet. 

Your short story collection, God Isn't Here Today, is forthcoming in 2022 from Invisible Press. Did submitting to literary journals and contests help you pick the stories for your collection?

I wanted to craft a narrative within the entire book that is comprised by all the stories so as I was going through my stories and ordering them I kept that narrative in my mind. I wasn’t concerned with which stories were award winners, or contest finalists, or published, I was more concerned with the story the collection was telling as a whole. There will always be more collections and more opportunities for stories to live in them.

How has your role as an educator and visual media creator inspired your literary writing?

With ON/Me I was focused on writing for the Indigenous youth I work with, and in the novel I am working on that is also the audience I am writing for. I mean I hope that lots of people connect and find meaning in my work but for these two projects I really hoped that youth would particularly connect.

Are there any books you are enjoying at the moment?

I am enjoying nonfiction books that explore pandemics honestly, I dunno, for me looking at the past is helping me get through the present.

 

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