The Malahat Review congratulates Carla Funk of Victoria, BC on winning our 2012 Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize! Her story, "Returning,"; was chosen from 125 entries by our final judge, Madeline Sonik. Funk's story will appear in our Winter, 2012 issue (#181). She was also awarded a $1000 CAD prize.

Description: Of Funk's story, Madeline Sonik said: "I was initially hooked by the relentless, poetic list of images that opens this piece and leads the reader to the leitmotif of the 'snow geese.' Just as the narrator is distant from the dying, self-destructive father (both physically and emotionally) the reader, too, enters this story with a long-distance view of the narrator's world. Skilfully, the writer uses small and subtle details to draw us closer, revealing the tragedy of estrangement and the grace of consciousness and reconciliation. The narrator tells us, 'the decades locked like winter in me seemed to shift' as the father, a diabetic with vascular dementia who is expected not to 'last long,' returns from a near death experience. Interestingly, it's not the narrator's desire to make peace with the past that facilitates this thawing, but the father's new-found vulnerability, which is never stated, but rendered with authenticity and precision. Dialogue, though spare, captures the essence of characters and the constructions of family. For example, as the father begins to rally, asking for watermelon, his own 90-year-old mother, sitting in her wheelchair, announces: 'This happens to the dying...They need a little something to make it to the end.'"