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Rossland writer shortlisted for Cedric Literary Awards

A local writer was a finalist in a Western Canadian writing contest.
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Louise Sidley of Rossland was a finalist in the Cedric Literary Awards. (Submitted)

A local writer was a finalist in a Western Canadian writing contest.

The Cedric Literary Awards are open to writers 50 or better from B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Yukon and this year the contest received more than 80 manuscripts in the categories of Fiction, Creative Non-Fiction, Poetry and First Nations Writing.

Rossland resident Louise Sidley entered the Cedric Literary Awards for the time this year and was one of 12 finalists shortlisted for the awards.

She entered her short story, Nemo Creek.

“It’s about a middle-aged man who is going through some rough times and he’s trying to reconnect with nature and so he’s camping out in the wild, but then it turns sideways on him,” explained Sidley. “And it comes to kind of a tragic ending that he actually caused, but didn’t mean to. So he would never be able to return again.”

Sidley said she was inspired to write the story because she herself enjoys spending time in nature.

The judge for the Cedric Literary Awards mentioned liking the camping and fishing details in the story:

“There is so much to like about this story: the highly credible camping and fishing details, the suspense of the rotting smell, which turns out to be a foreshadow of the tragedy to come, the undercurrent of personal grief in the form of a failing marriage that lends a poignancy to the rituals of Jeremy’s time at the creek. You give us a flawed, complex protagonist in Jeremy,” reads the judge’s comment.

Nemo Creek didn’t win, but Sidley said it felt good to be among the finalists.

“I’ll be curious to see what the winning story was all about,” she said.

Sidley said she formally started writing when she joined the Columbia River Writers in about 1999.

“It was a writers’ group that was just forming then in Rossland,” she explained. “And they’ve been meeting together since then, so now it’s been 18 years this group’s been getting together.”

Sidley found out about the Cedric Literary Awards when a member of the group sent around an email.

She received a master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of B.C. in 2010 and has had her work published in literary journals across the country, such as The Dalhousie Review and The Prairie Journal. Previously, her short stories have won first place in the Joyce Dunn Memorial Writers Competition, and she recently headlined as a reader at Oysters, Authors & Ale in Bamfield, B.C.