“I’m excited, I want to cry … I’m trying really hard not to mess up my makeup,” said Chanel Sutherland on hearing that she had won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for her story “Descend.” The ebullience in the video, which was shown at the award ceremony, is clearly authentic; the author can still recall the rush the announcement gave her. “I was exhausted but hearing that I won, there was this surge of energy,” she says, speaking on a video call from her home in Montreal. “Suddenly, I was not tired anymore.”
Though Sutherland says she was shocked by the news, which came just about one month after “Descend” won the regional Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Canada and Europe, it is not the first time her writing has been recognized in such a way. Her short autobiographical piece “Umbrella” won the CBC Nonfiction Prize in 2021 and the following year “Beneath the Softness of Snow” won the CBC Short Story Prize.
Sutherland says she has always identified as a writer, but didn’t become really serious about it until 2020, a year that was remarkable for the confluence of Covid-19 lockdowns and the murder of George Floyd that led to a resurgence in the Black Lives Matter movement. The combined toll these events exacted helped spur Sutherland into a new period of productivity. “There were a lot of emotions and a lot of unresolved feelings inside me that I needed to work through,” she says. “I thought the only way I could really do that – because the world was pretty much shut down at the time – was through writing.”
She didn’t start with fiction; “Umbrella” was the first thing she wrote, which felt to her like a stretch from her preferred mode. “I always thought of myself as a fiction writer,” she says. Not just fiction, but a specific kind of fiction: “I’m a sci-fi person.” She cites Isaac Asimov’s work as foundational (so to speak), and becomes animated when she talks about her preferred work of fantasy. “Lord of the Rings is my favourite thing ever,” she says. “I’ve read it, like, ten times and watched the movies more times. That’s me. That’s where I’m comfortable.”
While she is “itching to get back” to speculative fiction, in the years following 2020 she found herself pursuing material that lent itself to a more literary presentation. “It’s this weird world I find myself in,” she says. “But I’m just following the stories and wherever they take me, I’m just going to go with it.”
Her willingness to “go with it” has paid off, not just with the CBC prizes and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize; next spring, Sutherland’s debut story collection, Layaway Child, is set to appear with House of Anansi Press’s Astoria imprint. “It’s a bunch of short stories about the Vincentian Caribbean experience in Montreal,” she says. “It’s centred around girlhood and motherhood and all the complexities of those relationships.”
Complexities in relationships between characters are profound in her published writing to date, which addresses subjects of migration, both forced and otherwise. “Beneath the Softness of Snow” is about a woman who abandons her husband and child to become a live-in nanny for a privileged white family in Montreal, while “Descend” focuses on a group of imprisoned Blacks on a sinking slave ship who tell stories to offer each other some measure of solace from the horrors of their situation.
Though she thinks of herself primarily as a fiction writer, autobiographical or semi-autobiographical elements do work themselves into her stories. “Beneath the Softness of Snow” is based on her mother’s experience immigrating to Canada, a story unfolded over long walks during the period of Covid isolation. “My mom and I are now at the stage of our relationship where we are friends,” Sutherland says. “We started taking these walks almost every day. And from that, we began talking about both of our experiences and she started telling me about her experience when she first came to Canada. Juliet [in the story] is modelled after my mom.”
From that genesis, Sutherland was able to fashion a story that allowed the immigrant experience to appear in the form of metaphor; it should not escape any reader’s attention that the snow in the title and throughout the piece is associated with the employer’s skin colour. But beyond any symbolic implications, snow has another resonance for Sutherland, both as an immigrant and a storyteller. “Snow is such an interesting thing and the cold is such an interesting thing for someone who has never experienced it before,” she says. “It’s the most foreign thing you can feel to go from a climate that is tropical and always warm to this place where you’re hit with cold. I thought it was a really interesting metaphor for what it must be like to be a young mother – she was in her twenties – coming to this foreign place and you’re facing all this coldness metaphorically and physically.”
It was also important for Sutherland to shine a light on the experiences of Caribbean immigrant women like her mother, because the culture around women from the region is that they do not generally talk about their feelings or their situations outside of a very select group of close friends. There is what Sutherland calls a “put up and shut up” mentality among many Caribbean women that made her want to provide a conduit for their stories to come out. “It’s interesting because once I did, not just Caribbean women but people who came to Canada from different parts of the world suddenly wanted to talk about what happened to them and their experience,” she says.
If writing “Beneath the Softness of Snow” was an attempt to give women like her mother a voice in fictional form, “Descend” proved even more ambitious, both in conception and execution. Structurally adventurous, the story is framed with a choral “we” narrative comprising the prisoners in the bowels of the slave ship; it then zooms in on certain individuals who relate stories of their homeland before becoming enslaved.
Sutherland credits a Vincentian women’s writing group of which she is a member for the story. The group had a list of writing contests to which they wanted to contribute material; the Commonwealth Short Story competition was at the top of the heap. With one week to go before the entry deadline, the group began talking about which of them should submit a story. Despite being in the middle of composing a novel and feeling as though she just “didn’t have it in” her, Sutherland felt that research she had been doing on the transatlantic slave trade might offer her some usable material for a story.
What she began writing was nothing like the finished work. Sutherland set out to write the story of the first people to come to St. Vincent, who history suggests were either shipwrecked off a slave ship or enslaved people who revolted against their captors and made it onto the island. Her story was meant to be linear and told through one consistent point of view. But she was sidetracked when the first of a succession of individual voices inserted itself into her narrative. “I don’t even remember why I decided to write it the way that I did,” she says. “It just felt like that’s what the story wanted to be.”
The process was completely intuitive, which Sutherland says is typical for her. She does not map out the trajectory of a particular work, preferring to allow the story to determine where it wants to go and how it wants to get there. In the case of “Descend,” she simply listened to the various voices that announced themselves to her as she was composing the piece. In fact, Sutherland seems almost as mystified about how her story-within-a-story-within-a-story structure manifested itself as anyone. “I wasn’t sure what they were going to be until I got to the end of each story. I would get to the end of the first story not knowing what the second story was going to be,” she says. “I don’t know what that is – maybe it’s inspiration or a muse or whatever. I call it the ancestors guiding me.”
For Sutherland, the ability to free write and let the story determine its own shape is part of the joy, and clearly something that has served her well. She says the full-length piece she is currently working on requires a bit more in the way of planning, though she still wants to leave herself sufficient space to play and allow the narrative to surprise her along the way. “For me, the enjoyment of writing is just being able to sit down with pen and paper and see where it takes me,” she says. “You can edit after.”