'Unpredictable but utterly perfect': Sarah Selecky's recipe for 'This Cake is For the Party'

Related Galleries

2010 Scotiabank Giller Award Gala

View images from this year's Scotiabank Giller Award gala.

Related Articles

Publisher to ship Johanna Skibsrud's award-winning novel this week

The novel has been in high demand since Skibsrud won the $50,000 award.

Montreal's Johanna Skibsrud wins $50,000 Giller, but book is tough to find

Thirty-year-old Montreal author Johanna Skibsrud became the youngest recipient to ever win the prize.

Johanna Skibsrud wins $50,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize

Montrealer Johanna Skibsrud Prize won for her debut novel "The Sentimentalists."

Advertisement

by: Sheri Block
Date: 11/2/2010 2:39:00 PM ET

An innocent weekend at the cabin that turns into an adulterous affair; a celebratory dinner party that instead serves up salacious secrets; a bus ride home that will change a young girl’s life forever.

The ten short stories in Sarah Selecky’s debut collection “This Cake is For the Party” don’t always take the path the reader expects but that’s exactly what the Toronto-based author intended.

“I can’t remember where I first heard it, but a short story’s ending should always be completely unpredictable but utterly perfect and a reader must be surprised but also (think) that it couldn’t have ended any other way,” Selecky tells CTV.ca.

Many of the stories in “This Cake,” which is a finalist for the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, seem to deal with the mundane things of life on the surface but pack a powerful punch by the story’s conclusion.

Selecky says because the narrative of a short story must be compressed, every detail must be of utmost importance.

“That includes pencil shavings on the ground or whatever it is. Everything has to become imbued with meaning because you don’t have enough space to have anything that’s not.”

Even though themes of love, cheating, self-improvement, entrepreneurship and yes, dinner parties, run through the stories in “This Cake,” Selecky says she didn’t always intend to put them together in a collection.

She has been crafting the characters and stories since 2002, many of which have been published in the likes of “The Walrus” and “Prairie Fire,” but didn’t think about putting them together in a book until a few years later.

“It’s been a strange experience for me,” says Selecky. “I have felt kind of exposed when putting all the stories together that way actually because when it’s one (at a time) I could deal with the story as a piece but when I put it all together I couldn’t avoid the fact that I write about dinner parties and I write about food.”

Selecky admits that dinner parties are her main social hub, as she considers herself a homebody, but also because she loves cooking and introducing people to other people.

“Around the dinner table is where I see some exciting conversations happen. It’s where I see exciting personalities either mix or clash or open up to each other. The dinner table is sort of the heart of my social world. I think I’ve spent many hours listening to my friends talk around the table and mentally taking notes about everything,” says Selecky with a laugh.

It’s particularly interesting when the attendees include other writers and something is said that everyone knows would make a great story.

“Then there’s this full, slightly awkward pause where all the writers look at each other and then someone raises their hand and says, ‘Can I have that?’ or ‘Can I use that?’”

Selecky says when writing a short story, the characters usually come to her first, and she often finds inspiration in a line of dialogue or an image – something that might not have anything to do with what ends up being the crux of  the story.

“It’s almost like a picture (in my mind) that’s charged with emotion, a picture that’s charged with feeling and then I’ll draw it out from there.”

Since it often takes eight months to hear back after submitting a short story to a publication, Selecky says she juggles many stories at a time.

While waiting to hear back on one piece, she’ll start another story or two, and by the time the first one comes back (“usually rejected,” she says with a laugh), she’ll be able to look at it with fresh eyes and make new revisions, before sending it off again to another publication.

Selecky says this extensive writing and editing process has allowed her to develop her voice and adds that the stories in “This Cake” truly represent all the writing she’s been doing up until this point.

“In some ways, it’s like a first album. Everything you’ve ever done goes into it.”

Selecky, who holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC, also teaches writing courses in her living room and says this has also helped her immensely with her own work.

“It’s been huge in terms of finding out what I want to learn about form and voice and tone and what it means to revise and what it means to read for influence and inspiration and all of that. Everything that I teach my students I need to do myself first.”

The courses are currently on hold until the spring to give Selecky time to write and do all the extra Giller publicity but she says an overwhelming number of people have been contacting her to get on the waiting list since her nomination was announced.

It’s just one of the many spin-off effects of being a finalist for the country’s top literary prizes – something Selecky admits she’s still coming to terms with.

“This nomination is such a big deal in Canada that I don’t know if I fully have accessed what it feels like yet but I do know that I’m so proud of these stories and am really happy for them.”