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Hello judges, authors, teachers, adminstrators, parents, and lovers of short stories. On this website, you will find a vast array of fictional short stories written by TDSB secondary school students. These students have submitted their stories to us in the hopes that they may win the TDSB's coveted TCTE Short Story Contest! Aside from aspirations of fame and glory, many of these authors write simply for the love of writing. Because of this, we are rewarding them all with an exceptional opportunity: the chance to workshop their stories with real, published Canadian authors! The potential is limitless; the boundaries are boundless!
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The 2015/2016 Short Fiction Contest
Entries for the 2015/16 edition of the TCTE Short Fiction Contest are no longer being accepted. Electronic submissions are due no later than Friday January 29th, 2016 at 11:59pm. Hard copies should be mailed and arrive no later than Wednesday February 3rd, 2016. For more information on how to submit your story to the contest, please click here --> HOW TO SUBMIT
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Toronto student short story contest a winner: Porter
By: Catherine Porter, Columnist
Once upon a time there was a group of dedicated high school English teachers.
They decided to inspire their students to write for themselves. Not essays, but fiction. Short stories. They held a Toronto-wide contest.
Their bosses at the board of education thought it was a grand idea. They gave them days off to judge the 200 or so entries and money for a gala lunch at the Primrose Hotel.
Can you imagine such harmony between teachers and the board over funding and student extra-curricular programs?
This was a long time ago: 1986.
At the inaugural “Authors Day,” the top 50 young writers ate lunch and talked craft with Margaret Atwood, Farley Mowat, Earle Birney, Janette Turner Hospital and Pierre Berton. At their table! Eating with them!
Can you imagine better inspiration?
“That defined my life from then on,” says Sarah Elton, who won the prize eight years later. “I became a writer.”
It gets even better.
Elton’s winning story, “The Rack,” was published in a booklet along with the stories of her fellow six winners. That booklet was printed and distributed to high schools across the city, where English teachers interspersed them with stories by Margaret Laurence, Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor and other greats.
Officially, they were teaching the skeleton of writing: point of view, structure, pacing. But unofficially, by reading stories by their peers about stuff in their own lives, the students were experiencing the very flesh of literature.
“The Rack” is a story about a teenage girl named Naomi who binges on Christmas cookies, then stares at her body with loathing in the mirror and forces a fist down her throat. It could be a page in my teenage diary after some serious editing to excise all the flowery sentences and overwrought metaphors. Had I read it at 17, I would have been flush with both power and comfort: someone else hates herself like this? This is worth writing about? And also: she is just a year older than me and she wrote this.
“There was a role-modelling thing,” says Ian Waldron, who started the competition while teaching writers’ craft at my alma matter, North Toronto Collegiate Institute. (I sadly never had him as a teacher. Maybe I would have invented Harry Potter . . . ) “That had its own kind of magic. Kids would say so often, ‘I didn’t realize I could do this. I didn’t know I had a voice.’ ”
Can there be a better lesson to take from the broken and naked years of high school?
The teachers got as much out of the contest of their students. They read the stories in their free time, passing them back and forth for comments and editing. They watched the creative unconscious unfold before them. Talk to them today, and many will describe student stories like scenes from Jane Eyre.
The contest continues to this day. “I still get a lump in my throat thinking about (a recent) story . . . about a family leaving Afghanistan,” says Marlene Bourdon-King, a co-ordinator of the contest who has been teaching high school English for 38 years now. “It was so raw and real. The authenticity of her voice — it’s humbling.”
In its heyday, the context could have been called The Perfect Inspirational Learning Experience of Harmonious Times.
But these aren’t harmonious times in education. The Student Short Fiction Contest got started very late this school year, because of the extracurricular strike. Then, there’s the board’s $27-million deficit. Up until this past week, there was officially no money for the contest.
Then, the board came through with $3,000 — less than half the cost of the contest, but something nonetheless.
To be fair, the contest’s wheels have been falling off for years. First, the sponsors left. Then, the board scrapped the day off for judging.
The Primrose was substituted with a cheaper venue. Last year, Authors Day was held at the University of Toronto’s Robarts Library, for free.
“We have to review all our partnerships every year, once we get our budgets,” says Tracy Hayhurst, a co-ordinating principal overseeing teaching and learning for the Toronto District School Board. “If we can find the funding, we’ll certainly look at doing it again.”
Lean times call for hard measures. But the 28-year-old contest seems like the Grameen Bank of education. Micro-credit loans; huge returns. That $3,000 buys passion, confidence and inspiration for hundreds of students, not just the winners.
It opens doors and minds and maybe even careers.
Elton is releasing her second book next week. It’s called Consumed: Food for a Finite Planet.
Maybe her publisher, HarperCollins, should fund next year’s contest. They should consider it long-term R and D
Link to The Star page of the story here
Once upon a time there was a group of dedicated high school English teachers.
They decided to inspire their students to write for themselves. Not essays, but fiction. Short stories. They held a Toronto-wide contest.
Their bosses at the board of education thought it was a grand idea. They gave them days off to judge the 200 or so entries and money for a gala lunch at the Primrose Hotel.
Can you imagine such harmony between teachers and the board over funding and student extra-curricular programs?
This was a long time ago: 1986.
At the inaugural “Authors Day,” the top 50 young writers ate lunch and talked craft with Margaret Atwood, Farley Mowat, Earle Birney, Janette Turner Hospital and Pierre Berton. At their table! Eating with them!
Can you imagine better inspiration?
“That defined my life from then on,” says Sarah Elton, who won the prize eight years later. “I became a writer.”
It gets even better.
Elton’s winning story, “The Rack,” was published in a booklet along with the stories of her fellow six winners. That booklet was printed and distributed to high schools across the city, where English teachers interspersed them with stories by Margaret Laurence, Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor and other greats.
Officially, they were teaching the skeleton of writing: point of view, structure, pacing. But unofficially, by reading stories by their peers about stuff in their own lives, the students were experiencing the very flesh of literature.
“The Rack” is a story about a teenage girl named Naomi who binges on Christmas cookies, then stares at her body with loathing in the mirror and forces a fist down her throat. It could be a page in my teenage diary after some serious editing to excise all the flowery sentences and overwrought metaphors. Had I read it at 17, I would have been flush with both power and comfort: someone else hates herself like this? This is worth writing about? And also: she is just a year older than me and she wrote this.
“There was a role-modelling thing,” says Ian Waldron, who started the competition while teaching writers’ craft at my alma matter, North Toronto Collegiate Institute. (I sadly never had him as a teacher. Maybe I would have invented Harry Potter . . . ) “That had its own kind of magic. Kids would say so often, ‘I didn’t realize I could do this. I didn’t know I had a voice.’ ”
Can there be a better lesson to take from the broken and naked years of high school?
The teachers got as much out of the contest of their students. They read the stories in their free time, passing them back and forth for comments and editing. They watched the creative unconscious unfold before them. Talk to them today, and many will describe student stories like scenes from Jane Eyre.
The contest continues to this day. “I still get a lump in my throat thinking about (a recent) story . . . about a family leaving Afghanistan,” says Marlene Bourdon-King, a co-ordinator of the contest who has been teaching high school English for 38 years now. “It was so raw and real. The authenticity of her voice — it’s humbling.”
In its heyday, the context could have been called The Perfect Inspirational Learning Experience of Harmonious Times.
But these aren’t harmonious times in education. The Student Short Fiction Contest got started very late this school year, because of the extracurricular strike. Then, there’s the board’s $27-million deficit. Up until this past week, there was officially no money for the contest.
Then, the board came through with $3,000 — less than half the cost of the contest, but something nonetheless.
To be fair, the contest’s wheels have been falling off for years. First, the sponsors left. Then, the board scrapped the day off for judging.
The Primrose was substituted with a cheaper venue. Last year, Authors Day was held at the University of Toronto’s Robarts Library, for free.
“We have to review all our partnerships every year, once we get our budgets,” says Tracy Hayhurst, a co-ordinating principal overseeing teaching and learning for the Toronto District School Board. “If we can find the funding, we’ll certainly look at doing it again.”
Lean times call for hard measures. But the 28-year-old contest seems like the Grameen Bank of education. Micro-credit loans; huge returns. That $3,000 buys passion, confidence and inspiration for hundreds of students, not just the winners.
It opens doors and minds and maybe even careers.
Elton is releasing her second book next week. It’s called Consumed: Food for a Finite Planet.
Maybe her publisher, HarperCollins, should fund next year’s contest. They should consider it long-term R and D
Link to The Star page of the story here