From oat milk to tarot decks

Best Canadian Stories 2025
selected by Steven W. Beattie

Windsor: Biblioasis, 2024
$23.95 / 9781771966344

Reviewed by Jessica Poon

*

I once pitched Steven W. Beattie when he worked at the Quill and Quire and he did not respond. In light of his judicious selection of sixteen short stories for Best Canadian Stories 2025, I’m going to let that slide. It is clear that Beattie values technical excellence, plot, and readability. 

Short story collections always summon equal parts dread and guilt for me—I like writing short stories more than I want to read them, but if I don’t want to read them, what kind of irredeemable hypocrite am I? It’s not unusual for me to read a short story collection and only like one or two of them, which then results in my internal panic about how to diplomatically say I don’t like them. Sometimes one good story is all you can hope for.

Happily, though, Best Canadian Stories 2025 exceeded my expectations and is about as solid as short story collections get.

In “That Petrol Emotion,” by New Brunswick writer Mark Anthony Jarman (Burn Man), a woman in Dublin hits a young boy named Danny with her car. She is decidedly not freaking out or crying, as one might expect. She does not turn herself in, preferring instead to observe the ostensible calm of swans, criticize Bono, and reflect that “we should have stopped inventing things after bikes.”

With the veracity of a person swearing off social media for good, she thinks “This is the age of confession. I refuse to join. Once the trees are fallen over, does a gale feel regret?” Jarman has always been masterful at complicated, “bad” emotions and unorthodox, experimental prose; this story is no exception.

A major highlight in this collection is “Funny Story,” by recent UVic graduate Liz Stewart, which lives up to its title. The protagonist has a vibrator stuck in her asshole and her casual lover, Shanna, intends to accompany her to the hospital. Her lover observes that the protagonist has never been more vulnerable and likeable; however, their not-quite-a-relationship ends there. Stewart captures the awkwardness of being seen naked by a casual lover outside of sex—in a new context, the body they’ve just been doing all sorts of things to, suddenly feels like something to conceal again. For instance, “I knew she did whatever I wanted with a timid openness that didn’t exist in her clothed life.” 

Though rife with humour and salaciousness, the story is also poignantly vulnerable: “I told her I wanted to start wearing boxers. I tried to convince her that I was not a broken person, but someone who was going through a metamorphosis and would emerge from that mouldy basement, some day in early summer, with a fully formed personality and a healthy attachment to others.” I have a tendency to complain about endings, though I don’t usually expect very much. The ending of “Funny Story” captures the permanent sense of fleetingness; that is, the thing you long for may well be irretrievable after all, but remains in your memory, as you continue living your life, bereft of what could have been, and never will be. 

The piece by Toronto-based Cody Caetano (Half-Bads in White Regalia), “Miigwetch Rex,” is a voice-driven story about a well-regarded artist, Mino Bee, who is likened to Banksy for his enigma and never showing his face.

There are a few truly sublime sentences—one of my favourites is “The end of my life began like every other morning”—and some lacerating, acerbic insights about how news cycles, reparations, and days of remembrance intended to centre Indigenous peoples make “everyone forget about the issues that really affect communities.”

“Because We Buy Oat Milk,” by Okanagan artist Glenna Turnbull, feels like what Lucy Ellis’ Ducks, Newburyport was striving for—there is a distinct sense of domestic overwhelm and tangential insertions that make for a frenetic, yet immersive reading experience.

Toronto writer Kawai Shen’s story, “The Hanged Man,” is a contemporary love story about Queenie, who, in spite of her misgivings, is attracted to Ryan, “incontrovertibly, a white male” and prone to carrying gemstones “on his person for grounding.”

There is a SNL short titled Brutal Marriage Movie, starring Rami Malek. Among several satirically choice quips, one of them is: “The therapist will be Black.” In “Couples Therapy,” by another Torontonian, Christine Birbalsingh, a Black woman, Naomi, and her white husband, Ryan, go to couples’ therapy. The therapist is definitely not Black, but Tammy, who “has straw-like blond hair that looks as though it wants to reach her shoulders but just can’t quite make it there.” Against the protagonist’s hopes, Tammy and the protagonist do not “have a secretive wink-wink-nudge-nudge feminist bond that would no doubt benefit, well, me.” Without spoiling anything, the ending of the story is apropos to all preceding events.

Because this story is about relationships, complications are inevitable—Queenie is already committed to “her common-law partner Eunice, a feminist activist and clinical psychologist who ran studies on eating disorders.” From Queenie’s purview, “Eunice was an equal; Ryan collected tarot decks. But Queenie was self-aware enough to recognize her humiliation as part of the attraction.” The discrepancy between what one ‘should’ desire and what one does desire—more, variety, and sometimes, everything you are against—is written about with wit and grace.

In “Mudlark,” by Manitoban writer Chelsea Peters, a recent graduate of UBC, is a reflective story of an ordinary, fraught partnership. The man muses of Sal, his partner, that “She’d been so vain before the babies that he was always surprised, and a little disappointed, that she no longer seemed to care much about how she appeared when it was just the two of them.” He notes that the word Sal is most liable to use to describe him is “un-evolved.” 

This story poses uncomfortable questions, in particular: “What did it say about you, if you hated all the people around you—your loved ones, your family—for what you knew were small, petty reasons, then hated them even more for not loving you in the exact way you wanted them to?” The overall vibe of the story reminds me of an episode of Six Feet Under where Nate Fisher, overwhelmed by a domestic life he never really wanted with a wife he doesn’t truly love and his job as a funeral director, which he also never really wanted—stops his car, has the world’s most grim, perfunctory orgasm, and returns home, ready to face what he was avoiding: his family. Neither enjoyable nor daisies, but entirely real.

“The Money” by Toronto-based Lynn Coady (Watching You Without Me) is so comedic and insightful that I wish it were a novella. Helen, a divorced poet, is friends with Ernestine, an effervescent optimist whose “flakiness was so extreme and insistent that it struck Helen as honest in some objective way.” Being friends with Ernestine means a lot of yoga classes. 

When Nicola Rasmussen, a stupendously beautiful actress that reminds me of how the media treated early 2010s Megan Fox—“It was difficult to sit across from Nicola and not think about the way she looked. Helen couldn’t imagine it as anything but an inconvenience”—solicits Helen’s help with a poetry project (comparison is a gift that keeps giving—Megan Fox is also a poet), Helen is incredulous.

As time passes, Nicola divulges more and more of her life but has yet to show Helen any poetry. The dialogue is consistently excellent. To have one’s looks so commodified—a source of both genuflection and hatred from strangers who cannot see beyond the surface—is rendered with nuance. Nicola is aware of the outsized influence of her appearance: “I used to be self-deprecating all the time,” said Nicola. “I thought it made me cute and relatable. I’d say, Oh I’m such an idiot. Oh I don’t know what I’m talking about. And then I started to notice that no one was arguing with me. They’d just smile and nod as if to say, Yup—assumption confirmed.” 

Torontonian Catriona Wright’s “Making Faces” portrays a woman whose miscarriage with her ex-boyfriend, Alex—so wealthy that his television comes out with a verbal command—continues to haunt her. She founds temporary solace in elaborate make-up looks that she uploads to Reddit, to much adulation. Her sister, Eileen, is brash, opinionated, and for whatever reason, is incredibly attached to the idea of naming a child Reginald. The sororal dynamic in this story is pleasingly reminiscent of Alexandra Tanner’s mostly good debut novel, Worry. 

Plus, in Wright (Continuity Errors) syntax and dialogue are immaculate and enjoyable. For instance: “Are you my missing semicolon?” Eileen quipped back. “Depends. How big is your dangling modifier?”; “… only late capitalist apologists believed in ‘careers’—but Amanda found his optimism refreshing, if alien”; “Alex broke up with her so kindly and efficiently she’d only realized what happened hours later, walking home from his condo, dazed. The whole relationship felt like a pleasant misunderstanding, destined to be corrected eventually”; “When she was drunk, which was often, she would lecture them about the unacknowledged brilliance of female artists they’d never heard of.” Really, the amount of awed underlining I did was almost the whole story.

“The Vigil,” by McGill graduate student Marcel Goh, nails sibling dynamics and a youthful point of view. Better yet, the phrase “durian-headed” is used. The opening line is stellar: “I realize now, looking back, just how unusual it had been for my family to have entrusted three children with the overnight watch of a corpse.” 

Reading about two siblings ganging up on bullying the youngest is written about with a childish, nonchalant pragmatism: “If we made him cry in the next hour and then spent the hour after that cheering him up, that would keep all of us entertained until six o’clock.” I couldn’t help but remember my own siblings treating me similarly, but sadly, without any of the cheering up. It’s melancholy, but also the perfect closing story for a wonderfully varied, worthwhile collection.

Originally from East Vancouver, Jessica Poon is a writer, former line cook, and pianist of dubious merit who recently returned to BC after completing a MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. [Editor’s note: Jessica Poon has reviewed books by Pat Dobie, Giana Darling, Umar Turaki, Katrina Kwan, Jane Boon, Terese Svoboda, Maia Caron, Wendy H. Wong, Andromeda Romano-Lax, Sarah Leipciger, Katrina Kwan, Shelley Wood, Richard Kelly Kemick, Elisabeth Eaves, Rajinderpal S. Pal, Keziah Weir, Amber Cowie, Robyn Harding, Roz Nay, Anne Fleming, Miriam Lacroix, Taslim Burkowicz, Sam Wiebe, Amy Mattes, Louis Druehl, Sheung-King, Loghan Paylor, Lisa Moore (ed.), Sandra Kelly, and Robyn Harding for BCR]

*

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-25: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster