Interview with the 2025 First prize winner - Jillian Grant Shoichet

 Meet the Winners!

Jillian Grant Shoichet endured an idyllic childhood in pastoral southwestern British Columbia (where nothing happens unless someone sets things in motion), which meant that at an early age she became a fiction instigator. Over time, friends and family members have come to accept they will find reflections of themselves in her work. Jillian is most comfortable writing about uncomfortable human experience: love and loss and our quest to find a meaningful balance between the two.

You can visit her author website at www.jilliangrantshoichet.com,  
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jilliangrantshoichet/ 
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jilliangshoichet

How did you feel when you found out that you’d won?

I’d been travelling for about 24 hours – 3 flights from Victoria, British Columbia, to Berlin, Germany – when I received the email from Exeter Writers. I walked in the front door of my sister’s house, the phone connected with the home Internet signal and the notice arrived in my inbox. I’m always disappointed when a rejection comes, but over time I’ve become more philosophical about it. I’ve learned to treasure the moments when one of my stories speaks to a competition’s judges or a journal’s editors; those connections don’t always happen. My first thought when I saw the “First Prize” in the header of the email was, Darn, too bad, maybe next time. It took me a second read-through to realize it wasn’t a generic announcement but a personal congratulations: “Salt” had connected with the judges. It was a good way to start a week of holiday and a good reminder of how valuable these competition opportunities are for writers, at whatever point they are in their writing career.

Where did you get the idea, and how would you sum up your story in a sentence or 2?

My stories often come to me as a first line or a strong visual image. “Salt” began with the first sentence – “My task was to salt the slugs” – and draws on childhood memories. One of the jobs of the Shoichet children really was to salt the slugs. The temperate landscape of the southwestern Fraser Valley is a breeding ground for slugs, and if you don’t get out to the garden early enough, you’ll lose your lettuce. I watched hundreds of slugs dry beneath spoonfuls of salt, with that casual curiosity of a young person who has grown up on a working farm, where birth and death are part of the everyday. Family friends in nearby Crescent Beach (outside of Vancouver) had a backyard that butted up against a set of train tracks and where, four times a day, all conversation stopped as the train rumbled past. I have a close relationship with my siblings and a fear of losing them. “Salt” explores what happens when we lose someone we care about – what’s gone, but also what remains.

How long have you been writing? Is this your first win and do you have any other stories published elsewhere that our readers can check out?

I began writing seriously in my early twenties, then went back to school to do graduate work and establish a career that had a better chance of paying the rent. I started writing again a few years ago, with some recent success in other competitions, including shortlisted stories in the Fish Short Memoir Prize, the Bristol Short Story Prize, the Exeter Story Prize, the Bridport Prize and the PRISM International Non-Fiction Competition. A work in progress placed third in the 2024 Stockholm Writers Festival First 5 Pages Prize, and a short murder mystery placed first in the 2024 Writer’s Digest Annual Writing Competition’s genre category. Readers can find my work in the Toronto Journal, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, WritersDigest.com and Mystery Magazine. Later this year, short pieces will appear in the Bristol Prize Anthology and the Fish Anthology.

Do you have any advice for other short story writers?

I don’t know if what works for me will work for others – or even if what works for me on a Tuesday will work for me on a Thursday, so take it all with “Salt”. First, never throw anything out. Somewhere, someday, it may be useful. Second, write the story you’d like to read. Don’t try to guess what others want to read. Third, be open to rejection and criticism: Submit. Be edited. Grow that thick lizard skin. Fourth: Know when to say no. If you’ve opened yourself up to being edited, if you’ve submitted, been rejected, dusted the story off and submitted again, then you’ve earned the right to say, No, this piece of writing says what it needs to say.

Where did you hear about our competition and what made you enter it?

A few years ago, I entered the Exeter Short Story Prize. The website mentioned a sister organization’s competition, so this year I decided to enter Exeter Writers. The short-term goal of polishing a story for competition keeps me from getting frustrated or overwhelmed by my longer projects. I also admit to the thrill of pressing “submit” and knowing that someone, somewhere, is going to read a story I wrote, and maybe, just maybe, they will like it. I don’t think that feeling will ever get old.

Thank you, Jillian. If you haven't read Jillian's story yet you can find it here.