Exeter Writers

 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 do...

 Salt   by  Jillian Grant Shoichet My task was to salt the slugs.               As dawn stole beneath the scant slip of fabric tacked to the window frame, I crept from the bed I shared with my sister.             I slid past the bathroom, with its leaky faucet whose drip-drip-drip was the soundtrack of my childhood, along with the throbbing growl of the train that lumbered through the blackberries beyond the gravel path three times a day: 6:06, 3:14, and 11:20, like clockwork. Down the hall on the left to avoid the squeaky floorboard on the right. Across the edge of the balding carpet that marked the boundary of the living room, where my mother now sleeps on a pull-out couch, pills by her head, lined face awash in flickering blue light from the television.             Towards the stained Formica table wit...