Brendan Bowles has made the 2018 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for The Patterson-Gimlin Film.

Brendan Bowles holds an MA from the University of Toronto and an MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was one of two Canadian nominations for PEN International's New Voices Award in 2013, won the Toronto Star Short Story Contest in 2014 and the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers from the Writers' Trust of Canada in 2016. His work has been published and produced for stage and radio and he is currently a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. This is his second time being longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize.

Bigfoot cameo interrupts family film.

"A trip to the dump, the boring/urgent problem of obsolescent technology, the trashy A&E and Discovery Channel specials of my childhood — all of which seemed to be hosted by Leonard Nimoy — and the impossible question of what makes us who we are."

That one summer before Dad lost it on a Bronco's game, Mom fancied herself quite the artiste with her home-movie camera, a Rockwell maybe — someone who paid attention to everyday stuff.

But that is not what her one film is known for.

If you've seen grainy footage of Bigfoot, it's likely her film. She is the Patterson of the Patterson-Gimlin footage. As with all suspect sightings, the camera work is shoddy. She'd been entertaining herself during a hunting trip. And she never did master the inverse relationship between magnitude of zoom and quality of picture. Gimlin was her brother-in-law. They'd been out hunting. Or rather, my dad and her brother-in-law went hunting, but she'd decided nothing could be killed that day and all life was precious even amoebas and we would be vegetarian henceforth, which lasted about a week. And not that she ate anything but Dr. Pepper and cigarettes anyways.

The winner of the 2018 CBC Short Story Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, will have their story published on CBC Books and will have the opportunity to attend a 10-day writing residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their story published on CBC Books.