Chiante Guretzki has made the 2018 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for The Man in the Bookshop.

Chiante Guretzki has been a storyteller all her life, but started writing her stories down in 2012. Chiante is currently working on a degree in humanities at Briercrest College and Seminary, and she spends her days creating plots and worlds in notebooks meant for lecture notes and drawing character sketches in the margins of assignments. Chiante is a logophile, bibliophile and an ailurophile. For her, an ideal day is when she can put all those things together.

Watching life through a window.

"My story is based off a doodle my best friend drew of a man shelving books in a bookshop."

I almost never met the man who changed my life. He was always a world away; I was separated from him by a street, a pane of glass and hundreds of books. Ever since I had moved to the dreamy town, each morning, I would pass the bookshop that had been on the corner of 5th and Barkley.

He, the man, was always in the window. His hands were busy, but careful. To know this, I have to confess, I regularly stopped on my route to watch him move around the shop, pulling the old books from the shelves, dusting their spines with a cloth, and replacing them on the shelves with such care it was almost as if he was willing them back into place. He was consistent in the meticulous cleaning ritual he performed, watched only by me and a cat that inhabited the shop.

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.