D.W. Wilson has made the 2018 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for See the Darkness,Yielding.

D. W. Wilson is the author of Once You Break a Knuckle, a collection of short stories, and Ballistics, a novel. His fiction and essays have appeared in magazines across the globe. In 2011 he won the BBC National Short Story Award for The Dead Roads. Since then he has been shortlisted for numerous fiction prizes. He won the Manchester Fiction Prize and the CBC Short Story Prize in 2015. He studied creative writing at the University of Victoria and the University of East Anglia, and for the last few years he has been teaching creative writing and video games —separately! — at the University of Victoria.

Perhaps happy moments yet remain.

"I don't generally work via inspiration (my muse may not show up but she knows where to find me every night at 11:00), and I've been tinkering with this story long enough that its genesis is lost to me."

You spent the summer of your father's disappearance at the cabin he owned outside Kirkwall, your hometown hamlet on the cusp of the Alaskan Highway. Each day, to reach the cabin, you bushwhacked along train tracks that traced the curve of Kirkwall's lake, then climbed a thirty foot clay hill so steep it warranted mountaineering gear. You'd go whole kit and caboodle — or, as your dad used to say, whole kitten caboodle — and deploy crampons and the engraved ice axe given to you when you saved an Irishman from certain death. That time, you dislocated both arms at the shoulder, clutching the rope as he fell. End of your climbing career, and he, unharmed, knew it. Nevermore, he said, when he laid the axe at your bedside.

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.