Lindsay Burgess has made the 2018 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for Trigger.

Lindsay Burgess' work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, Food and Wine and Refinery 29. She holds degrees in history from the University of Toronto and the London School of Economics. After completing her graduate studies, Burgess spent five years in the U.K. before returning to Canada, where she became the inaugural digital editor of Foodism Toronto magazine. She lives in Montreal with her partner.

A terrible, ordinary day.

"I was doing homework for therapy and kept getting stuck on this one event. The point of the exercise was to brainstorm healthier responses to things that happened that week — I couldn't think of any. So I started writing about that day, and that became the first draft of this story."

"Our air conditioning was broken.

"At first it tried to pretend like everything was fine: the vents hissed out spurts of not-cold wind, filling our tiny apartment with stale air and false hope. 23 degrees, the thermostat insisted, just like you like it. But it was so hot even my lungs felt like they were sweating, and when Chris pried off the plastic cover to reset the display panel, the temperature jumped seven, eight, nine degrees."

The winner of the 2018 CBC Nonfiction Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their story published on CBC Books and attend a 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.