Jennifer Tzivia MacLeod has made the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Patricide in Four Parts, with Intermezzo.

The winner of the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and have the opportunity to attend a two-week 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 work published on CBC Books.

The shortlist will be announced on April 22 and the winner will be announced on April 29.

Jennifer Tzivia MacLeod is a freelance writer, editor and translator who moved to Israel from Toronto in 2013. Her writing for children has won the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Crystal Kite Award and the PJ Library Author Incentive Award. She holds a BA in philosophy from University of Toronto and a Master of Arts in interdisciplinary studies from Athabasca University. She has published widely in literary journals. A companion piece to this story, Icarus in the Holy Land: Moments of Frailty, appeared in the fall 2018 issue of Prairie Schooner.

"Father, dying, over and over."

"My father loved lying down. He'd lie down wherever and whenever the desire struck. Even when he was young and healthy, we'd all lie together on the floor of our house. I have great memories of that. After he died, I kept looking at one picture where he's lying on a picnic table outside Riverdale Farm in Toronto with a hat over his face; picturing him lying in less likely places; and imagining having him with me here in Israel, where I now live with my family. Eventually, those pieces came together to make a story."

It is a beautiful spring day in Toronto, and the picnic table is right in the middle of Riverdale Park, so it surprises none of us when my father lies down on top, there in the middle of everything. He pulls his sunhat down over his eyes and there he is, unexposed but for a narrow strip between his nose and beard. Even his hands, crossed over his chest, are covered in white cotton gloves.

My father always seemed to think you could lie down anywhere.

In our house growing up, he'd lie in the middle of the living room floor. "We didn't have carpets in the house where I grew up," he'd say. I pictured wooden floorboards, rag rugs and horsehair sofas, like Pioneer Village, but in the 1960s? In downtown Toronto? Hard to imagine.

He'd invite us to lie with him, and often enough we would, boisterous and silly, when all he wanted to do was lie still.

The winner of the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and attend a two-week writing residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.

The 2021 CBC Poetry Prize is open for submissions until May 31, 2021. The 2022 CBC Short Story Prize will open in September and the 2022 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January 2022.