Bruce Cinnamon has made the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for The Bubble.

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.

Bruce Cinnamon is a writer from Edmonton. His first novel, The Melting Queen, was published by NeWest Press in 2019, telling the story of a genderfluid ex-frat brother who is appointed as the sacred spring goddess of a magic-realist Edmonton. In 2020, he was named as a lieutenant governor of Alberta Emerging Artists. He currently lives in Brussels, Belgium, and is working on his second novel.

"It's safer in the zoo."

"My story was inspired by some of my experiences during the pandemic. Like many people, I spent the last year living in isolation, trapped in a bubble away from my friends and family. It was lonely in this bubble, and some days I felt utterly depressed. But it also reminded me of a previous bubble I had survived: living in the closet throughout junior high and high school, having to maintain a minimum safe distance from everyone, waiting and waiting for that unknowable day in the future when I would be free. As the pandemic wore on and the murder of George Floyd sparked protests for racial justice across the world, I reflected on other invisible bubbles that I was enclosed in, bubbles of race and class privilege.

"All these thoughts and feelings crystallized into my story when I read about the establishment of the NHL bubble in downtown Edmonton. I was fascinated by the amount of energy and resources that went into creating this bubble, how the players were trapped in this fishbowl to perform ultimately nonessential work, and how it all took place only two kilometres away from the Indigenous-led Pekiwewin camp for houseless people who were tired of being harassed by the police. And so came the idea to write a story about a closeted gay NHL player living in all of these overlapping bubbles, aware of his role as a performing zoo animal, ignorant of the world beyond his hotel — isolated, yet insulated."

They said there would be mountains, but all I see are fields — stretching to the horizon in every direction, flat as freshly Zambonied ice.

I stand at my hotel room window and watch the storm roll in. You can always see them hours before they arrive, building up in big menacing mounds of cloud like a swarm of locusts or an enemy air force about to descend on the city. I feel the electricity in the air, close my eyes and sense the skyscraper swaying slightly around me. Maybe this next storm will be strong enough to topple the tower, and the whole building will come crumbling down, and they'll search the rubble for my body but never find me.

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.