Libby Gunn has made the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for My Northern Outhouse. The shortlist will be announced on Sept. 14 and the winner will be announced on Sept. 21.

If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize is open for submissions until November 1st.

Libby Gunn worked at Parks Canada for much of her career and has also worked as a museum curator, Yukon News reporter and sawmill worker. This is her third time longlisted for the CBC Nonfiction Prize. In 2017 she was longlisted for Whitefish Harvest and in 2021 she made the longlist for Whitefish. She has written for Up Here, Geist and Legacy magazines. Gunn has lived, worked and paddled in BC, Northwest Territories, Yukon, northern Alberta, Manitoba and Australia. She divides her time between Gabriola Island, B.C. and Lake of the Woods in northwestern Ontario. She loves to be on her stand-up paddleboard, and to play Boggle on winter evenings. Gunn has a diploma in Wildland Recreation, holds a BA in Humanities and Political Science, a post-graduate diploma in Writing and Editing and an MA in Environment and Management.

"Stories from the sixtieth parallel."

"I found it quite funny to think that my old outhouse was likely the northernmost building in Alberta. I lived a stone's throw from the sixtieth parallel, this imagined line that has come to represent the border between "northern" and "southern" Canada. I crossed it on my way to work, on my walks through the forest, on my way to buy groceries. I was never exactly sure of its precise location as various maps showed it in slightly different places, reflecting improvements in measuring equipment.

"I was also puzzled by a strange lump of concrete in the tangle of rosebushes just off the dusty road. It was some time before I looked at it closely and even longer before I realized that it had been intentionally placed on the sixtieth parallel. It was such an unheralded, untended little monument. Nobody ever came to look at it, and the inscription was pitted and hard to read. I was moved by the few words about this man who chopped wood for the steamboats that went up and down the Slave river, right into the 1960s. The wood-powered steamboats were a major catalyst of change in the subarctic in the early part of the last century, and they too went back and forth across this imagined line that crossed the river out front of my cabin.

"I started writing about my little piece of the border, intending a light-hearted piece about borders that are not natural ecological or cultural boundaries."

When a legal border follows a feature like a river, I can see the logic behind it, but this cutline through the woods was more difficult to reconcile. It inconsiderately bisected the stately jack pine forest, without regard for the nuances of the landscape. For well over one hundred years the line had legally distinguished this clump of buffalo berry from that stand of white spruce. The mats of leathery kinnikinnick carpeted the forest floor equally on both sides. Red squirrels dashed back and forth, carrying mushrooms and cones across the line, stopping on a warm winter day to nibble on rosehips along its edge. On the ground, the border was just one of many unremarkable trails through the woods.

The winner of the 2023 CBC Nonfiction Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and win a two-week writing residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.

The 2024 CBC Short Story Prize is currently open until Nov. 1, 2023 at 4:59 p.m. ET. The 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January 2024 and the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize will open in April 2024.