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Four-Boot Fred by Izzy Ferguson

CBC Books | Posted: April 11, 2024 1:30 PM | Last Updated: April 11

The Dundas, Ont. writer is on the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize longlist

Image | Izzy Ferguson

Caption: Izzy Ferguson is a writer from Guelph, Ont. now living in Dundas, Ont. (Jonah V)

Izzy Ferguson has made the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Four-Boot Fred.
The winner of the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts(external link), have their work published on CBC Books(external link) and attend a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity(external link). The four remaining finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts(external link) and have their work published on CBC Books(external link).
The shortlist will be announced on April 18 and the winner will be announced on April 25.
If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes(external link), the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize is open for submissions until June 1. The 2025 CBC Short Story Prize will open in September and the 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January.

About Izzy Ferguson

Izzy Ferguson was born in 1954 in Guelph, Ont. After education at the University of Toronto and in England, he practised architecture in Toronto for 35 years. Architecture may be the heart of his past, but running through it are significant veins of performance (improv theatre director, stage storyteller, cabaret poet) and literature (magazine writer, book reviewer, manuscript-in-the-bottom-drawer novelist). He has a wife, two daughters and a museum-quality collection of grandchildren.
Ferguson has now been longlisted for all three of the CBC Literary Prizes(external link). He was a finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize in 1995. More recently, he was longlisted for the CBC Nonfiction Prize in 2014, 2015 and 2017.

Entry in five-ish words

"Road hockey's mystical power emerges."

The story's source of inspiration

"I try to use two sculpting tools — memory and imagination — when revisiting important and still perplexing events from my past, hoping to give them a shape (and a reduction of the perplexity). Four-Boot Fred simply showed up on that sculpting bench, perhaps because youthful loneliness, coping and confusion invite a lot of perplexed revisiting. Especially when watching your children and grandchildren confront the same things."

First lines

Why, you ask? Because he wore four boots.
Everybody else of course wore only two. Or just wore shoes, because there was a pride in going bootless in our snowbelt winters. But winter hadn't quite arrived on the day that Fred showed up, and the only drifts were dead leaves although we could already sense the sharp feelers in the air that snow sends on ahead.

Image | CBC Short Story Prize

Caption: The 2024 CBC Short Story Prize shortlist will be announced on April 18 and the winner will be announced on April 25. (Ben Shannon/CBC)

Check out the rest of the longlist

The longlist was selected from more than 1,900 submissions. A team of 12 writers and editors from across Canada compiled the list.
The jury selects the shortlist and the eventual winner from the readers' longlisted selections. This year's jury is comprised of Suzette Mayr, Kevin Chong and Ashley Audrain.
The complete longlist is:

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