Equipoise

A young woman forms her own idea of feminine sexuality while skinny-dipping with her best friend’s mother during a thunderstorm. A naive bride returns to her beloved Ontario farm country and, after an encounter with a young female beekeeper, suddenly sees her husband in a sobering new light. Under pretences, a rural doctor returns for her childhood friend, but finds the women in her new life have only a very specific use for her. A middle-aged woman facing the devastating end of a friendship as well as her last chance at childbirth, flees North only to be confronted with the complexities of life in the Yukon. The women of Equipoise struggle to find their positionality in life in relation to the women around them. They are also contoured by their geographies, caught between North and South, East and West, childhood home and adulthood home. They struggle to maintain a balance within the tension of their opposing female roles, landscapes, friendships, rivalries, victories, and catastrophes, always vigourously seeking equipoise.

Equipoise was shortlisted for the 2018 HarperCollins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction and stories from the collection have won the 2020 $10,000 Carter V. Cooper Emerging Writer Short Fiction Award as selected by Joyce Carol Oates (a second story was also shortlisted for the prize) and The New Quarterly’s 2018 Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award, as well as having received publisher-nominations for the 2019 Writers’ Trust Journey Prize and a 2020 National Magazine Award. Her writing has appeared in EXILE Quarterly, The New Quarterly, The Malahat Review, The Antigonish Review, CBC Canada Writes, PRISM, and more. Katie Zdybel received a 2019 Canada Council for the Arts grant toward the writing of the stories, and she also participated in The Excelsis Group/BMO Mentoring Program.

Three short excerpts from the stories:

“He was leaning gently into the curve and gliding. So seamless was this action – the slight bend of the cul-de-sac, the diagonal streaks of lemony morning light, the tilt of the bicycle, and his body’s weight dipping softly toward the moist, sponge-like pavement – that the lines of it were echoed everywhere.” —from the story ‘Equipoise’

“The power and the beauty of those storms! Light came again, a magnificent bolt lighting up the dark clouds in the black sky above and skittering down in a thick, crooked vein of sheer white energy.” —from the story ‘The Last Thunderstorm Swim of the Summer’

“She sat there, never so aware of her own breathing, of how deeply important it was, how beautiful, and how uncomplicated. It was as though, at this late age, life was showing her a magic trick she’d never been aware of, had never known she could perform, if she chose to.” —from the story ‘Northern Tether’