In the Hours After by Anna Lee-Popham

Anna Lee-Pophamhas made the2022 CBC NonfictionPrize longlistfor In the Hours After.

• 31 writers make the 2022 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist

The winner of the 2022CBC Nonfiction Prizewill receive $6,000 from theCanada Council for the Arts, have their work published onCBC Booksand have the opportunity to attend a two-week writing residency at theBanff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from theCanada Council for the Artsand have their work published onCBC Books.

The shortlist will be announced on Sept. 15and the winner will be announced onSept.22.

If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2023CBC Short StoryPrizeis currently open for submissions until Oct.31, 2022.

• Calling all writers! The 2023 CBC Short Story Prize is now open!

About Anna Lee-Popham

Anna Lee-Popham is a poet, writerand editor in Toronto. She is a graduate of the MFA in creative writing at the University of Guelph, the Writer's Studio at Simon Fraser University and University of Toronto's School of Continuing Education creative writing certificate, where she received the Janice Colbert Poetry Award. Her writing was the first runner-up in PRISM international's Pacific Poetry Prize, shortlisted for the Fiddlehead's Creative Nonfiction Contest and has been recently published in Arc, Riddle Fence, Canthius and Autostraddle. She co-hosts the Emerging Writers Reading Series and was an editor at HELD magazine.

Entry in five-ish words

"Feminism, mothering, memory across generations."

The story's source of inspiration

"Though I wrote this before Roe v Wade was overturned in the US in fact I first wrote a section of this story, then a poem, after returning from a march against police violence in 2016 the political reality that led to both of those moments is the landscape of the story.

"When I started writing what turned into this piece, I was living in Atlanta with my then six-month-old child and I was thinking a lot of my own mother, who had started a national campaign to end child poverty in Canada when I was young. She died when I was 18. I was thinking about her mothering and her activismand I was full of questions for her. When I returned home to Toronto when my child was one, I was frequently surrounded by even more vivid memories of my mother: simple ones of us riding the subway together or walking along the boardwalk but also more momentous ones of us marching in a rally up University Ave. when I was a child. When I was a teenager, we cut up her favourite jeans in our home in the east end of the city after the company released an ad glorifying violence against women.

"These memories were not simple. I was often uncertain of which parts I might be making up and they frequently left me with more questions than any sense of answers. But even in their complexity, they seemed to point toward the possibility of an ongoing conversation about mothering, activism, and building the world we want. This writing attempts to navigate these landscapes that I experience as part of life in Toronto the political landscapes, the emotional ones, the landscape of being someone's daughter, even if that person has died, and someone's mother and draws from the uncertainty of memory to contribute to these ongoing conversations."

First lines

There is a picture of us at a rally. I'm in a stroller with balloons, or a sucker or a stuffed bear. There are signs: Free Mandela. Or Ban the Bomb. Or Take Back the Night. You are wearing bell bottoms and your shoulders are relaxed. Your curly hair is full. In the photograph, I am two, or three, or four. I am your calm, happy child. You are content, at ease as a woman in a world still getting to know the concept of global warming, barely introduced to Reaganomics.

There is a picture of us at a rally. I'm in a stroller with balloons, or a sucker, or a stuffed bear.

It will be years a decade or so after this picture was taken before you will begin a national campaign to end child poverty and are regularly interviewed on television.

About the 2022 CBC Nonfiction Prize

The winner of the 2022CBC Nonfiction Prizewill receive $6,000 from theCanada Council for the Arts, have their work published onCBC Booksand attend a two-week writing residency at theBanff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from theCanada Council for the Artsand have their work published onCBC Books.

The 2023CBC Short StoryPrizeis currently open for submissions until Oct. 31, 2022. The2023CBC Nonfiction Prizewill open in January 2023and the 2023CBC Poetry Prizewill open in April2023.