"Spirit Dance" picked for anthology of Aurora Award winners
My story, "Spirit Dance," has been picked for a new anthology from Nanopress entitled The Aurora Awards – Thirty Years of Canadian Science Fiction. Nanopress is a new small press based in Montreal, and their authors include Elizabeth Vonarburg.
Looking back, the road for "Spirit Dance" from birth to a "best of" antho seems like a long and strange one. It was the first story I ever wrote and the first I ever sold.
It appeared in Tesseracts6 in 1997, was a finalist for the Auroras in English the next year, and snagged an honourable mention for The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, all of which I thought at the time was pretty good for a first story. And that was where I figured it would end.
But then I discovered reprints, and foreign language reprints in particular.
I sold "Spirit Dance" to a great little (and now defunct) dark fantasy magazine in France, called Tenebres, whose editors kindly translated stories from English.
Once it appeared there, I was able to sell the translation to the excellent Quebec magazine, Solaris, which only takes subs in French. That translation, entitled "La Danse des Esprits," went on to win the French Aurora Award for short fiction in 2001, which then, almost a decade later, brings it to being picked for this Aurora Award anthology.
What a long strange trip it's been for the little story that could. "Spirit Dance" has been reprinted a total of eighteen times in several languages and was included in my mini-collection, Impossibilia in 2008. It's also the story on which I based my first novel, "Spirit Dreams."
