Give Us This Day

Give Us This Day is a striking collection of short fiction that explores the weight of the past through a kaleidoscope of voices and styles. From retired grandparents thrust into unexpected childcare parenthood to young labourers adrift in mines and road crews, from teachers struggling to find meaning in their classrooms to couples at a crossroads, these stories capture the quiet reckonings of everyday existence. Whether intimate or expansive, meditative or urgent, each story reveals how missteps and circumstances shape identity, and how, for many, the past is never truly left behind. Give Us This Day is a profound meditation on regret, resilience, and the fragile beauty of human connection.

Stories from the collection have appeared in The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, The Portland Review, The Worcester Review, Blank Spaces, Stag Hill Journal, Kelp Journal, Spilled Milk Magazine, and the CBC.

Terence Young lives in Victoria, B.C., where he has recently retired from teaching English and creative writing at St. Michaels University School. He is a co-founder of The Claremont Review, an international literary journal for young writers. His first book of poetry, The Island in Winter, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award and the Gerald Lampert Award. Since then, he has published several books: a collection of stories, Rhymes With Useless, which was one of two runners-up for the annual Danuta Gleed award; a novel, After Goodlake’s, which received the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize in 2005; and a second collection of poetry, Moving Day, which was nominated for both the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and The City of Victoria Butler Book Prize for 2006. In 2008, he was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence, an honour shared with fifteen other teachers from across Canada that year. In 2010, he published a second collection of fiction, The End of the Ice Age. More recently (2019), he received a National Magazine Award (Silver) for his poem ＂The Bear.＂ His third collection of poetry, Smithereens, came out in 2021.