The Three-Day Novel, which turns nineteen on Labour Day [1996], remains one of Canada's few contributions to the world of literary form. (Milton Acorn's jack-pine sonnet is the only other one I can think of at the moment.) Writing a novel in three days is as difficult as you want to make it, we are told by agents of Anvil Press, who sponsor the contest and claim as their model Voltaire's Candide, which they say was written over a weekend in the eighteenth century, and "pretty well anything by Jack Kerouac," who, they say further, typed his stuff nonstop on 2-foot telex rolls (which is "why they're all the same length"). Nineteen tears? Good Lord.