Monday, July 30, 2012

Prairie Fire Fiction Contest

If I can't toot my horn on my own blog, where can I?
I have a story in the current issue of the fine literary magazine, Prairie Fire. The story won first prize in the 2011 Fiction Contest.
You can buy the magazine--or you can wait until/if I ever publish another collection of short fiction. If you buy it now, there's lot of interesting reading by other fabulous writers and prize winners.
My piece is about a young woman determined to withstand the limitations of a physical handicap. It's set in Mexico City, where R and I spent a couple of weeks in 2011.
I'm impressed that I wrote a story when we returned from Mexico, revised it several times, and sent it off without sitting on it for years. It's not the first time I suspect that interminable questioning about word choice, moving paragraphs around, and diddling with commas don't always make a story better.
R tells me that if he works paint too much, the colours turn to mud. Does the same thing happen to words? Maybe.
On the other hand--in fairness to the writing I sit on for years--it sometimes takes me years to figure out how best to enter a story and let it unfold.
As a footnote: the news that I won first prize came when I was in an ICU recovering from complications after heart surgery. Wonderful to feel that the outside world still knew I existed. Spend enough days under fluorescent ceiling lights, being hoisted and rolled about, poked with catheters and needles, and you begin to doubt. A win with Prairie Fire was a better boost than morphine.

1 comment:

  1. congratulations I am so happy for you and look forward to reading yet another piece of your fine work.

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