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Author Archives: Ally
1998 Editors' Prize Winner
Our 1998 Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize winner was Alice Fulton, a widely published author with one book of fiction and several books of poetry to her credit. Her story, “Happy Dust,” is set in the early twentieth century on a farm governed by Mamie, a pregnant mother of four who is suffering from tuberculosis. She faces the prospect of orphaning her children, of delivering a child who will die during labor, or of delivering a child who will live briefly and miserably. In her desperation she seeks out miracle cures; she makes a pilgrimage to holy ground and prays that the baby not be a “blue baby or an idiot,” that it be born “modern, a twentieth-century child, with no muck or mire, no caul or purple mother’s marks upon it.” Armed with her prayer and Indian Perfection Medicine that she received from a nun, she faces her labor with mettle and grit. Read more at
http://www.missourireview.com/content/dynamic/text_detail.php?text_id=254
1997 Editors' Prize Winner
Our 1997 Editor’s Prize winner, Anne Miano, was also an author who had not been previously published. “The Oboist” features a narrator who is, to begin with, a violist. As her skills progressively improve, attention is increasingly focused on her. As a result, she develops a tremor that makes violin playing impossible. She stutters and is forced to recite Hamlet at the kitchen table. She leaves her violin and takes up the oboe, grateful that it is “virtually impossible to have a solo career as a concert oboist.” Her domineering mother who dreams Julia will one day be center stage as a premier violinist never forgives her, but Julia is happy in her anonymity. Or rather, she is safe. That is until a neighbor begins eavesdropping while she practices. He leaves notes of praise and Julia’s tremor returns. Her borderline agoraphobia forces her to leave her position at the New York Philharmonic and take a position with an orchestra in California. There she lives in blissful solitude until she encounters Margaret and Walter, two unconventional shepherds who gather the lonely and forgotten and feed them tuna casserole and offer them a space in which to be their own imperfect selves. Read more at
http://www.missourireview.com/content/dynamic/text_detail.php?text_id=902
1996 Editors' Prize Winner
Our 1996 contest winner, “You Think I Care,” by Deborah Way, is especially exciting because, like our 1994 winner, it was the author’s first publication. Annie, a 15 year old girl walks down a quiet country road on her way to her boyfriend’s house to “do it” for the first time. A stranger in a car offers her a ride and she accepts despite her awareness of the dangers. The bulk of the story occurs as these two traverse a relatively short distance, and the threat the stranger poses is real. While Annie is caught between what might happen and what does, she wrestles with the contradictory messages she has received about sex: that she has power over men, and that men will hurt her for that power. Read more at
http://missourireview.com/content/dynamic/text_detail.php?text_id=994
1995 Editors' Prize Winner
The 1995 Editor’s Prize winner, “The Incredible Appearing Man” by Deborah Galyan, went on to appear in the 1996 edition of Best American Short Stories, and is one of my favorites. The story opens with the narrator being visited by a man posing as a plumber. “His panama hat is an odd touch, shadowing dark glasses. A blue work shirt and jeans. Cowboy boots, very tooled. But the grin is center stage.” He returns as a radon inspector. Later, he will be a tree trimmer. The sexual tension is palpable. There is a long and hidden history between these two, seventeen years of visits from the Incredible Appearing Man, during which time the narrator marries another man and has a son. Her marriage is healthy and happy, her husband, kind. The Man, on the other hand, is music and philosophy and passion; he is gone for years at a time and reappears like a spirit sent to lure her back to their origin. He is her dream and her husband is her life. The great success of the story lies in the way Galyan captures the compromise that is often inherent in love lived. Read more at
http://www.missourireview.com/content/dynamic/text_detail.php?text_id=2091
1994 Editor's Prize Winner
Michael Byers won the 1994 Editors’ Prize contest with his story, “Settled on the Cranberry Coast.” This was Byers’ first publication and the story later appeared in his award winning debut collection, The Coast of Good Intentions. Ward, aka Frosty, is a recently retired high school history teacher coming to terms with his new life. With no wife or children, retirement threatens a future of unbroken solitude until Ward advertises his carpentry services and is contacted by Trudi, a woman he went to high school with. Trudi, a hard-edged, Native American with a granddaughter in tow, hires Ward to fix up her house, and over the course of the weeks that follow, Ward gets his first real glimpse of the life he might have had had he married, and his first glimpse of hope that it’s not too late. Read the story at
http://missourireview.com/content/dynamic/text_detail.php?text_id=985
1993 Editor's Prize Winner
The 1993 Editor’s Prize award went to David Borofka for his story, “Epilogue.” Borofka’s characters – an adultering priest, a virtuous insurance man, a surgeon with multiple sclerosis, two women who are marriage/family counselors and who are both in disastrous marriages – explore the inevitable chasm between professional identity and life. In the end, mercy is found within this chasm: “Grace caroms around the room with the velocity of a hockey puck.” Len, the virtuous insurance man, meets Max, the adulterous priest, in a diner. Len chokes on a piece of sausage and he’s saved not by the priest, not by the doctor, not by either wife, but by an anonymous, vomit-splattered patron who is thought to be nothing more than a vagrant. Read the story at
http://missourireview.com/content/dynamic/text_detail.php?text_id=1981