Afterword by Gina Ochsner
Judge's comments on the Doug Fir Fiction Award's winner and finalists

WINNER
The Lord’s People Colorado

The writing in this story exhibits a depth and breadth of narrative skill and technique that immediately drew me into the author’s fictive world where two sisters sort out the differences between body and will, possession and control. External conflict drives internal conflict, and there’s a beautiful symmetry between image, symbol and action with the fire, the symbiotic link of sisterhood, of shared blood and, in this case, a shared kidney that binds all the thematic strands to a tight conjunction. And while the story speeds along economically (I could go on and on about that athletic opening paragraph), never does the writing run spare. This is a writer who isn’t afraid to wander into the darker territory of hard questions. Where is God in the mess that humans make and is love possible in this mess, the story asks and happily does not try too hard to answer. The quiet and surprising sense of humor, and writerly compassion and wisdom compelled me to choose this story for first place.

FINALIST
Self Service

This is a beautifully architected story set in beautiful but rugged Oregon where people have to live and work hard to survive. The differences between different groups of people—the locals and veteran fishers versus younger tourist fishers—become readily apparent just as the division between the Norm who “held an ambition, however limited, and that ambition distinguished him like a shock of wild rye in a field of patient wheat,” and Wilbur, “a small man, wiry and cut to element and mineral.” The story thoughtfully examines through narrative how land shapes character and imagination, how working the land works on people and their vision. Wilbur maintains a horizontal gaze while Norm entertains notions of better, easier work. But both men have remained. And so has the narrator, and he has the difficult task of living and working between the two worlds, and eventually we sense he will have to make a decision and this is the driving conflict. What kind of life is he called to live? He must answer and, in doing so, choose where his loyalties lie. These are complex questions about place, territory, and class that the writer deftly raises, all against the backdrop of the land and the river and weather. The visual detail, the lyric prose quality and turns of simile and metaphor mark this story as very fine and the creation of a very fine storyteller.

FINALIST
Rolling One-Handed

The uncommon strength to the voice and confidence in the pacing and storytelling swept me immediately into a world where our narrator Marvel knows far more than a girl her age should, and she is well aware of this. “We got to be best friends fast because of where we live and what we know,” Marvel says of her friendship with Raycene, and that in itself is a heartbreak of a sentence. Another brilliant line: “My mind is like a scab I’m always picking at. I am always and forever trying not to think of the one thing I’m thinking about.”
Throughout the piece, the prose quality of this writing is so fine. The layering of detail and the quick deft spin of metaphor convinced me that this is a writer of skill and imagination. This writer has an ear for the inner music of words and how to create rhythmic balance in and between sentences. All this without losing the strong lead of a forward-moving narrative. This is gifted storyteller, and I can’t wait to see what else this writer can do.

Semi-Finalists:
“Updike Falls Short” by Tera Hatfield, Portland, Oregon
“757” by M. Alison Melville, Portland, Oregon
“On The River” by DC Young, Seattle, Washington
Gina Ochsner, a lifelong resident of Oregon, is the author of two short-story collections, The Necessary Grace to Fall (University of Georgia Press, 2002) and People I Wanted to Be (Houghton Mifflin, 2005). Ochsner is the grateful recipient of an NEA award and is a John Simon Guggenheim fellow. She also has received the Oregon Book Award for fiction and the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction. Recent short stories have appeared in The New Yorker (August 2004), Tin House (#29) and Glimmertrain (fall 2005). One of her early stories, “Spare Lake,” was first published by
The Bear Deluxe Magazine (winter 1998).