Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

Ron Rash's family has lived in the southern Appalachian mountains since the mid-1700s. He grew up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, and holds the John Parris Chair in Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University. His poetry and fiction have appeared in many magazines, including Sewanee Review, Yale Review, Georgia Review, New England Review , and Poetry. He is the author of two story collections, The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth and Casualties; three volumes of poetry, Eureka Mill and Among the Believers Raising the Dead; and two novels, One Foot in Eden and Saints at the River. Rash lives in Clemson, South Carolina.

Nancy Reisman, “Tea”

I’m interested in the way that longing can shape one's perceptions of reality and in the delicate balance between hope and self-delusion. One reason I’m drawn to Lillian's character is that I think of her as a realist, a highly pragmatic woman, yet her relationship with Abe moves her into wishful, unsteady territory. It's an emotionally fraught mix, but I think this combination of pragmatism and wild hope is what has enabled her to survive and to sustain an unconventional life in a tradition-bound community.

Nancy Reisman is the author of a novel, The First Desire , and House Fires , which won an Iowa Short Fiction Award. She teaches at the University of Michigan. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and Bestial Noise: The Tin House Fiction Reader , and has also appeared in Five Points, Tin House, New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review , and Glimmer Train , among others. Reisman lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Elizabeth Stuckey-French, “Mudlavia”

I began “Mudlavia” years ago. It started with a conversation I had with Harold Watts, a family friend and colleague of my father's in the Purdue University English Department. Harolds mother took him to the Mudlavia Hotel and Resort in 1916, when he was ten years old, hoping to heal his aching knee with mud baths. Harold generously told me all about his visit there, giving me many intriguing details, including a description of the character I call Harry Jones, the cushion man, whom Harold and his mother thought was a gangster.

I wrote an early draft of this story in which I didn’t stray much from the facts Harold told me, but it wasn’t very dramatic and I had to put it aside. From the start, however, I tapped into a voice that I found mesmerizing, and it was the voice that drew me back into the story when I picked it up again over a decade later. When I reread it a plot suggested itself right away, but it took me a number of rewrites until I allowed the inevitable to happen at the end. After finishing this story I didn’t want to leave Mudlavia, so I am in the midst of writing a novel set there.

The real Mudlavia Hotel burned down in 1920. I often wish I could go there. If I could, I know I’d be a much better person.

Elizabeth Stuckey-French is the author of a novel, Mermaids on the Moon , and a collection of short stories, The First Paper Girl in Red Oak, Iowa. She teaches at Florida State University. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Gettysburg Review, Southern Review , and Five Points , among others. Stuckey-French lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

Liza Ward, “Snowbound”

I wrote this story during a bout of loneliness at the end of one very hot summer in Missoula, Montana. The hills had turned brown. Fish struggled in the shallow water of the Clark Fork River, and dark plumes of smoke crowded the horizon. It felt like the end of something. There seemed to be no one anywhere to verify my existence, and I slipped into a strange internal world, dragging this character, Susan, along with me. After a while it was hard to tell who was leading whom. I fantasized about winter, a frozen place white as the moon where new truths emerged, where everything was subjective. I remembered how our garden in Brooklyn looked to me as a girl, buried in snow, our pint-sized terrier hopping through the magic blue light as a confused rabbit might, and the way it felt like the city was yawning. Anything could happen on a snowy day, and I had the feeling that anything could happen in this story. I had no idea where it was going, only that my character was writing her own version of history, assuaging her fear of abandonment with a fictional world where people found each other. She knew she didn’t want to spend her life alone the way her father was going to now that her mother had left. I guess her dream, her invented story, gave her hope.

Liza Ward was born in 1975, and grew up in New York City. Her first novel is Outside Valentine , and her stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Antioch Review, Agni Review, Georgia Review , and Best New American Voices. Ward lives in Massachusetts.

Ann Darby, “Pity My Simplicity,” Prairie Schooner

Andrea Dezso, “The Numbers,” McSweeney’s

Tamas Dobozy, “The Inert Landscapes of György Ferenc,” Colorado Review

E. L. Doctorow, “Walter John Harmon,” The New Yorker

Stephanie Koven, “The Events Leading up to the Accident,” Antioch Review

Barbara Klein Moss, “Little Edens,” Southwest Review

Alice Munro, “Runaway,” The New Yorker

Paul Murray, “Anubis,” Granta

Julie Orringer, “The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones,” Zoetrope

Michael Redhill, “Long Division,” Zoetrope

Annette Sanford, “One Summer,” New Orleans Review

Shauna Seliy, “Blackdamp,” Alaska Quarterly Review

Katherine Shonk, “The Wooden Village of Kizhi,” Georgia Review

Scott Snyder, “About Face,” Epoch

Jay Teitel, “Luck,” Toronto Life

As of this collection, The O. Henry Prize Stories will be published in January rather than in October. The change in schedule has led to a change in title. There was always a difference between the year in which stories were published in magazines and the year in which The O. Henry Prize Stories was published. Although it may appear that we are skipping 2004, in fact, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2006 , our next collection, will be based on stories originally written in English and published in Canada and the United States in 2004.

Because of production deadlines for the collection, it is essential that stories reach the series editor by November 8 of the year in which they are published. If a finished magazine is unavailable before the deadline, magazine editors may submit scheduled stories in proof or in manuscript. Stories may not be submitted or nominated by agents or writers. Please see our Web site http://www.ohenryprizestories.com for more information about submission to The O. Henry Prize Stories.

The address for submission is:

Professor Laura Furman, The O. Henry Prize Stories

English Department

University of Texas at Austin

One University Station, B5000

Austin, TX 78712-5100

The information listed below was up-to-date as The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 went to press. Inclusion in the listings does not constitute endorsement or recommendation.

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