The Genesis of “Enough of Me”
Back Story
| 0 CommentsJoe Wilkins' short story Enough of Me won our 2011 Obsidian Prize in Fiction. It beat out over 130 entries and was shortlisted by each of our four readers as a finalist to be passed on to judge Gretel Ehrlich. That all four readers earmarked Enough of Me as... Read more
Back Story to Planned Communities and Motherhood's Unlikely Soundtrack
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What follows is the second of our series of “back stories” a look behind the writing of some of our favorite essays and fiction from the print issue. This month Jennifer Ruden tells us what has happened since she wrote Planned Communities and Motherhood’s Unlikely Soundtrack. I remember when it... Read more
Special Feature
Interview
| 0 CommentsOver the course of the next few months High Desert Journal will be publishing the “back stories” to a number of essays and works of fiction that appear in the print edition. In each one of these the author of the work will explain in their own words how... Read more
Runaway Truck Ramp
by Robert Micheal Pyle
| 1 CommentsThe following story by Robert Michell Pyle was the runner-up in our 2011 Obsidian Prize in Fiction judged by Gretel Ehrlich. Congratulations Bob. Ever since she started driving, first at 14 on the ranch, 15 on dirt roads with her permit and her dad, 16 on the highway to Lewiston... Read more
Salmon Becomes Them
by Kathy Powell
| 0 CommentsI am chiseled by the plane of your brow. The pattern of your features and line are simple, elemental. Provocative, haunting and familiar like a well loved ghost story told in winter in the musky cedar long house. Meat hung low, a fire burning small and mindlessly tended. Children are... Read more
Truth, Myth, and the Western Writer of Place
by Robert Rebein
| 0 CommentsEudora Welty used to say that fiction writing depended for its very life on place. “Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable as art, if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else,” she wrote in her essay “Place in Fiction.” Flannery O’Connor took the notion... Read more