Contest Winners, Fiction 2011

First Place Winner—Lyn McCarter
$1000 Prize
“On Ice” (click links to read!)

Judges’ comments—
“This wasn’t writing. I was there.”
“Poignant. Love, loss, and healing begun.”

Marsden would definitely get the baby buried by Friday. Pay day. He would take the toweled bundle out of the freezer and drive the twenty miles to Bluff or further on to Blanding if he had to, find a mortuary there or the sheriff who could tell him what he needed to do.

Lyn McCarter grew up in Salt Lake City and the Utah mountains and deserts. She earned an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Montana and prefers to read and write about the people and places of the Colorado Plateau, Rocky Mountain, and Great Basin regions. She lives in the Park City, Utah, area and works in the IT industry.

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Second Place Winner—Brad Rhoda
$250 Prize
“Early Water” (click links to read!)

Judges’ comments—
“True, contained. Not a false note.”
“What’s not to love? Mountains, water, resilience and the need to change, all masterfully told.”

It was this type of early runoff that tricked the out-of-staters and the enthusiastic college kids and the drunken mustached dads and the teenaged girls who desperately wanted a tan more than anything in the world.

Brad Rhoda was born and raised in Michigan and then left with no hard feelings.  He now lives and writes in Fort Collins, Colorado, because it is there that he found answers to questions.  For the past eight years, he has worked on a farm that uses an agricultural context to help bring healing and health to men struggling with addiction and homelessness.  He believes that the reconciliation of farming and conservation will dictate the future direction of the arid West, and much of his work is driven by the hope in that possibility and efforts to expand upon that conversation.  He is grateful to live with his wife, daughter, and their good fat dog.

Third Place Winner–Brett Hullinger
$100 Prize
“Fenced In” (click links to read!)

Judges’ comments—
“Zowie.”
“Charming style and focus on the landscape, to begin. Almost comic. Fenced in, indeed.”
“A lived account of the loss of rural landscape, and the price paid: a sandstone penny sundeck diving platform. And true contact with the land.”

There wasn’ t another house in sight. At night, me and Charlene would run bare-assed from the porch to the pond, laughing like you do when you got the world on a string. We’d float on our backs, the world silent, the stars so close we felt like we were drifting through space.

Brett Hullinger grew up in Wyoming, Nevada, and Idaho, thereby completing the elusive middle-of-nowhere trifecta. His feature articles—covering everything from WWII history to mountain biking to higher education—have appeared in Continuum, Utah Business, Utah Outdoors, The Kingfisher, Salt Lake Magazine, and Utah Bride & Groom. He lives in Salt Lake with his wife Tamara and their two boys, Kellen and Blake.