Short Story

The Wreck of Amtrak’s Silver Service

A surgeon in a small town lives with his garrulous socially adept but childless wife. He blames her for his failed career and anger mounts to where he plots to be rid of her, seeking help to remove her from his life, but his plans go horribly awry.

Gatemouth Willie Brown on Guitar

An escaped convicted felon arrives in New Orleans and lives on the street to avoid apprehension. In Jackson Square he plays harmonica for tips on a bench occupied by a guitar player, unhappy with his presence and competitive music. Despite their quarrels, music binds them as wary friends to the benefit of both.

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A disabled young man becomes homeless when his only relative, his grandmother dies. He’s a kind soul in a world of anger despair and hurt. A homeless woman befriends him and teaches him to stand up for himself against others, knowledge that leads to newly learned violent actions that change his life.

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Clouds
The first story is Clouds, the story of a loving single parent mother who must take her developmentally disabled son to be institutionalized when a trusted caregiver dies. Her grief is intensified by the obstacles her estranged husband presents.
The first . . .”Clouds” is the story of a mother who must take her young disabled son to be institutionalized the the obstacles she must overcome and the emotions of grief she must suppress.

Dilemma
The second story is the short-short dilemma where a physician-father must make a decision to save or let his severely injured son live or die.

Crossing Over
The third story is Crossing over, a story about a healthcare worker on a ward with terminally-ill patients who die prematurely unnoticed on nights when the worker is alone on her shift.

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Finalists in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition.

The first story, the Bear, is about two trappers and a boy in Alaska who anger a bear who seeks revenge with unrelenting rage.

Second Story: Father Ryan. The Bishop is escorting Father Ryan from Boston to his new assignment in Idaho, under mysterious circumstances and salacious rumors.

Third story: Lost Papers, is about Isaac the Jew and Rebecca, his wife of twenty years, who, in the early 1940s stand in line at the checkpoint between Germany and Switzerland for three hours to be allowed to cross into Switzerland to bring home the recently orphaned daughter of his brother. But Rebecca’s papers are lost and she must stay in Germany under fear of arrest as Isaac crosses into Switzerland with dark secrets and betrayal.

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The armed-service wife of an air force Captain stationed in France in the 1960’s stands up to the selfish philandering of her pilot husband and demands justice and compensation for her leaving him and returning to the states. A resistant commanding officer denies her just demands to disastrous consequences.

Award winning short story in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition.

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The first story, On the Road to Yazoo City, is about a broke, loveless guitar player walking through Mississippi hoping to find a gig when he comes upon a young aloof waif of a girl who leads him through a day of shocking awareness of the nature of love and life that changes the direction of his obscure future to determination to succeed.

Award winning short story in both the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.

The second story is Dr. Greiner’s Day in Court. Three children are on their way with their aunt, their mother’s sister, to attend the arraignment of their father who is charged with killing their mother. The oldest child, a girl, steps up amidst the disarray, fear, and confusion of the group to grasp control of the family’s actions and future.

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In a small town in Mississippi, a young boy is bullied by an older girl on the way home from school he retaliates and is blamed as the aggressor. When the families of the two children are on an outing, the girl is found dead. Although there is no proof, and the boy is innocent, suspicions hover that he is responsible for the girl’s death, suspicions that follow him into later life and unfairly affect his chance of happiness.

Award winning short story in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition

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With consternation, a long-haul big-rig truck driver reluctantly picks up a young woman seemingly injured on the side of an interstate highway and against his will and judgement takes her home to his wife who receives the girl as the child she never had and irreversibly alters the trucker’s future.

Award-winning short story in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition.

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A medical student is infatuated with her much older professor and defies her mother’s warnings of disastrous results if she continues an affair with a much older man highly respected for his status and work at university. But the mother’s feelings and advice are complicated by the arrival of a box that has items that intensify her memories of her own similar affair with an older man decades ago.

Award-winning short story in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition.

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A boy mother takes him to visit his grandparents in upstate New York when the farm is swarmed with hordes of flies from swampland on an adjacent property forcing angry dysfunctional interactions among grandparents and mother that finally presents an opportunity for the boy to see his father, who is estranged from his mother and living in Alaska.

Award winning short story in both the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.

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The daughter of a well-respected portrait painter confronts the reaction of the community to the series of nude portraits her father painted of a young woman and must respond to rumors the town has disseminated based on more than a few carnal interpretation of the paintings. The daughter, as her father’s business manager, scrambles to squelch the rumors before the grand opening of the show in Boston but discovers truths that result in drastic actions.

Finalist in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition.
Finalist, (top six) Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award.

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A former college roommate Peter comes to university to interview and Tony and his wife Amanda invite the roommate to dinner. Tony’s attraction and always unstated affection for Peter intensifies. The couples, at a sit-down dinner, listen as guest Peter tells a story of sexism and poorly disguised misogyny. Tony must decide whether or not to defend Peter and his decision alters his life.

Finalist in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition.
Finalist, (top six) Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award.

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The younger daughter of a mother battling against the society and humanity with misdirected fervor that when her first grandchild dies in the womb of her elder daughter, the mother seeks vengeance on erroneously perceived injustice; her younger daughter realizes she is of age and must make decisions that her mother does not agree.

Finalist in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition.
Finalist, (top six) Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award.

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An insecure, uptight, assistant professor of English denies his suppressed attraction to a precociously arduous and passionate student in his evening noncredit creative writing course with twisted consequences that could deny his desire to be full professor.

Finalist in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition.
Finalist, (top six) Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award.

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A Chinese girl abducted and imported illegally into the syndicated New Orleans sex trade befriends one of her handlers scheming to escape and fulfill her dreams of living the American dream—like she knows from seeing Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. After many attempts to gain freedom, she finally succeeds in escaping but not to the world of her dream.

Finalist in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition.
Finalist, (top six) Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award.

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An older couple with deep caring for each other live together unmarried and take an extended tour of India where they befriend a married couple, the wife who insists on wearing an expensive and ostentatious multicarat-diamond necklace on tour that is stolen with repercussive consequences that make the unmarried couple realize the value of love and the urgency of commitment.

Finalist in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition.

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A lonely grocery store manager hires a seriously disabled boy to collect wheeled shopping-carts and becomes involved in false accusations, injustice punishment, unexpected caring, and painful loss.
Finalist in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition.

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A half-crazed, homeless con-man meets a young girl grieving for her father killed in a plane crash and is faced with the dilemma whether to persist in a scam when truth is called for.

Finalist in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition.
Finalist, (top six) Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award.

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A Socialite’s philandering physician husband goes to a medical meeting and when he doesn’t return she must face the humiliating pain of friends’ sympathies and the discovery of betrayal by her closest friend

Finalist in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition.

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During the French Revolution, a fatherless apprentice iron-monger carries his mother, dying of a throat lump, to a cathedral near the sea to find a miracle to save her, and is gifted with many miracles that will shape his future.

Finalist in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition.

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The time is late nineteenth century, the place “A Barnum and Bailey’s Circus on tour just ten years after the civil war. DiDi, one of the performing dwarf falls in love with Lazlo, the five-foot one trapeze sensation and rejects the amorous attention of the diminutive attendant of her midway act. She learns about the value of true love when she succumbs to lust that blinds her reasoning.

Finalist in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition.
Finalist, (top six) Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award.

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An arrogant, self-centered audiovisual technician is fired for incompetence, his wife leaves him and he courts and marries the rich widow of an owner of a used-car lot. When his first and only love becomes ill, he hard-headily makes uninformed decisions about her health care with disastrous consequences for all.

Finalist in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition.

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Following the teachings of non-violence by Dr. Martin Luther King, a low-down blues piano player befriends a white-farmer of the Klu Klux Klan at a truck stop gig in Maryland. His activism saves lives but destroys his family.

Finalist in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition.

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A young white male in prison for murder is the object of a young graduate student’s research—his first female contact since his mother stopped coming years ago. He begins to covet the attention of her sessions and schemes to charm her so she’ll never desist but has difficulty finding a key to open her caring.

Finalist in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition.
Finalist, (top six) Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award.
Winner: Sandhills Writing Competition

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An adolescent boy, the only son of an illiterate gravestone cutter, falls in love with one of his father’s beautiful clients and during his fatuous, one-sided affair he finds admiration and love for a father he’s silently scorned and dishonored for as long as he can remember.

Finalist in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition.
Finalist, (top six) Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award.

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A story about a man’s anger for his dead wife who he despised for her betrayal and rejection for whom he reluctantly agreed to deliver a eulogy at the burial. He discovers the power of forgiveness, through an unanticipated acquaintance with a college student.

Finalist in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition.

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At a small Midwest college a failing college student takes summer courses to stay in school and is charmed by the innocent beauty of an Amish girl selling pastries and baked goods on a street in  an adjacent village. The shy girl ignores him at first but as his attraction intensifies they must face inevitable cultural disapproval that may threaten opposition to a future together.

Award winning short story in both the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.

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A mother, fearing social disdain, sends her pregnant teenager daughter to a convent in France to deliver the baby for adoption. The infant girl is deformed and adoption fails but the daughter loves the child and must try to raise  her to thrive and succeed despite a parent’s objections.

Award winning short story in both the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.

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