The winner of the 11th annual Stanford Fiction Contest is “How to Change Someone's Life, Not Your Own,” by Lolly Ward, '93, MA '94. It's a story, the author says, “about chance meetings and decisions as we enter and exit one another's lives.”
The author knows about entrances and exits: in addition to writing, she is an actress in Los Angeles. She's been a member of The Actors' Gang since 2000, playing leads in The Seagull, Mephisto and Love's Labor's Lost. She opened Tim Robbins's play Embedded in Los Angeles and toured with it to London and New York. She met her husband, actor Nathan Kornelis, at the Actors' Gang Theater; their son, Lennox, was born in 2006. At Stanford, Ward majored in English, and studied creative writing with John L'Heureux.
Authors and former Stegner fellows Katharine Noel and Eric Puchner, who are married to each other, chose this winner and two honorable-mention stories from among 12 finalists. STANFORD editors chose the finalist stories from 74 entries and submitted them anonymously to the final judges.
Calling Ward's story “an original and striking work,” the judges wrote that “the postmodern 'choices' embedded in this story could feel merely like a gimmick, but instead build to a surprising—and surprisingly moving—meditation on love, death and impermanence. Beneath the cleverness of the writing runs a strong undercurrent of sadness and insecurity.”
Noel's novel, Halfway House, won the 2006 Kate Chopin award. Puchner's story collection, Music Through the Floor, was a finalist for a California Book Award. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a 2006 National Endowment for the Arts grant.
