Stories

Roz Spafford’s story “Drought” won the 2010 David Nathan Meyerson prize for fiction, was published in Southwest Review and anthologized in Road to Nowhere and Other New Stories from the Southwest. 

About the story, Bret Anthony Johnston (Remember Me Like This), who judged the award, wrote, “What is most impressive about ‘Drought’ is the power the narrative generates from restraint. The story is remarkable in its economy, in the silences that betray the characters’ deep vulnerabilities and longing, and the reader immediately recognizes the abiding empathy with which the author is rendering the stricken world. By exacting such pressure on the characters, by exploring what they’re willing to do to save what they can, the author has given us a story that is brutal and beautiful, harsh and spare and violently essential.”

“The Season” won the 2014 Obsidian award from the High Desert Journal. About it, David Abrams (Fobbit) wrote: ” From the first sentence to that last startling, riveting image, ‘The Season’ wastes no words. Along with the economy of language comes a very palpable sense of menace and tension strung tight between the sentences. Spafford perfectly nails that awkward, scary moment we’ve all experienced moving from childhood to adolescence. In ‘The Season’ that transition just happens to be drenched in blood and violence.”

“Watering Stones” won the 2014 short-short fiction award from New Millennium Writings. You can read the story here.

“Heart Failure” won Quarry West‘s first place fiction award and was published in Quarry West’s anthology, Poets and Writers of the Monterey Bay. Click on the links below to read “Drought” and “Heart Failure.”