Winner of the 2026 Fugere Book Prize
In the early 1980s, when I was twenty-five, I picked up a copy of the Los Angeles Times near the docks in San Diego. I was working as a third mate aboard a small oceanographic ship at the time. I’d spent four years in the Coast Guard, and then most of the next four years in the Merchant Marine. I’d sailed in the North Atlantic, the Pacific Ocean, and once in the Indian Ocean. And though I didn’t realize it, my life was about to change.
In the Times, I read a long feature by Gabriel García Márquez that began with him seeing Hemingway from a distance in Paris. I did not know even the name of García Márquez. But I admired Hemingway, partly for the glamor of his life, and I decided to look for a book by the Colombian who had written so well about him.
I’d long held the idea that I would be a writer someday, though I didn’t know much about how one went about becoming one, and my own attempts at fiction to that point were amateurish at best. At a bookstore, I picked up a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude and began to read it in a small café nearby.
The novel shocked and astonished me – the long time sweep, from utopian beginnings to decadence and destruction, the human passions that carried the characters toward destruction, the fabulist elements depicted in a realist mode. And the centering of a world’s worth of story in a single town, a single house, a single family.
The work of García Márquez helped me envision a goal for my writing that I could aspire to, however short I might fall. Some months after reading that newspaper in San Diego, I signed off my ship and began college at the University of California, Santa Cruz, studying Literature and the Spanish language, and taking fiction workshops with Jim Houston, Page Stegner, and others. And I eventually discovered the work I wanted to do in my mother’s home in the Santa Clara Valley – a once pastoral place famous for cherry and apricot and prune orchards, now known as Silicon Valley.
My first novel, The Blossom Festival, was set in the valley between World War One and World War Two, and it ended with great changes looming on the horizon. This book won the Western States Book Award for Fiction and was selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Series. Most of my work since has been set in Northern California. I want my stories to have deep roots, to connect the present with the past, and to be concerned with the fate of place as well as with the fate of people.
I’ve been a teacher as well as a writer, able to share my love of writing and literature as a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley and the University of Utah, and as a professor at Southern Utah University and Bowling Green State University. I’ve had the good fortune to teach hundreds of talented students over the years, many of whom have gone on to publish stories and books, and I hope I’ve given all my students that special element of empathy that comes from literature.
I recently left my teaching position and finally moved back West, to Port Angeles, Washington – a port I visited more than once aboard ship. Over the years, I’ve placed short stories in The Missouri Review, The Greensboro Review, Gulf Coast, Story, Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. I’ve published five books, and my work has been recognized with the Donald Barthelme Prize in Short Prose, the Miami University Press Novella Prize, the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Prize for the Novella, two Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction. The novella that won the Fugere Book Prize will be my sixth book – a story set in 19th century California that I hope will have some resonance for our world today.
