After having poured over our six prose finalists for some time, our finalist judge, Jim Sallis, has selected the winner for the Many Voices Project competition in Prose!
Oranges by Gary Peter of St. Paul, MN, will join our other titles slated for release in 2018. Congratulations, Gary!
Of this short story collection, Sallis says:
“What we do as artists is gather up pieces of lives and try our best, if not to make sense of them, then at least to find or create patterns that help rescue them from rubble. ‘Knock hard. Life is deaf,’ Mimi Parent wrote. Oranges, like all great writing, never lets down but keeps on leaning towards us, speaking, till we listen–hard.
There’s a great deal to admire in Oranges. Ground-control matters like clean, economical writing, strong characters, vivid scenes. Effective shifts in tense and point of view. Fine evocations of emotions in all their mutability. The structure itself, giving us the stuff and heft of a novel along with the freshness and renewed engagement of short stories. Strikingly, the effortless way the writer traces lineaments of past ever flowing into present, present forever washing back int past: memory becoming anticipation; anticipation, memory.