Judge’s Comments

In the instances where I’ve judged contests before--and maybe this is just me--the decision often comes down to a story that seems technically accomplished but possibly lacking in heart and heat and a story that is brimming over with the latter but not so finely drawn where the former is concerned. The selection of a winner is always difficult, for Robert Browning’s exhortation from “Andrea Del Sarto” is always foremost in my mind: “Ah but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp/Or what’s a heaven for?” Whom to reward then? The risk taker or the craftsperson?

In this case, the two stories seemed nightly to vie for my attention, as each alternated between these two poles: achievement in craft and achievement in invention. That’s because the two stories are both so well realized and so singular in their usage of what I always see as the key element of fiction: point of view. For “The View of Birds,” it’s the perfect choice of second person--one that makes more universal the very particular experience of losing a spouse. Each story also has the characters so vividly portrayed that readers struggle to recall they are really just words on a page. Each story also has the kind of attention to language that draws one’s pen to underline choice phrases when one isn’t reading them aloud to stunned passersby.

But in the end, it seems “The View of Birds” possesses, perhaps, the greater degree of authority. Its author seemed to never under write or over write or play coy. It maintains a magical combination of plot moves that unsettle and affirm. It answers questions just before the reader is prepared to ask them. And, to me, most importantly, its elements accrete in a way that establish this unassailable reality: the story is presented in the only way it could be told.