INTRODUCTION Harrison Berry When I was in the second grade my teacher Mrs. Elm assigned the class to write a short story. Mine was about an Antarctic expedition gone haywire: The scientiic vessel crashed into an iceberg, forcing the crew to evacuate. All seemed hopeless for a few sentences as the members of the expedition slipped on the ice and met a rookery of friendly seals, until the captain remembered he’d packed an inlatable spare boat, complete with a laboratory. Reading over my work, my mother alerted me to my error. Stories, she said, have conlict, something mine only suggested. The problem was one of low stakes. By losing its boat my expedition lost nothing; and a reader should expect the destruction of the vessel to have some kind of impact on the story overall. That is the story of the irst story I ever wrote, and I tell it because I think there are universal elements about this creative process that bear on what writing does for the artist and for the world. Judging The Cabin’s Writers in the Attic contest this year was a tremendous honor, and reading and re-reading the work of so many talented authors gave me a chance to consider where our craft its into the outline of things. I was in the middle of considering a professional change when The Cabin asked me to be a part of this contest. For the previous eight years I’d worked at Boise Weekly, irst as the calendar editor, then as a reporter, and inally as its managing editor. One of my duties was to organize the Fiction 101 contest, which I looked forward to all year. I loved gathering the judging panel and reading the entries, and seeing how our guest artist illustrated the winners. Finally, we’d throw a party where authors would read their work. Writers in the Attic is a scaled-up version of that. The stories are longerand you can submit poetry. Plus, the winners are published in the lovely book you’re holding. But also, writing contests draw out the things that concern us, and trends always emerge. For this contest I read a lot of pieces about war, miscarriages and bees. The theme of this year’s Writers in the Attic is “rupture;” and while a handful of entrants slipped the word into their pieces like the mystery ingredient on a reality cooking show, there were some who took a
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