Presented to: Darrell Spencer
For: A Woman Packing a Pistol
The judges stated, "This collection of eleven stories--a set of virtuoso improvisations by a writer with exceptional technical skill, a keen ear for speech, and an irrepressible delight in language for its own sake--presents us with a problematic case: that of a Mormon writer of serious short fiction who does not obviously write about Mormon characters or (except peripherally) the Mormon milieu. These stories test the powers and limits of a contemporary perilous terrain for the Mormon imagination, a planet of genuine surprise. They enter this terrain by an investment of loving but unintrusive moral imagination that shows their kinship with the family of classic short stories from Chekhov to Raymond Carver: they think speak, and feel 'in keeping with [the] spirit' of their characters, and they ask the reader for an equally risky investment."