A quick look—and a winning story

At The Writer, we recently finished our first edits of articles for our February issue, where you’ll be able to read the $1,000 winning entry in our 2010 short-story contest, “Footnotes and Footlights.” Although fiction writers sometimes dislike being asked where their stories come from, there are often, it turns out, good stories behind their stories. I won’t give away the anecdote our winning writer, Mark Wagstaff, gave me for our biographical sidebar, but let’s just say that his fine tale about an aging, one-time actress began with a fleeting glance at someone on the London subway.

Read more about Mark, as well as his story and insightful comments about it from our judge, fiction writer and teacher Susan Breen, when that issue comes out in early January. Learn, too, why a male writer like Mark might actually prefer writing from the first-person point of view of a woman.

-- Ron Kovach, senior editor, The Writer

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