2003 Award Results

The SLF is delighted to announce the results of our 2003 Fountain Award judging! The Fountain Award is given to a speculative short story of exceptional literary quality, chosen from work nominated by magazine and anthology editors. Our jurors for 2003 were: Heinz Insu Fenkl, John Kessel, Larissa Lai, Kelly Link, and Maureen McHugh. They have chosen a winner and selected the following short list for honorable mention.

 

 

 

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Two Fountain Award jurors offer the following comments on our 2003 winner, Alison Smith’s “The Specialist”:

John Kessel:

Alison Smith’s “The Specialist” is beautifully written, funny, and full of evocative details. As I read the nominated stories I was on the lookout for originality and good writing, but what really carried me in this story was the feeling that the author had access to something fundamentally mysterious. I love the way the story kept taking sharp turns when I least expected them, and I found the final images powerful and disturbing.

Larissa Lai:

As I went through the heap of stories, I was looking for ones that struck me as innovative, resonant and well-written. I was looking for stories that delivered both emotional impact and conceptual depth. I tended to favour stories that were socially meaningful. It was a great pleasure to do this work, as there were very few stories I did not enjoy in some measure. But this also made it difficult to narrow the list down.

“The Specialist” stuck out for me because it took a prevalent cultural trope—that of the “frigid woman”– and explored its implications in ways that were emotionally resonant, and at the same time fresh and strange. Alison Smith takes an everyday metaphor, literalizes it, subtly at first, and then keeps needling at it and making it more and more fantastic, until were find ourselves somewhere very wonderful indeed. Her logic is compelling and strange, and takes the reader to an interesting and oddly satisfying close.

 

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And our winner, Allison Smith, offers us insight into her story, and comments on winning the first annual Fountain Award:

Alison Smith:

I’ve always been fascinated by tuberculosis. It’s a rather disgusting and highly contagious disease. Nonetheless, in the fiction of the nineteenth century, people are always rushing about kissing tubercular young ladies. So I thought, if we can make TB sexy, then we ought to be able to make just about any illness compelling. Yet sickness languishes on the back shelves of great literary topics. And our ideas about it remain undeveloped. There are the romantic consumptives, the noble cancer patients, and then there are neat deaths. I started kicking around the idea of chronic illness as a subject for a story in 1994. I wanted to write about the isolation of chronic illness, the unnamable quality of it, about how it quietly alters the trajectory of a life. Then I came across a gynecological study that reported ten percent of females experience unexplained pelvic pain. And no one talks about it. Soon Alice arrived in my mind, with a constant ache in her nether regions.

It took eight years to write The Specialist. When I got up to the part where the Fourth Man’s wife is on a dogsled in the Yukon leading the search party for her husband I stalled out. I had written myself into a corner, a cold snowy, sparsely populated corner. So I set the story aside (for good, I thought) and wrote my first book, a memoir titled Name All the Animals. I finished it while in residence at The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in May of 2002. I met a writer there named Laurie Foos. Her first novel, Ex Utero, is about a woman who loses her uterus at the mall. It’s a thrilling ride of a book and Laurie delivers it in spare, deadpan prose. Reading Ex Utero gave me courage. I pulled out The Specialist. I finished the story that week.

I was certain that no one would ever publish the piece. A dark quest story about a woman and her troubled vagina? No editor was going to go near that. But I was wrong. The lovely editors at McSweeney’s picked it up right away. And then it was optioned for film. And then the kind judges at the Speculative Fiction Foundation have blessed it with the very first Fountain Award. I am stunned by the spectrum of people who can relate to Alice’s story. And I am quite honored to accept the Fountain Award, on Alice’s behalf.

A.S.
August 18, 2004

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More information on the Fountain Award

To discuss the Fountain Award, visit the SLF Forum page.

 

Questions about this year’s awards process may be directed to Karen Meisner, Awards Administrator – FountainAward@speculativeliterature.org